Happy International Working Women's Day?

 Femicide

In recognition of International Working Women's Day, I thought I'd look at the cheery topic of femicide – the specific targeting of females called 'gender-related killings.' You know, the topic of every detective show you're watching. The U.N. & World Population data are all over the place. Some data is missing, like China or incomplete, like India or old, as far back as 2012, and much is unreported. It is also not clear the role of warfare in the numbers. In 2022 the data reflected a world-wide increase in 'domestic partner' homicides – i.e. by a family member known to the victim. This is the largest subset of murders of females, at 48.8K in 2022, which is about 55% of the total. This means the majority of killings of girls and women was in the home and not by a stranger.

The largest increase was in Africa. There were reductions in some countries, increases in others. The Central African Republic at 10.6 per 100,000 as of 2016; South Africa at 9.0 in 2019 and El Salvador, at 13.8 per 100,000, were some of the highest. The U.S. is at 2.91 in 2021; Russia at 3.3; India at 2.5; Mexico at 6.2. The lowest – at .1 or .2 - were countries like Singapore, Bahrain, Oman, Tajikistan, Belgium and Japan.  Some countries had zero. The 'pattern' underlying the data is unclear. The U.N. has no idea what is behind this wide-spread level of attacks on women and girls but the concepts of the 'patriarchy,' the class system, racism and caste, conservative religion and profiting off women's labor might help to explain women's secondary place in the social structure.

Child Care

It's no secret that child care costs are rising across the U.S. The U.S. Census reports that child care costs range from $5,357 in small 'counties' to $17,171 in large 'counties,' between 8% & 19.3% of income. HHS estimated by a survey in 2024 that families spend an average of 24% on childcare. These figures don't quite match, do they? At any rate, Yahoo Business estimates the value of 'the market' at $59.87B in 2023 and is expected to grow to a $88.2B 'market' in 2033. 23% of children under 5 live in families below the poverty-line in the U.S. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that $9,193 is the average cost of child-care or 17% of income. What is clear from these exorbitant costs is that the U.S. needs free or cheap socialized daycare, better family paid-leave policies and shorter hours, not just inadequate payments through AFDC, Head Start, tax write-offs or relying on aging grandmas and grandpas. 27.1% of families rely on child care, while another source, the NAFCC, cites 40%. I'm not sure if they include after-school or park programs in this data, though those are for older children. Pandemic aid is ending and many childcare centers are closing as a result.  This situation impacts women the most, as they are the majority of unpaid caretakers of small children, in the home and out.  It is time for socialized child centers at worksites or in the community.

Femicide memorial in Mexico City 3/8/24

Barbie

As someone whose experience of Barbie was as an oddly-sculpted, too pink, plastic thing with tiny clothes that rip and way too many possessions, an attempt to craft her into a feminist icon was flawed from the get-go. Barbie the movie is a mass-market exercise in girl-boss feminism. Any 'moral' about how oppression is ultimately bad is lost in the cartoon firmament of Barbieland itself – the cars, the houses, the color, the perfection, the girls. The film is the flip-side of a macho film shot in a dirty male locker-room, but instead it's a place where men are homeless, everything is artificial and every woman is almost identical, housed and happy. The airhead men, led by a buff Ken, go macho like an infantile version of Susan Faludi's 'Backlash' and attempt to conquer the professional Barbies, but they thankfully fail. Like Arwen from LoTR, this Barbie eventually chooses reality over being a Mattel doll, or in Arwen's case, an Elf that never dies. This sends Barbie, now called Barbara, off to the gynecologist, which is about the funniest scene in the movie. Welcome to reality, which is the only solid point it makes.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  "FGM, “Socialist Feminism and the New Women's Movement,” “Feminists and Feminists,” Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Red Valkyries” (Ghodsee); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Queen's Gambit,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Without Apology,” "Miss Sloane."

More Cheery News on FGM:  https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/mar/08/dramatic-rise-in-women-and-girls-being-cut-new-fgm-data-reveals

May Day Books has many magazines, books and pamphlets on feminist issues from a left point of view.

The Cultural Marxist

March 8, 2024 - Happy International Working Women's Day! The holiday originally brought to you by the 2^nd Socialist International in 1910, Clara Zetkin presiding.

