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

NO SOCIAL SECURITY FOR YOU, DUDE!
The Wizards of Wall Street have convinced millions of younger Americans that there will be no money for their Social Security retirement This could happen if we let the finance thieves run things and it would have come partly true if the Bush plan for privatizing the system had been enacted.
As of now, our planet is quite sick BUT with intelligent planning it can support 2 or 3 billion more persons for a millennium or two and, as always, there is more than enough labor to create the wealth needed to provide economic security for everyone. The same would be true for our health care system. Or is this overly optimistic?

Bye-bye, US hegemony

In the last few days there have been three articles devoted to the imminent demise of US financial hegemony -- a corollary of which will be the loss of US military hegemony.

1) An essay by Michael Hudson on "de-dollarisation,"

2) An essay by W. Joseph Stroupe on the move out of dollars and US Treasuries,

3) And an essay by Chris Hedges on how bankrupt the US imperium is.

These essays are of interest to someone like myself who for years has known that the US-dominated financial system is utterly unsustainable but yet was never able to figure out what kind of tectonic changes would have to occur for the demise of the old system and its replacement by a multi-polar system. In the past few months we've begun to receive intimations, suggestions, of what an emerging new set-up may look like. It appears that both the world's major central banks and private investors are becoming increasingly averse to both dollars and US treasuries. This means it will not be possible for the US to deficit-finance its budget. And since half the budget deficit for this year is defence-related, this suggests the US is going to have to trim its sails. Drastically.

I always enjoy everything Michael Hudson writes. If memory serves, I bought one of his two books -- "Global Fracture" -- at Mayday some years back, and this was my introduction to his historical analysis of how the US-dominated financial order came into being. In the essay listed above he examines how, inter alia, the emerging BRIC powers, are trying to diversify out of dollars -- primarily for economic reasons (no-one wants to be left holding a bag of worthless paper), but also with an eye to reducing USA's deficit-financed bellicose stance towards the rest of the world. But in order to get out of the present system, they have to devise a new one, however tentatively and uncertainly. This is what the current SCO meeting in Yekaterinburg is all about.

The second essay, by Stroupe, confines itself to discussing how Washington's policies of exploding budget deficits is undermining faith in both dollars and Treasuries, and how this will likely accelerate a trend towards a new global around based around the major emerging economies rather than the USA and UK.

And the final essay, by Chris Hedges, rewords some of Hudson's essay, and points out some of the dire domestic implications for the United States. Some of these can be questioned but will no doubt divert those who enjoy doomsday scenarios.

Not Socialist Realism...

Let Us Now Praise the Dead!

The Grateful Dead got their start in 1965 in the Bay area. They are on tour this summer again, 45 years after they got their start as the Warlocks in 1964. The survivors – Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman, Mickey Hart – were joined on this summer’s tour for the second time by Allman Brother’s member Warren Haynes, and by keyboardist Jeff Chimenti of Ratdog, who is the permanent keyboardist now. Former core members Jerry Garcia and Rod ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, lyricists Robert Hunter and John Barlow, and keyboard players Keith Godchaux, Tom Constanten, and Vince Melnick, along with female vocalist Donna Godchaux, were all inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as members of the Grateful Dead. People like Stanley Owsley, the creator of LSD, was their soundman for many years. They are the most long-running rock act in the U.S. The only acts that have been around longer are doing an ‘oldies’ style show at casinos. I don't think I go out on a limb when I say they are the best live rock band - ever.

Fare Thee Well at Soldier Field, Chicago

Let us examine what the Dead have done to music.

They came out of a scene in San Francisco that was not controlled by corporate music interests. It was the product of an artistic community of musicians and the cultural impact of the unique times and a unique place – San Francisco. Other bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Country Joe & The Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape and Janis Joplin/Big Brother came out of that same organic scene. In fact, at Monterey, they and the other San Francisco bands faced off with the more commercial groups from Los Angeles. The Dead played free shows and benefits constantly. They fought and succeeded in controlling their studio sound from record one. They are one of the main historical links between the Beat Generation of the 50’s and the counter-culture of the 60’s –working with Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsburg at “Acid Tests” – and traveling with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the ‘bus.’ Their style of music is an amalgamation of blues, country, folk, bluegrass, rhythm & blues, 50’s rock, electronica and jazz into a peculiarly American style. First called ‘psychedelic’, they became the originator of the ‘jam band’ scene, which has spawned imitators like Phish, Widespread Panic and festivals like Bonnaroo and ‘10,000 Lakes’ across the U.S. In effect, they encompass almost every popular U.S. musical style. Their use of drugs to enhance music creativity and collectivity is almost unique, but also predictably destructive.

The Dead started out as a cover band, and continue to play covers of Rolling Stones, Dylan and the Beatles, along with blues, country and 50’s covers. They make each cover song their own, which is why they can get away with it. Listen to Pigpen singing “King Bee” and compare it to Jagger, and you will see McKernan rips the throat out of the song, while Jagger sounds like a mincing boy. They are the best cover band in the country, and in this process, show their respect to other musicians, and to popular music’s traditions.

The Dead are the most recorded live group in history, playing more than 2,350 concerts, including three at the Great Pyramids in Giza. They encouraged their live shows by allowing music tapers, not discouraging them, and not suing people who recorded them ‘illicitly.’ They were the first group to sell soundboard CDs to fans after each show. Until recently they sold their own tickets so that people did not have to go through Ticketmaster – a conglomeration of thieves. They are followed by both young and old at live concerts, not just elderly fans in wheelchairs and oxygen tanks. Their fan base is, to put it mildly, very dedicated. Very few bands have such numbers of people who drive from one concert to another. Concerts range up to 3+ hours normally, so that the audience gets their money’s worth. Marijuana is a standard item at concerts, shared by many, and hence the band plays a non-public role in efforts for the legalization of this, and other, drugs. A Dead concert is a sort of semi-religious event, heightened by the marijuana as communion, much as peyote is used in Native American Church. People dance for nearly the whole 3 hours, so it has something of the nature of an ecstatic St. Vitus dance. They like outdoor arenas due to the clear sound outside. Essentially, the heart of the Dead sound is jazz improvisation, by every musician, not just one. Set lists vary from night to night, and songs are played as themes, not copies. So one song can have many versions, segueing into each other, which stretches the music out. This is the heart of their jazz approach, and one reason people like Wynton Marsalis play with them.

Garcia started as a bluegrass player, Lesh as a classical musician, Pig Pen as a blues man, and Kreutzmann as a jazz drummer – incorporating their styles at the very beginning. No other band has two such accomplished drummers as Kreutzmann and Hart – making the Dead sound heavily rhythmic and intricate. Hart himself has become a top ‘world music’ drummer. Every concert includes a 15-20 minutes “drums & space” set allowing these two to stretch out, which includes an electronic section that the other members come in on.

Since day one, sound quality and instrument quality was a number one concern. They were tired of the low quality PA systems offered bands. Their interest in giving the audience the best sound possible lead to the Wall of Sound – a massive distortion-free sound system with 7 separate instrument systems - being developed by Owsley and Alembic Studios. The Dead recorded their albums on 4 and 8 track systems long before any other band, including the Beatles. They even went independent for awhile, putting out their own albums. Their staff was large, and paid well – until they could no longer support so many people. Graphically, the Dead still rely on striking graphics and light shows at their concerts. No other band has so many ‘logos,’ symbols and emblematic/thematic visuals – strutting bears, skulls alone, and crossed with roses, terrapins, Uncle Sam as a skeleton, and others. Most music acts pay little attention to artwork – but the Dead, and the San Francisco sound they came out of – revered visuals.

The Dead have done it their own way from the beginning, not following the clichés of the music business. They came out of a collective music scene, and the way the band toured and played was an extension of that collectivity. Which is why so many musicians have been part of the band. They represent the best of American popular music creativity and artistic freedom. So let us praise the Dead. They are growing old, and will one day no longer be able to play. They are the great American ‘rock’ band. Period.

