Time to Vote

Melt-down of the Minnesota Green Party?

Curiouser and curiouser. Two months or so ago, Cam Gordon, a Green, received the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic Party and Mayor RT Rybak – that mannequin guy that looks just like Tim Pawlenty. According to Mike Calvan, someone testifying under oath explained in a court suit brought about by Dave Bicking that Rybak and Gordon had made a deal. Gordon would oppose the Greens running anyone for mayor, and the Democrats would not run anyone against Gordon. It happened…especially the last part. Mr. Rogers now has a safe seat. Dave's suit was to stop Rybak from claiming Gordon's support, which he had not gotten written approval for at that time. Later, Gordon did endorse Rybak.

At any rate, this sad setup was preceded by the main Party in town, the Democrats, gerry-mandering the wards of Natalie Johnson Lee and Dean Zimmerman, in order to get them out of the city council. Evidently, the Democrats couldn’t make a deal with these two. Also evidently desperate for cash to pay for a lawsuit against this gerry-mandering, Dean Zimmerman accepted some in an entrapment sting organized by the Republican federal District Attorney. There was no quid pro quo, but this did not make a difference to the DA. Those with long memories can remember how the U.S. DA did somewhat the same thing to Eddy Felien, another progressive council person for the Farmer-Labor Association from an era long ago. And you might add several black council people that the powers-that-be evidently didn’t like, adding to a pattern against ANYONE who rocks the boat in this here ‘nice’ town. In effect, only if you are 'approved' can you get away with this kind of thing in Minneapolis. In sum, together the two – the Democrats and the Republicans – eliminated two Greens in the city council, by fair means but mostly foul.

Dean Zimmerman is back in town and out of jail. And Natalie Johnson Lee’s Uncle Tom replacement rules the roost in the forgotten part of town. But Natalie is still kicking, running again in the 5th Ward, though not as a Green it seems.

Now ‘Papa’ John Kolstad is running against RT for mayor, breaking a pact Gordon could not enforce. Remember Rybak, the pretty-boy, do-nothing former neighborhood activist, who claimed he was going to fight for ‘affordable housing?’ Right - he increased housing stock for poor people less than the former Republican mayor in St. Paul, which was hardly any. RT is running a non-campaign, dreaming about being the next handsome, young, white governor of Minnesota.

RT’s Minneapolis police evicted Rosemary Williams from her house a month of Fridays ago because of a Minneapolis trespassing charge… trespassing in her own house. Ah, yes, the bank owns it now. So the bankers’ cops - with RT not making a peep, or issuing instructions to allow her to live in her home - busted in, boarded up the house to the rafters with steel grills, and hired a private security guard to stand by the property, while arresting more than a dozen. And so, Rybak’s move for ‘affordable housing’ continues. Rosemary's house stands empty, joining thousands of others while the 'leaders' of Minneapolis fiddle.

However, in this virtual crapdown, Papa John is now running as an “Independent Civic Leader,” not a Green. He has secured the endorsement of the Minneapolis Republican Party, which has been seized by the followers of Texas Republican Ron Paul. The Independence Party has also endorsed Kolstad. Kolstad ran previously as the Attorney General candidate for the Greens. Al Flowers, who also has ties to the Greens, and is endorsed by Fareen Hakeem, is now running as a “Democratic Farmer-Labor” candidate. The Green Party is not running an official candidate for Mayor, much as RT wanted. The Greens are running Dave Bicking, Jeanine Estime and three others for city council, including Gordon.

Now read that back. Kolstad got an endorsement from Ron Paul’s libertarians, who are hated within the fundamentalist Republican Party, it was thought. However, Ron Paul has also recently endorsed Michelle Bachmann. So there is no Chinese Wall between the crazy fundie wing of the Republican Party and the libertarian one, contrary to certain illusions. I understand that Kolstad has good personal relations with the Paulites, and that on certain issues they agree. And I also understand the Paulites are upset about the Paul endorsement of Bachmann.

Certainly, if the Greens are endorsed by someone, it is different than if the Green's adopted their program, which they haven't. And in this run, Kolstad is not an official Green. In this instance, that certain piece of the program that they all seem to agree on is standing up for small businessmen – or as Kolstad put it on cable TV and at Merlin’s, ‘small businessmen are the life-blood of the community.” Wha?

OK, so now we come to the meat of the issue. Anyone hanging around the Greens can see that labor people are few and far between. And anyone hanging around also sees that they have had an over-representation of small businessmen among their candidates. Essentially the Marxist analysis of the Green Party is that it is a basically a progressive, petty-bourgeois opposition to big capital – in the Democratic and Republican forms. In a way, the Ron Paulites are also a petit-bourgeois opposition to big capital. And so we see the link. It is not that some of their criticisms are not accurate, or that we do not need small businessmen as allies - it is that they represent a class that is not, ultimately, able to fundamentally change our situation. No Marxist wants to point this out, but at this point, it is so obvious even the uninitiated can figure it out.

With the evaporation of the Labor Party in the U.S. because they would not run candidates, I supported Nader in 2000, and worked in a group called “Labor for Nader.” No wing of capital supported Nader at that time, and a critical vote for Nader was a useful tactic in 2000. He got millions of votes and showed up Gore in state after state. I voted for that ‘crazy black woman’ from Atlanta in 2008, Cynthia McKinney, who ran as a Green candidate. I have worked and donated money to David Bicking, running for the council in Ward 9 as a Green, who is one of the most principled persons in Minnesota politics today. I will be voting for a member of Socialist Action, Brent Perry, in my own Ward, Ward 12. He doesn’t have a chance in hell against another former neighborhood activist, the wretched Sandy Colvin Roy, who gave away public park land on Nicollet Island to the Catholic Church for ANOTHER stadium - among other acts. These people are truly stadium-crazy. Roy's claim to fame, from her candidate forum, was protesting outside the ROTC building in 1972. I was there too, but seem to have gotten a different message from that event.

At any rate, the national race in 2000 galvanized the local Greens into some kind of mass support in the City. Since then, no national race has helped the local Greens. And this is a real deficit. I know there is an argument between those Greens who just want to concentrate on local issues (and who refused to endorse a national candidate in 2008) and those who think the two are interrelated. The answer is now in. You need to burn the candle at both ends if you are a Green.

The Minneapolis City Council is the grave-yard of neighborhood activism.
So how can we absorb these changes? I think the Green Party in Minneapolis is fractionating, and has lost its ideological and organizational coherence. And just when IRV was to go into effect in the city, a situation they could have taken advantage of.

The real masters of our local Democratic Party council members are the real estate interests and giant corporations who run this town. This is a One-Party Town, presided over by an incestuous council cozy with the ruling financial interests, the stadiums, the real estate developers, the cops, and anyone with a dollar bill. They all vote alike. Once they get elected, it is 'hasta la vista.' These people are just tiny versions of the corporate Democrats on the national stage, and neo-liberalism in general. They are helping undermine the true health of the city by giving a free license to the police, condo overbuilding, corporate welfare like stadiums, wasting taxpayer money on ridiculous projects like the Lake Street makeover and the new downtown public library; trying to liquidate any independent groups like the Park and Library boards and other anti-democratic moves, and ignoring the foreclosure crisis and the jobs crisis. They also allowed the federal and various city police to run wild during the Republican Convention. The Greens made a valiant effort to change this. Hopefully their present candidates will do well. However, the present situation points to a need to go beyond Green politics. The fat is in the fire.

Red Frog
10/20/09.

Petition to Harry Reid:

When you read this I may be dead if I am one of the 93,000 who die each year from hospital infections or one of the 100,000 who die each year from wrongly administered drugs or one of the 43,000 who have no coverage. It's a disgrace in this rich country. Yesterday, Ralph Nader, Michael Moore, Cornell West and Jon Stewart all were disgusted at the lack of health care for so many. You and your esteemed colleagues and distinguished gentlemen should become human!

The Effortless Revolution

“Facing Reality – The New Society: How to look for it and how to bring it closer.” – CLR James & Grace Lee, with C Castoriadis, Intro by J H Bracey – Originally Published 1958

C.L.R. James (Cyril Lionel Robert), the Trinidadian writer best known for the masterful “The Black Jacobins,” co-authored this book, which was written right after the worker-led revolts in Hungary and Poland. It is best described as a cross between Marxism and anarcho-syndicalism. James was part of the Johnson-Forrest tendency in the SWP, which left the party in the 50s. Starting out as a Trotskyist, James broke with the Socialist Workers’ Party and Trotsky’s analysis of the ‘degenerated workers state’ and agreed instead with Max Schactman that the USSR was a form of state capitalism. James denies that getting rid of capitalist ownership of the means of production, and having that owned by a state of ANY kind, is historical progress.

