Behavior Modification

“The Happiness Industry – How the Government and Big Business Sold Us on Well-Being,” by William Davies, 2015

How can anyone be against ‘happiness’?  Davies, a British sociologist, carefully explains that actual happiness is not the issue – it is the form of capitalist ‘happiness’ engineered through corporate HR departments, large Internet companies, government surveillance or programs and academic research projects.  In essence much of the present ‘happiness’ industry is a behavior modification program and pseudo-science designed to get people to better adapt to present circumstances, no matter what those circumstances may be.  Its real purpose is to produce more productive workers and better shoppers and actually inhibits actual happiness. 

Early quote posted on Athenian slave quarters.

Capital early on began to understand that workers could be worn out by work. (Duh!) Burnout and fatigue are obvious results of especially intense work, and they realized they had to manage their employee’s psychology to maintain productivity.  As the profit economy in advanced capitalist countries relied more and more on direct exploitation of labor in the ‘service’ and intellectual property parts of the economy, the emotional and psychological state of workers became even more important.  An alienated, distant worker became a profit problem. Enter the Happiness Industry!  Does your firm have a ‘happiness officer’ yet?

While this may hint at another form of socialized and democratic functioning at work, instead it is taken in the other direction.  To Davies, the methods that developed are essentially false solutions to a social problem. As he says, “In many ways, happiness science is ‘critique turned inwards,’ despite all the appeals by positive psychologists to ‘notice’ the world around us.”

If you were expecting a more current look at this issue, similar to Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Bright Sided,” this is not it.  A third of the book is a description and critique of the history of utilitarianism, psychology and the origins of behaviorism which led up to the present moment.  He also spends time looking at the development of the neo-conservative Chicago School and its’ all encompassing ‘price theory’ and hatred of any government policy.  All of these are essentially ideological products coming out of the development of capitalist society, from Jeremy Bentham in 1766 to the present.  Out of this perspective came the neo-liberal terms ‘human capital’ and ‘cultural capital’ – as if our character and knowledge are now quantifiable commodities. 

Figures covered by Davies are Bentham, the utilitarian who first postulated that ‘pleasure’ and the avoidance of ‘pain’ were the goals of human beings;  William Jevons, whose understanding of the mind was as a mechanical balancing act rationally weighing value; John Watson, who thought the mind was nothing but observable behavior; Frederick Winslow Taylor, who made the work flow more efficient, but did not touch psychology; Hans Selye, who thought all emotions had a discoverable biological form in the body and Jacob Moreno, who developed the method of social and power linkages through socio-metrics. 

Many of the buzz words floating around today come up.  Like the ubiquitous corporate ‘wellness’ programs that seek to get employees to stop smoking, loose weight, eat healthy, limit drinking or drug use.  They are designed to push themselves into the private and social life of workers.  The goal is to produce better workers for higher profit of course, but infractions are already being monetarized – such as higher rates for smokers. Some workers are being threatened with termination for not cooperating with wellness programs.  Some businesses want to submit workers to a gene test before hiring, to confirm 'wellness.' 

Davies takes direct pokes at ‘Davos Buddhism,’ mindfulness programs directed at getting more productivity out of top executives and relieving stress.  Or its equivalent for ordinary people – mindfulness, yoga and meditation that require a position of semi-mystical individualist quietism in the face of social and economic turbulence.  He describes how the present data mining through Facebook, Twitter, Fitbit, Google and many other programs are attempts to gain ‘scientific’ data to be used by powerful corporations or academics to manipulate behavior – to peer inside the population.  Or the academics working with the military or corporations who seek to better quantify an elusive thing like ‘happiness.’  They think if you can scientifically measure it through various forms of data, especially bypassing input from the subject, you can understand it and use that knowledge.  A housing and shopping complex in New York is now being built in which all the residents will be monitored on many levels – a ‘smart town’ and ultimate lab-rat cage. 

The industry thinks happiness can be monitored through purchases and so Davies looks at advertising’s interest in customer surveys as they were originally undertaken by the J. Walter Thompson agency.  He shows how ‘brain’ science is now a multi-billion dollar government project, attempting to locate all ideas and emotions in one location in the brain – a location that can then be stimulated.  Or ‘social entrepreneurship,’ which hints at another relation to profit, but is then distorted in this economy into a ‘hip’ sales gimmick. 

Davies takes issue with the various forms of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders”(DSM) – the dictionary of psychological ailments.  The DSM has over-medicalized nearly every single emotional issue.  One version, #3, was dominated by behaviorists from St. Louis who came up with many new diagnoses for which private health plans and drug manufacturers could then use to market products.  Depression, which has been shown to have a direct connection to social issues in a person’s life like poverty, unemployment, bad workplaces and ethnic oppression - is instead treated by expensive drugs like Prozac.  Prozac is like the ‘Soma’ of our Brave New America.

The worst form of psychological abuse is the recommendations by some happiness gurus that people with ‘negative’ thoughts be shunned or fired from firms.   What is ‘negative’ is a matter of debate.  Davies sees that classifying all forms of negativity as depression or unhappiness “is the most pernicious of the political consequences of utilitarianism.”

Later quote posted on U.S. work bulletin boards.

Davies is not a Marxist, but is somewhat anti-capitalist and supports efforts at improving the work place through cooperatives, where workers make decisions in their own work lives.  Cooperatives (and non-profits) have actually been shown to have better ‘happiness’ levels than other kinds of businesses because workers are not as alienated.  Alienation was a topic Marx highlighted because he understood that most workers had no control over the products, business or methods of work at their workplaces due to the basically dictatorial control of the capitalist. 

Davies thinks a society that believes in cooperation, altruism and potlatch is the cure for unhappiness, not the various attempts to control human behavior that are coming out of the corporate interest in ‘happiness.’  As the ‘community psychology’ movement has discovered, humanity has survived and been psychologically healthy not because of individualism and war, but because of cooperation.  And that seems to be his message too. 

Davies does not address the existential question of whether ‘happiness’ is even possible or desirable at all times.  Ultimately, the human condition does not argue so.  Evidently that is for the philosophers, not the sociologists, to discuss.