And you cannot buy them at May Day books.
Red Frog – 6/7/2009

California Upholds Ban on Gay Marriage: Build a National Movement for Equal Rights Now!
May 31, 2009 By Dan DiMaggio
On Tuesday, May 26, in a 6-1 ruling, California’s Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. In response to this ruling and the continued discrimination faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people across the country, activists have called for a National March for Equality in Washington, D.C. the weekend of October 10-11 to demand full, equal rights for all LGBT people. Just hours after the verdict on Prop 8 was released, thousands took to the streets in protest across the country, in an echo of the hundreds of thousands who demonstrated on November 15 after the initial passage of this reactionary law. According to DayofDecision.com, there were events organized in over 115 cities, including rallies of 15,000 in Los Angeles, 5,000 in San Francisco, 3,000 in San Diego, and over 1,000 in Seattle. Another 4,000 marched in Fresno on Saturday, including hundreds who marched 14.5 miles in an effort to reach people in more socially conservative areas. The ruling on Prop 8 in California is a major slap in the face to equal rights, even though the court did agree to recognize the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California prior to the passage of Prop 8 in November 2008. Yet while the California decision is a huge setback, recent months have witnessed a number of victories for the gay rights movement. New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Iowa have all legalized same-sex marriage, bringing the total number of states that have legalized marriage equality to six. In addition the movement is making a huge dent in the battle for hearts and minds. 44 percent of Americans now say same-sex marriage should be legal (up from just 21 percent in November 2004). This includes 58 percent of those ages 18-34 (CNN, 5/4/09). There is a widespread feeling of confidence among many LGBT people and activists that the tide may be finally turning, despite the California ruling – although a major struggle lies ahead. As Robin Tyler, one of the plaintiffs in the Proposition 8 suit, said, “No civil rights movement has ever lost. Never. We will win. It’s not an ‘if’ it’s a when. Only we are going to have to fight like hell.” Tyler, who was married while same-sex marriage was legal in California, founded the website DayofDecision.com, which was responsible for the protests Tuesday evening. Activists are now gearing up to put an initiative to overturn Prop 8 on the California ballot in 2010. There is also a major lawsuit being filed in the federal court system, arguing that California’s ban on gay marriage violates the constitutional right to due process and equal protection under the law. Yet many major LGBT rights organizations oppose this strategy, saying it is too soon to aim for a challenge at the national Supreme Court level given the current balance on the court. We can't rely on corporate politicians or the courts to defend our rights, much less expand them. Rather than waiting for a supposedly more favorable balance on the court, now is the time to step up the movement in the streets, which can change the relationship of forces in society and build public support for LGBT rights. Now is the perfect time to seize on the momentum generated by recent victories and the outrage at the passage of Proposition 8 in California (and the state supreme court’s refusal to reverse it) to go all out in organizing the national demonstration for equal rights for all LGBT people on October 10-11. Such a demonstration will help link up all the many efforts in different states and localities to push for marriage equality and broader LGBT rights. Crucially, the mobilization will demand that the Obama administration repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, as well as demanding marriage equality at a national level. While Obama promised to repeal DOMA during his campaign, his administration has yet to make any moves in this direction. Unfortunately, leading Democratic politicians have shown again and again that rather than taking a principled stand, they are willing to sell out the interests LGBT people out for their narrow electoral gains. In order to build a powerful social movement, it should not concern itself with the supposed needs of “friendly” Democratic politicians, but rather start from the standpoint of the need of LGBT people for equal rights NOW. Expressing the growing frustration and anger of some in the LGBT community at the timidity of Democratic politicians on this issue, Tyler said, “If the National Democratic party does not, after 35 years of promises to our community, make sure we have full equal rights in this country, the gay divorce you are going to see is the gay communities divorce from the Democratic party. We are a civil rights movement. It’s time we acted like one.” The national march this fall will allow LGBT rights activists to boldly campaign in their communities, schools, and unions to mobilize and build support. It will place the issue in the national spotlight and highlight the broad support for equal rights for all that exists, giving confidence to the millions who support marriage equality that they are part of a broader movement. As the National March for Equality organizers put it in their call, “As members of every race, class, faith, and community, we see the struggle for LGBT equality as part of a larger movement for peace and social justice.” The call for a national demonstration on October 10-11 should be enthusiastically supported by all progressive organizations, linked to the struggle against all forms of oppression and for equality and real justice for all. As socialists, dedicated to building a world free of exploitation, we wholeheartedly support the call for a national demonstration for equal rights for LGBT people in Washington on October 10-11. We link the struggle for equal rights for LGBT people to the need to replace this rotten capitalist system, which gives rise not only to economic crises and wars, but also feeds off of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Ultimately, it is only through mobilizing a powerful mass movement that we can transform society. As the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “Without struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will.” http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article18.php?id=1092

Are You Shocked?

“The Shock Doctrine” – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, 2007 

Naomi Klein is a left critic of the Democratic Party and neo-liberalism. She herself seems not to be a through-going socialist, and implies that a ‘non-disaster’ capitalism might just succeed. “It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and no such ideological purity.” (p.24, SD)

This book is a work of research and journalism, and gathers the economic threads of Milton Friedman Thought into one historical basket It shows how Freidman’s ideas have played out over the last 30 years in history, at the World Bank & IMF, and in torture regimes. The oddest fillip here is Klein’s use of the metaphors of modern psychological ‘medicine’ and torture – sensory deprivation, the destruction of personality and memory, the breaking of all social bonds and violence – and equate them with what neo-liberalism uses to break down a … society. Psychological methods which developed into the CIA torture regime of MKUltra were then used in Iraq in Abu Grahib, after being used on the Iraqi people themselves. This is how Klein links electroshock therapy and … Shock and Awe.

I think Klein is on to something here. The key point is that capitalism can no longer create sufficient wealth itself, and must severely loot the public sectors and working classes all over the world to maintain profits. It is the twists of a decaying system, much like the move toward financialization in the 70s in the U.S. was a result of a failure to make adequate profits the old-fashioned way. These two developments actually go together – Friedmanite “privatization, deregulation and cuts to social services” are at the bottom of our own financial meltdown here in the United States in several ways. And the fact that disasters – which were at one time avoided by prudent capitalists – are now eagerly sought as new profit opportunities by many major corporations – shows the capitalist system is at an even lower economic and historical point. During World War II, war-profiteering was a dirty word. During Iraq War II, war-profiteering was standard operating procedure. Capitalism has not changed, but the perception of it has.

Much of this history will be familiar to leftists. The operations of the “Berkeley School” in Indonesia in the 60s, which lead to the fascist crackdown by Sukarno. The counter-revolution in Chile, lead by Pinochet, which gave Friedman’s Chicago School and it’s homegrown acolytes their first chance to destroy an economy for the greater good of the comprador bourgeoisie and international capital. Similar events in Bolivia and Argentina followed, the latter leading to years of dictatorship and disappearances. Friedmanism spread to the UK after the Falklands War, when Thatcher seized upon that war to bring it ‘home’ against the Miners Union. It was used in South Africa after the defeat of apartheid. And the climactic moment - the massive destruction of the economies of the USSR and Poland, and other former workers’ states, through Friedmanite methods championed by people like Jeffrey Sachs. All this has started to come to an end – especially in Latin America where the ideology of Friedmanism and neo-liberalism has been defeated by bourgeois ‘developmentalists’ and leftists. They both oppose making their nations nothing but raw material suppliers and passive debt payers for U.S. capital.

Kleins’ thesis is that many times ‘changes’ and ‘reforms’ have to be accompanied by physical and cultural violence – in fact violence is an almost necessary part of neo-liberalism. Much as torture and some ‘therapies’ use the same methods. Chile, Indonesia and Argentina come to mind. But even in Bolivia, where the U.S. used ‘liberals’ like Victor ‘Paz’ Estenssoro to institute a draconian Friedmanite plan, they had to declare martial law and round up protest leaders.