This book is remarkable for its optimism. Marxists are by nature optimistic, as they believe that the working class actually can take power. James took this one step further and said that socialism was already existing in the advanced capitalist countries, as well as the bureaucratic ‘state capitalist’ ones. What he meant by ‘socialism’ was that the working class was already organized, educated and conscious enough to take power, and could, given the right conditions. He pointed to the 1956 workers councils in Hungary, the 1956 rebellion in Poznan, the 1953 rebellion in East Germany, and the shop stewards movement in England as current proofs the workers were able to take power, as their social strength was such they only needed the right impetus. The Hungarian workers councils he considered the height of workers power, and draws from that the slogan “All power to the Workers Councils.” I do not think many Marxists would have a problem with this slogan, of course.

When he rejected Trotsky’s theory of the ‘degenerated’ or ‘deformed’ workers states, he also rejected the Leninist concept of the ‘vanguard’ party. He considered it to be a product of workers organization in one time and place, Czarist Russia, and not appropriate for other conditions. James believed that workers did not need a self-appointed vanguard to take power. He saw the role of the Marxist organization to be one voice of many working class voices, which would describe conditions and provide information to the working class. His revolutionary organizations would essentially be ‘committees of correspondence’ which would not be dominated by through-going Marxists, but could have other working class oriented individuals in them. The role of these committees in the factories and in society was to provide information to counter bourgeois propaganda. Essentially, the Marxists would hasten the event which would weaken or topple bourgeois rule, and organize around their paper (and presumably now, their website…) James pointed out that the events in Hungary and Poland happened without a ‘vanguard party.’ And the shop stewards movement in England allowed Communists and Trotskyists to participate, but did not allow these organizations to dominate it. And this is partly because the workers see the factionalism built into the ‘party’ system.

Of particular interest is James’ point on factory committees in the USSR, which James and Lee said formed in various plants after the revolution, had a national organization, and wanted to take over economic management in the USSR. He said the Bolsheviks preferred unions to handle that function, and broke up the factory committees. James said very little has ever been written about these committees. I find it persuasive to allow a national factory committee structure to handle the economy, as unions are organized as defensive organizations of the working class, and are not normally suited to run production. And they frequently fail even as defensive organizations.

Trotsky’s main disagreement with Lenin before the 1917 revolution was on the issue of the vanguard party, which he saw as carrying the seeds of despotism. After 1917, Trotsky adopted Lenin’s idea, and held it to his dying day. James theory is similar to early Trotsky – that the vanguard party can become a bureaucracy quite easily. This of course was proved in the USSR and China, though in the former it was not an easy process, occurring over the dead bodies of most of the Bolshevik leadership and cadre. Trotsky maintained that real democratic-centralism, not bureaucratic-centralism, would prevent a re-occurrence. James insists that the nature of the vanguard party, while enabling revolution in some conditions, also guarantees their degeneration.

James & Lee were not able to comment in this book on the vast police powers accrued to the modern imperialist state after the 50s, as part of the degeneration of bourgeois rule. It is hard to see how revolutionary organizations could survive without a structure able to handle the various forms of repression that emerge, even in our present 'bourgeois-democratic' structure. Assassination, firings, heavily armed police, constant surveillance and jailings are by now normal police methods, and would be used extensively. Surveillance itself is certainly more broad now than at any other time in American history. When James & Lee wrote this book, re-privatization and the growth of white-collar service-sector employment in the imperialist heartlands were not on the radar either.

The most amusing parts of this book are James shots at various Communist and Trotskyist organizations and their failures, and might well be familiar to some readers. Tiny organizations coming out with massive slogans of the day. Organizations that pursue their factional interests over the interests of the working class or the movement. Leaders who spend all their time trying to curtail the deterioration of their own small organizations, whose permanent survival is their only goal. Organizations fighting each other instead of the enemy. In essence, the small-group mentality instead of the broader view of the needs of the class.

However, we must draw a short balance sheet of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency, and James himself, based on this 1958 book. The small committees created by James have all disappeared. The heady enthusiasm for Hungary, East Germany and Poland has been replaced by the restoration of direct capitalist bank rule in those countries. James never seemed to notice that it was in Hungary, a country whose bourgeoisie had been dispossessed and its property nationalized, that the working class, by his own analysis, held direct state and economic power through the workers councils. This did NOT happen in bourgeois France in May-June 1968, for instance, which might point to a major difference in these two countries – not to their similarity. The shop stewards movement in England has disappeared; defeated after the smashing of the coal miners by Thatcher in 1984-1985. The American working class, repeatedly celebrated in this book for its tough, independent behavior, was de-unionized and many of their jobs exported during this same period. World-wide capitalist reaction, glorying in the 1989 destruction of the USSR and the central European workers states, has run almost untrammeled until recently. The ‘socialism’ that already existed everywhere in James’ eye has somehow not come to fruition.

I wish James & Lee were right, as it would make things a lot easier! However, perhaps revolution is not so effortless. Or perhaps the working class is not prepared to rule. Whatever the answer, James and his friends main contribution is their view that it is the actions of the working class that are key, not any substitute. They point to the ‘small’ actions of workers on the job, or in a community, resisting bourgeois ideas and actions, as proof of the socialist existence of the working class. They believe that if workers do it, it is correct.

Indeed, workers do many things without a party; sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes completely – as in Hungary, where the workers councils held both economic and political power – really a dual power against the Russian Army. Whatever your opinion of the insurrection there, it cannot be denied that the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian working class was not on the side of the Russian Army and the bureaucracy. Marxists can organize, but it is the action of the working class itself that will make any movement – and any revolution.

I read the books so you don’t have to…And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog – 10/8, 2009

Author visit

Upcoming author event at Mayday Books.

THE ECONOMIST MAY 6, 2001
US Imperialism
The American flag is habitually burnt publically around the world by anti-imperialists while the Union flag of the United Kingdom rarely is, if ever. Second, the Stars and Stripes flies over the states of California and Texas, which America took by force from Mexico fewer than 150 years ago. Mexicans still call these states occupied territories. Unlike Britain, America has not yet decolonised, and continues to act in a brutal, imperialist fashion in many parts of the world. But what can one expect from a nation whose creation involved the genocide of one race and the subjugation of another.
David Short, Johannesburg
Letters are welcome and should be addressed to the Editor at The Economist, 25 St. James's Street, London SW1A 1HG.
FAX: 020 7839 2968
E-mail: letters@economist.com

Local Boy Makes Good

“The Grass – A Young Man’s Journey to the Korean War” – Paul Zerby, 2009

Minneapolis’ own Paul Zerby has written a fictional account of a feisty young man from Fargo who ends up fighting in the Korean War. It is unknown how much of this is biography, and how much is fiction – but then, that is the essence of some kinds of literature. Zerby is a former lawyer and irascible DFL City Counsel person who represented the 2nd Ward on the West Bank. He himself was born in Fargo, went to the U and later shipped out for Korea. Writing this book seems to be something he has put off until ‘retirement’ – a story he has been carrying around for quite awhile.

Battle of the Pusan Peninsula  and Witch'es Tit

The lead character, high-schooler Tom Kelly, initially believes that the Korean war is worth fighting, to save ‘the American way of life,’ because there was no doubt that the “Communists were trying to take over the world.’ By the end of the book, after being in Korea for a combat tour, Kelly doesn’t believe that anyone should die for any ‘isms’ anymore. It is not quite clear how this transformation happens – contact with warfare does not make all soldiers into pacifists. Kelly is quite an odd conglomeration of characteristics. He is a kid who talks about Hemingway without ever being seen reading him; who is loud, foul-mouthed and drinks Jack Daniels constantly, even at school; is mostly driven by sexual urgings in his relationships with women - i.e. a thoroughly conventional male. Yet he is also somehow class-consciousness, bookish, anti-racist and not afraid of authority. I have met this kind of person in the cold North, but they are certainly a rarity.

The book starts by tracing Kelly’s life in Fargo, North Dakota, when one of his friends comes home in a box from Korea; where he romances an upper-class, conservative Christian named Moira who fancies herself an edgy progressive; and when he finally leaves his Democratic-populist, working-class parents to go to school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, not to the agriculture school in Fargo. Throughout the book, Moira attempts to win him back, even though she will not have sex with him. This is the early ‘50s, after all, and she is an endless source of frustration to Tom.