Prior books on similar topics: “Bright Sided,” by Barbara Ehrenreich; “The University in Chains,” “Propaganda,” about the start of modern advertising; and “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.”

MLK died for our sins...

Craig made me buy this at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

January 18, 2016

The Losers Win

"The Damnificados,” by JJ Amaworo Wilson, 2016

The damned have come to life.  Led by an imp cripple who speaks five languages and his daring brother who speaks one.  2000 squatters in the sky, scraping 60 stories.  Occupying an abandoned tower, so-called 'private property.'  Guarded by the Chinaman, a Japanese sumo son.  All standing against the Torres terrorists who breathe the sins of capital – military, political and economic.  Living in a land of many languages and cultures, not just one. Our world.  To hell with your ‘sense of place.’  

The Real Tower of David in Caracas

Sky above them, garbage below.  Rottweiler Avenue or Boondoggle Street.  Humor in the street names of ghettos and shanty-towns and favelas and garbage villas, bursting full of peddlers and children.  The working poor in a ruined world – dystopic broken factories, empty zoos, toxic buildings.  Surrounded by wastelands of emptiness riven by train tracks and road warrior ruts. 

A pack of heroic wolves, warning rats and a giant sinkhole save the day.  Assassination fails.  Nature results in dead soldiers - a rare result.  The people’s utopia survives in a way.  It is the end of this trash war. 

Dostoevsky’s damned, Babel’s Tower, the Two-Headed gorgon, Slum-Dog Millionaire, the stone heads of Easter Island, David & Goliath, The Flood and the tall Ark, Gilgamesh, Golgotha  – all resonate.  Magical realism, but better than magic, better than Marquez.  An abandoned skyscraper, maybe in Caracas, Venezuela, but perhaps in every other city in the world.  The homeless make this their home. 

A great book, with flaws.  It reflects the outlook of a world citizen.  Wilson was born in Germany, having a Nigerian mother, an English father, grew up in the UK.  Lived in Egypt, Columbia, Lesotho, Italy and the U.S.

The damnificados are useless as a military force.  Civilians with brooms and outdated weapons, afraid and untrained.  No match for real killers.  They have not been brain-washed that way. Would nature or animals really come to their aid, like the trees or eagles from ‘Lord of the Rings?’     Does this kind of thing really happen?  Only in magic.

Why does the cripple get healed after being dunked in the waters of the dirty (maybe Ganges) river in a miracle of religious baptism?  The religious hovers in the background, certainly.

Why do progressives write fantasies or science fiction or magic reality?  Why the remove from the present?  It is obvious that their books really relate to present society.    Do they have to aestheticize their angle?  Or make it more presently consumable.  Relatedly readable.  More lyrical and more literary.  More distant, less blunt?

After all, the real Tower of David in Caracas was partly made possible by a social movement of millions strong.

Nevertheless, a great read.  Pick it up.

Other progressive fantasy/science fiction reviewed below:  Bisson: “Fire on the Mountain,” Atwood: “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Le Guin:“The Dispossessed,”  Dick:  “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Spinrad:  “Raising Hell”, "Cloud Atlas," and Abbey: “Good News.”   

P.S. - the author responded to the review here: Thanks!
 https://jjawilson.wordpress.com/tag/mayday-books/

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

January 16, 2016

And even today, we still use the phrase 'Land-Lord.'

"Jimmy’s Hall,” a film by Ken Loach, 2014

Loach is one of the best left-wing filmmakers in the world and this film is an undiscovered gem, at least in the U.S.   It tells the true story of James Gralton, a member of one of the Revolutionary Workers Groups (RWG) in Ireland, who returns to Ireland in 1932 from the U.S. after having been deported for leading anti-eviction actions.

James Gralton Poster

Gralton returns to his mother’s farm in a rural area, County Leitrim, and goes about revitalizing a rural meeting hall near the farm.  This hall is based on the real Pearse-Connolly hall in Effernagh.  Leitrim is in the north of Ireland, next to Northern Ireland itself.  Loach carefully weaves a story of cultural work and social struggle into one.  This is rare, as most people think that politics and culture are in two distinct boxes.  Gralton proves otherwise.  The majority of the community gets together to rebuild the hall, which has fallen into disuse.  They begin holding classes in poetry, in boxing, in drawing, in Irish dancing – and even jazz dancing.  Community dances are held with bands, as this hall seems to be the only large place that people can meet.

The dead hand of the Irish Catholic Church is immediately evident, as the local priest starts telling people not to go to the hall, as he insists only the Church can handle education.  He threatens them with other-worldly condemnation and inveighs against ‘modern’ jazz and dancing.  The film starts to look like an Irish version of “Footloose.”  Well, it gets darker than that.  This is Ireland, after all. The folks at the hall try to figure out a way to win over the priest by putting him on their ‘Board.’  The priest says yes, but only if they put the deed in the name of the Church.  No way. 

A young girl is whipped by her father for continuing to visit the hall.  Others are intimidated from coming to the hall.  Then leaders of the RWG, which in 1933 helped form the Irish Communist Party, visit Jimmy to tell him about an eviction.  A large family has been thrown out of their hovel by the local landlords.  The RWG thinks that the country – in the midst of the Depression – is ready to move against evictions.  They want Gralton, who has a name, to make a speech and spark that movement.  They point out that the nationalist IRA is noncommittal.  Jimmy’s local co-thinkers get together to decide if he should make the speech, as they know the repercussions.  Dancing and jazz is one thing, but fighting evictions is a whole ‘nother level in Ireland. 

A classic confrontation ensues.  The majority of people in the village and surrounding areas march back to the abandoned house with the family, with Jimmy and his buddies in the lead.  Standing against them is the priest, the landlords & rich people, and the police – the whole local ruling elite.  Guns are drawn on both sides – and the local elite backs down, for now.  Jimmy makes the speech and things start to come apart.

The hall is burnt at night.  Jimmy is arrested, escapes with help, but is ultimately caught and condemned to being deported again without trial.  His love affair with a local women is once again sundered.  And the children of this locality no longer have someone who can help them get beyond daily prayers.