Private Inequity Iniquity

 “These Are the Plunderers – How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America” by Gretchen Morgenson, 2023

This is a series of detailed stories about the ruin private 'equity' firms create when they purchase a medical chain, an insurance company, become a landlord for thousands, buy a newspaper, a hotel or casino, a retail chain or trailer parks. The main culprits are Blackstone Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the Carlyle Group and Apollo Global Management, the latter being the worst and the focus of most of these stories. The author is a lover of capitalism and has no understanding 'why' capitalism might produce such monstrosities, but believes the solution is 'more regulation' actually applied and better taxation. Where have we heard this before? 

These investment outfits merge, lay-off workers, move production, load companies with debt, increase fees, severely reduce quality, merge entities, cut benefits, increase work-load, pollute and sell the company for a quick profit. They'll even shut down a company just to sell their real-estate! So if your company is bought or owned by a misnamed private 'equity' firm, look out! The 'equity' is for the owners and investors, or as she calls these firms, “money-spinning machines.” The 'private' means that everything they do is as secret as non-public companies can be.

Their efforts are aided by numerous government legal and policy decisions from both parties: A 1978 Supreme Court decision allowing usury; a 1978 rule killed off employer-run pension funds; a 1978 decision allowed pension funds to invest in private equity deals – all in Carter-time at the beginnings of neo-liberalism. In 1986 debt interest became a primary tax-lowering strategy, very useful in private equity mergers using debt. In the 1980s, the SEC had a light hand on even hostile mergers, blocking very few. That pattern has continued. In 1994 Clinton's Riegle-Neal law allowed banks to merge across state borders.  In 1996 a law opened private equity partnerships to more people while shielding them from state investigation. In 1997 capital gains taxes were cut, allowing a flood of investors into private equity. The rule separating normal banking and investment gambling, Glass-Steagall, was abolished in 1999 by Clinton and Rubin. After the tech wreck in 2000 the Fed dropped interest rates to historic lows, fueling more mergers using cheap debt. In 2010 a rule was passed that helped 'self-dealing' in private equity among their related companies.  In 2020 Jerome Powell, former private equity executive at Carlyle, had the Federal Reserve prop up corporate bonds by buying them, which was an aid to private equity.  In 2020 private equity was allowed to get involved in 401(k)s retirement accounts. These are just some of the decisions that show the 'public' state's involvement in building private equity privateers.

DREXEL to APOLLO

Apollo's head goon, Leon Black, came out of the corrupt junk debt machine Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s when he started Apollo. Apollo was basically an extension of Drexel, staffed by many of the same people. He remained a buddy of Drexel's Michael Milliken, convicted felon and HY bond assassin of the S&L industry. He later had a tight relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who had provided 'tax advice' to Black for $158M. This scandal led to Black losing control of Apollo in 2021. His own father Eli had committed suicide over a United Fruit tax fraud bribery scheme in Honduras that had been discovered in 1977. So sad!

Morgensen tells the story of how private 'equity' grew out of the junk bond / leverage buyout heyday of the late 1980s. Drexel itself went bankrupt in 1990 after many of its leading players were indicted in 1986 for a wide range of frauds. Black's Apollo first targeted huge insurer First Executive, which he was able to buy for cheap with the help of the incompetent head of California's insurance regulation department in a no-bid, no due diligence process. This was the foundation of Apollo's wealth. As a result many ordinary First Executive insurance policy-holders were deprived of coverage, as they were collateral damage.

RAID TARGETS

The next targets Morgenson focuses on are Samsonite, Noranda Aluminum in Missouri, ManorCare; health outfits like HCA, Jazz Pharma and EmCare; Taminco Chemicals, Bayonne Water, Coastal Gaslink and Athene Insurance. The Noranda deal led to higher electricity rates for residential customers and the later bankruptcy of the firm and workers' pension fund. The effects on health care in hospitals and nursing homes was dire, especially during CoVid. Manorcare went from owning their own land to renting from others after the land was sold by Apollo, which drove it into bankruptcy. Jazz was indicted for illicit uses, creating a date-rape drug and later, engaged in price gouging. Taminco was an example of 'company flipping' – sort of like what you do with houses – but with a company that supplied chemicals to Mexican narco traffickers. The water rates for Bayonne, New Jersey ratepayers went 60% up under Carlyle's private water contract. The pipeline company Coastal Gaslink was a typical carbon polluter, as private equity invests heavily in carbon firms, something they try to hide. Athene is a serial insurance rule-breaker, fined by a number of states.