In Minneapolis, Kelly starts taking classes, working part-time, and also joins ROTC. His first sexual experience is with a waitress at work who he doesn’t like that much except for sex. He also meets various leftists from the Socialist Workers Party, whom he calls ‘pseudo-intellectuals,’ and also the pivotal person in this narrative, Professor Theodore R Williams. Williams is a left-wing professor, and also the only black professor at the U at that time. Oddly enough, this professor seems to be modeled on the first black professor at the U that Nelson Peery helped get hired. (See the review of “Black Radical,” below.) The real professor’s name was Forrest O. Wiggins. He was hired as an instructor in the philosophy department in 1946 (when Peery helped get him hired), and terminated by the U administration in 1952 for political reasons (which Zerby probably protested.) As you might notice, discussing politics with the SWP and joining ROTC are usually mutually-exclusive activities. It certainly never happened in the 60s to my knowledge.

Kelly disagrees with but respects Williams. Williams comes out against the Korean War in public; like a fool, Kelly’s girlfriend Moira publicizes his stance in the Minnesota Daily; the administration decides to fire Williams, and, in an epic scene, Kelly leads a protest of hundreds of students against the firing by publicly arguing with the head of the University, Chancellor Werrecker. Kelly finishes the discussion by leading a foul-mouthed chant against the decision. That gets Kelly kicked out of ROTC and the University, and he heads back to Fargo, now known as a ‘communist sympathizer’ and a ‘nigger lover.’ During that time these designations were badges of honor, at least in retrospect. However, it seems unlikely that many real Tom Kellys earned them.

The hidden war in Korea – ignored by most of the population, somewhat like Iraq and Afghanistan – comes back to center stage. In 1952, Kelly decides to join the Army against the wishes of his family, his girlfriend, and his more radical friends like Will Lindeman, because he wants to ‘do the right thing.’ He is sent to boot camp in North Carolina, which also happens to be near the poor black college Professor Williams has been exiled to. At boot camp, he watches as a fat, slow soldier, Schlumpberger, who has been hazed and insulted for weeks, intentionally stands up in a live-fire exercise and get chopped in two by bullets. This starts the horrified Kelly on a writing jag, as he feels partly responsible for the suicide.

Kelly goes to visit Williams, who is thankful to see him, but is appalled that Kelly has joined the Army. The Professor feels somehow responsible for this. Kelly sees what happens to people that stand up to the power structure – Williams has aged, and he has become unhappy, as has his wife. The family is now poorer. Right before shipping out, Kelly has a 30-day furlough which he spends in New York City with a new woman he has met, Anna, and fantasizes about being a writer or going to Columbia. He spends most of the time trying to get this woman ‘in the sack’ – which is the slangy way Kelly usually puts things. On the last night, he succeeds. And they pledge their love.

Kelly lands at Pusan, and is immediately put in the field, where he shoots a young North Korean close-up on a hill called the “Witches Tit.” Then follow various maneuvers that take him through fields of exploding bodies, shit-soaked and pointless mud advances, deadly friendly fire, and trench warfare. He spends his 15 month tour along the 38th Parallel, as the two sides alternatively negotiate and fight. Nearly at the end of his term, he tries to help a black solider avoid court marshal by pretending the soldier is sick, not asleep on watch. At this point, he has already told his brass, Lieutenant Winton, that he does not believe in fighting the war anymore. Winton, a stiff West Pointer, is angered, and at the trial of the soldier, Kelly lies and is called a ‘nigger-lover’ again. Of course, Kelly later marries Anna and reluctantly returns to Korea’s DMZ in 2007 as a grandfather. He sees how Seoul has changed from a destitute, bomb-wracked town to a city of shining glass and skyscrapers.

I’ve read a lot of anti-war novels and this is one of the milder ones. Its real topic is the 50s in America, where most of the action takes place. The combination of the slangy attitude and the intellectuality of the lead character seem in conflict, and give Kelly an air of class unreality. Of course, he could, indeed be based on Paul Zerby … and Mr. Zerby is quite real.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, 9/22/2009

The pathetic "Left" in the USA

As I've been arguing for quite some time, the problem in the USA is not the right; it's the left. More specifically, what masquerades as the left in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It's no use blaming the right: they're attack dogs for an entrenched plutocracy and they do their assigned job well. The fault lies with a pathetic, spineless, and gutless grouping that likes to masquerade as "left." If the US had a vocal and militant left, it probably wouldn't be up sh!t creek on so many fronts -- imperialistic quagmires in the Middle East, health care "reform," and the growing disparity between the rich few and a growing army of dispossessed -- to name but a few.

It seems Chris Hedges is of like opinion in his latest essay:

The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do
not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not
militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot
win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with
right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because
they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.

My apologies for not reviewing some book but unlike my erudite friend, Red Frog, I am in Norway and lack access to books.

Apres Le Deluge, C'est Moi

“The Coming Insurrection” by the Invisible Committee, 2007 French edition, 2009 English Ed.

This slim philosophical book was written by friends of a group of anarchists in Tarnac, France, who were arrested in 2008 for supposedly planning a ‘terrorist’ attack on the French rail system’s electrical lines. This book issues out of the ‘ecole superieure’ and the hated French school system, not the lumpen proletariat, of which the authors are enamored. It is written in beautiful, elliptic prose, and initially traces the psychological and personal deterioration of French society and its citizens. It advocates communism, but seems to primarily advocate revolution in order to end personal and social alienation.

There is much to value here. What it does say about the hidden personal problems of French citizens is no doubt accurate, and similar to our society. Both populations live in advanced, deteriorating capitalist societies, with all of the psychological ramifications that that implies – compulsive overwork, weak social bonds, passivity, bad relationships, crumbling marriages, and alienated selves. Capitalism’s vaunted strength – its emphasis on “YOU” the individual, is a vast commercial lie. Behind that lie wait SWAT teams, prisons, surveillance, rent-a-guards, predator drones and all manner of silent compulsion.

The Invisible Committee’s sensitivity to the social breakdown in France comes after the 2005 riots by mostly Arab youth, when 2 youth were gunned down by the French flics. These riots lasted for months because of the close coordination of the youth of these neighborhoods, and the authors maintain that these are the only real communities in France. They also draw present inspiration from the 2007 Greek riots, led by left-anarchist forces, that successfully stymied the Greek state. The present economic slide across Europe is adding fuel to this fire of spontaneous struggle.

They direct part of their attention to the notion of over-work in France, Japan and the U.S. Their analysis is a reflection of the collapse in secure labor, and the growth in the unemployed, the lumpen-proletariat, the partially-employed, the street merchant, the transitory worker, the temp, the homeless and hidden homeless. Except for the upper-middle class of high-level engineers, lawyers, programmers and managers who they quite rightly identify as people who ‘never stop working,’ advanced capitalism is creating, all over the world, a vast army of the unemployed and the marginally productive. The’ flexibility’ and ‘mobility’ favored by late capital for their workforce is only a reflection of this basic collapse in stability. In essence, it repeats the obvious assertion that we, as workers, are wage slaves. And who wants to be a slave of any kind?

The Committee also disdains every organized force on the left in France. They wish to be ‘as impenetrable to state intervention as a gypsy camp.’ I quote: “Becoming autonomous could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.” Shoplifting, of course, is just an understood cost of doing business.

The Committee is acutely aware of the vulnerability of the advanced urban metropolis. Their view of low-level war in the metropolises of the world is very similar to Mike Davis’s view in “Planet of Slums” (reviewed on the blog below) – it is the new battleground, already recognized by the ruling elites’ military forces. They give credit to Blanqui for being the first to think of non-linear warfare, a philosophy that has been adopted by various western military forces. Given the interconnectedness of everything, they believe electrical grids can be brought down with careful explosions that will turn the lights off across Europe. They insist French society is quite similar to the USSR under Andropov … the French rulers no longer even pretend to rule in the name of the people anymore.  The class basis of these two, however, escapes them.

The Committee considers ‘environmentalism’ under capitalism to be an attempt by capital to save the same people who … destroyed the planet. Capital’s new version of environmentalism will create super-profits for some corporations, and allow the state to exert further control over the population. This is precisely the plan of Al Gore and Barack Obama, of course. The Committee favors a bloody planetary collapse as better than further capitalist crisis management. As a photographic negative of the capitalists (See Naomi Klein “Shock Doctrine”, reviewed below) they also believe that disaster can be beneficial, but in an opposite way - bringing people closer to reality and rebellion.