What Remains of the Hall after being Burned.

The RWG were supporters of Irish socialists like James Connolly and James Larkin. 

Even after the formal independence of the south in 1921, which was won by an IRA guerrilla war against Britain lasting 3 years, struggle continued.  This film makes the obvious point that the Irish national struggle against the landowners was not over.  The landlords were both Irish and English. In other words it was all along both a national and a class fight.  So in essence this ‘revolution,’ like all others, is permanent – i.e. it can break the bounds of any stages that are decreed by a reformist group like the IRA, which had led the national struggle, or the later Irish CP itself.

Other films by Ken Loach that are worth watching concerning the working class or politics:  “Land & Freedom,” (about the Spanish Civil war); “Riff Raff,” “My Name is Joe,” “Bread & Roses,” (about the L.A. janitors movement) “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” (about Irish liberation struggle…), “Family Life,” and “The Navigators.”

Red Frog

January 11, 2016

Nazis in Scandinavia

“Redbreast – A Harry Hole Novel,” by Jo Nesbǿ, 2000

Literary conventions seem to cross boarders, as do topics.  Very few detective novels in the U.S. involve fascists, given the generally tired, crime-crazy and non-political slant of most of the U.S. genre.  But in Scandinavia, for clear reasons, Nazis are popular in fiction.  Norway was dominated by a pro-German Quisling government throughout World War II and the scars still remain. The term ‘quisling’ has become a synonym for ‘traitor’ after all.  Sweden maintained ‘neutrality’ during the war, but that meant that pro-fascist elements were rife in the country among the upper classes, while Sweden also became a refuge for all of Denmark’s Jews.  The ‘neutral’ Swedes still let the Wehrmacht use Sweden as a jumping off point for the German invasion of the USSR in 1941.  1918 saw a class-based civil war in Finland, which was drowned in blood by Finnish Whites and German troops, who also put down their own insurrection in Germany a year later.   Finland officially allied with Germany during World War II and fought the Soviets twice – the first during the ‘Winter War’when Stalin questionably decided to invade Finland and annex it.  When eventual peace was declared, Finland lost Karelia to the USSR. 

The Robin - for some reason.

So fascism is not an abstract or fuzzy notion in Scandinavia, as it is in the U.S., where most people couldn’t identify a real fascist for the life of them.  Recent right-wing developments in Scandinavia show the links.

This book might be seen as a forerunner to the Stieg Larsson Millennium series.  That series started in 2005 with ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ but was written before that, perhaps in 2002.  The latter featured rich Swedish fascists who murdered women on a regular basis across Sweden.  Larsson himself was a real leftist journalist, dying in 2004.  Larsson created a team of an older male journalist and a young, kick-ass female punk skilled in technology and complete commitment.  Lisbeth Salander, a rape survivor, became a world-wide female action heroine in the process.   

Nesbǿ is a Norwegian who instead follows the convention of the intelligent but troubled male detective, who then becomes his stock character in several books.  Hole drinks too much, gets into fights easily, defies authority, but is also the best detective on the Oslo force - of course. 

In Nesbǿ’s book there are no heroines, just one police female, a close friend of Hole’s, who is murdered by a mysterious person.  Hole follows the traces of a large sniper rifle, a Märklin, which turns up in Sweden during a series of murders of former Norwegians who fought with the Germans.  This is all preceding a visit by Swedish royalty.  Early on Hole shoots someone he thinks is an assassin gunning for the U.S. president, only to find out it is a U.S. secret service agent who was not where they were supposed to be.  He is promoted for his alert role here - a bit of humor at the expense of the Americans.  Hole misses a very right-wing gunrunner who turns out to be a detective on Hole’s own force, and who is also a killer.  So he’s not perfect. 

The story revolves around a group of young Norwegian Nazi punks who link up with an older Norwegian fascist who fought on the Russian front in World War II, besieging Leningrad.  One of these older soldiers is killing a whole slew of people who fought ‘for Norway’ on the front.  Hole tracks the very expensive and accurate Märklin rifle from South Africa (of course) to this individual, who oddly enough has a ‘split personality’ and is that much harder to identify because of it. This is an unnecessary fictional ‘out’ that really weakens the story, making it more unbelievable.

Hole eventually nails the assassin, but after you are witness to the odd world of former collaborators and skinhead violence.  During the war, most Norwegians waited to see which side would win before they declared for a side.  Very few were anti-Quisling partisans.  Instead after the war the ‘neutral’ Norwegians pretend to have always been anti-Quisling, and so a deep social lie develops – much as it did in West Germany, Vichy France, Finland, Italy, Spain and other western countries where sections of the population collaborated with the Nazis or were passive bystanders during World War II.  Nesbǿ pokes fun at this lie. 

Nesbǿ is rated as one of the top detective fiction writers in Europe and he’s worth a read, though Larsson seems to have done a more progressive take on the genre.

Other reviews of genre cop stories below: 'Sycamore Row,' 'Gone Girl,' 'Prudence Can't Swim,' and 'The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows.'

Red Frog

January 8, 2016

The Homocene Epoch

“The Sixth Extinction – an Unnatural History,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, 2015

Spreading like ants, humans have occupied the whole world, and in the process, they have changed it.  This most successful species – up to this point – is in the process of so altering the world as to endanger all other life on the planet, and itself in the bargain.  Kolbert has taken a journalistic tour of this ‘sixth’ extinction in the new ‘anthropocene’ age, traveling across the globe to bring these stories to life.  Short on solutions or even a clearer identification of the problem, she hints that we need some kind of ‘change.’  But given writers for the New Yorker magazine are not in the habit of revolutionary or even disruptive solutions, that is to be expected.

The Red Frog. Amphibians - the most endangered species.

Amphibians are the most endangered class of animals, crashing across the globe.  According to Kolbert, one-third of all corals, freshwater mollusks, saltwater sharks and rays; a quarter of all mammals; a fifth of all reptiles; a sixth of all birds are headed for oblivion too.  Many insects and other kinds of life- too many to count - are also on the list.  This exceeds the normal ‘background extinction rate’ by many times, due to the unprecedented high speed of environmental change brought on by humans and human-induced climate change.   