Studies show that 20% of companies taken over by private equity file for bankruptcy within 10 years, while employment in those firms fall by 16% prior to that. The average time for ownership is 5 years.  At the same time fraud convictions against financial industry players have dropped like a stone. 11% of nursing homes in 2021 were owned by private equity, which is somber news for that industry. These nursing homes were especially deadly during the CoVid pandemic. Pension funds and other private equity investors have to pay 10% management fees to these firms. Many familiar retail names come up in her analysis of private equities' role like Toys R Us, Neiman Marcus, Telemundo, Harrah's Casinos, HCA, Nine West and Linens N' Things.

Hostess workers strike private equity outfit GGH

The overall picture you get from the book is a trail of enormous damage left by these raiders, these modern day pillagers who make actual pirates and Vikings look like reasonable pikers. Also how this private club of financiers seem to turn up everywhere.  Private equity is the apotheosis of neo-liberal financial capital and it was let lose by both capitalist parties, wreaking havoc on the working class and nature. Her book is only focused on the U.S. situation but private equity roams the world, with Blackrock having the most assets. She leaves this international reach unmentioned, as her book focuses on the minutia of miserable U.S. private equity deals. Private equity was very close to the Trump administration in 2016.  It provided some of his leading financial advisors like Steven Schwarzman of Blackstone Group.  This is another picture of the revolving door between the Federal government and the financial industry itself, with Jay Powell being another example.

SOLUTIONS?

Morgenson thinks private equity is an outlier that good judicial decisions like 2020's private equity induced Nine West bankruptcy decision could cure. That decision said that “creditors, workers, pensioners and taxpayers” had to be taken into account, not just shareholders. Morgenson praises the Biden SEC, FTC and other agencies for limiting private equity fees and health-care consolidation. Apollo spent $7.1M lobbying to prevent any changes, and the rest of the industry pitched in too. A 2022 Delaware legal decision exposing corrupt payments to Carlyle and Apollo executives in league with governor and ex-Carlyle CEO Glenn Youngkin was another stone in their shoe.

The industry is putting up cosmetic changes around charity and stock awards to some workers as their answer to their reputation as thieves. Yet stronger bills in Congress against private equity were defeated after heavy lobbying by the industry. The Supreme Court blocked a key SEC rule change that would inhibit EPA pollution rules from applying to a KKR coal and natural gas plant in West Virginia. Instead Morgenson hopes for a block between Tucker Carlson and Elizabeth Warren, much like Ralph Nader's own pleas to 'left & right' and to 'good' billionaires, to unite against fraud, against the privateers, against cannibalizing mergers, in order to mitigate the automatic processes of capitalist consolidation built into the system. There is even evidence these PE firms collude in private about deals.  This “competition” actually creates oligopoly and monopoly, as Marx pointed out long ago, and private equity has proved this once again.

Socialists have a different take. We'd re-institute Glass-Steagal and roll back the laws benefiting the industry. Morgenson singles out one aspect of Wall Street, private equity, for damaging U.S. health care – and yet it's not as if the general capitalist 'health providers' are not also wrecking health care. Like the rest of the banking industry, private equity should be seized without compensation, nationalized, its books opened and its operations put under the control of workers, socialists and a social state. This will actually end private equities' run of madness, and begin to create a stable financial system. Instead of tolerating the Leon Blacks of the world, or chastening them, send them into obscurity and irrelevance.

Pastor Chris Hedges interviews Morgenson 3/2/24 on Scheerpost: Hedges interviews Morgenson

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Capitalists of the 21^st Century,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty);“Giants – the Global Power Elite” (P. Phillips); “The Big Short,” “Liar's Poker”(on Salomon Bros); “Flash Boys,” (all 3 by M. Lewis); “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Scorsese); “Den of Thieves” (on Drexel); “Liquidated – An Ethnography of Wall Street” (2 part review); “The Ponzi Factor,” “House of Cards” (on Bear Stearns); “Ponzi Unicorns!” “Antitrust” (Klobuchar).

And I got it at the Library!

May Day Books has many books on capitalist financial issues.

Red Frog / March 5, 2024

College Library Browsing #11: Post-Modern Capitalism?