The wrecking behavior of the IMF and World Bank, which were, and still are, stocked with Friedmanites, came to a glorious conclusion in the USSR, when U.S capital intentionally drove the former USSR’s economy over a cliff in the early 90s. These entities saw no contradiction in their so-called love of ‘democracy when they praised Boris Yeltsin's use of tanks and soldiers to break up a democratically-elected parliament, killing many in the parliament. Jeffrey Sachs, the U.S. ‘man on the spot,’ had promised Yeltsin IMF/WB aid in exchange for drastic measures to privatize, deregulate and remove social programs in Russia. When this aid didn’t come through, even Sachs has now realized that the U.S. had no intention of ‘helping” Russia. Russia, and much of eastern Europe, fell into a depression that lasted many years, with productivity, health and every other factor dropping like a stone. The social gains of the revolutions were nearly all destroyed or sold off for pennies on the dollar. George Soros, another buccaneer of the time, realized (after making millions off of neo-liberalism in eastern Europe), that something was wrong with the formula.

Even the ostensibly leftist Solidarnosc leadership in Poland bought into the neo-liberal agenda, and instead of getting workers self-management, they got plant closures and poverty. Recently, the Polish government sold the historic Gdansk shipyard to a Dutch off-shore company, UIT, for L82M. The EU Commission forced the sale when it determined that 'state' aid gave the shipyards an unfair competitive advantage. This sale was protested by the 9,000 employees and by the Polish shipyard union.

Friedman also made a visit to the Chinese bureaucracy before the Tiananmen Square massacres. He encouraged the bureaucracy to integrate more fully with the world capitalist system, and one way to do that was not to coddle the population. While some analysts think only students opposed the regime at Tiananmen and in other cities, many workers were actually part of the protest. Some students left before the crackdown. Klein points out that workers were the main target of the assault by the bureaucracy, in dead and arrested. This makes perfect sense if the point was to discipline the class in order to provide a cheap, quiet place for imperialist factories to re-locate.

The most astounding story is still playing out – in South Africa. Klein carefully dissects the mistakes of the ANC, which focused almost exclusively on the political, and ignored the economic, at the moment of victory over apartheid. This guaranteed that the economy would continue to be controlled by the white apartheid bourgeoisie. The economic conditions for black workers in South Africa since apartheid was overthrown have barely improved, if not gotten worse. And that is because the economic aspects of the Freedom Charter – which guaranteed nationalized control over major industries and banks – were dumped by the ANC leadership. There is no way the black proletariat in South Africa can better their situation now without seizing economic power. The moment was lost when apartheid was defeated – and apartheid economics remained. This is presently the struggle we are seeing now within the ANC and the South African workers movement - the realization that the Freedom Charter, whatever its limitations, was not instituted. In retrospect, the 'stagist' theory of the ANC leadership and the South African CP has resulted only in the prolongation of the masses' misery.

Klein looks at how the Friedmanite approach worked in the Asian financial crisis in the early 90s, the tsunami several years ago, and of course, Iraq and Katrina – using disaster to enrich a large, well-connected segment of international capital. For instance, the tsunami lead international resort owners to seize beach land that had been lived on by fisherman for hundreds of years, all in the name of ‘reform’ and ‘aid,’ and then turn it over to paying western tourists to enjoy.

Is there an essential link between Friedmanite theory and disaster? No, but in reality, it has played out that way. In theory, Friedmanism is such a vicious assault on the working class that it needed an opening in society to institute its methods. And collapses helped it take hold. What is most interesting here is to apply Klein’s thesis to the U.S. now. How is capital taking advantage of the present financial crisis to INCREASE their control of the government and society?

And I bought it at May Day Books!
05/19/2009
Red Frog

Labor's Turning Point showing

Katrina One – “When the Levee Breaks”

"Rising Tide – the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and How it Changed America," by John M Barr, 1997

Katrina wasn’t the first time. This book details how many of the same problems of Katrina – racism, government inaction, broken promises, profiteering, the Army Corps of Engineers, the ruling clique of New Orleans – were there in 1927, long before the 2005 hurricane over-topped the levees around New Orleans. However, instead of coming from the Gulf, this torrent of water came from upstream. 1926 and 1927 had massive rains upstream, in the various tributaries of the Mississippi. The river levees broke in 145 places, 27,000 square miles were flooded, some to a depth of 30 feet.

ARMY CORPS WRONG

Barr starts the book with an analysis of the debate after the Civil War between two engineers – Andrew A Humphreys, an arrogant and intense soldier appointed head of the Army Corps of Engineers; and James Eads, a bootstraps businessman, who first got his start dragging sunken boats out of the Mississippi. Humphreys was appointed because he had made a signature and ground-breaking study of the whole Mississippi basin and its flood potential. Eads, representing civilian engineers, spent his life on the river, and made his calculations based on his study of the real behavior of the river. Essentially, the debate centered over whether levies alone were enough to protect the surrounding areas to the rivers. The Corps said yes – even though Humphrey’s himself had shown this might not work. And Eads said no – levies alone would only raise the flood higher, and eventually be over-topped. He recommended that the Mississippi be allowed to drain into other rivers like the Atchafalaya, and some surrounding land areas. His thesis was that careful ‘diversion’ of flood waters into reservoirs, outlets and through cutoffs was the only way to prevent massive destruction.

Essentially, the Corps was wrong. In a debate with Eads and the building of jetties to create a boat channel in the Mississippi at the Gulf, they said it couldn’t be done. They lost that argument - the jetties worked, digging a deep channel using the natural flow of the river, which allowed big ships to reach New Orleans. However, they won the debate prior to 1927 regarding Mississippi flood control. As a result, the Corps started damming natural outlets, including the river just above Greenville, Mississippi. They were ready to dam the Atchlafaya in Louisiana too, which is the biggest natural outlet to the sea. Prior to Katrina, the Corps also claimed the levies around New Orleans were adequate for a category 5 hurricane. They actually are not recommending an improved levy system to this day. Having the Corps in control of the Mississippi river basin is a little like handing the freeway system to the Pentagon.

THE LEVEES BREAK

In spring 1927, levees upstream in state after state had failed. That still didn’t reduce the main pressure on the Mississippi, as some of the water just flowed back into the main channel. The main levee broke (called a ‘crevasse’) near Mound’s Landing, Mississippi, just above Greenville, and scoured out a long lake, still existing today. Hundreds of black levee workers drowned. It flooded the whole Mississippi “Delta” – the rich cotton land north of Vicksburg in the Yazoo basin that General Edgar Jadwin of the Corps said could never be flooded. The song, “When the Levee Breaks,” written by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, and later made famous by Led Zeppelin – that is this flood. It was one of many blues songs written about it.  As Barry himself puts it, 1927 was 'when the blues came to the Delta.'

It was not just the flood waters that made people miserable, principally black sharecroppers. They were herded to work prior to, and after the flood, under compulsion and guns. Blacks lived in concentration camps, some right on the levee, eating inadequate food. Somehow whites were not qualified to do the backbreaking, grinding work of dam building and flood recovery. The sharecroppers were not allowed to leave by the Red Cross, especially in Greenville. They were physically and sexually abused by National Guard troops. Greenville had been dominated by liberal white plantation owners for many years, lead by the Percy family, who had even stood up to the Klan. But when the flood hit, the ‘liberal’ plantation owners showed their true colors, and imprisoned their black populations, as they were afraid to lose their labor. However, this very action created the exodus they feared. After the flood subsided, millions of former sharecroppers moved north to Chicago, Detroit and other cities, having had enough. Scratch a ruling-class southerner, liberal or not, get a neo-Confederate wage-slaver.

NEW ORLEANS BANKERS

The ruling clique of New Orleans, an especially powerful and in-bred collection of bankers, dominated the Mardi Gras krewes and private clubs like the Louisiana Club, the most exclusive in the country. At that time, they were led by James P Butler, president of the South’s largest bank. To guarantee that New Orleans would not be flooded, Butler and his cronies got the government to agree to dynamite the levee in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes below New Orleans, thus releasing the flood waters into mostly white, Cajun areas. Butler and the New Orleans bankers promised the Cajuns restitution, and of course, reneged on their promise after the levee was destroyed. At the time, all factual indications were that the Atchafalaya would carry most of the flood waters straight to the Gulf, and they would NOT come through New Orleans. And that is what happened. Hence the levee did not need to be destroyed. This unjust dynamiting helped Huey Long win the governorship of the state later, as he ran against the New Orleans ruling clique for what they did to the citizens of the state, among other things. Later, Long would pay with his life, when he was assassinated, by most careful accounts, by a policeman working for those very same bankers.