Kolbert begins her tour in central Panama, examining the disappearance of amphibians like the golden frog.  She identifies the problem as the spread of a fungus, chrytid, on frog skin, which eventually gives frogs a heart attack.  She hints that the problem is that this fungus has been transported around the world by humans, thus reducing the ocean barriers which separate continents to nothing.  This has been called a ‘new Pangaea’ by scientists – Pangaea being the original single continent before the advent of continental drift.  We now have a virtual Pangaea. After a visit to upstate New York, Kolbert discovers that "white nose" disease as destroyed bat populations across the world - also transmitted quickly across continents by humans, cargo ships and airplanes.  According to Kolbert, there are now more 'invasive' species than native species.

Kobert includes a history of the idea of animal or plant ‘extinction,’ which was finally theorized by Jean Leopold Cuvier in 1796, after examining mastodon bones from Kentucky.  (Cuvier was also a racist who believed black people to be a 'missing link' to apes. He did not know that humans in Europe interbred with Neaderthals, but Africans never did.)  Before then no one thought a species could go extinct.  Darwin then wrote in “Origin of the Species’ about human-caused extinction, as he had observed it from the destruction of the Gallapagos tortoise by ship-board hunters.

It wasn’t until Walter Alvarez in 1980 that this theory was supplemented - that change (and by correlation, extinction) was not always slow and ‘gradual’ (per Darwin and Cuvier) but could happen suddenly.  This happened after Alvarez studied marine ‘ammonites’ in a strata in Gubbio, Italy, then later subjected the strata to chemical analysis, which showed that meteorite iridium debris in the strata was off the charts.  He finally located a massive meteor crater on the coast of Yucatan.  This is what most scientists now think caused the dinosaur extinction after the Cretaceous period.  Kolbert points out that 3.5 of the previous 5 mass extinctions were caused by rapid climate change – once by glaciation, 2.5 times by global warming - and the human-induced one now going on would be the 4^th related to climate change.  The animals had little time to adapt.  These discoveries conform with the dialectical property of nature – that quantity eventually turns into quality.  Nature is not static, circular or always gradual.   

Kolbert visits Iceland to look at the place where the last auk, a large, slow moving penguin-like seabird, was killed for food in 1821.  Kolbert notes that 6,000 years ago, the ‘mega-fauna’ extinction’ occurred, which correlated to the spread of hunter-gatherer humans to every continent.  At that point, massive animals like mammoths, mastodons and sloths were slaughtered for meat and disappeared.  Today large mammals like lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos and hippos are on the way out too. So human-induced change started long before the present onslaught of global warming.

She goes to Italy and to a tiny island off New Zealand to look at ocean acidification.  She examines a methane leak in the sea floor near Naples which indicates that increasing acidification will kill most everything in the seas, especially shellfish.  The pH level of the oceans is changing due to the absorption of carbon dioxide, as ocean acidification is the nasty watery cousin of global warming.  A scientist studying ‘Biosphere 2” discovered ocean acidification by looking at the carbon-heavy, acidic water at Biosphere 2.  Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has already declined by 50%, which endangers all marine life that live on reefs. 

Kolbert points to the role of human-run fertilizer plants, river dams, agriculture and cities, fisheries, fresh water usage and carbon changes in the atmosphere in changing the world’s chemistry and biology.  The ‘anthropocene’ age is upon us – a name that has not been officially declared but will soon be.  ‘Anthro’ is Greek for human.  As usual ahead of the curve, Soviet scientists in the 1960s first used the term.  If things don’t change, by 2050 when our children will still be alive – and by 2100, when their children will still be alive – the present environment will be at two certain points of collapse. 

Kolbert travels to the Amazon and Peru to look at isolated tree projects, which measure the movement of tree species up slopes or the number of animals living in them.  The Amazon has 1,000s of tree species, more than anywhere else on the globe, which is common in areas along the Equator.  Northern latitudes in Canada only have about 20 trees, while areas in between slowly increase.  The Amazon and Peruvian tests reveal that both trees and animal varieties are declining even there. 

Kolbert has praise for zoos or scientists studying these trends, or trying to preserve dying species.  In the process she sometimes misses the forest for the trees.  At one point she praises scientists for convincing the Brazilian government to set aside land for study – even though the Brazilian government has decreed that the other 50% of the Amazonian land should become grazing or agricultural land!  She knows – kind of – that efforts to preserve a single species like the California condor or the Sumatran rhino miss the point if the animal die-off is affecting thousands and millions of species.  She ignores the fact that getting animals for zoo displays disrupts small wild populations, leading to premature death, and helps lead to extinction.  Meat eating, which seems to play a large role in the death of animals, is not mentioned.  In short, she is a middle-class environmentalist who endorses all the Big Green organizations.  This book describes the dead body on the sidewalk, not who shot them or what to do about other shootings. 

Naomi Klein, in her book “This Changes Everything,” has a better tack on the issue, directly pointing at capitalism as the main culprit behind global warming, ocean acidification and species extinction.  While Klein thinks capital can be tamed and controlled, eco-socialists think that it won’t happen, nor is there time to expect it to happen.  Only a revolutionary change in society, from the ground-up, leading beyond small revolutionary groups, Occupy or Black Lives Matter organizations will work.  A mass Populist-Labor movement that extends across the globe is the only force that can ultimately change this situation.

“This Change Everything,” reviewed below.  Many books on environmental issues are also reviewed below, including “Animal Planet,” “Born Under a Bad Sky,” “Collapse,” “Ecological Revolution,” “Gaia,” “Garbage Land,” “Green is the New Red,” “The Party’s Over” and “Tar Sands.”

And I bought it at Mayday Books.