 “Reading Negri – Marxism in the Age of Empire” edited by P. Lemarche, M. Rosenkrantz, D. Sherman, 2011

There's a lot in this book and much of it is irrelevant or too abstract. Here is a sketch of some of Negri's thinking, which parallels his co-thinkers in Italy like Tronti and Hardt. Negri was jailed at least three times for a number of years in Italy for his writings – at one time being blamed for the plot to kill Aldo Moro tied to the Brigate Rosse. His politics were formed in the labor and Left rebellions of the 1950s-1960s in Italy after he broke with liberal Catholicism and moved towards Marxism. He became a professor in France and died in 2023 at the age of 90. I consider him a modern version of some kind of anarcho-communism, with positive and negative approaches, mainly the latter.

1. Negri understands the role of technology in driving down the rate of profit, per Marx. He goes on to consider workers as extensions of machines, not the reverse. Marx made a similar comment in the Grundrisse, but I think it's main point to show how brutalized workers are.

2. He extended the concept of the 'factory' to the circulation of capital in the community, tracking how every aspect of life is now commodified and 'produced' for profit. He calls this 'social capital' – usually a name for the capitalist commodification of the skills or background of an individual worker. This theory obliterates a distinction between the worksite and the community.

3. He opposes any concept of a party or parties or a united front in place of the 'autonomous activity of the workers.' This 'self-organized' current was first called 'workerism,' then 'autonomism.' It did include worksite committees.

4. He believed that capitalism could be fully planned and that a planned economy was not a hallmark of socialism. We have yet to discover a planned capitalist economy. He later saw that corporations had taken the place of the 'planning' state as the key command locus.

5. Negri replaces the 'labor theory of value' with the capitalist need to dominate all of society at all times. The temporal timing of surplus and necessary labor in the work day is overridden and useless to him. Capitalists who want to extend the workday to 24 hours would agree.

6. He contends that the 'law of value' only holds in an actual factory and that has been superseded by 'social value' and social control in general society. As a result economic 'value' can no longer be estimated.

7. He contended that 'immaterial labor' would slowly become dominant over ordinary worksite labor. 'Immaterial' seems a description of very real white collar labor that produces intellectual property, but that is not his definition. It extends beyond commodification to all forms of social creativity, intelligence and help, similar to Marx's concepts of unalienated labor, free creativity and the necessary work of social reproduction.

8. Instead of the proletariat, now the 'poor' or the 'multitude' are the main harbingers of revolution. The nature and analysis of the 'multitude' is left undefined that I can see, but it means just about everybody.

9. Some theories of imperialism posit the nation-state as the main actor, ignoring class. Negri maintains it is still class actors – or at least 'the multitude' - that motivate states.

10. Any class analysis has to look at 'class composition' and 're-composition' – the varied strata, castes, classes and sub-classes found in a country and within a country, along with their shifting nature in response to changes in capital.

11. At one time the duo of Hardt & Negri proposed winning over 'swing' voters by promoting consumerism – 'luxury communism' evidently. They dropped that.

The book includes a bit of history of the Italian New Left and 3 of its key figures during the 'creeping May' or 'years of lead' from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. This was a time when new Marxist groups like Avanguardia Operaia, Il Manifesto and Lotta Cotinua operated widely in northern Italy. Negri and the proletarian New Left worked in the political context of the deep reformism of the Italian Communist Party, but also took advantage of the long anti-fascist, labor and socialist movements in Italy that even reached into the peasantry.

Post-modern Capitalism?

The contributions in this book challenge aspects of Negri's thought and sometimes embrace it. Caffentzis's contributions come from a classical, orthodox Marxist point of view in his overall opposition to Negri. He shows Negri's growing distance from Marxism and closeness to Frankfurt School 'culturalism.' In a way Negri broke with 'workerism' to the point where productive worksites become banal, lost among everything. Others see his turn towards Spinoza as another marker of 'post-Marxism.' One writes of Negri and Hardt's “postmodernization of the global economy.” This means that 'production' is now the production of 'cooperation, social relations and communication' – i.e. the 'production of subjectivity,' combining the 'economic, political and cultural' aspects of society. It is “the creation of life” itself, not just commodities. This leap mashes commodities and social production, which reflects the totalizing effect of world capital but renders any understanding of exploitation, economics and profit moot. It dismantles some basics of Marxism into a vague classless, post-modern hash of general social 'dissatisfaction,' of anti-capitalist morality, of utopian thinking.  In a way, it also partakes of the 'financialization' thesis.

