Doomsayers Corrective

“China – the Bubble That Never Pops,” by Thomas Orlik, 2020 
This is a bourgeois economist’s analysis of why the Chinese economy, given its vast debt burdens, hasn’t gone into severe recessions or depressions yet.  Orlik, a reporter for Bloomberg and the WSJ who lived in China for a long time, supports the complete privatization and marketization of the Chinese economy.  But he’s honest enough to detail how these kind of deep crises have not occurred in the Chinese economy - yet.  Orlik says that “China itself is the innovation.”

China is still enmeshed in a capitalist world economy.  Given the hard blows from the rest of the capitalist world – long-term Japanese stagnation, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the U.S. 2008 Wall Street collapse of securitized mortgages, the European sovereign debt crisis – China as a whole has avoided many of the consequences in spite of the large debts accumulated by its public and private sectors.  China now has to deal with the severe CoVid recession, a U.S. trade war and military encirclement, but that is not in the book.  Orlik explains in macro-economic detail how China has avoided the worst effects of four cycles containing at least six economic crises.

CHINA’s CLASS CHARACTER

This book relates to the endless debate on the class character of Chinese society.  It is pretty clear that in any retelling of the ups, downs and sideways moves of the Chinese economy since 1978, two forces are always at work.  On one side in this dialectical war is the Chinese Communist-Party (CCP) dominated economy – a planned and state-owned industrial and banking sector; CCP run local governments; a restricted capital account, a controlled foreign exchange market and blocks on external capital outflows.  On the other side is the capitalist and imperialist export sector; the private shadow banking and financial sectors and the private real estate construction sector. Many of these enterprises have CCP cadre planted inside them. The state monopoly on foreign trade and a fuly-controlled yuan value are no longer in effect.  As Orlik points out ‘reform’ – i.e. a neo-liberal market orientation – has generally grown for 42 years since 1978, enabled by the CCP and a parade of its leaders.  1978-2002 was when the ‘iron rice bowl’ and agricultural communes ended, for instance.

The question is, what has been created? A fully capitalist state and economy, or a deformed workers’ state run by bureaucrats attempting to promote and still control an ever-growing capitalist sector?  After all, even billionaires are now allowed in the CCP and in government positions.  The book shows that China has a better-regulated economy than almost any capitalist country, as Orlik compares actions in China with similar ones in Korea, Japan and the U.S.  The book gives ammunition to both sides in the debate but it clearly shows the ‘market’ is not in full control.

To Orlik, the state keeps the capitalist economy in check, which is why deep recessions and depressions don’t happen.  Orlik contends the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy are in the hands of CCP bureaucrats, not a private capitalist class.  I.E. the state basically controls the economy, not 'the market.'   To Orlik some of the worst effects have been slower growth rates, massive overcapacity, business bankruptcies and workers thrown out of jobs and peasants off their land. Behind the 1989 Tienanmen Square events - which many thought was only about ‘human rights’ - the economic situation was deteriorating for workers and farmers.  This is why workers joined some of the protests due to “a misstep on reform – moving too quickly from government to market-set prices” as Orlik puts it.  High inflation was the result.  The CCP wants to avoid this happening again.

SEMI-PLANNED ECONOMY

Orlik does not spend much time on the conditions for workers or farmers or the agrarian economy.  He does mention the internal hokou system frequently.  Hokou walls rural migrants out of social programs in the cities, even preventing their children from getting an education.  It defines two kinds of Chinese citizens – a rural underclass of temporary workers in the multi-millions and a more settled urban working class.

Orlik’s wider topic is to expose why all the China doomsayers in the bourgeois press have been wrong so far.  He picks apart each economic crisis in detail and how the government handled it.  He starts with the 1989 Chinese market price initiation and subsequent shutdown, the same year the Japanese real estate bubble burst. That was followed 10 years later by the 1998 Asian financial crisis and 10 years later the 2008 great sub-prime financial crisis, both hammering exports. In 2012 in Wenzhou the sovereign debt crisis closed factories, leading to the state curbing shadow banking and real estate speculation.  The government even put a cap on house prices.  Shadow banking involves a 3^rd party making loans to a high risk entity while the bank buys a ‘security’ from the shadow bank, so the money actually comes from the initial bank.  To Orlik shadow banks are “too small to cause a systemic crisis.”