Red Frog

January 3, 2016

The Permanent Government

“The Devil’s Chessboard – Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” by David Talbot, 2015

Recent discussions of the ‘deep state’ underlying the U.S. congressional system belie a new understanding, even among liberals and left-liberals, that something is going on outside of elections in the relations of power in the U.S.  Talbot here traces it to the still increasing power of the ‘security state.’ He thinks it is embodied in the CIA/military/FBI/NSA/State & Defense Departments/CFR, starting after World War II and consolidating itself in the government assassination of John Kennedy.  In this sense, the latter really amounted to a ‘coup’ by the security state, which is still with us today  Since events do not happen except in the form of real human beings, Talbot focuses on the role of Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles.   Allen was the first head of the CIA until being fired after the Bay of Pigs by Kennedy; his brother was the cold-war secretary of state under Eisenhower.

Ivy League, Wall-Street, CIA Assassin Allen Dulles

Much of the book is somewhat familiar territory to leftists, focusing on the Dulles’ and the CIA’s protection and use of Nazi’s during and after World War II.  Allen Dulles helped install a former Nazi, Reinhard Gehlen, as head of West Germany’s secret services.  At one point he tried to make a separate peace with Karl Wolff, the head of the Italian Nazi’s, which showed he already had his own private agenda compared to Truman.  Allen himself pooh-poohed reports of the Nazi extermination camps.  This directly contributed to the U.S. military's inaction.  So trains full of Jews rolled on, even late in the war when the extermination of Hungarian Jews had commenced.  He succeeded in getting some high-ranking Nazi’s overlooked by the Nuremberg trials.  John Foster himself was a supporter of Hitler until sometime in the mid-1930s when he changed his mind. 

Talbot details Dulles and the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of Lumumba, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the coup against Arbenz, the funding of the Italian Christian Democrats in Italy – all pointing to this ‘secret’ U.S. government’s reactionary role against national liberation movements and for international banks, exporters and factory owners.  Eisenhower basically let the Dulles brothers control foreign policy, including ‘nuclear brinksmanship.’ While many quote Eisenhower on the 'military-industrial complex' he basically enabled it.  Some of Allen’s tricky tactics were designed to split the Communist camp and make Stalin more paranoid than he already was   In Czechoslovakia, for instance, it set Stalin off against successful national Communists, which resulted in 1,000s of arrests and the weakening of worker's rule there.  Dulles justified all this as fighting ‘communism,’ but in reality it was a fig leaf used to justify opposing ANY progressive movement anywhere in the world, with or without communist leadership.  The CIA even funded various cultural figures and institutions to combat ‘communism,’ which shows their reach. These policies continue to this day, just in a different form – which shows the ‘deep state’ is still operative, with military and control objectives absolutely unchanged.

Talbot draws links between Dulles’ early role as a white-shoe corporate lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, which defended banks and corporations, including German ones, and his circle of upper-class friends among the Rockefellers, in the Ivy League and across Wall Street.  Allen had sympathizers in key positions in the government and in positions of influence, like the Counsel on Foreign Relations (CFR).  James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA after Dulles, was a ‘Dulles man’ all the way, consulting with Dulles during the period of the Kennedy assassination and the white-wash of the Warren Commission, a commission virtually controlled by the former ‘spook.’  Dick Nixon, Jesse Helms, William Bundy, C Douglas Dillon, Curtis LeMay, Texas oilmen, key news owners like Luce, Sulzberger and Paley and many others were part of Dulles’ circle.  Dulles even funded the first ‘red-baiting’ election in California in 1946, when Nixon ran against Voorhis, a progressive.  Joe McCarthy was a ‘useful idiot’ until McCarthy started accusing friends of Dulles for being communist or gay. 

Talbot draws a psychological portrayal of Dulles, showing him to be a cold, secret person with few emotions.  His own wife was ignored.  During the MKUltra program, Allen recommended his son, Allen Jr., be treated with similar methods.  The CIA conducted mind-control, LSD, sleep-deprivation, insulin and electro-shock, biological agent and torture experiments – all the while accusing the USSR of doing what the CIA was doing.  One scientist who was going to blow the whistle on these programs ‘fell out of a window.’  A later autopsy revealed he had not committed suicide but had been bludgeoned first. 

The Assassination of Kennedy:

So now we come to the topic of assassinations.  A commonly-used tactic by the CIA internationally, the CIA also could use the tactic nationally.  Most stunning to me was the international plot by the CIA and reactionary French generals to overthrow and perhaps assassinate Charles DeGaulle as president of France because he wanted to pull out of Algeria.  The coup was foiled by a mass outpouring of French workers and citizens.  In the U.S., a CIA operative admitted that Huey Long, the Louisiana left-populist, was killed by the CIA and that Joe McCarthy might have to be liquidated too.  As it was, it was not necessary. 

So why was Kennedy killed?  Oswald himself said he was a ‘patsy’ and never showed a dislike for John Kennedy.  He called his CIA handler from jail, which sealed his fate when Jack Ruby, a mob-connected assassin, killed him to shut him up. 

Kennedy upset the reactionary cold-warriors in the security state, government, media and corporate suites for these reasons:  1. Cuba/Bay of Pigs – Kennedy’s failure to invade Cuba when things went wrong; 2.  The successful Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the USSR; 3.  An attempted revamp of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco to get rid of the hardliners;  4.  Kennedy ordered the military not to invade Laos to support the war in Indochina; 5.  Steel firms were forced not to increase prices 3.5% by the Kennedy administration;  6. The Justice Dept. filed price-fixing charges against steel firms; 7.  The Cuban missile crisis.  Kennedy made a deal with Khrushchev, while hard-liners instead wanted to invade Cuba again; 8.  A sort of overall early détente with the USSR; 9.  The government withdrew official funding of armed Cuban exiles. 10.  The Kennedy administration told the CIA to end their alliance with the Mob; 11.  Kennedy did not order tanks to knock-down the Berlin Wall or Checkpoint Charlie when the wall was built; 12.  The Kennedy administration’s support for ‘apertura’ - an opening to a block between the Italian Socialists and Christian Democrats in Italy; 13.  Ordering a stop to plots to kill Castro (which went on anyway…); 14.  The oil-depletion allowance was to be closed for oil firms; 15.  LBJ was to be off the Kennedy ticket in 1964.   

Kennedy had offended almost everybody in the ruling elite. Daniel Ellsberg, who worked in the Pentagon at the time, said, “There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles.” 