They cite Hurricane Katrina as an example, an event Klein also cited to draw a different lesson. The failure by the Bush administration over Katrina undermined his political support, and threw some of it to Obama. The Committee contend that the growth in community organizations in the wake of the hurricane proves that disasters are beneficial. However, pro-union laws were put in abeyance after Katrina. The same firms that made out like bandits in Iraq also made billions on Katrina. The whole school system was privatized into charter schools.  The City of New Orleans was depopulated of some black residents permanently. Many are still scattered across the U.S. or living in trailers. Whole neighborhoods are empty patchworks of homes. Many died or were injured. 

And to this day, the Corps of Engineers STILL doesn’t think a Category 5 hurricane dike is necessary.  You will look long and hard to find ‘gains’ – only misery, and humans coping with misery. Sometimes disasters don’t create rebellion – they create destruction. Tell the survivors of the Tsunami in India about its benefits. Oppression oppresses. It does not automatically create rebellion. Or as King Louis XV once said, "Apres le Deluge, c'est moi."

The Committee notes that, in the homeland of the idea of the ‘nation,’ the concept of the French national state has ended, They conclude as to ‘civilization’ as a whole – "We have a corpse on our backs.”  Hyperbole is their metier naturelle.

Instead of seeing events as atrocities or indignities, they point out that events should be looked at as part of low-level warfare. They advocate avoiding far left, activist and community groups, and forming secret and unbreakable communes and ‘base committees’ to prepare for an insurrection now. For money, the communes are to rely on hustling, some work, public funds, trafficking, theft, dumpster diving and fraud. This frees up people’s time for revolutionary activities – target practice, learning to set broken bones, pick locks, run pirate radio stations, learn urban agricultural practices, develop expertise in computers and other technical skills. They want to create different-sized free territories in the cities, geographic spaces opaque to the military, but known to the residents. They advocate personal travel around Europe and the world to make contacts. They also advocate sabotage at a minimum of risk and time, and for maximum damage. They believe in becoming anonymous, not public; developing the ability of self-defense; and destroying government computer databases.  This is mostly common anarchism.

The Committee eventually advocates linking up all the communes for an insurrection, perhaps at a moment of crisis. They oppose assemblies or mass voting at these critical times, believe in ‘blocking the economy’ through shutdowns; liberating territory without direct confrontations and deposing local officials. They think a military insurrection is only the very last step, basing themselves on the experience of the Paris Commune.

The philosophic conflict between Marxism and anarchism has been a long one, and I will not get into it here. Some of these things Marxists can agree with and are useful counter-weights to liberalism. For instance, actual Marxist organizations have both a public and a non-public face. However, in much of this, it is Blanqui again – a select, ultra-leftist conspiracy of rage. I cannot assess the class character of the proponents, but again, the document has the air of the bourgeois ‘ecole superieure.’ Events have shown that many kinds of public legal struggle, like mass marches, have become increasingly futile in advanced capitalist countries, which certainly accounts for this document. What is truly significant is that this book was even written. It is a thermometer held to the temper of the times.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog, September 8, 2009

Imperialism and Financialism

The following is a lucidly written essay by Nitzan and Bichler on the evolution of the terms "imperialism" and "financialism" among Marxists:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15054

It's a 13-page printout and I've never seen the terms so clearly discussed. Like many people, I grew up with Baran and Sweeezy's "Monopoly Capital"; and like many others I've read Foster and Magdoff's recent "The Great Financial Crisis." But I've been blissfully ignorant of how the discussion among Marxists has gradually shifted over the decades -- partly because the same terms are used.

Nitzan and Bichler are famous for their 2002 book, "The Global Political Economy of Israel," which perhaps Mayday Books had in stock some years back.

Have You Cashed Out Today?

“The Great Crash, 1929,” by John Kenneth Galbraith, with 1988 forward, 1954 – 1988

This classic, recently cited by Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi in his roaring Goldman Sachs take-down, should be read by everyone interested in the present market meltdown. In elegant, humorous, evenly-paced prose, Galbraith elucidates the story of the 1929 crash month by month, week by week, nailing every pompous fool, while staying remarkably even-handed. He follows it up with a short section relating the crash to the Great Depression. Galbraith is best known as a Keynesian, which in this day and age signifies a veritable revolutionary. However, Galbraith insists that ‘robbery’ is an individual failing, not a failing of any one class. He is, after all, a defender of a humanized capitalism.

In Galbraith’s 1988 forward (written right after the 1987 crash) he insists that market bubbles are based on 3 things: “a vested interest in euphoria;’ the ‘speculative instinct’ and tax reductions that benefit the wealthy. Contrary to the trickle-down, supply- side theory that says when rich people get money, they buy plant and equipment, and put people to work (such generous wonders!) – Galbraith points out that they actually put their money into speculation and luxury goods. I.E. tax cuts for the rich are very good for yacht builders and hedge funds, not capital improvement.

During 1929 there was no FDIC; no insider-trading rules, no government regulation of the NYSE, no wall between banks and capital markets; no rules on margin; no rules on leverage or assets on hand; no rules on price manipulation; no rules on public disclosures, no rules barring insider trading, and a confirmed overall policy of no government intervention. Imaginative financial products were encouraged. Inflation was feared; deficits were hated and a balanced budget was the goal of all good Republicans and Democrats. It is for you to decide how much this looks like today’s picture.

Investment trusts were one of the new financial inventions, buying stock in many other companies, including other investment trusts. At their height, they controlled $3B in assets. Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation was one of the largest and most prominent investment trusts, cited by Taibbi when he pointed out Goldman’s continuing role in ‘bringing down the house.’ These trusts were similar to the present mutual fund. However, they were so highly leveraged that only tiny real assets controlled massive amounts of what later became illusory capital. One investment trust, highly secretive, successfully solicited funds ‘for an Undertaking which shall in due time be revealed.’ And no one laughed.

Prior to the meltdown in October and November 1929, the market had an incredible run-up. People felt that it would never end, and that they all deserved to make ridiculous amounts of money for essentially doing nothing. Harvard and Yale professors, captains of industry, the press (with the notable exception of the New York Times and Standard & Poor’s) and government politicians like Hoover all joined in the chorus. But as Galbraith points out, every run-up has the seeds of its own destruction within it. Most players, of course, think they can get out in time. What made 1929 unique was that it teased the speculators and ‘investors’ into believing they could turn the market around – with positive thoughts, with ‘organized intervention’ (the banks agreeing to support the market by buying stock…which happened several times) and, even, companies buying their OWN stock to prop up the price. In effect, as Galbraith says, ‘swindling themselves,’ as the stock was then nearly worthless.

One myth Galbraith punctures is that ‘everyone’ was in the market in 1929. He points out that the market dominated the culture, and made brokers and corporate insiders into cocktail-party heroes. As he slyly puts it, “Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.” And “it is far, far better to be wrong in a respectable way than to be right for the wrong reasons.” By his calculation, out of a population of 120 million, 1.5 million owned stock, and of those, 600,000 were speculators on margin. This, really, is a small proportion of the whole population.

Tuesday, October 29, 1929 was probably the most devastating day on any market in history – 33,000,000 shares would have traded all day if the volume had kept up with what happened in the first ½ hour. As Galbraith says, the first week was the slaughter of the market innocents, but “during the second week there is some evidence that it was the well-to-do and the wealthy who were being subjected to a leveling process comparable in magnitude and suddenness to that presided over a decade before by Lenin.” The ‘Crash,’ or should we say ‘Slide,’ lead to a continual decline in stock prices for 3 years, until 1932.

Another myth he takes a shot at is that a good number of speculators and bankers later committed suicide. While we might find this myth oddly comforting, unfortunately the rates for New York City rose only after time, and he attributes this to the Depression itself. It was the poor hurling themselves off bridges, not the rich. What he found more interesting – and what we are finding anew – is that embezzlement, fraud and financial weakness were suddenly revealed on a massive scale. 1929 revealed crooks like Chase Bank’s Albert Wiggins, National City Bank’s Charles Mitchell and even the head of the New York Stock Exchange itself, Richard Whitney. The latter’s indictment was the day the business class surrendered to Roosevelt. In today's Great Recession, Bernie Madoff has become the largest swindler in world history – stealing billions. Here in Minneapolis we have several large Ponzi thieves of our very own - Tom Petters and Denny Hecker to name two. The whole nation is now dotted with indicted schemers and embezzlers who presided over failed hedge funds and businesses that were highly leveraged on the basis of … lies. Seeing what was behind these illusory fortunes is the inevitable aftermath of a broken bubble.