In 2013 there was a money market crisis of high interest rates that almost caused major defaults, cured by People’s Bank of China (PBOC) intervention in the money markets.  Orlik notes that a very small fraction of the population, 5%, is actually caught up in the financial markets, so losses are not widespread when a financial market seizes up.  That was followed in a 2015 equity crash due to yuan market depreciation, which caused the government to shut down trading and stop capital outflows of any kind.  By the way, most of the funds and brokers were state-owned! As part of market regulation, China controls foreign speculators in Chinese assets, who are nicknamed ‘crocodiles.’  In 2016 the Chinese government used what Orlik terms “supply-side reform” to reduce overcapacity.  One province closed 510 coal mines.  Zombie firms were merged, restructured or closed, while ‘public-private’ partnerships were introduced for infrastructure projects.  This led to further ‘slum clearance’ and moving many people into better housing. 

Skyscraper socialism?

DEBT

In the late 1990s many state enterprises were ‘de-leveraged’ by premier Zhu Rongji and CCP secretary Jiang Zemin, with millions losing their jobs.  This was supposedly due to the massive and continual debt of state and private actors.  Yet the state continues to back up most unprofitable state companies or public governments to maintain jobs, so the enterprises do not fear going out of business.  This is no small matter, as the Chinese state industrial sector’s revenue is larger than Germany’s GDP and has been growing since 2014.  Orlik considers this government guarantee a ‘moral hazard’ in capitalist terms.  Yet to Orlik, “state firms smooth the ups and downs of growth, drive the government’s development strategy and provide patronage opportunities…”

Orlik focuses on the high savings rate in China, as its inadequate welfare system makes citizens cover many expenses themselves.  This leads to low consumption by the working-class population.  For many years, deposit and loan rates were set, but now they are left to ‘float’ based on the market.  Like Greenspan, Orlik tries to blame the 2008 U.S. crisis on Chinese savings invested in U.S Treasuries by Chinese state banks.  This led to low U.S. interest rates, leading to low interest mortgages, leading to anyone with a pulse qualifying.  This of course leaves out many things – like no-doc mortgages, fraudulent paperwork, the dollar standard and securitization.  The high domestic savings rate and blocks on money transfers out of China give the large state banks stability and size, as they are the biggest in the country.  The state-owned Industrial & Commercial Bank of China is the largest bank in the world by assets.

Orlik points out that local governments sell peasant land to real estate developers to gain funds, a practice partly behind the recent Chinese property bubble after the 2008 Wall Street collapse.  According to Orlik these formerly unoccupied buildings and infrastructure are slowly being used - but that is still up in the air.  At that time the 4-trillion yuan stimulus initiated by Wen Jiabao in November 2008 helped stabilize the world economy and allowed growth to continue in China.

The present CCP general secretary, Xi Jinping, has launched another large campaign against corruption. Corruption actually depresses growth.  Corruption, not labor exploitation, is how a bureaucracy gets richer. Tens of thousands of officials have been caught.  Even a cursory knowledge of the various bureaucratic strata in eastern Europe or the USSR shows they did not live like filthy-rich capitalists.  In East Germany the ruling bureaucratic caste was very small and tight, but not wealthy.  Think of a high union boss and you get a bit of a picture of their lives.  Now think of Jeff Bezos.  A big difference.

Orlik spends a bit of time on the ‘Belt & Road Initiative” and Trump's new cold war which started under Bill Clinton. He also discusses vastly accelerating tech R&D, with China spending almost as much in 2017 as the U.S. as part of a ‘Made in China 2025’ plan.  Tech focuses like AI poses a threat to human jobs everywhere, including China.

Theoretically Orlik mentions that the CCP now believes that ‘public ownership’ is the sum total of socialism, ignoring planning, workers’ control, equality, exploitation, social basics, a classless society, the falling away of the state or any other parameters.  To many Marxists, this is almost laughable.  China is one of the most unequal societies on the planet, given its leadership is more concerned with being a developmental state than anything else. The Chinese proletariat will one day rise up and take political power away from the bureaucratic strata and their capitalist allies and move towards full socialism in league with others.  But in the process no one must forget the massive gains that must be preserved in China.

P.S. - The centrist 'balance' between the two economic sectors cannot go on forever.  At some point the debts and instability of the capitalist sector could overwhelm the government sector.  