COOLIDGE, HOOVER and ROBERT MOTON

Calvin Coolidge appointed Herbert Hoover the head of the relief effort. Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Hoover was an engineer too, and thought that a scientific and energetic approach to the disaster would solve the problems quickly. He was all over the newspapers, and it was this effort that led Hoover to being named candidate of the Republican Party and then President. Hoovers fundraising from private sources did not really work, but he did put pressure on the federal government to get involved with aid. At the time, the Red Cross was a private organization, and the government had no role in disaster relief. Hoover was able to get the government to make small contributions, for the first time, to aide citizens. Coolidge, much like Bush, thought the problem was someone else’s responsibility.

At the time, black people still voted for Republicans, due to the heritage of the Civil War. Robert Moton, head of the Tuskegee Institute, was the modern representative of the Booker T Washington style of black leadership. After the flood, Moton went to meet Hoover. Moton, in exchange for a promise by Hoover that the Government would give black sharecroppers their own land, and break up the plantation system(!), promoted Hoover for president among the black population, and helped cover up the conditions that black people had been subjected to in the Delta during the flood. Of course, Hoover never kept his promise after winning the election. Moton was that flood’s Ray Nagin. Nagin voted for Bush in 2000, and worked hand in hand with the New Orleans ruling clique for their interest. He failed to prepare poor citizens of New Orleans for evacuation, and now colludes with white real estate interests to decimate the 9th and other wards and parishes.

This disaster, like Katrina, revealed the rotten parts of the ruling class – a plantation system rooted in slavery; a banking elite that would drown their fellow citizens property so that their property would survive; technocrats who make mistake after mistake; a political class that used disasters to gain political power, and then went on as if nothing had happened; and a black elite that covered for the white elite. However, the black population of Mississippi paid attention; the poor white ‘crackers’ of Louisiana paid attention, and both made progressive steps to change conditions. Katrina itself had some of the same effect, and played a role in turning part of the population against the Republican Party and its philosophy.

And I bought it in the Vieux Carre, on Chartres Street, in New Orleans –
Red Frog, 5/10/09

At Last!

...A well known, respected economist and Nobel Prize winner saying what some of us have waited a long time to hear:

"...[T]here's no longer any reason to believe that the wizards of Wall Street actually contribute anything positive to society."
-Paul Krugman

When the deaths from Swine Flu reach 35,000 that will equal the number of flu deaths that occur every year in the US. What is the problem?

Nazis in America!

“A Bright Room Called Day” – Tony Kushner, 1985-1990

As part of Tony Kushner “time” in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota theatre department staged “A Bright Room Called Day,”a play Kushner wrote in 1985. This play was his first. Kushner went on to become famous as the author of the 7 hour “Angels in America”, which won the ’93 Pulitzer for ‘best drama’ about the 80s AIDS crisis and ... Roy Cohn.

Kushner visited the student actors at the U last week, and described himself to them as a gay Marxist agnostic. He is definitely a progressive, and is influenced by Bertold Brecht, as most progressive playwrights are. 'Bright Room' was inspired by Brecht’s “Private Lives of the Master Race.”

“A Bright Room Called Day” is set in Weimar Germany and also in 1990 Berlin. It is a carefully researched historical play about events that led to the triumph of fascism in Germany, combined with a look back at this period by an outraged lesbian activist fresh from Reaganite America, Zillah. Zillah is a reader and history buff, and has decided to move to Berlin where things are more 'real' than Long Island. She occupies the same apartment in which all the events almost 50 years earlier take place. In that far, long ago time, a quite ordinary and sometimes leftish actress, Agnes Eggling, shared this apartment with a group of friends - Husz, her Trotskyist Hungarian film-maker boyfriend; Gotchling, a Communist Party activist and artist; Baz, a mascara-wearing homosexual Reichian; and Paulinka, an actress interested in fame and opium, in that order.

Politically, the play agrees with Trotsky’s analysis of the failures of the German Communist Party (KPD) to unite in a military and electoral united front with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to smash Hitler. This was due to the KPD's ultra-left position that social democracy was ‘social fascism.’ (Readers might also note that Stalin alleged Trotsky was a fascist as well.) At the same time, the SPD spent time trying to vainly unite with rightist elements like the Catholic Party to oppose Hitler. The KPD argument is best represented by the presence of two KPD officials, who argue about taking orders from Moscow, versus acting to block the Nazis using their own knowledge of what was really necessary to win.

The key person in the play here is Agnes, an ‘everywoman.’ She is a middle-aged, somewhat frumpy and emotional person who flirts with joining the KPD, produces a puppet show at a workers meeting for them, then ostensibly drifts from politics. As fascism triumphs, she refuses to leave Germany, as every single one of her friends are doing. She wants them, actually, to stay and … fight. She helps one of the comrades escape, but refuses to leave, and later, we are told, ‘dies of a broken heart.’ The subtext of the play, quite clearly, is the inability of most to act in the face of ‘evil.’

As evidence, the KPD organization folds up shop after their disastrous politics. The homosexual has a chance to kill Hitler, but fears for his own life, and doesn’t aim his gun in a darkened theatre. The Trotskyist filmaker flees to Chicago, with his remaining one good eye, after a brawl involving he, Paulinka and some brownshirts. Paulinka has no intention of getting involved in politics, and settles for dope. She is refused entry to the US because she was at one time a KPD member, joinging for a few weeks 'because they make the best films,” and instead departs to the USSR by train. Gotchling, however, returns to Germany underground, continuing the fight, and asks Agnes to help a comrade escape to Czechoslovakia. Gotchling is the one comrade that seems the most dangerous to Hitler, and in spite of the mistakes of the KPD leadership, represents the working class people who continued to play a heroic and underground role in Germany itself during that period. She is clearly contrasted with Agnes, who is middle class, and while sincere, is unable to act.

The figure of Zillah is ostensibly the most ‘controversial’ because of her modern anger at the Great Communicator, the senile actor Ronald Reagan. Kushner allows her stright-out diatribles - not usually allowed in American theatre. While some think the play and Zillah compare Hitler and Reagan, it does no such thing. She makes the philosophical point that the yardstick for ‘evil’ is now Hitler, and if, in that context you only kill hundreds of thousands (the handling of AIDS, contras in Nicaragua, government death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala were some of Reagan's crimes) history somehow determines that you are not 'evil' enough, and you don't even get an dishonorable mention. I.E., now the ‘smoking gun’ has to kill millions ... or it doesn’t smoke.

Like other Kushner plays, there is a ghost that haunts Agnes’ apartment, Die Alte, just as Agnes herself becomes a ghost that haunts Zillah’s apartment. I thought that Die Alte represented a woman who lived in the apartment during World War I, and was consumed by famine. However, she insists she was taken to the camps, and shown the dead, and ate all the way through it… which would post date WW I. The figure of the Devil appears as Herr Swetts, a charismatic and powerful man who has taken up residence in Germany for the duration. Paulinka is quite taken with him. She would sell her soul for a good part, and actually introduces Satan to the play through a role she had in Faust. Common to Brecht, dark humor is laced throughout, with Paulinka, Baz and Zillah providing the most jokes, at the expense, respectively, of self-centeredness, gay orgasms and doddering reactionaries like Reagan.

The high point of the play for me is an ecstatic scene after the Communist Party made temporary gains in the Reichstag in 1933, while the Nazis lost seats. To celebrate, Husz pours vodka and pretends to film Gotchling, as Trotsky, and Agnes, as Dziga Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker, shaking hands. They all sing the International, with the modest Hungarian Husz standing at the side, singing too. The merger of art and politics, he says. I sang along, but was one of the few that knew the words …

And I saw it at the U of M, Rarig Theatre.
Red Frog
April 26, 2009

90 more years of black oppression?