Talbot considered Dulles to be at the center of a ‘government in exile’ after his firing in 1961.  Talbot goes into the somewhat familiar finger-prints of Allen Dulles and the CIA in the Kennedy assassination.  Howard Hunt at the end of his life partially explained the role of the CIA in the assassination, naming Bill Harvey, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Cord Meyer and Frank Sturgis as key CIA operatives he knew about.  Hunt himself was seen in Dallas during that period.  Dulles spent the days immediately after the shooting – during the Kennedy autopsy and killing of Oswald – oddly enough at CIA operational headquarters in Camp Peary, the “Farm,” even though he was no longer ‘officially’ with the CIA.  Dulles met with Meyer before the assassination, but never mentioned this to the Warren Commission.  He himself lobbied hard to get onto the Commission, and after being appointed, some said it should have been called the “Dulles Commission’ instead, based on his control of its workings.

Talbot’s hero in this book is C. Wright Mills, who was one of the few left progressives who stood up to the Dulles and Eisenhower in the 1950s and 1960s, writing the classic book, “The Power Elite.”  Talbot seems to think that Mills corrected Marxists by showing that power was not just among a ‘ruling’ class, but a web of links between the capitalists, the state and civil organizations.  Yet I think this analysis just fleshes out what how a ruling class functions in modern times.  The understanding of the ‘deep state’ is a different terminology, but again, is another name for a similar thing.  The ‘state’ represents, defends and preserves the economic relations of any society, including those who dominate it. Talbot here only refers to the more international ‘security’ side, but it also encompasses the domestic laws, court system, judges, lawyers, cops and jails of the 'national' security system.  They are ultimately all one.  It will not change, even if a new politician is elected, until the form of economic production of society changes. 

Prior book reviews on assassination:  “American Assassination:  the Strange Death of Paul Wellstone,” “Orders to Kill,” (about MLK); and “They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK” by Jesse Ventura.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

January 1, 2016

Another Take on the Sorriest Swindle of the Capitalist Century

“The Big Short,” film by Adam McKay, 2015

Finally, a film that does a book justice.  Like some weird convergence of Bertold Brecht and Michael Lewis, this film never lets you forget it’s a film by directly addressing the audience a great number of times, then actually being didactic and even polemical.  It directly explains what short selling is, what a ‘tranche’ is, what a ‘credit default swap’ is, what a mortgage bond is, an adjustable rate mortgage, the internal structure of collaterized mortgage and debt obligations (CMOs and CDOs), even those of the ‘synthetic’ variety.  If you are none too polite and like laughing at clueless authority figures – know-it-all equity bankers, SEC officials, Alan Greenspan, ratings-agency pooh-bahs, complacent billionaire investors, Wall Street Journal journalists – this film will provide the dark humor.  It is sharply funny and cannot be missed.
 

NYSE at 11 Wall Street - No longer open for public tours!

In 2010, Michael Lewis wrote the book on which this film is based. It became a story of the biggest financial fraud ever perpetuated in the U.S. – a criminal fraud involving the whole power structure of the U.S., from Wall Street outward.  This fraud has never been prosecuted because a system will not and cannot indict itself.  While the ‘heroes’ are 3 groups of contrarian investors who short the mortgage bond market and make mega-millions and billions, their profit comes at a price.  As they soon realize, millions of U.S. citizens will become unemployed, lose health insurance, go into foreclosure and become homeless – and that just in one country.  The contagion, as we know, spread to the financial systems across the world, especially to Europe, which had produced and invested in U.S. mortgage bonds too.  The effects are still with us.

For years Marxists have pointed out the fantasy role of finance capital at this stage of capital’s development and decay, and this film shows how it plays out in all its grubby, glitzy sub-reality.  The film ignores the legal preparation for the collapse in the Bush and Clinton administrations, and instead focuses on Wall Street itself, reflecting the weaknesses of Lewis’ own book.

The film only lightly touches on the misery of millions, showing one family living in their van and a 'job-fair' of the unemployed.  It acknowledges that the working people who were lured into these phony ARMs by slick real estate agents will be blamed by racists and classists, not the actual people who caused the crash.  Of interest is the very tough attitudes of the short-sellers, who had the intelligence and odd fortitude to stand up to the whole financial system.  People with a get along/go along method of life could not handle this situation.  But of even more interest are the sleazy, weak, pompous blowhards and conformist individuals making up these institutions of power.  We’ve all met them, or people like them.  Power is ultimately based on living people.  They are still with us.

Reviews of books “The Big Short” ,"Flash Boys" and "Liar's Poker,' all by Michael Lewis, below.  Review of the film, “Wolf of Wall Street,” below.  Many other books on the financial crisis have been reviewed below.  Use blog search box, upper left.

Red Frog

December 27, 2015

The “Hail Mary” Pass in Paris

Reflections on the Environment and Consumerism

I don’t know about you, but the ‘results’ of the Paris talks on global warming were upsetting, yet no one in the bourgeois press dwelled on it.  Instead the happy talk stenographers in the news prattled on about an historic agreement, echoing the government lines.  'Historic,' all right, historically bad.  The New York Times, the paper of ruling-class record, said Paris was “the last, best hope" to deter the more serious effects of global warming.  The post-mortems have now come in from the Left.

Flooding in Wales in 2015

James Hansen, no radical, called the agreement a ‘fraud.’  Hansen thinks the market will fix everything, and yet the agreement signed in Paris did not put a price on carbon.  Pricing carbon interferes with neo-liberal ideas of the market, which does not price environmental costs and never has.  Only Soviet economists back in the 1920s started to take into account environmental damage for economic plans.  They did not carry through with it, perhaps due to the rise of Stalinism. There are political economists right now who are doing so, but their influence is negligible.