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Two Sea Changes in World Political Economy,” “Is the East Still Red?” “From Commune to Capitalism,” “The End of the Revolution,” “Jasic Factory Struggle,” “China’s New Red Guards,” “The Rise of China,” “The Fall of Bo Xilai” “Maoism & the Chinese Revolution,” “Striking to Survive,” “China on Strike.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 4, 2020

DemExit on Dem Bones

“The People’s Convention”- Sunday, 8/30/20 on the Internet 
This convention was sponsored by the U.S. Movement for a People’s Party (MPP).  After the speeches they reported that 99% of viewers voted to endorse the formation of a People’s Party (PP) in 2021.  I watched the whole 5 hours, listened to 32 speakers and listed the 33 or so MPP demands.  Nick Brana, a former national organizer for Sanders in 2016, chaired.  That basically tells you what is going on.  The Sanders campaign, after 2 attempts, has now given birth to an independent, mild social-democratic party without Sanders.  Much as Bill Clinton’s vote for NAFTA in league with Republicans gave birth to the labor-based Labor Party (LP).  Whether the PP will follow in the LP’s footsteps is up for grabs, but the MPP promised to run candidates starting in 2021, something the LP never did.

The PP program is a sprawling grab-bag of every demand Sanders had along with extras like supporting a state bank, an Economic Bill of Rights, Universal Basic Income and animal rights.  What was notable was that labor speakers were not in abundance, nor were references to the ‘white’ working class or even the use of the lone word ‘class.’  One exception was Chris Smalls, who spoke for non-union workers.  Another was Omar Fernandez from the Vermont postal workers, who while detailing the destruction of sorting and relabeling machines at USPS, oddly ended his speech with two God stories.  “No god!” was laughably popping up in the comments section after that.

Brana noted that the People’s Convention was trending #2 on Twitter on Sunday.  He also noted that the MPP now had 100,000 members, 10,000 joining in the last week.  Brana said that no one at the Convention was told what to say.  On YouTube I counted a high of 11,697 viewers right after Chris Hedges spoke at about 1.5 hours in, but the convention was also streaming on FB, Twitter, Jimmy Dore’s site and others, so there were more than that. On YouTube it hovered around 10,000+ viewers most of the night.  According to their own Aug. 31 stats, they had 400,000 individual views across all platforms.  Always have to wonder when numbers always end in 000.

The convention had speakers from the recent U.S. presidential campaign – Marianne Williamson and Mike Gravel – though Gravel bailed.  One Green Party activist spoke, while Chris Hedges called for voting Green in this election, as well as calling for ‘overthrowing the system.’  It had two supporters of the ‘Yang Gang’ calling for UBI.  Jesse Ventura also spoke, warning that the Democrats and Republicans would unite against the PP.  He said conditions were worse now than in the 1960s and predicted a possible civil war.  He ended by quoting Jerry Garcia as to ‘a lesser evil still being evil.”  Nina Turner, co-chair of the Sanders 2016 and 2020 campaigns also spoke, doing her best to out-prophet love warrior Cornel West who preceded her, and without giving Biden props.  So the lineup was reaching out to different groups, also including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). No one mentioned socialism or nationalization and no hard-core socialists were invited.  Nor does the program mention socialism, unlike the formation of the British Labour Party.  People didn’t mention capitalism much either, substituting adjectives like neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism or neo-fascism or ‘the system.’  The system without a name.

There were a lot of podcast people and comedians, so the MPP has kind of an on-line media network.  Gram Elwood cracked everyone up with the suggestion that perhaps Rosa Parks should have gradually moved up one row in the bus each year so as not to upset the liberals.  Or that the difference between Trump and Biden is like that between a pedophile or a tweeker.  Elwood took the tweeker.  Jimmy Dore called Biden a “tottering relic” … “yearning for his pajamas and Gunsmoke re-runs.”  According to Dore, in any re-run of “It’s a Wonderful Life” Biden is actually Mr. Potter, as his spokespeople are now talking austerity and 'bare cupboards.'  The Convention cut Lee Camp’s submitted video because I think there was too much swearing, after Camp went off on the big-tent, no-change ‘Resistance©’ to Trump.

It was a pretty multi-ethnic event, though only two black women spoke, and no one from outside the U.S.  Williamson recommended studying the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, though I blessed god when her swarmy speech ended. Danny Glover also warned of fascism.  Brana enthused about the overwhelming election of Obrador’s party in Mexico, as Obrador’s party had only existed for 4 years. Brana mentioned other new left political formations like Podemos, Syriza and Frente Amplio. (Brana’s parents are from Chile.)  He predicted the PP would win in 2024 and would be running candidates in 2022. Cornel West asked the toughest question of all – Can you have radical democracy in this country and be without imperialism, white supremacy, labor exploitation, gay hatred etc.?  No one was going to answer that in this upbeat atmosphere.