"The Bloody Shirt – Terror after the Civil War," by Stephen Budiansky, 2008

The “bloody shirt” was a phrase used by the defenders of racism in the South to hide the bloodshed, intimidation and anti-democratic methods used against ex-slaves and Republicans during Reconstruction. It came from a real incident where an ordinary northern white man named Higgins was beaten by the Klan in Mississippi. The legend was that this same bloody shirt (and there really was one) was taken to Congress and waved in the air by Benjamin Butler, an abolitionist general. (This part never happened, of course.) The ex-Confederates would say ‘he’s waving the bloody shirt’ to make light of any claim they were violent. Asserting all along that they were unjustly accused of barbarism, they insisted that ‘they’ were the victims of ‘nigger rule’ and carpetbagger Yankees. And this inversion of the truth is, even today, the accepted myth about the period after the Civil War.

Thugs Play Victim

If you wanted to know why the Civil War did not end segregation and destroy Klan terror, or promote voting rights and black land ownership, this book explains the brutal process whereby the Confederate aristocracy, while losing the war, won the ‘peace’ - mainly through violence. It confirms Marx’s analysis that a democratic revolution - or indeed any revolution - must become ‘permanent’ in order to fully succeed.

The Civil War did not develop into that ‘permanent’ revolution. The legal end of slavery brought about by the war led for a time to voting rights being granted former slaves. For almost 10 years, the vast majority voted in Reconstruction governments in all the former slave states, as the freedmen outnumbered the Confederate whites. These governments allowed blacks to sit on juries, vote, hold office, own land, travel, build up businesses and generally act like anyone else. And that was unheard of. These governments were slandered by the White Leagues and the Klan (who themselves were led by the South’s most prominent citizens…) as ‘carpet baggers', ‘scalawags’ and ‘nigger rule.’ To the racists in the South who wanted a "white man's’ government,” whites who supported the Republican Party were as bad, or worse, than the black ex-slaves. It took almost 10 years of Klan and White League violence to be successful in overturning democratic rule in the South. These same elements then controlled the South for the next 90 years. Only with the advent of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s was there another attempt to end the rule of the Jim Crow, segregationist South.

Budiansky focuses on 5 different people to tell this story. One was typical of the white people who moved south after the Civil War to make a living. Albert T Morgan, a moderate, non-abolitionist, just wanted to start a business in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Like most Northerners, he had no clue about what was really going on in the South. Until he found out - 'the half has not been told you!' What Morgan discovered was that any white person who had ANY sympathy for black people was first shunned, then verbally harassed, then tricked out of property, and finally assaulted and shot at by the leading citizens and ‘good’ white people of Mississippi. You see, among other things, he had made the mistake of marrying an educated, mixed-ethnicity woman, Carolyn Highgate, of New York state. Morgan was elected several times as a Republican, until armed Democratic Party thugs swung the election of 1875 in the other direction.

Even being a Confederate General was not enough, as James Longstreet found out. Probably the best general in the Confederate Army – actually superior to Lee in some respects - he suggested to his fellow Southerners that they had lost the war, and should accept the peace. He joined the Republican Party. For this impertinent suggestion and act, he was roundly reviled by the whole Southern establishment, to the point where his death went unremarked by the Confederate Army societies in the south. Although every other Confederate general was ‘not forgotten.’ Longstreet fought the "Knights of the White Camelia" reactionaries at Liberty Place in New Orleans in 1874 while leading the pro-Republican Louisiana State Militia. 100 people died or were injured, and Longstreet was captured. While U.S. troops came in the next day and put down the rebellion, this event signaled the end of reconstruction in Louisiana and the triumph of reaction. To this day there is a memorial to the battle in New Orleans, by the river in the French Quarter, mentioning both 'sides' as somehow co-equal heroes.  It has only recently been removed. (2023)

Another was a black man, “Prince” Rivers. He joined the Union Army outside Charleston, South Carolina, ending as a sergeant of the First South Carolina Volunteers. Rivers had great abilities, and went on in to become a legislator and then judge in Reconstruction South Carolina. He settled in a town called Hamburg, across the river from Augusta, Georgia. Hamburg, South Carolina, was later to be the scene of a massacre of black militia and other citizens, led by violent white racists under command of a former Confederate general, Matthew Butler, and a former Confederate legislator, Ben Tillman. This event set the stage for the complete destruction of this black-run town, and the beginning of the end for Reconstruction in South Carolina. Prince Rivers ended up as a coach driver, the same occupation he had during slavery. Hamburg vanished after burnings and floods, and now lies beneath a riverside housing project in “North” Augusta, SC. Even in 2006, a monument commemorating the one white racist killed during the slaughter at Hamburg was mentioned positively during the Centennial of North Augusta. The text of the monument reads, “to the only (sic) resident of Hamburg to be killed in the Hamburg riot of 1876.”

There is a local connection in this book as well. Adelbert Ames’ parents lived in Northfield, Minnesota, and owned the Ames Mill, right next to the dam on the Cannon River, and at one time the original source for Malt-o-Meal. Ames became the Reconstruction governor of Mississippi, where he built schools and universities for the first time, which also included black people. He was forced from office in 1875 after the terrorist Mississippi White Leagues threatened, killed or beat anyone attempting to vote a Republican ticket. They were successful and the “white man's government’ of the Democratic Party took control – for the next 90 years. As the Yazoo Democrat (newspaper) said, “Carry the election, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”

Even during the 10 years of Reconstruction black people were shot, hung, beaten, driven off land, fired, foreclosed on, their crops burnt, their animals stolen. They were hindered from voting, sitting on juries, going to school, holding office, and generally having much more rights than a slave. White Republicans were killed, insulted, burnt out, mobbed and made the victim of various ‘legal’ stratagems by the white southern aristocracy. Essentially, the Confederate Army and the Confederate government became the Ku Klux Klan, the White Leagues and the Democratic Party. 3,000 freedman and Republicans, including 60 office holders, were killed during this period. The Republican administrations of Andrew Johnson, U.S. Grant and Rutherford Hayes did not send enough troops to the south, nor have any deep commitment to democracy for blacks or even their own Party. And they allowed the South to slip back into the hands of the ex-Confederacy. The United States paid for this.

While this story may seem like ancient history, it is not. In the American body politic the Civil War and black slavery are defining events. Even now, the Republican South is still the most conservative, where workers are the most economically impoverished, with socially retrograde state governments. You can track the movement of members of the Southern Baptist Convention into the north, and where they settle will coincide with extremely conservative politicians being elected in those western or northern rural areas. The day Lyndon Baines Johnson supported the Voting Rights Act in 1966 was the day the Democratic Party Bollweevils started to move into the Republican column, until today the Ex-Confederate South is almost solid Republican. Irony of ironies. So it doesn’t matter what your party label is in these states – only so long as it is reactionary in every way.

The Civil War played a role in fusing fundamentalist Christian religion with racism. After the war, it promoted the rule of a southern aristocracy that has used southern ‘nationalism’ and religion to weld many southern whites to their reactionary banner. The open shop in the south is a testament to that. The South today is still the homeland of the most conservative politicians in the United States – and has been since the end of the Revolution, for more than 200 years. The southern bloc has held back progress in the Unites States for nearly every year of its existence since then. There is a long running argument about even bothering with the "backward southerners," promoted by Democrats like Thomas Schaller. However, social progress in the United States will be far more difficult without winning over working class elements in the southern states. Undermining the influence of the Bourbon corporate capitalists in oil, real estate, military procurement, coal and auto is essential to a national revolutionary strategy.  After all, they still use the slogan of fake oppression - i.e. 'the bloody shirt,' to this day.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!
---- Red Frog, 2/22/03.

A Contract Is a Contract, Unless You Work for Your Money — Letter from UAW member on AIG Bailout Rip Off

This past week Ford workers conceded, yet again, to the demands of the company, Washington and the UAW (mis)leadership. The breach of contract includes a decrease in pay, shorter breaks, no paid leave and forfeiting the Christmas bonus, just to name a few. We were told that we had to make these concessions in order to save our jobs and to qualify for emergency loans. Government policy was to open up our contract to attack our living standards.

Now, at the same time, taxpayer-bailed-out AIG is giving away $165 million in “contractually obligated” bonuses. Tony Rohdin of the Express-Times described this hypocrisy: “Hey, a contract is a contract. Oh, that's right, we ordered the auto companies to renegotiate their deals. We just forgot to apply the same standard to Wall Street. Oops!”