Galbraith talks of tax cuts as a Keynesian response to a financial crisis. It is, indeed, the only action Hoover took, and Galbraith applauds it. Hoover’s mistake was to announce the crisis over, and over, and over again. And he paid with his job.

Galbraith thinks the Crash is related to the Great Depression in 5 ways. Conventional wisdom has it that cheap money (the Federal Reserve lowered rates in mid-1929) caused the speculation. He asserts there are times when money is cheap and yet speculation does NOT occur because the pre-requisite ‘euphoria’ is not present. (Note to the Austrian monetarist followers of Ron Paul.)

Galbraith’s 5 reasons:

1. Bad Distribution of Income. 5% of the population has 1/3rd of the income. The collapse in buying power of the rich affected production more that it might now – they were vital to consumerism and to savings and investment.
2. Bad Corporate Structure. Instead of being prudent, American business was full of ‘grafters, promoters, swindlers, imposters and frauds.’ Investment trusts and holding companies were inherently unstable, as they had little real assets. I.E. too much leverage.
3. Bad Banking Structure. A domino effect of one failing bank lead to it knocking down the next one, and so on. 346 banks failed in the first 6 months of 1929, for instance.
4. The high balance of payments account with the rest of the world. The U.S. was a ‘creditor’ nation. Dangerous loans made around the world could not be paid back. In addition, the tariff was increased, which damaged farm and industrial exports.
5. Poor state of economic intelligence. No matter the economic situation, the parties supported an increase in taxes or reduction in spending, to balance the budget and to stop inflation. As Galbraith puts it, “The simple precepts of a simple world did not hold amid the growing complexities of the early thirties.”

Galbraith ends the book with a excessively sanguine conclusion, as he points out in 1988 that the laws passed in the 30s mitigate some of these 5 problems. However, in 1988 when he wrote the last intro, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act had not been passed, and Glass-Steagall had not been repealed. Nor had requirements for bank assets been lowered farther - something the SEC allowed to happen in 2004. For instance, some present banks like Ing have 42 to 1 ratios of debt to assets. In addition, the distribution of income has gotten increasingly worse since 1988. And of key interest - government regulators do not actually have to USE the laws they have. The slavishness of the government to Wall Street reached a nadir under Clinton and Bush - also after 1988.

The U.S. is now a debtor nation, which has allowed us – so far – to blackmail holders of dollars and Treasuries into continued support. And the FDIC has prevented – so far – a run on the banks, because of the experience with the Depression. However, the FDIC will need to be re-funded very soon. The ruling class HAS learned that passivity is not its own reward – which accounts for the massive bi-partisan action to save some brokerage firms and banks by Bush and now Obama - an action which to this point has succeeded for the big banks.

And I bought it at May Day books used-book section –
Red Frog, 9/1/2009

Volunteer POV

If you were a Mayday volunteer, this would be your view of the store!

You Must Comply

Stacked Chairs




Making sure Mayday's chairs are stored correctly is an important task in book store management. Here, for the record, are two images of perfectly stacked chairs in Mayday's "chair alcove".

The bricks in back of this archway block off one of the old tunnels that run through the West Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Come the revolution, we'll probably need to break down those walls and reclaim the tunnels as we fight for a better world!

Ravenmn

Author Event

Dahr Jamail

Great book. Great author. Come to our next event:


Dahr Jamail in Minneapolis

Join the Army and Get Radicalized

“Black Radical; The Education of an American Revolutionary” – by Nelson Peery, 2007

Minnesota’s own Nelson Peery tells his story of his revolutionary awakening after World War II. He came home as a soldier and ran into discrimination and poverty in the North and heard about lynchings in the South. After the war, Peery and his 6 brothers became members or supporters of the Communist Party (“CP”), while their father became a well-known and professional anti-communist in Minneapolis and later Los Angeles. Later Peery left the CP to form the Communist Labor Party ("CLP"). This book can be seen as Part 2 of Peery’s earlier memoir, “Black Fire,” about his life in rural American Minnesota, the depression and World War II.

The book starts with him coming home after 4 years of combat. Peery’s experience in the Pacific war paralleled that of many black soldiers – not only in World War II, but also in the Civil War and World War I. Combat empowered black men and some women to feel both competent to handle any physical threat and entitled to equal rights with white people. It, in an odd sense, was the incubator for revolutionary and egalitarian feelings. Black ex-soldiers formed the heart of the anti-discrimination and anti-Jim Crow movement that developed after World War II. Educated not on the pablum of non-violence and obsequiousness, but on combat cohesion and the risking of their lives for ‘democracy,’ black soldiers after World War II were changed men. The 90 years of post-Civil War neo-confederate rule, the result of the defeat of Reconstruction, was about to end, in both north and south.

Peery re-joins his neighborhood after the war, but cannot just blend back into the aimless life of partial work and partying. He joins the Communist Party (at their office on Fifth and Hennepin), greatly influenced by people like Paul Robeson and W.E.B Dubois. Later he joins the Party group at the University of Minnesota, where he starts reading Marxism more deeply. He was part of a group that got the first black professor hired at the U in the late 40s. In an incredible scene during this period, Leadbelly tours Minneapolis and Peery invites him over to his home to meet the ‘Red Bishop' of the English Anglican church. At the families' south Minneapolis house, Leadbelly performs an impromptu concert for the bishop, and 200 other people show up.

The Party then asked Peery to leave the U and get a working-class job. With some trepidation, he agreed. Fearing the ordinary unskilled union jobs usually assigned blacks, he walked upstairs in the union hall to the office of the Bricklayers Union, and got a job as the first black bricklayer in Minneapolis through plain moxie and a threat of a lawsuit. Peery worked construction for awhile and learned the trade from the Swedes on the job. As the Red Purge picked up in the United States, mostly targeted at unionists and workers, Peery was then assigned by the CP to go ‘underground’ in Detroit. The CP was afraid the whole organization would be outlawed, rounded up and incarcerated in jail, much as some of their leaders were due to the Smith Act. In Detroit he meets one of the Scottsboro boys hiding there, who had been heavily marked by his experience in prison. Perry lost contact with the Party organization due to its own disorganization. Peery eventually decides to re-emerge on his own, contacts the CP again, and is then assigned to work in Cleveland. There he joins a black Party club that helps initiate a major boycott of the Cleveland Sears for their refusal to hire blacks.

Problems in the Party start to surface. Peery initially made the mistake of going to a CP convention in New York and criticizing Tito when Tito was Stalin’s darling. For this, he is roundly denounced by the Party leadership at the convention meeting. The very next day Stalin denounced Tito, and then the U.S. Party also decided to denounce Tito. Peery, of course, was suddenly back in favor. Peery did not fail to notice that ‘thinking’ in the CP was not an independent process.

It is somewhat difficult in this book to figure out exactly which political or strategic issues lead to the break between Peery and many black comrades on the one hand, and the CP on the other. It is clear during the McCarthy and 50's period that the white leadership was afraid of getting deeply involved in anti-racist activities that might involve illegalities. The Party lost its nerve, and it meant that more radical comrades were asked to leave. The black comrades in Cleveland, through their anti-discrimination work, had stood up to the East Cleveland white racists, the FBI and the Cleveland police in their work in the mass Negro Labor Council. Some were expelled for refusing to leave the Negro Labor Counsel. Peery was also expelled for something similar to this reason, though his conflicts with various leaders over other issues seemed to play a role too.

Peery’s first marriage, to a non-political women, fell apart in Cleveland, and he moved to New York. In New York, he met his politicized second wife, Sue Ying. After the departure from the CP and move to New York, Peery joined the Provisional Organizing Committee (POC) ("…to reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States of America"), who were a group of ex-CP’ers in the city. There, in one significant moment, he describes having the idea of giving political speeches on street corners in Harlem. His Marxist speeches were made not far from the headquarters of the Black Muslims. In the audience was a young Muslim, Malcolm X. Later, Malcolm started giving street corner speeches, and of course, drew far vaster crowds than Peery. The implication is that Peery gave the idea of talking on the streets to Malcolm.