Some other speakers or points made:

·        A pod-caster, Tim Black, refused to trail tired sell-out politicians like Jim Clyburn, who corralled older African-Americans into the Biden camp in South Carolina.  Black doesn’t want to watch the DNC dump Sanders’ platform a 3^rd time.

·        Cheng-Sim Lim, a Medicare-For-All advocate (M4A), understood that this was a contest for power, not a polite debate.   

·        An Iranian-American woman and Sanders delegate, Hanieh Jodat, warned of the brown-shirts in the U.S. She pointed out that there was a deep connection between the U.S. military’s wars and domestic police violence financially and politically. 

·        A climate scientist, Peter Kalmus, said the fossil fuel industry had to be destroyed to save the planet.  He warned that billions will migrate from a wide uninhabitable heat band along the equator. 

·        The head of the MPP’s youth arm, Mayo Engeshi, advocated a united front. 

·        Elynelys Vinson, a former candidate for political office, mentioned she had ‘fled the Castro regime’ as a kid and the response by the constant stream of comments to the right on Youtube was hilarious, mostly consisting of ‘Viva Fidel.’ 

·        Chris Smalls, who led a strike at Amazon in New York, is now organizing essential workers.

·        Ryan Knight, podcaster, wants a $20 minimum wage.

·        Jerry Perez, a vet in the Marine Corps who did time in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the toughest guy in the room.

·        Isiah James, another vet and a housing organizer, is tired, tired, tired of all the problems in NYC – homelessness, student debt, Biden, de Blasio, the NYPD, the U.S. military budget.  “A Change is Gonna Come…” as Sam Cooke might say.

·        Jamarl Thomas said the ‘comfortable class’ looked down on protests and would do so even if they knew African-American poverty in Kenosha is 39%.  The refusal by the DNC, even in a pandemic and vast unemployment, to endorse M4A showed Pelosi and Schumer will never allow a popular left-wing plank to get by them. 

·        Chase Iron Eyes, NoDAPL activist, addressed ‘existential dread’ and said the fascists will be defeated because they are too few.  By the way the MPP program endorses ‘respecting treaties.’

·        Medea Benjamin of CodePink noted the dangerous new cold war against Russia and China endorsed by both parties and how this will fuel continued military spending. 

·        Brana pointed out that sclerotic Congress people did not and will not budge, even with tens of thousands in the streets calling for police reform. 

·        Cornel West admitted he was going to vote for Biden, but understood the other side’s position.  He’s Coltrane’s man with a plan or two.

·        Nina Turner mentioned the ‘owner-donors’ of U.S. parties.  The PP, like Sanders, would not have corporate donors or corporate PACS, but would run on small contributions.

All the present crises were mentioned – environment, pandemic, Trump, unemployment, racist cops, fascists, Biden - and indeed, this conjuncture, especially the kow-towing of Sanders to the DNC, has presented the MPP with a chance to grow.  Many speakers mentioned the U.S. as a ‘failed state’ – not just one that was failing.  Some of the speakers had already run for a political office, or held one.  It was a politically correct vibe with some poetry, some swearing and a few MPP videos. It was mostly activists, small bore politicians including a drag queen and media commentators, as well as the nationally-known.  A good number were former Sanders delegates.  Missing top names were people like the radioactive Ralph Nader, African American intellectual Adolph Reed and former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.  Telesur podcaster Abbey Martin and filmmaker Oliver Stone endorsed but did not speak.

I’m not sure how much mass appeal this group has to the working class, as it is not yet centered on labor or proletarian organizations or appeals.  Though its lead platform demand is an “Economic Bill of Rights,” borrowing from Roosevelt and the second is “Strong Unions and Workplace Democracy.” Whether the PP will be able to garner mass support from unions, community groups, leftists, office-holders, single-issue organizations and the like is yet to be determined.  Certainly the need for a left-wing party is there.  There is a gaping political hole on the Left as the two ruling-class parties trend even further to the right.   Given the legal, media and economic stranglehold by the corporate parties in this imperial headquarters, chances are not good.  Without the present granular changes among millions translating into action and changing minds out of the corporate trap, the PP will remain a minor party like the Greens.  But in this true time of crisis, the time may be right when many proletarians and white and blue collar workers feel they cannot go on as before, especially the youth.

 

On that note, many young activists in my city are now calling themselves 'communists' of some kind, so that might tip-off the PP that things are going 'lefter' than they think. 