While Ford autoworkers (whom in an entire year make a fraction of what the AIG bonuses are) were put under massive pressure to make concessions, the AIG bonus boys are simply “encouraged” to give back part of their bonus. The bonuses range from $1,000 to in the millions. The New York Times reports that “Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.” If the 165 million were divided evenly between each of the 400 receiving employees, it would offer $412,500 EACH.

“In return for nearly bankrupting the republic, when their paper transactions make fortunes, they keep their fortunes. When their paper transactions lose money, they keep their fortunes, and expect the heartland to pay the cost. [AIG is] demeaning the value of those who make real things through hard work in the heartland of America, while proclaiming the value of those who barter paper money of decreasing value in manipulated markets [they] then expect the rest of us to pay the price of their failure" (Brent Budowsky, journalist for The Hill).

We are deemed “over compensated” for our labor and consequently, our rightfully earned wages and benefits are repealed. Now, as tax dollars go toward bailing out the greedy financial crooks who are responsible for the failing economy, the administration stands with their hand tied behind their backs. “It’s a contract,” they say. “Nothing can be done.” Where exactly does the government stand in regard to the rights of working class America, the true producers of wealth?

Kate Hammer
Member, United Auto Workers Local 879

http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article12.php?id=1059

Stop Foreclosures! Make the Banks Pay!

STOP FORECLOSURES!

ACORN, the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign, the IWW, Economic Crisis Action Group and Homes not Jails are sponsoring a demonstration on Wednesday, March 11, in the basement of Minneapolis City Hall, Room 30, Hennepin County Sheriffs' Office. Take a few hours off work!

That office is ground zero for the foreclosures in Minnesota - over 8500 in Hennepin County alone, according to Finance & Commerce magazine. It is where the Sheriff sells the home from the mortgage holder back to a representative of the banks.

MARCH 11 MASS DIRECT ACTION TO STOP HENNEPIN COUNTY SHERIFF FORECLOSURE SALES. STAND WITH YOUR NEIGHBORS! BRING SIGNS!

Here are some ideas for signs: "Make the Banksters Pay", "Bailout the People", "Housing is a Human Right!" "Stop Home Evictions, "Stop Home Evictions and Foreclosures!" "Moratorium on Foreclosures,"

EVERYONE IS INVITED! Wednesday, March 11. Gather at 9:45 am. Room 30 of Minneapolis City Hall, 350 South 5th Street, Downtown Minneapolis.

Contacts:A. Nurack, ACORN, 651-642-9639, mnacorn@acorn.org
Cheri Honkala, PPEHRC, 267-439-8419, info@economichumanrights.org
Karen Redleaf, ECAG, 651-283-3495, ecag@riseup.net

The Patched Up Obama Stimulus Plan Feb 27, 2009 By Lynn Walsh
In Denver on February 17, Barack Obama signed his ambitiously titled American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It was only three weeks after formally taking over the presidency, though over a year since the onset of a severe economic downturn, which Obama himself has warned could turn into a ‘catastrophe’ unless checked. The $789 billion package is unprecedented in scale – around 5.8% of GDP, spread over two years, compared with Roosevelt’s New Deal package of between 1-2% of GDP. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the ‘output gap’, the difference between the capacity of the US economy and its likely actual output, will be $2.9 trillion over the next three years. The CBO comments that the impact of the package will be ‘uncertain’. Out of the package, $281 billion is tax cuts, partly to ‘working families’ but including substantial tax concessions to business and around $70 billion (9% of the total) to adjust the alternative minimum tax (AMT) threshold, to prevent this tax affecting upper-middle-class families. This has nothing to do with economic stimulus, and was inserted under pressure from Republicans, although the AMT would clearly have been amended anyway in the coming months. Additional government spending (repairs of bridges and roads and other infrastructure projects) is to be allocated $308 billion. Included in this is just over $50 billion of additional aid to state governments, though this is a tiny amount given the tax shortfall of many states. California alone has a $42 billion deficit, and the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is imposing massive cuts and public-sector layoffs. Just under $200 billion of the package is increased benefits, for instance, food stamps, and the extension of unemployment from 26 to 36 weeks. While infrastructure spending will take time to work through to the economy, additional benefits to the unemployed and low-income families will have a much more immediate affect. But there is no provision in the package to ensure that any jobs created will pay union rates or for an increase in the minimum wage. These measures would be far more effective than tax rebates in rapidly boosting demand for goods and services. Republicans in Congress fought to increase the tax cut element and reduce the additional public spending, despite Obama’s attempt to involve them in bipartisan negotiations. In the House of Representatives, where the Democrats have a clear majority, no Republicans voted for the package. In the Senate, Obama managed to win the support of three Republicans, on the basis of concessions, thus avoiding the danger of a filibuster by Republicans. Congressional Republicans are still clinging to neo-liberal ideology, still asserting that tax cuts for the wealthy are the magic remedy for all economic maladies. In contrast, a majority of Republican state governors, who have to grapple with the crisis, have supported Obama’s package. A number of Senate Democrats successfully inserted clauses into Obama’s legislation imposing restrictions on the pay and bonuses of banks and corporations receiving any funds under the TARP bank-bailout program. This new provision prohibits cash bonuses and almost all other forms of incentives for the five most-senior officers and the 20 highest-paid executives at large companies receiving money under TARP. Although Obama recently denounced the recklessness and irresponsibility of top bankers, calling for a curb on bonuses, the president and his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, actually opposed this measure! Obama claims that his package will create four million jobs. Most economic commentators, however, estimate that it will create between one and three million jobs at most. But even four million jobs saved or created – Obama’s ‘bottom line’ – would be a very limited cushion for millions of unemployed workers. The jump of over half a million job losses in January brought the number of jobs lost since the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to 3.6 million. This means 11.6 million unemployed workers (7.6% of the workforce), but if part-time workers who need full-time jobs and jobless workers who have given up looking are included, the total rises to 21.7 million workers (13.9% of the workforce). Reflecting protectionist pressures, House Democrats inserted a ‘Buy American’ clause into the stimulus bill. This is mainly aimed at ensuring that U.S.-made steel will be used in infrastructure projects. Steel makers’ organizations in Canada and Europe immediately protested at this ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policy. The clause was softened in the Senate, with language that the protectionist provision should be "applied in a manner consistent with the United States’ obligations under international agreements". But as Jagdish Bhagwati, an adviser to the WTO, warned, it is still possible for the US to restrict trade within WTO rules: "I would bet everything I have on a trade war breaking out within WTO-consistent rules", he said. There is little doubt that, if serious restrictions are imposed on the use of imported steel, other steel-producing countries will retaliate with similar measures. The ‘biggest imponderable’ about Obama’s package is: "Will the plan work?" (The Washington Post, A Fiscal Gamble, editorial, February 13) It is not only left-Democrat, Keynesian commentators who are skeptical about the likely effectiveness of Obama’s plan. For instance, in a note to their clients, the business analysts, High Frequency Economics, comment: "We remain firmly of the view that the package now in Congress is the bare minimum required. It will ultimately prove too small". Obama’s package, despite its size, is a hastily improvised patch-up job. The stimulus plan does not significantly increase expenditure on healthcare or education. There are no measures which will significantly raise the general income levels of workers and no measures to enhance the trade union rights of workers. Apart from the time-lag before most of the stimulus measures will have an effect, the package has to counter a deepening global downturn and the continuation of the credit crunch. The first installment of TARP, implemented by George Bush and Hank Paulson, has so far prevented a domino-like collapse of financial institutions but has not overcome the paralysis of bank lending. Obama has proclaimed that TARP 2 (the second $350 billion installment) will be much more effective, but so far Geithner’s announcements remain extremely vague. One way or another, the bulk of the debt mountain will be shifted from the private sector to the public sector, with the cost being imposed onto the working class. Fifty billion dollars or more will be used to try to prevent housing foreclosures, but this is primarily an indirect form of support for banks facing a rising number of mortgage defaults. Increasing negative equity (already about 28% of home buyers) and a tsunami of unemployment will mean more and more defaults and foreclosures. The only way to prevent this would be for the Federal government to impose a moratorium on all foreclosures and to subsidize the refinancing of mortgages or a switch to renting at affordable rates. Obama’s huge package will have some cushioning effect, but whether it will actually stimulate renewed growth remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however: the Federal debt will balloon over the next few years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that (including the current debt plus the cost of TARP and the stimulus package) Federal government debt will rise from 41% of GDP in 2008 to 70% of GDP by 2011. The CBO estimates that after that the annual budget deficit will fall to 2% of GDP. But this estimate is based on extremely optimistic projections: a 4% a year average GDP growth 2011-14 and minimum growth of public spending in line with inflation. If the global slump continues beyond 2010, budget deficits would continue to soar. This would make it much more difficult for the U.S. to finance its debt on global financial markets. http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article10.php?id=1034

Do you know where your money is tonight?