Then Peery and Ying moved to Los Angeles’ Watts district for the POC, and helped form the California Communist League, and later, the CLP, his own organization. You see, he seemed to have a habit of pissing-off the leaders of every organization he was part of, until the CLP. While in California, Peery was involved in the 1965 Watts uprising, which he characterizes not as a ‘riot’ but as a people’s rebellion against white privilege and the police state in Watts. During Watts, he sees the unorganized black masses of Los Angeles almost overcome the strength of the cops and state, though at the cost of many dead, wounded and arrested.

This is a personal, non-rhetorical book, combining both private and political details. What runs throughout this second part of his memoir is how Peery always understood that black nationalism, no matter how radical or phrased, is ultimately a dead end in defeating capitalism and institutional racism. While he well knew that many white people, even those who call themselves communists, are flawed, he also knew that no overthrow of American capital can occur without black, white and Latino workers uniting. And this is the ‘red’ thread that runs through all his organizing - his bedrock commitment to a united working-class movement.

And you can buy it at May Day Books!
Red Frog, August 17, 2009

Best Health Care in the World

BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE WORLD.

The U.S. health care is very good for many people including me---but it is not very good for the 40 million plus who have no care. And it is not very good for the 90,000 people who die each year from infections acquired in hospitals and the same number w ho die due to incorrect drug treatment. Except for the first mentioned the care here is a disgrace. This is the richest country in the world. What’s wrong? More than 100 years ago, Germany put in a national plan. Europe and the rest of the industrialized world have had it for 50 years or more. The profit system is blamed, yet Germany did it under the capitalist profit system?

As an advocate of socialist principles, I believe that in a true socialist society , this would never even be a question; it would automatically be instituted.

Tom R. Dooley. 8/15/09

There's a Killer on the Loose

“American Assassination – The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone” – by Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, 2004

Are you a ‘conspiracy nut?’ This is the bourgeois media’s eternal phrase for anyone who believes conspiracies are possible. Intellectually, of course, conspiracies are very possible. Intellectually, of course, the ruling-class media is allergic even to the phrase “intellectual.” So is their analysis of the impossibility of conspiracies based on facts? No. Only on oft-repeated myths or cherry-picking.

Heavily controlled 'crash' site of Wellstone plane?

Since the 60s the U.S. CIA/FBI has operated death squads – and not just in foreign countries. Overseas, most observers agree the CIA and their trained henchman made/make death squads and assassination normal tools of political life. In Iraq right now death squads have been operating for years, outside the military purview, under the control of the U.S. secret services, using Iraqi para-militaries. This is no different from the bloody CIA Phoenix program used in Vietnam. The well-documented involvement of the secret services in the deaths of Lumumba, Che and attempts on Castro are the tip of the foreign iceberg. But for anyone conscious, the deaths of Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King were all government hits – carried out by a conservative group within the CIA/military under the control of James Jesus Angleton and J Edgar Hoover, with help from the mob and local police departments, and, as these authors argue, with heavy influence from the Bush family and other ruling-class entities.

Assassination is an essential tool of the armed bourgeois state's political rule. You will notice that the overwhelming majority of targets are those on the liberal or left side of the spectrum – something mathematically impossible based on the laws of probability. As of 2004, there were 47 ‘accidental’ deaths by plane crash or some other method for U.S. politicians or whistleblowers, also illustrating a mathematical impossibility of 2-1 majority of liberal or ‘troublemakers’ having ‘accidents.’ If Obama strays off the ranch, he too will be the target of assassination. Recently, the Secret Service refused to arrest a gun-toting Republican at a "town hall' anti health-care reform rally, held right outside the site of Obama's appearance.

The recent 2009 revelation that Dick Cheney had set up an assassination squad ostensibly limited only to Al Quaeda is no surprise. Since killing Al Quaeda members has been official public policy for years, this secret Cheney hit squad had something more about it than the supine major press wants to delve into. After all, why would it be secret, even to the Congress, if it was only duplicating U.S. policy? The key lies in revelations by journalist Seymour Hersch, who has information that this unit was actually operating on domestic terrain too.

We are all familiar with how the FBI ‘loses’ much crucial evidence over and over again, in various politically sensitive cases, from the Kennedy assassinations onward. What is interesting is the involvement since 1996 of an ostensibly 'objective' agency, the NTSB – the National Transportation Safety Board – in covering up evidence in controversial crashes. The present head of the NTSB, Carol Carmody, is a former CIA officer. Within hours of a few crashes, this supposedly ‘scientific’ NTSB head has rushed to microphones to assure people that the crash is ‘only an accident.’ Prior to any scientific investigation, the legendary ‘forte’ of this supposedly neutral government agency. How does she know? You may well ask.

Now to the specifics of this book:

• The Sheriff of St. Louis County confirmed that Minneapolis FBI was on-site at Wellstone's plane crash site, just below Eveleth in northern Minnesota, between 12:00 noon and 1:00 p.m. The crash site was publicly identified at 10:50 a.m. One of the controllers at the airport thought the FBI was there by at least 1:00 pm. No one has claimed they notified the FBI of the crash. It is impossible to get from Minneapolis to Eveleth, even by air, in that time period, without already being on the road. (The FBI claimed they used the Duluth airport, not the Eveleth airport, which necessitated a car rental and drive as well.)
• 
  The FBI claimed it got there at 3:30 p.m., and verified it was a Minneapolis evidence crew. Washington D.C. Capitol Police got on-site at 4:00 p.m. The NTSB, the ‘official’ investigators, got there at 8:00-9:00 p.m., also from Washington.
• 
  Around 6:00 P.M. the FBI announced there was no ‘terrorist’ connection about the crash to the national news – 2-3 hours before the arrival of the NTSB, the official investigators.
  It is NTSB policy that ONLY the NTSB can investigate a crash. The FBI is supposedly not allowed to investigate crashes until the NTSB determines they are criminal matters. The NTSB had not done so.
• 
  Carmody announced the initial NTSB focus was recovering the ‘voice data recorder.’ There was none required on this plane, but sometimes they are installed. A voice data recorder might reveal it was not an accident, and could have accounted for the speed of the FBI intervention, and Carmody’s concern. No voice recorder was found, or, if found, was made public.
• 
  Weather was blamed by the media for the accident. However, many other similar planes were flying. Visibility was around 2-5 miles, temperatures on the ground were 36 degrees, winds were light to non-existent, the clouds were higher than normal, and icing was not a major problem for any other plane in the area. Local reporters and weather experts said weather was not a factor – only the national news and some government types floated these ideas.
• 
  Dick Cheney personally told Wellstone that “There will be severe ramifications for you and the State of Minnesota’ if he continued to oppose the Bush administration on the war. Wellstone was enemy number one in the Senate for the White House across many fronts – asbestos, the Iraq War, the control of the SEC, the Homeland Security and Patriot acts, labor issues and tax cuts.
• 
  The guidance system at the airport and the planes mechanical condition were fine, and the NTSB agreed with this finding.
• 
  The NTSB said they only have public hearings in ‘high profile cases.’ No hearing was held in the Wellstone crash. They have hearings in almost 50% of cases.
• 
  It was known for several days that Wellstone was going to fly up north instead of appearing with Ted Kennedy for a fundraiser. Wellstone used the same pilot 12 times. While the Wellstone boys later sued the aviation firm over an ‘unqualified’ pilot - one has to ask why Wellstone used this same ‘unqualified’ pilot 12 times, if he was so incompetent?
• 
  The FBI and Capitol Police were omitted from the listed parties to the investigation by the NTSB. This in spite of the fact that the FBI were the first one’s on the scene after emergency personnel, and later ruled it ‘an accident’ several hours later. The Capitol Police also arrived before the NTSB, and also began investigating.
• Carmody much later agreed it was “an accident” too, before her 11 month investigation closed, although NTSB rules indicate no verbalization of cause can be made before a report is officially issued.
• 
  First responders were ordered by the FBI not to take photos of the wreckage.
• 
  The plane turned almost 180 degrees before it crashed, and was last known going 85 knots -- and hit the ground at a 30 degree angle. A stall is at 69 knots. Stalling was later blamed for the crash. Why would a 'stall' make a plane turn 180 degrees?
• 
  Two witnesses heard the plane’s engines going ‘on and off’ and ‘quiet.’ One witness said they heard a ‘bang’ while the plane was in the air. A witness aid they saw fire and blue smoke in the tail. On the ground, it was confirmed the tail was burned, though gas tanks are in the wings. KSTP reporters said the fuselage was a ‘fire pit.’ Mechanics did not understand why the fuselage or tail would burn, when the fuel was in the wings, which were separated at the crash site. Instead of black smoke for fuel, the smoke from the fuselage was blue, which means electrical smoke.
• 
  Cell phone call in the immediate area broken up at 10:18 a.m. At 10:19 a.m. the Wellstone plane started its unexplained turn and plunge. The NTSB says it is not aware of ‘electro-magnetic pulse’ weapons. However, electro-magnetic impulses have lead many planes to crash. According to Fetzer, weapons that produce these pulses exist, and they can bring down planes. Time magazine reports their use in Iraq. Rayethon holds many of the patents, some developed in 1993. That is why individuals cannot use electronic devices during takeoff and landing of an airplane.
• 
  The NTSB never considered a ‘non-accident’ scenario. This from a supposedly ‘scientific’ body. Not considering sabotage as one scenario is a political decision. It underlines their investigations of nearly every other recent plane crash.
• 
  Carmody also worked on the plane crash of Democratic Senator Carnahan in Missouri, who died 2 years earlier, a few days before his senate election in Missouri against John Ashcroft. The NTSB also ruled that crash an accident. What is interesting is that Carnahan's widow took his place and won against Ashcroft. This time, Sheila Wellstone was also on the plane with Wellstone, and died too. So she could not take Wellstone's place on the ballot. This is either an 'accident,' or it implies that this time that option would be unavailable.
• 
  The assassination of Wellstone was predicted by a website, Vox Fux, which said it would relate to a tight electoral contest, and look like the Carnahan crash. This web-site was taken down by the government later. A former CIA contact with close ties to the CIA/FBI asserted to the authors that the Wellstone crash was not an accident.
• 
  The lead pilot, Conry, was a careful, experienced flier, especially concerned with weather issues. The FAA had re-certified Conry two days before the crash. The co-pilot was also very experienced, and could have easily taken over from a sleepy pilot. The Star Tribune concentrated on the ‘sleepy pilot’ theory, of course.
• 
  Both electrical communication and control of the airplane ended at the same time. Hitting a flock of birds or some other ‘catastrophic’ event would normally have been reported, as all power would not be out. Instead all electrical systems failed simultaneously.
• 
  Logs of planes arriving in Duluth that day have disappeared. From what I can tell from the book, the car rental logs have also not been found. The FBI said they landed in Duluth and rented a car.
• 
  The official NTSB report blamed pilot error for causing the plane to stall, not weather, and not the plane. They highlighted Conry’s prior felony conviction. His felony does not, of course, explain why the plane turned, instead of just dropping down. Nor does it explain why the pilots let the plane stall, in spite of a very loud ‘stall’ horn. It is only useful in a campaign of character assissination.
• 
  NTSB simulations of the stall failed to duplicate what happened to Wellstone’s plane.
• 
  Opponents of the authors assert that some ‘unexplained event’ caused the crash, not sabotage or the official NTSB explanation. But they cannot verbalize what ‘unexplained event’ that would be.
• 
  2 of the 5 NTSB members are HW Bush appointees. Only one is an actual aviation expert. One, again, is a former CIA agent. A real police investigation would start with the questions 'who had the motive, ability, and the most to gain' from the death of Paul Wellstone. The tentative answer here, of course, is Dick Cheney and those around him.