My list of the MPP program:  Economic Bill of Rights / Strong Unions-Workplace Democracy / Infrastructure modernization / Fair tax code / Rein in Wall Street – Public Bank / Fair Trade / UBI-Job Guarantee / Abolish Money in Politics / Free and fair domestic elections / Ranked Choice Voting-Proportional rep / Oppose Surveillance / Wealth Tax / Human Rights / M4All / Free public college / Cancel student debt / Citizenship path / Protect environment / Biodiversity / Green New Deal / Animal Rights / Sustainable Ag / Housing for All / End Mass Incarceration / Legalize Weed / Racial Justice / Equal Women Rights / LGBTQIA Equality / Honor Treaties / End Wars / Expand Social Security / Veteran’s Support … and a few others.

Red Frog

September 1, 2020

Dark Before the Dawn?

The Coming Storm

It is not just about the climate.  It is also a political storm.  If Trump wins in the coming election, the level of class conflict will go sky-high throughout the U.S. for years.   If Trump wins, the Democratic Party will be in tatters ideologically, and they will not be able to blame Russia, China or Jill Stein this time - though they will try.  Their endless con-job as the ‘party of the people’ will be laid to waste.  If Trump wins, conditions in the U.S. will become even closer to an authoritarian police state, with fascists allied with the forces of repression, posing a huge question for the left, workers, unions and minorities. If Trump wins, leftists, minorities, ‘outsiders’ of any kind will be open targets.  Right now we are already seeing the beginnings of open fascist killings and armed self-defense by the left, with racist cops and sheriffs backing the white right.

If Trump loses, Trump’s fascist militias will come out and try to occupy state capitols to support Bill Barr’s attempt to guide the election away from the Electoral College into a single-state vote in the House of Representatives; or by Republicans nullifying some states' votes they control and choosing their own electors.  In the process, violence will be inevitable against all Republican enemies.  It will be an open season of anger.  If Trump loses, Biden will be unable to carry out anything for the working class of whatever skin color.  Social conditions will continue to deteriorate.   If Trump loses, a more effective and intelligent Trump will be promoted by the Republican Party while Biden practices patty-cake ‘bi-partisanship’ with them.  Tucker Carlson might be their next candidate!

Whatever happens, it will not be pretty.  So the boy scout motto, minus the pedophilia, is ‘Be Prepared.’  Prepare for a defense against fascist violence.  Prepare with other people.

The second part is to build a united social movement with a political arm – a Left Front among the hard-left factions; a 3^rd leftist or populist party like the Movement for a People’s Party; a Labor Party based on the unions; an Anti-Fascist Front ready to stop fascist mobilizations.  A divided and amorphous ‘resistance’ movement with little organization, transitional demands or limited goals cannot handle the coming storm or its aftermath to actually move the dial towards massive social change.  Things will stay the same with this kind of approach. The unions have to stop kow-towing to Democrats and look to strike action. The BLM movement has to chart a path towards class struggle.  Socialists have to unite on a basic platform.  The so-called ‘left’ in the Democratic Party has to prepare to break and unite with those who are charting an independent, working-class course.

Whether any of this is possible is another question.  A moment in class-struggle history is coming.  Those who don’t understand will be overwhelmed and defeated.  Those who do understand can intervene and move society to the left.
 Watch People's Convention Now:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6u5xPJaW2s

Red Frog

August 30, 2020 

Fear the Reaper ... Drones

“The Tragedy of American Science – From Truman to Trump” by Clifford Connor, 2020 
This is a socialist take on the state of science in the U.S.  Conner is a science historian who describes the slow prostitution of science to corporate and military power since the end of WWII.  Anti-communists yap about Lysenko’s political rise way back in the 1930s USSR and for good reason.  They should look at their own conflicts of interest approach which encompasses universities, professors and university presidents, various scientists, captured government agencies, laws, research journals, corporate and private research labs, national science bodies, Astroturf consumer groups and Beltway think tanks.  The dictatorship of money & militarism has encroached in many scientific disciplines, creating bad science for profit.

The Corporate Science Complex

Conner wrote the “People’s History of Science.” Among other things, here he examines how toxic sugar became a ‘benign’ ingredient in so many processed foods, brought to us by modern ‘nutrition science’ and official diet guidelines.  Almost half of all U.S. adults have food-derived health problems – heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.  He takes apart the 'high tech' Green Revolution, which now bankrupts farmers and has privatized and commodified seed, feed, fertilizer and pesticides for agro-profits.  He looks at the science debate about sales-based GMOs and the precautionary principal of ‘do no harm’ – so much so that GMOs cannot be mentioned on a package.  He remembers the lies and ‘doubt industry’ around the medical safety of cigarettes, which is reminiscent of the present lies and pseudo-scientific ‘doubts’ sown by oil & gas companies about global warming.