The environment minister for Nicaragua said much of it.  Besides not treating or pricing carbon realistically, the agreement is A, voluntary – there is no enforcement except by Mother Nature.  We know how ‘voluntary’ efforts work among capitalist governments.  B, In the agreement there was no specific mention of oil, gas or coal as problems – the words were not even there.  Yet these carbon commodities hovered over the meeting like unnameable dark forces.  They were not named so as not to offend some of the richest corporations in the world. C, There was no bar on the building of coal plants or dirty oil.  D, Nor was there a mention of the elimination of the massive government subsidies to the oil/coal/gas industries.  Britain itself is a league leader in this respect, and the U.S. is no slouch either.  Government subsidies add up to $10M a minute worldwide, according  to the 'Guardian.'  E, The plan itself admits, even if carried out, it is still over the 2 degree Celsius limit that allows massive climate damage.  F, Conservation was not mentioned; reduction of production in useless items was not mentioned.  G, The plan will go into effect in 5 years, not immediately.  H, The military and aviation are exempted from doing anything about climate change.

Obama’s ‘all of the above’ strategy and the fake idea of natural gas as a ‘bridge’ fuel were implicit in the agreement.  While the U.S. signed this agreement, Obama’s mixed message outside Paris include arctic drilling and the TPP.  WTF?

Carbon emissions have been going down recently, but not enough to significantly alter the main trajectory of climate change.  This is due to recessionary economic pressures in many countries, which is the chaotic form ‘planning’ takes in capitalist economies. And what capitalist wants a ‘recession’?  He wants growth!   It is also due to the effects of real transitions to solar and wind power grids in some countries, electric & hybrid cars, conservation efforts by individuals and cities, the rise of bicycling, local food production, vegetarianism and organic agriculture, better mass transit, the growth of LEED buildings, forest preservation and other efforts.  China is actually leading the way in the world production of sustainable power generation due to their partially-planned economy.  Germany is also making massive strides, as the German state is still capable of some guidance of the market economy.

Ultimately though, the Paris ‘Hail Mary’ pass by the capitalist world governments is a failure.  This is significant.  This is the situation staring the world population in the face.  We are actually already experiencing the effects at this moment, as events in the Middle East and other failed states are not purely political or economic, but also have environmental causes – especially drought and food production in that part of the world. 

The center has not held.  

The real question is, what does this mean for the revolutionary socialist movement?  As dialectics shows, events sometimes are gradual, but build up to a qualitative change.  Climate disasters might roll along for years, but at some point, there will be a serious break – much as the inundation of New Orleans and later New York by hurricanes were ‘breaks’ in the understanding of climate change in the U.S.  It might not happen all over the world, but certainly country by country - until ‘critical mass’ is reached.  The happy talk issuing out of Paris will seem like whistling past the graveyard.  At that moment, the old ruling classes will be politically naked.  The capitalists will be shown to be buffoons and criminals.  Their governments will be ruled incompetent.  And the majority of the population will understand the time for reforms is over.

The political question will then be – a social revolution ... or a return to the world of human-eat-human barbarism, dictatorship, mass deaths, war and religious and national tribalism.  Socialism or barbarism? A cliché but one which never seems to go away - because its roots are based in reality.

The Shelves Are Full

I have had to go shopping a bit for the holidays, and something is bothering me.  In every store I go into, the shelves are groaning with massive amounts of merchandise of every variety.  Really junk mostly.  In each specific store there are hundreds of olive oils or hundreds of colors of lipstick or hundreds of cheap plastic toys or hundreds of T-shirts or hundreds of snacks or thousands of books or DVDs.  This is not just during the holidays – this is year-round.  There is every single absurd commodity that you could imagine, and every variation on it.  It seems our ‘freedom’ really is the freedom to buy almost any commodity we want - if we have the money. 

Something We Need

This is partly a product of capitalist overproduction, which is certainly evident.  It is clearly environmentally wasteful.  As George Monbiot of The Guardian humorously put it, you can…

“…buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map…An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog…” 

“In “The Story of Stuff,” Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolescence (by becoming unfashionable).”

But this is the ‘raison d’etre’ of the whole system.  This is what it does!  This is what it is good at!  This is its final wisdom.

What is unmistakable is also how cultural commodities like movies, music, books, magazines, games, TV and cable, internet U-Tube videos, software, applications, streaming videos, etc. are also a large part of the economic mix.  Entertainment and the hardware designed to view, use or produce it, is central to American capitalism.  In a way, even as the economy gets worse, these products are how the majority of the population is pacified and entertained while they are fleeced and dominated.  Sort of like the Roman Coliseum or the role of any drug like alcohol, or the prior role of the ‘boob’ tube.  Culture even beats out the diversion of professional sports.   

Is there a point where we will be over-saturated with entertainment?  I think that point is here or almost here.  The culture drunks might wake up after being over-sozzled by another yuk-yuk TV episode of “Veep.”  Then what?

Happy Holidays

Happy Solstice

Red Frog

December 25^th, 2015

Bombs or Vermont?

"Daydream Sunset – the 60s Counterculture in the 70s,” by Ron Jacobs, 2015

The 1960s – which ended around 1975 or later – exercises its influence to this day. Jacobs specializes in the history of this period, as he wrote a prior book on the Weather Underground. The book uses Jacob's own reminiscences as the basis for this short history. He was a young kid entranced by rock music bands like the Grateful Dead and also influenced by various Maoist groups. He traveled the country in the '70s as a post-hippie with friends, attending both musical and political events, working temporary shit jobs to survive. Jacobs helped organize some protest activities like rents strikes and marijuana 'smoke-outs' and seemed to be a freelance nomad. Music and politics in this book are entwined as they were at the time. A free-wheeling counter-cultural identity was formed in the 60s and 70s similar to the 'gig' economy of many of today's youth. The book describes a time that may be decidedly familiar to them.

1970s Hippie Commune

No one can encompass a decade, so Jacobs does his bit to fill in some blanks. He covers the collision of the counter-culture and history, paying attention to the groups that attempted to combine them, not ignore them. Familiar cliches about Altamont are supplemented with information on the activities of the White Panther Party, the Diggers, the Yippies and Zippies, the Mayday Tribe, High Times magazine, the German Autonomists and the Italian Autominia.

Jacobs highlights the more radical nature of the counter-cultural / political movements in Europe, as the proletarian-oriented groups there did not shy away from self-defense against the police. He contrasts it with the 'non-violence' of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement, which was dominated by middle-class pacifists. Jacobs illustrates the role class plays in the attraction of pacifism.  