Why, as a radical, would anyone care what happens to Paul Wellstone, a left-liberal in the capitalist Democratic Party? Well, for those whose vanilla schematic of the world is that there are no divisions within the ruling class, or that the Democratic Party is one completely uniform body, that makes sense. However, when divisions arise between the rulers, or a few Democratic Party members stray from the 'path,' then we are left blind to the consequences if conflicts erupt. Leaving out facts, and replacing them with political generalizations makes Marxists into preachers, not scientists. And we are, above all, scientists.

Essentially, Four Arrows and Fetzer argue that the most logical and explanatory answer to what happened to Wellstone’s flight was that it was not an accident, but was sabotage of some sort – an electro-magnetic pulse, small plane-attached bomb, or some combination. This is the only thing that scientifically explains the long string of facts and strange, fraudulent or contradictory happenings concerning this somewhat simple event.

And I bought it at MayDay Books!
Red Frog, 8/12/2009

Is ideology important?

I was at a meeting at Mayday Books about ten days back. This was one where anyone who was so inclined was allowed to speak for two minutes, ostensibly on the economic crisis. And what a farrago of nonsense I had to endure (for over two hours). The people at the meeting who understood the roots of the economic crisis could probably be counted on a crippled hand. The rest ranted on whatever took their fancy. These people don't seem to understand that just proclaiming that one is "of the Left" doesn't necessarily make it so. Some theoretical understanding and some responsibility in utterance is called for. Without viewing the world through an ideological prism, one cannot be of the Left. All that is left is inchoate moral outrage and the simplistic and puerile thinking that those in charge are "evil"; and that once these "evil" and "greedy" people are supplanted, everything will be hunky-dory. This is the rubbish one has to endure at these meetings. I remember a meeting two or three years back when one person stood and proudly announced, "I hate Bush." So ...? The problem has never been Bush. This is an imbecile's view of social and political reality. Bush has gone and Obama is in. What has changed? You could put an archangel in the White House and the structure and dynamic of the empire would not change an iota. The aircraft carriers, the foreign bases, the wars of aggression, and the assassinations and the torture would continue unabated (as they are in the Obama administration). Someone has to say this out loud: Ignoramuses who have never cracked a book and never learnt to think and who then go to these worthless meetings and self-importantly spout drivel are not going to accomplish anything. These meetings are an exercise in futility and other than stoking the egos of a pack of sorry losers accomplish precious little else.

The tottering US imperium

Dedicated empire-watchers like myself have long been arguing that the days of the US imperium are numbered. But the argument for this position quickly becomes a little more intricate than I would wish. The imperium has two foundations -- financial and military -- and they are mutually reinforcing. The collapse of one has grave implications for the other. Without the ability to run huge fiscal deficits -- and as a concomitant have them financed by foreigners such as the Chinese and Japanese -- the US military complex cannot be sustained even for a year or two. Yet there is now a growing reluctance to finance these deficits when the value of the paper these foreigners buy (in return for real goods and services) becomes increasingly dubious. This growing scepticism and reluctance is what we've been seeing the last few months, and in particular at the meeting in Yekaterinburg a few days ago attended by SCO and BRIC countries (see Hudson's article here for an excellent analysis).

Every week now there are a handful of articles in serious publications worrying about the fate of the dollar. The crux of the problem is an utterly irrational US financial and political system whose dynamics no-one understands -- not even those at the helm of affairs in the US. For instance, no-one knows what the consequences of "quantitative easing" are going to be -- is it going to be deflation or Weimar-style hyper-inflation? No-one knows. Even I don't know. All serious people agree, however, that the house of cards that is now the US economy, is looking increasingly fragile and unsteady. The US today is not the juggernaut of half a century ago. Most people also agree that this is a time of transition as the US loses its top-dog position and we enter a more confusing multi-polar world whose rules and dynamics are unclear.

The catalyst for this post was a well-crafted article in the Daily Telegraph.

The effectiveness of strikes in difficult economic times

Here is an interesting article in today's Guardian:

The most recent walkouts have naturally focused on jobs, as insecurity grips the labour market. But they also show that, as one leading trade unionist puts it, "it isn't inevitable that employers have the whip hand, even during a recession, and collective action can deliver results" – while passivity guarantees that jobs, pay and conditions are culled, squeezed and slashed.

Second, they underline the irrelevance of anti-union legislation when workers are determined and well-organised. Every single one of the walkouts at Lindsey and at dozens of other power stations and refineries has been illegal under what Tony Blair boasted were "the most restrictive union laws in the western world". But so far no employer has even hinted at a visit to the courts, so counter-productive would that be in the real industrial world.

It's now become obvious that only by defying or ignoring the anti-democratic legislation bequeathed by Margaret Thatcher – which outlaws, for example, all solidarity action – will there ever be the political will to ditch or replace it with something more reasonable.

This is precisely what should be occurring in the United States. American workers need to be organising and striking. And even more importantly, they need to be aiming for political power. Had American labor not relinquished claims to political power eons ago, the social, economic, and political texture of the country would be radically different today. As it is, American labor gets into a one-night stand with the Democratic Party at election time -- a party that is indistinguishable from the Republicans in its obeisance and fealty to capital.

American capitalism is unequivocally demonstrating that it does not work -- except for an insignificant minority of capitalist. Yet without insistent countervailing pressure from labor, absolutely nothing will change. We can already see this clearly. And conditions for American labor -- and by implication the mass of American people -- are continuing to steadily deteriorate.