Conner focuses on the sciency promotion and 'tests' of deadly opioids by Big Pharma to the tune of 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocondone pain pills sold over 6 years.  This is the kind of thing that allows the drug industry to have a 21% profit rate.  The industry also gets help from patent protections enforced by the government against generics, fraudulent research, made-up diseases and a focus on high profit remedies, not ones that will help many but bring in little cash.  The privatization of public research in drugs started in 1980 with the bi-partisan Bayh-Dole act.  This allowed universities to patent discoveries, which invited Big Pharma in the front door - blurring the lines between public and private and turning the universities and their scientists into profit-centers.  As part of this, pay to publish ‘science’ journals flooded the scientific community.

Conner reminds us of the toxic water issues in Flint, Washington D.C. and Newark, ignored by the CDC until there was a crisis.  62 million deaths a year world-wide can be attributed to water, air or soil pollution and the CDC pretended nothing in the U.S. was amiss.  He dissects the oil and gas industry, especially fracking’s earthquakes, water pollution and methane venting that are routinely ignored in official and industry studies.  The Kochtopus-funded denial industry is backed by political convenience, as even Obama bragged about building oil infrastructure and development.  Yet the dangerous nature of carbon production has been known by some U.S. scientists since 1977.  Conner tracks the ‘academic-industrial’ complex, which now features leading academic scientists getting grants from corporations and starting their own private companies, leading to huge conflicts of interest.  The university, following the lead of George Mason U, is now a ‘private-public partnership’ in lockstep with neo-liberal principles. Not to ignore the heavily propagandist ‘sciences’ at Universities like political ‘science’ or economic ‘science.’  Conner takes on the fake academics and intellectuals in Beltway ‘think tanks’ like the Brookings Institution, which pretend to authority while actually being captured by corporate money.  They are now basically corporate or military advocacy and lobbying groups.  The official media and government officials continue to believe they are ‘objective’ intellectuals, not partisan parsers.

These examples of corruption of science and thought bleed into the ignoring of good science on global warming, evolution, vaccines, a single biologic race, chastity’s efficiency, gay conversion therapy, abortion, marijuana, even simple things like mask wearing.  Economic and political forces profit from taking bogus irrational stances against real scientific facts.  They are helped by the prostitution of science to money and weapons, as well as the anti-scientific cultural atmosphere engendered by religion and politicians, especially in the GOP.

Dr. Strangelove - Curtis LeMay, Kissinger, Ed Teller, Von Braun

The Military-Industrial Complex Again

R&D for the military composes more than half of all money spent on R&D in the U.S. Military spending and R&D are not just a vile waste of scientific talent, it is also the world’s worst jobs program and a non-cyclic Keynesian economic pump essential to U.S. capitalism.  This is why this technology of death never produces a ‘peace dividend.’  Conner digs into the 1600 Nazi scientists recruited by the U.S. and laundered through “Operation Paperclip” (yes…) to head U.S. programs like rocketry, where former Nazi Werner Von Braun became the first head of NASA.  Other Nazis and some Japanese fascists led U.S. programs in chemical and biologic warfare, in torture, while doing other military ‘medical’ experiments. Many of these scientists had ties to fascist slave labor or death experiments in WWII.  This was only exposed years later.

Conner looks at the U.S. “Atoms For Peace” program which is intimately tied to nuclear arms escalation and proliferation - they are not two separate things. Nuclear energy is not clean, not profitable without government support and not cheap if you take into account the radiation dangers, as proved at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the build-up of nuclear waste across the U.S. Conner reminds us of how the RAND Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) shaped much of U.S. science.  RAND’s criminal tactics advocated dropping 7.662 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, as well as torture and assassination.  As part of RAND’s game theory, John Nash’s ‘beautiful mind’ created a zero-sum game for RAND that privileged betrayal and misanthropy. Conner even gets in a dig at RAND’s ‘mathematical idolatry’ that replaced verified experimental results.  This point relates to the issue of mainstream cosmology’s almost exclusive reliance on math as well.