“The Great Financial Crisis – Causes and Conflicts” -
John Bellamy Foster & Fred Magdoff, 2009

These are astounding times for American Marxists. War and economic collapse are the mother of revolution. Right now we have two ‘small’ wars and one giant economic collapse – and that not limited to one country. Republicans are babbling about Obama being a ‘socialist.’ So socialism, safely buried by its association with Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev and a sclerotic bureaucracy, is once again placed on the table. Though carried by the oddest of flag bearers!

While most people are scratching their heads over the financial crisis, making up various stories to explain what they see unfolding before their eyes, Foster and Magdoff explain this crisis based on long-running observation, for them personified by the American Marxist analysis of Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and Fred Magdoff. Foster is the present editor of their magazine Monthly Review, and carries on their tradition, which started in the 60s.

To deal with the crisis, conservatives are still pushing to cut taxes and ‘big guvmint’; centrists want to take a bite from the tax-cut pie and the Keynesian pie too; while liberals think that lots of government spending will bring the ‘good times’ back.

Think again. John Maynard Keynes, the present patron saint before the fall of Saint Thomas Friedman, inspired Roosevelt to blunt the depression in the 1930s by using his approach to contain the fall in unemployment, the financial situation of the banks, and the productive character of manufacturing firms. Of course, Roosevelt borrowed most of his specific New Deal programs from real populists like Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long. A cigarette-holding East Coast patrician, Roosevelt was elected on a program of mild ‘improvements’ to counter the effects of the depression. While the Communist Party has put him on their banners, Roosevelt only did what he had to do to save capital – the ‘enemy,’ as they say, was at the gates. His solutions gave capitalism a 'human' face.

However, as Foster and others point out, what really ended the depression was World War Two, which boosted war-time production 6 times, far above the drop in production that had developed in the recession of 1938 under Roosevelt. The whole economy was virtually put under government control.  Of course, liberals can’t face this. So the present worship of Saint Keynes as their savior. They hope that blunting this recession/depression will be sufficient. After all, what other choice do they have? Nationalization, without compensation, with workers control? We are at an actual situation where the banking, real estate/land, health care, auto and oil sectors of the economy should be nationalized. These are, of course, the pre-cursors to the workers state. So for liberals this is impossible.

Foster carefully analyses the 50s and 60s, and, like his predecessors, calls it a “golden decade’ but an EXCEPTION to normal capitalist development. Due to the destruction of competing productive forces in Europe during World War Two; the technological development of cheap oil, roads, suburbia and automobile technology; and the strong position of the U.S. military - the United States economy flourished for 25 years based on these exceptional circumstances. This all came apart at the beginning of the 70s, when stagnation overcame the U.S. economy. The imperialist boom was over. Vietnam was a defeat, on the battlefield and economically; the oil embargo showed the fragility of the oil economy, and the fall of the dollar were all symptomatic of an underlying malaise in the United States, a stagnating economic situation not seen in 25 years. That situation continued through the 70s, until financialization slowly took off.

The rulers at the time, quite clearly, wondered what to do. Nixon decided with his Treasury Secretary to abandon a ‘production’-based economy, and send work, instead, off-shore or across the border. It is no accident that Nixon was the one who lead 'detente' with China - which weakened the USSR, and eventually lead the Chinese to become our industrial heartland. Every production worker in the U.S. knows what that decisions meant. To substitute, the U.S. slowly started to build up FINANCIAL capital as a solution to the drop in profits from production. This is when financialization began to grow to dominance in the U.S. economy. Financialization is a phrase first popularized by Sweezy, Magdoff and Baran, according to Foster. However, I suspect there are prior Marxists who pointed to financialization as the final phase of capital. At its peak in 2005, the financial sector (FIRE – Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) of the U.S economy produced 40% of the profit, while the productive sector making actual things or goods, brought in 18%. The tables had turned.

However, with the domination of the financial sector has come a more robust and international bubble economy. Just as the jet plane allows disease to spread around the world at lightning speed, so the international capitalist markets allow a contagion from one market to infect all the others, in hours. This actually is not what was predicted by the Marketeers.

As we watched, the real estate bubble, created by rentier capital, was securitized by Wall Street, i.e. financial capital. Wall Street sold this new product around the world over 6 years, transferring the finance bubble from the tech economy to the sub-prime/CDO economy. In their enthusiasm for debt, and belief that bubbles never pop, the international banking sector over-leveraged themselves up to 43 times, which included decreasing the assets on hand in case of an old-fashioned ‘run’ on the bank. Encouraging debt, of course, is the core of finance-driven development. The banks backed financialization in Eastern Europe and other countries, and downplayed production, so as to impoverish them again through interest, rent and debt.

Now we see virtual bankruptcy of most of the largest banks in the U.S. – and many in the rest of the world. The recession, which may turn into a depression, is still accelerating across the globe. What Foster reminds us, in his last chapter, written in December 2008, is that it is the failure of the capitalist economy at its productive ROOT which has lead to this situation. In a quite interesting polemic with groups of left-liberals who assert that re-regulating finance capital and emphasizing productive capital will regenerate society, Foster and Magdoff assert it is precisely both financialization AND capitalist productivity that have failed. Hence the “stagnation” thesis that they embody seems to be more radical then the ‘re-regulation’ hypothesis.

One of the books few weaknesses is that they do not detail the specific roots of this stagnation – only hinting at over-production and the falling rate of profit – both classical Marxist categories. I think this was not within their purpose, however.

The main weakness of the book is its almost exclusive focus on the U.S.  Foster and Magdoff only hint at the way imperial capital can blunt recessions by ‘exporting’ misery overseas – soaking the working, middle and farm classes in other countries to pay for their crisis. Just as they do to the domestic working class on a lesser scale. One characteristic of the 50s-60s that Foster somewhat ignores is this spread of U.S. imperial capital around the globe, while every other national finance sector was still weak.

Foster does assert that the particular conditions of the '50s-'60s cannot be copied. He does not think that the internet (and, I suspect, though he does not address it, the ‘green’ economy) can substitute for the automobile and cheap oil. He does not think that U.S. military dominance will increase anymore - especially with the limited failure in Iraq. And he does not believe that increasing the productive side of U.S. capitalism again will work. On this latter, Obama and the Gore faction are counting on the ‘green economy’ to revive capitalism. Seeing as ecosphere and human survival also depend on a ‘green economy’, this is one of the most logical ways to try to get out of the crisis. I, too, however, doubt that it will work in a capitalist framework.

This books is short, clear and well-written - the best book-long analysis of the underlying cause of our present predicament. The graphs are illuminating, the rhetoric is minimal, the approach is factual. It proves once again that Marxism is still relevant, still scientifically perceptive, and still has some answers which people are looking for.

Red Frog – 2/17/09
--- and I bought it at May Day books!

Is the Apocalypse Coming?

“The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy – 2006

Cormac McCarthy is best known for penning the novel, “No Country for Old Men,” which the Cohen brothers made into a movie of the same name. Essentially, McCarthy has one major theme in his best novels – the brutality of life, and efforts to deal with it. “Blood Meridian” is his most famous – based on the actual history of Texas and Mexico when a group of convicts lead by John Glanton slaughtered and scalped their way across the country, while working for the government. This book contains far more of the reality of Manifest Destiny than the nostalgic, though apparently ‘realistic’ western novels of Larry McMurtry like “Lonesome Dove.” McCarthy also completed a “western trilogy’ as his version of the history of that time, a trilogy I have not read yet.