SUV's under Socialism?

Ecology & Marxism – Do They Connect?

Most older Marxists – no matter what tradition – were brought up thinking that the ‘production’ of material goods was one of the only gauges to measure the well-being of the proletariat. Marxism developed against capital, but Marxism also developed in a world where resources were just being developed, or ‘exploited.’ Hence Lenin and Trotsky were for industrializing the primitive, mostly agrarian Soviet Union (quite rightly) and Stalin took this to the ultimate extreme, favoring giant industrial building projects over closing a ‘scissors’ of any kind – the 'scissors' being the relationship with the countryside and peasantry. Instead, it was widened. We can see this today in the deformed workers’ state in China, which has become the productive marvel of the world under its’ mostly planned economy and mixed economy, while depopulating its impoverished rural areas.

The Aral 'Sea'

However, a look back at the Soviet Union shows some of the niggling flaws in an approach that favors production over anything else. Visit Baku and see the devastation of dry holes, rusting oil derricks and poisoned soils for miles around the city. Watch the Aral Sea shrink, as it is used for cotton irrigation across the plains – to the point where the lake is disappearing. And then there is Chernobyl, which continues to affect hundreds of thousands of citizens with the aftermath of radioactive poisoning. Regarding China, an excellent article in Mother Jones in 2007, "China's Pollution Problem Goes Global" by Jacques Leslie shows what pell-mell production has done to China and her people, exclusively from an environmental and health point of view. It is devastating.

As materialists first and necrophiliacs last, Marxists have to examine this new (actually not so new) phenomenon, and integrate it into our program. A good case can be made that environmentalism should be considered an essential part of an updated transitional program. Where environmentalism would fit into the bureaucratic/Stalinist model of the minimum/maximum ‘program’ conundrum, or the Maoist ‘mass’ line, I really do not know.

The most prominent synthesizer of Marxism and environmentalism in the U.S. is John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, a long running left-Marxist journal in the U.S. Foster wrote “Marx’s Ecology – Materialism and Nature” in 2000. This ground-breaking work looked at the works of Marx and Engels and how they noted environmental pollution and the ill-effects of capitalist production on the health of the working classes of England and Germany. Polluted water, leveled forests, smoke-filled air, work accidents, bad food, early death– it was all noted as part of the exploitation of the working classes. Environmental ‘racism’ would be no surprise to Marx or Engels. Foster has just come out with a new book called “The Ecological Revolution – Making Peace with the Planet.” I have not read the book yet, but his thesis is that human survival – and the survival of our class – is based on a revolutionary transformation of our relationship with the planet. He points out that capitalism cannot succeed at this task, as ‘profit’ demands the unending exploitation of people, plants, animals, air, water and land. So it has been from the beginning of the capitalist mode of production. Only socialism, which is based on scientific planning and not profit, can make the switch to a sustainable economy. Real socialism is not based exclusively on the unthinking exploitation of nature.

We are all familiar with the position – from ostensible Marxists no less - that anything less than an SUV in every driveway, a 10,000 sq. foot house on every lot, and a 4x4 in every woods is the due of the working class. Bicycling, growing your own food, shutting off the lights, eating organic, reusing and repairing, vegetarianism, grey-water systems and other environmental methods in building, saying no to bottled water, getting rid of throw-away products, solar or wind power - you get the idea – are all expensive and ‘petit-bourgeois’ deviations from working class needs. This by the way is also the view of right-wing Republican populism. This interesting congruence should raise a ‘red flag’ in the best possible sense.

While it is true that many of these practices did not solely originate from the working class, it is also true that they did not originate from corporate America. American workers have been buying used goods, or repairing broken ones, or eschewing the ease of expensive throwaways since the class began. If one has been to Hanoi recently, bicycles outnumber cars or trucks – though small scooters are now the majority. Vietnamese food is not grown with massive inputs of chemical oil-based fertilizers, as this costs too much. It is fresh and organic – horrors - and is reputed to be the best food in the world, if you listen to people like Anthony Bourdain, or even your own stomach. Anyone following the development of Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet workers’ state will find out that the Cubans have developed organic agriculture to an extent not seen anywhere else in the world. Their army of scientists has been devoted to this issue. This was occasioned by the end of cheap Soviet oil imports. If Cuba had been a capitalist society, they would have gone into debt as a nation to buy more oil from OPEC or the United States. The Cubans refused to go this route. Interestingly, urban gardens in Havana now account for much of the fresh food in the city. North Korea also faced this situation in 1989 too. Instead of switching over to another mode of agriculture, hundreds of thousands or more died of starvation. This does not reflect well on the entrenched bureaucrats in Pyongyang in comparison to the cadres in Havana.

More importantly, an SUV in every driveway, a 10,000 sq. foot house and a 4X4 actually impact the environment of the rest of the world. Internationalists do not consume in a state of oblivion. The constant flow of scientific data now indicates that global warming is past the point of no return, and that it is affecting the third world even more than the first world. Which is one reason the Republican Party pooh-poohs global climate change as an erroneous ‘theory’ – they couldn’t care less about people in Bangladesh or New Orleans. Unless Marxists can refute the science behind global climate change, Marxists are obligated to follow what it indicates. And by all indications, global warming is now farther alone than most thought only two years ago.

The other fact that will dominate future development in the world is the issue of oil. American capitalism was based on early and massive exploitation of oil – the most useful and powerful energy source ever discovered. To some extent, the immense growth in the Soviet Union was also based on drilling for oil. Oil is the key commodity for the recent development of capital. US imperialism cut off the oil supply to Japan, which was one of the sparks behind the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Battle of the Bulge was won because the Nazi tanks ran out of … gasoline from Rumania. The two wars in the Gulf were directly based on control of this most precious of commodities. Arguments can be made over the importance of oil to the wars in Afghanistan and in the former Yugoslavia. And as oil dwindles it will become more precious, more expensive, more destructive, but also more marginal. The oil age is over, and Marxists should read the handwriting on the wall.

I have to agree with Foster that without a Marxism infused with environmentalism, we will be unable to cope with the destruction of our biosphere, or the depletion of oil, and hence our ability as a class to lead the way to the future. As the saying goes, an unlimited appetite for ‘goods’ has now run up against the limited objective carrying capacity of the planet. The effect of bourgeois ‘globalism’ has created its opposite - a sense of a some world-wide alternative to a runaway cheap-labor, oil-war Dickensianism.

Enlightened Democratic capital thinks there is a purely technical fix to this – turbines, solar panels and a massive grid. And this project is indeed part of the solution. However, conservation is not a concept that is bankable, even under ‘enlightened’ capitalism. Nor is the need to control production, and eliminate anything that is unsustainable. Capital and its commodification of everything cannot do this – without moving towards social control.

Note my use of the word ‘enlightened’ – most capital is not enlightened and will fight the other wing of capital, and the working class, to the death. This is partly what we see in the battle between the Republican and Democrat parties – the clash of outmoded production, and an ostensibly ‘new’ production. Al Gore and Obama want to grow or transform a new generation of capitalists to meet this situation – witness what they are attempting to do with Chrysler and GM. However, they are also representatives of that whole capitalist class. Given this, they cannot carry through this battle to the end, and will instead protect all wings of capital. The collapse of the capitalist world economy is already hindering efforts to accomplish this transition in time. Money for a new grid is being dumping into warfare or the dead banking system by the Democrats. One of their solutions, the proposed market for ‘pollution credits’ will only create another unregulated gold rush in pollution derivatives – and, as has been proved in Europe, will not slow carbon production significantly. The declining dollar will make deficit financing even more difficult for U.S. imperialism - including infrastructure improvements related to a green economy.

Of course, China, which has created itself as the workhouse of world capital, has many of the same dilemmas. What they have as an advantage, however, is some centralized planning control. Overnight they shut hundreds of small coal plants. Overnight they ordered an end to the production of plastic bags. Overnight they decreed that all new skyscrapers built in Shanghai and Beijing would be ‘green’ - if that is even possible. This is the benefit of a theoretically planned economy, not one dominated by a short-term market and millions of individual bourgeois decisions. Because global warming and peak oil are not ‘short term’ issues, the short term corporate shareholder is not the best judge of where an economy should go. Nor is a government theoretically and financially based on these same shareholders able to chart a real solution.

Both books by Foster are available at May Day books.
Red Frog, 6/19/2009