Military science has produced Reaper drones, ICBMs, cluster and anti-personnel munitions, napalm, neutron bombs,Cruise and Tomahawk missiles, ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, fake smart bombs and intergalactic Star Wars / Space Force plans.  It has unleashed the Stuxnet worm virus and is leading to Terminator-like ‘super soldiers’ with exo-skeletons, brain microchips, combat drugs and a Skynet of technological artificial intelligence powered by high-speed quantum computers.  Micro-assassin ‘fly-bots’ are in the works designed as if they were tiny flies, to kill or explode a target.  Facial recognition and a matrix of satellites make it possible.  CIA psychologists collaborate with torture in Guantanamo and other black sites, while other celebrated scientists design ‘no touch’ torture.  Not to mention the CIA’s MKUltra program experiments, which were notorious for their failure and violence.  All brought to you by corrupted scientists paid the big bucks.

Conner ends with a section on socialist solutions to the perversions of science, including full public funding and control of key research; regulations with teeth of private research; and the elimination of the military-industrial complex.  He also advocates nationalization of many basic industries like pharma, health care, fossil fuels, banking and insurance.  The basic question in a capitalist society becomes “Should science be ‘for the people’ or for corporate profits and the military?”  The answer is already in…in this detailed book.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  “Peoples’ History of Science”(Conner); “McMindfulness,” “Big Bang,” “Pandemic”(Zizek); “Lost Connections,” “The Happiness Industry,” “The 5^th Risk”(Lewis); “A Redder Shade of Green – Intersections of Science and Socialism,” “Collapse,” “Astrology,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “New Dark Age,” “There is Only One Race,” “The Marijuana Manifesto”(Ventura); “Bit Tyrants,” “Civilization Critical,” “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Ubiquity – Why Catastrophes Happen.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 24, 2020

Covideo Nation

Streaming Run-Down

Covid has kept many people at home more than they might want.  One solution to dealing with cabin fever is streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or Disney+ if you have access.  These are political or semi-political series that might pass muster.  Two are good, one a maybe, and two are fails of typical escapism.  There are spoilers here. 

Afghan Family Fleeing Anti-Female Regimes

STATELESS (Netflix)

Good.  This short Australian series takes place in and around an immigrant detention camp in southern Australia in 2004-2005.  It is based on a true story involving a disturbed Australian woman who hides in the camp attempting to get to Germany with a stolen passport.  She is trying to avoid some psychological cultists who have threatened her life. The camp mistakenly treats her as an immigrant.  She is white, sexy and crazy and finds herself surrounded by Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, east Asians, Tamils, Syrians – no one like her except the Australian guards, who are also not like her.  The camp is full of desperate immigrants – men, women and children - who have survived the dangerous ocean journey trying to avoid various cruel circumstances in their ‘home’ countries.  Some have family members who have died on the way or from whom they have become separated.  The series focuses on an Afghan man who is trying to leave the camp with his daughter. The camp, under a careerist female officer, is not giving anyone permission to settle in Australia, so it’s a mostly hopeless holding pen except for one small exception.  In 2012 Australia shipped immigrants away from the mainland to off-shore islands to be warehoused after the mainland camps became unmanageable. That is the situation today, with the Australian Navy and Coast Guard now turning back boats.

The camp guards are also affected by dealing with this terrible situation.  One especially, a formerly happy but broke man, witnesses a beating and tries to expose it.  He then turns and blows a whistle on an camp escape organized by his sister, only to finally quit his job as a guard because of the misery he encounters. The short series brings you into the camp yourself and that is its strength.  It is a picture of a difficult capitalist world melting down.   

Not Hannah Montana.  Hannah and Erik in the woods.

HANNAH, Season 1 & 2 (Amazon Prime)

Good.  This series is based on the original 2011 Hannah revenge film about a young female trained in northern Finland to become an assassin.  In that film Hannah grows up in the woods, learning from her ex-CIA father how to shoot, fight and think on the run.  This is somewhat similar to how this series starts, but with a twist.

Besides the original Hannah film, the series borrows a premise from the Jason Bourne series and a bit of the Hunger Games.  It is focused on a group of young teenagers stolen at birth by the money-bloated and seemingly omnipotent CIA.  They want to breed and train them to become robotic assassins for a ‘wing’ of the Agency.   If you hate the CIA, you will enjoy how it is depicted in the most horrible terms.  And you will enjoy it when Hannah and her adoptive father crush various agents, much like Katniss Everdeen handles the Careers.  Like Jason Bourne, it involves a female CIA officer who gradually grows protective towards the outcast assassin, in this case Hannah.  And like Bourne it involves a rouge CIA group that carries out these policies, in this case far-right American nationalists embedded in the organization.  This is to give the series ‘deniability’ towards the rest of the 'regular' CIA, which has used assassination for years.  Taking place in cities across Europe, it is exciting and satisfying to see a young teenage girl and her allies ream these murderous and monied ‘defenders of the American Way.’