As Mike Davis pointed out, the bloodletting of the 101st Airborne’s Tiger Force in the Vietnamese Central highlands in the 60s, which also featured scalping and wholesale destruction of civilians, was no different than the western history McCarthy brought alive. Brutality seems a constant, especially when connected to imperial warfare or attitudes.

“The Road,” however, is science ‘fiction’ about a post-apocalyptic future. It is the story of a self-reliant man and his young son trying to find warmth and ‘good’ people in a world destroyed; burnt to the ground, gutted, inhabited by cannibals due to the lack of food - full of rain, wind, dim sunlight, ashes, empty houses, dead trees, gutted animals and corpses. It is never clear exactly what destroyed the world, but from McCarthy’s descriptions of human vices, it was probably something typically dark and… human. It is a great American novel. And it was written relatively recently, in 2006. It has also been turned into a film, though I have not seen it yet.

What I would like to address is science fiction. The bulk of science fiction that I am familiar with in this country portrays the future as either a medieval high-tech kingdom, or a completely devastated landscape, full of violence and barbarism. The former is laughable in that the technology goes along with completely assbackwards social relations – as if the science making the technology possible – and reason itself – were invisible, trumped by some cretinous hierarchies full of knights, kings and wizards. This vision of the future is usually on various other ‘planets’ – “Star Wars” and “Dune” are good examples. The Star Trek series was actually ‘progressive’ in a odd sense, given it’s choice of multi-ethnic crews, women and ‘reasoners’ like Spock, and not enthralled with the Middle Ages.

The other version of the future, however, has become dominant. Some older books about the triumph of fascism in the U.S. – both Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” (already reviewed in these pages) and Jack London’s “The Iron Heel” come to mind, are not ‘science fiction’ but they deal with the same theme – a theme of barbarism. 1931s “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s famous dystopian 1949 novel, “1984” (Orwell was a socialist) are the historical ancestors of this type of fiction.

However, in the cheery U.S., things did not pick up until later. Since Phillip K Dick published, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” in 1968, post-apocalypse is the place to be in science fiction. I am sure people more familiar with the genre than me will be able to come up with many examples. Dick’s book was followed by the Road Warrior film trilogy (presciently focused on the fight for oil in a depleted world) starting in 1979-1981; the film “Blade Runner” done in 1982, based on Dick’s book; the Terminator series, starting in 1984; and now a plethora of similar fare –the Matrix trilogy, and now most recently, “I Am Legend.” All of this indicates this type of story is hitting a nerve.

From the anarchist left, Edward Abbey wrote two books about the fight against fascism in a hopeless post-apocalyptic world destroyed by environmental decay – “A Novel (Plume)" and again in “Good News.” These books are far different than the "Monkey Wrench Gang" (also reviewed in these pages.) The very gifted and hilarious writer, left-liberal T. Coraghessan Boyle, wrote 2000s “A Friend of the Earth," about the environmental destruction of the world. While the rain never lets up, a group of people try to save rare animals like lions in their homes. McCarthy’s “The Road” is the latest in this tradition. It combines environmental catastrophe and barbaric human relations.

McCarthy is a writer of spare power. He tends to lean towards 18th and 19th century words, and enjoys long sentences in that same tradition; makes up many new words, which look somewhat like some other, more familiar, words; and creates words that we normally use hyphenated or separately -portmanteaus. He uses repetition in “The Road’ to increase the power of the vision. He attempts Biblical cadences. Because of his attempt at universality, you cannot tell what part of the country he is writing about, except it is somewhere in the U.S. – first it seems it is in the west, then it looks like the southeast. Only one town is mentioned – Rock City. In Tennessee?  They are heading 'south.'

McCarthy, at the same time, is not always a factual literalist. He is interested here, I think, in creating a myth of the creation of the new world out of the … literal ashes of the old. The Son and the Man (there is a hint of Christian iconography - the young Son seems to be the most sympathetic to the pathetic, thievish people they meet) constantly travel, and rarely stop, but stay on the road instead. It is not clear why they continue on the road, as there is no evidence it will get warmer by the ocean they are heading towards, or by going south, or that they will find ‘good’ humans by following it. In fact, it is very dangerous to be on it. They leave several places that have plentiful food – one a quite well stocked underground bunker - to cram some of the goods, instead, into their shopping cart, which they push down the dark, cold, dangerous, ash-covered highways.

This constant vision of a destroyed world – whether by atomic radiation, disease, environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, war or the triumph of fascism – reflects a deep fear running consciously and unconsciously through U.S society. It reflects a circular view of history, and and, at the same time, a 'terminal' view of history. But also a view that admits no optimism – no “utopia,” only a “dystopia.” “Utopianism” to the conventional modern mind is completely out of the question - utopianism is for light-minded fantasists and other cloud-dwellers, EVEN in fiction and science fiction. The prevalence of Christian Armageddon philosophy (the “Left-Behind” series dwells on the collapse of society) in the U.S. right wing indicates that this strand crosses the traditional political spectrum.

On the other hand, Soviet science fiction did not have such a sour view of the future, but instead speculated about what it would be like to live under high-tech communism, where conflict is disappearing, and where life has become less arduous. Now, the future is seen by bourgeois science fiction, including McCarthy, as almost wholly negative. “Salvation” is either through the imaginary mechanism of “the Rapture” or through the few remaining “good” people banding together to fight the ‘bad” people – sort of a moralistic tribalism. Which is what the rapture is about too. In essence, the bourgeois solution to apocalypse has nothing to do with preventing it in the first place. It does not understand the source of the apocalypse, or the forces strong enough to stop it. It believes that the worst of humanity will triumph. It now only has to do with weathering its inevitability, with 'adaptation.' In a sense, these people are already getting prepared for the results of … peak oil, global climate change, economic collapse, ethnic war, and global war. Of course, warning of it can act as a deterrent, and I feel that this is McCarthy's purpose.

There are other responses, however. Trotsky said that human history would not automatically lead towards utopia or communism. The choice Rose Luxembourg gave us, either “Socialism or Barbarism”, relates to the conscious development of the working classes, and not some automatic process. 

The action of the working class is necessary again. With the collapse of Freidmanite capitalist finance, and the bankruptcy of the major banks, insurance companies, hedge funds and the auto industry; with oil hitting a production peak a year or two ago; with world carbon levels above the point of no return; with a massive world recession in the making, with fascistic religious and ethnic war being promoted everywhere – revolutionary action is again urgent. We are presently even farther along in the development and decay of capitalism than we were in the 1930s. The election of Barack Obama is a step of bourgeois ‘hope.’ If Obama cannot rescue the present system, then the next people up on stage are the revolutionaries of all stripes, and the masses of people who have lost faith in the present system. This does not, anymore, seem an extreme statement to make.

-- Red Frog, 1/18/2009 - I did not buy it at Mayday books though we carry it.  Mayday has many progressive novels in stock. Buy one!

Gandhi Says...

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is done under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? (and you can add terrorism to that...)

--Gandhi

Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Address

I have posted the link of a Nobel Prize lecture presented by Harold Pinter in 2005 below. He starts by talking about literature but this is merely preamble to discussion of US foreign policy.

http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=620

Alternatively, the lecture can be read here:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html

And Paul Craig Roberts refers to it extensively in his most recent essay here:

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/081228_silent.htm

BUST THE BAILOUT!

Bust the Bailout!

Lunch Hour Protest, US Bank, 800 Nicollet Mall, 12:00 Noon, December 3, Wednesday -

U.S. Bank is receiving $6.6Bn of the massive $700Bn (or $7.5 trillion) bailout passed by a bi-partisan Congress, even though the bank was not having financial difficulties. Wells Fargo got $25Bn. Meanwhile, people are still losing their homes all over the metro area. Foreclosures and mortgages are at the financial heart of the present financial crisis. Make the benefits trickle up, not down!

Tell U.S. Bank to use this windfall to help the community by enabling homeowners and tenants to stay in their homes, not to enrich their shareholders, pay higher executive bonuses or buy other entities. Remember, this money is OUR tax money, and we have very right to make demands of U.S. Bank management about how it is used.

Sponsored by Economic Crisis Action Group