Jacob's first concert was a performance by the Who that he and his young friends came upon accidentally in New Jersey in the '70s. It was downhill from then on! Jacobs went to a lot of concerts and festivals, including what he considers to be the last real hippie concert in 1977, in which the Dead headlined. His love of music leads him to note that Patti Smith, a working-class girl from New Jersey, was a key link between the beats, the hippies and the punks - a remarkable feat. He reminds us of the 'culture-wars' between sub-cultures that defined themselves by their choice in music - in disco, punk, rock and country.  Jacobs was an enthusiastic user of various 'hippie' drugs like LSD, psilocybin, weed and hashish and doesn't shy away from saying he inhaled.  He describes the history of the Vermont co-op movement which started around the “Free Vermont” slogan. This ultimately moved the whole state to the Left, including the formation of the Vermont Progressive Party and the various candidacies of Bernie Sanders.

The extreme poles of counter-cultural politics became, according to Jacobs, either moving to Vermont and forming communes to grow food, or becoming a Weatherman and planting bombs in government buildings. These poles reflected the fault lines among hippies between the more political and the more cultural revolutionaries.  

The book suffers from being breezy and familiar (at least to me). His description of 10 years of history sometimes just ends up being a list. His capsule of the Progressive Labor, for instance, describes it as a 'culturally conservative' group wearing ties, suits and crew-cuts. No one in 1970 in PL looked like this, so I suspect some other points might be a bit thin. Yet the book is a nice intro to this lost decade for those unfamiliar with rebel youth culture during that period.  And it also might help those who lived through it remember that decade in all its shabby glory.

Also reviewed below: “The Way the Wind Blew,” (Jacob's book about the Weather Underground); “Hippie Modernism,” an art show review; commentary on the Grateful Dead, “Let us now Praise the Dead,” and “Laurel Canyon,” about the LA rock music scene in the 1960s-1970s.

And I bought it at Mayday Books!

Red Frog

December 17, 2016

The Anarchist Moon

"The Dispossessed,” by Ursula Le Guin, 1974

Progressive science fiction is rare in the U.S.  Most science fiction concerns dystopias, machines gone mad, invasions by aliens or socially medieval societies set in modernistic technical worlds.  Optimism about social progress is almost nil – unless you read late Soviet science fiction.  Le Guin is an exception.

Annares, as viewed from Urras

Le Guin’s hero is an anarchist scientist Shevek, patterned after Einstein, living on Anarres, a somewhat barren planet on which exists an anarchist society.  The book is based on Sheveks’ visit to the ‘propertarian’ society that exiled the anarchists 177 years earlier.  The society is on Urras – a place recognizably like the capitalist earth - full of war, poverty, wage slavery, extreme class differences, female oppression, proletarian rebellions and repressive governments.  As if an advanced alien landed on our planet and was ultimately repulsed by what he saw.  

There are many obvious parallels in the book to institutions and ideas existing in 1974.  The USSR is here called Thu.  The attempt to unite quantum mechanics and relativity has an unconvincing parallel here.  The founders of anarchism - like Kropotkin, Godwin and Proudon – is here named Laia Odo and the philosophy, Odonism.  Odo even writes something called the “Prison Letters’ which will remind anyone of Gramsci.  The central city of A’Lo has many sky-scrapers and is reminiscent of New York; the U.N. is called the “Council of World Governments.” And so on.

The book is organized in a non-sequential way, with events in the future and past mixed.  This is a somewhat lame attempt to translate Shevek’s theory of ‘Simultaneity’ – where past, present and future all literally exist at the same time – to the book’s structure.  This theory results in Shevek providing the secret to a hyper-drive that could benefit everyone to more easily travel through space & time.  It is ultimately broadcast to the various worlds to avoid it being owned by the government on Urras, which has been trying to steal it from him.  Shevek has been attempting to create a version of the ‘unified field theory,’ here called ‘general temporal theory.’  This scientific hokum is actually one of the most unconvincing things about the book. 

Of most interest is Le Quin’s attempt to describe life on Anarres – a society without a government or capitalist firms that cooperates among its members to survive.  Anarres is a place where food is difficult to grow, so is subject to periodic famines.  The society somewhat resembles Maoist China without Mao or the CP.  Le Guin calls it ‘an administration of things.’  Physical labor is required of all citizens.  Criticism/self-criticism sessions are sometimes held.  People own few personal items and eat cooperatively in dining halls.  Children live in dormitories, not with their parents and are brought up by society at large.   There are no wages and no profits, so work is allocated by a computer in the largest city based on the needs of the society.  Education is valued, privacy is difficult to find and sexuality is free.  Individualism is frowned upon and is called ‘egoizing.’  Le Guin even mentions their use of solar, geo-thermal and wind power – this in 1974. Life on ‘the moon’ Anarres is simple and practical, and based on the cooperation of nearly everyone.

Yet even on Anarres, the dialectic operates.  As Shevek and a group of co-thinkers figure out, petty bureaucrats develop who control scientific issues, use group pressure to quash any individual ideas and limit the spread of practices they consider objectionable.  The society itself is closed off from contact with any of the other worlds in the universe – not just Urras but several others.  They won’t even let Odonian rebels from Urras join them, as they suspect they will be ‘spies.’  However at the same time they deliver raw metals to Urras, so they are not completely autarkic.

Why social criticism has to be set up as ‘science fiction’ has always bothered me.  It is as if a certain ‘cover’ must be thrown over a work in order for it to slip by internal censors among readers or the U.S. culture controllers.  This is the same method that is followed in any repressive society, where an opposing point of view must be hidden through analogy or surreptitious comparisons in order to soften the blow.   Nevertheless, Le Guin and people like Terry Bisson stand out for not letting the propertarian geeks control the genre.

Several science fiction books are reviewed below – Bisson’s “Fire on the Mountain,” Phil Dicks’ “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” as well as various dystopian books/films like “The Road” “Cloud Atlas,” “Divergent,” “Planet of the Apes” and the Hunger Games series. 

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
December 6, 2015