International Streaming:

BORDERTOWN (Netflix), THE 12 (Netflix) and THE CLIFF (Amazon Prime)

Fail.  Bordertown is a traditional Finnish police procedural with the standard dysfunctional and brilliant detective solving crimes in a real border town in Finland, Lapeenranta.  The series, like so many others, pretends that many detectives are geniuses in some way or another, which of course is not true.  Its purpose is to humanize them so the police come off as brilliant heroes.  It includes other tropes - detectives who are rarely at home and have to ignore their families.  Phone calls in the middle of the night are standard.  There are an astounding number of murders in a country that has very few murders at all.  Shady government or police powers run the town but never get caught.  Nasty Russians, the enemy de jure, are behind many of the crimes in one way or another, as Lapeenranta is on the Russian border close to St. Petersburg.  Bodies washing up on shore, found in the woods, in shallow graves or out, chopped up or maimed, dead in a house with plenty of splatter or blood pools – the same obsessive stuff we see all the time.

Ending with the tricky search for the killer involving psychology, science, organization, motive and emotional intelligence.  This is probably what draws so many people to detective series – a creepy form of problem solving, even though the clues are completely arbitrary.

The most disturbing part of series like this is the murder, injuries or fear directed at women, female teenagers and young girls – including the cops’ own kids.  I found this bloody trope common to a number of Scandinavian detective series and it extends to nearly the whole genre.  It usually ends with a male, though sometimes female cop, solving the crime. In some of these series the ‘clueless teenage girl’ is a stock character.  Why are ‘dead women’ at the center of so many detective stories?  I think it is a way to instill fear in females and to normalize violent male chauvinism against women and girls. It is not just to show ‘reality.’ Unlike the Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc., this focus on dead women has no politics behind it.

Stephen King likes it but this series is not worth watching unless you like to see young women constantly a target.

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Maybe.  The 12 is about a Belgian jury that in no way resembles the classic U.S. film 12 Angry Men.  It involves 12 jurors and 2 alternates who barely discuss the two subject murders until the very last scene in the jury room.  It’s a sad bunch. They are mostly concerned with their own private traumas or relations.  One has seen her parents murdered.  Another is a construction boss hiding the death of an undocumented worker.  There is an alcoholic who gives information to a journalist.  One juror is a depressed keeper of monkeys.  Another is an autistic father with problems with his daughter.  A key juror is brutalized by her husband.  At the end the accused is convicted on one murder charge and one murder charge is dropped, all based on circumstantial evidence. Both killings involve dead females – one teenager, one a child – so it fits with the ‘dead woman’ pattern.  You are led by the defendant’s clever defense counsel to believe that the flaky accused is probably innocent, but at the last moment we are shown less murky clues that the jury is only half right.

At any rate, ‘a jury of your peers’ at work, showing how each brings their personal experience into their votes.  Not something that should be too surprising.  In a way, it makes a joke of the jury system and a joke of the humans in it.  Compared to the 1957 film 12 Angry Men it reflects a decline in the competence and focus of individual human beings.

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Fail. The Cliff (Hamarinn) is an Icelandic police procedural about a construction project that is attempting to build an electrical transmission tower on an historical and ‘magical’ cliff in the countryside.  Local environmentalists are protesting the project and eventually the viewer finds out how 2 deaths actually happened. In this case, only one women is harmed in the making of this series.  The divorced male detective helping investigate the crimes has trouble relating to his daughter, while the other female detective is becoming estranged from her husband.  Since dysfunctional home life is part of the cop trope, perhaps cops should never get married or have children.

Dull, even with the Nordic ‘magic’ touches.  Make environmentalists look like lunatics.  Works best as Icelandic tourism.

Other prior blog reviews on movie or TV series, use search box, upper left (you can click on the next page for more hits):  “Hunger Games” “The Peaky Blinders,” “Comrade Detective,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” “Game of Thrones,” “Line of Separation,” “Damnation,” “The Golden Age of U.S. Television,” “Black Sails,” “Fargo,” “Deadwood,” “The Wire” “Treme,” “Mayans M.C.,” “Rebellion.”

The Cultural Marxist

August 10, 2020