Oddly the book does not look at current knowledge workers as a new strain of labor who have more power than before. They are able to shut down companies quite easily by turning an electronic switch. Like electricians, the techies in the server center have the ability to make everything stop. Many bosses do not understand what their employees are actually doing and this gives employees vast leverage. It also makes them less easily replaced. Skilled blue, pink and white collar labor can now, through knowledge of computers and just about anything, shut down a whole worksite or sector. Given many 'blue collar' and 'pink collar' jobs involve higher-tech training of some kind – retail, service, assemblers, machinists, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, drivers and more – this 'knowledge' is not exclusive to white collar types. It is essential for many workers in complex economies, which means education has an even bigger role to play as complexity grows.

Refuting Marx?

What Negri really tried to do was 'update' and borrow from Marx and refute Marx at the same time. Caffentzis says what he did is really “a broad negation of Marx's whole opus.” Caffentzis' essay is centered on the question of 'what does the anti-capitalist movement need from Marx?' According to him Negri's refutation consisted of rejecting Marx's 'law of value' and everything associated with it. He notes that this supposed 'law' actually involves many things. The general 'laws of value' in Marx are tied to math and time measures, while Negri & Hardt claim that value is now immeasurable, especially after Nixon's Bretton Woods' break with the gold standard. All is speculation! Math and time are irrelevant to analyzing capital because value has burst the bounds of the worksite.

In other words the concepts of the labor theory of value, surplus value, surplus labor, rate of profit, rate of exploitation, organic composition of capital, exchange rate, exports, subsumption, the real value of commodities, work hours, etc. are all impossible to measure because everything is now immaterial social reproduction of the 'general intellect.' Wooo! Caffentzis maintains that this method mixes the concept of labor with that of general 'activity,' approaching a nihilist view that renders the heart of capitalist production invisible. It can be added that social reproduction, like volunteer labor and home labor, can be measured in part, so even these areas are not immune from forms of quantification. Nor did general social labor suddenly appear in 1971.

Every working Marxist economist interested in 'numbers' would laugh at this high-flying misconception. So would the anti-capitalist movement, which by following Negri's plan would drop some heavy weapons in the fight against national and world capital. After all, why do brutal, continual and varied anti-labor measures make sense other than in defense of very real, defined profits?! Child labor? Getting rid of work breaks? Unpaid overtime? Stolen wages? Debt slavery? Social control is only a means to that end, as capitalists 'do the math' too. One contributor accuses the duo of the “fantasy of originality” in trying to substitute for Marx while still claiming Marxism. I won't go further in this book, but if this debate is interesting to you, pick it up somewhere.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “In Letter of Fire and Blood” (Caffentzis); “From the Factory to the Metropolis” (Negri & Hardt – 2 reviews); “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Capitalism in the 21^st Century” (Roberts-Carchedi); “Democracy, Planning and Big Data,” “Magical Marxism” (Merrifield); “The Voluntariat,” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Wageless Life,” “Bit Tyrants,” “Fully-Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani).

May Day has many books on left theory from various viewpoints, old and new.

I got this at the UGA Library!

Red Frog / March 2, 2024

It Can Happen Here

 Plan for Fully Authoritarian Rule?

“Project 2025” by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and 100 other right-wing groups has become a well-known blueprint for an incoming Trump administration. It is a far more organized plan than the one in 2016 and far more reactionary. The general slant is the 'unitary executive theory' – meaning a dictatorial president has the most power. It is 'philosophically' aimed at 'woke' and 'cultural Marxism' - actually DEI, multi-culturalism & 'political correctness.'  It's a plan by a wing of capital for almost total control of state power based on politics. Gathered from various sources, its features include:

• The most worrisome is indications they will set up many camps to imprison immigrants without papers in the U.S., then initiate mass deportations. Police, DEA, BATF will all be deputized to help.

• Gutting the civil service and experts in various government departments and replacing them with 20,000 loyal MAGA zealots.

• Abolishing, 'dismantling' or chopping certain departments like FBI, DHS, USAID, Education, Commerce, Energy, BLM and Interior.

• Immediately using the 1807 'Insurrection Act' to quash any protests of any kind using the U.S. Army and a nationalized National Guard.

• Using a politicized DOJ to go after opponents in media, education, politics, corporations, the internet and the legal system.

• Environmental and climate change regulations and treaties will be unenforced or canceled. The EPA and NOAA will be gutted. Carbon sources will be promoted.  "Drill baby, drill!"

• Recruiting thousands of loyal MAGA Republicans to fill civil service positions by firing thousands of skilled workers and experts in AFGE, NFFE and APWU union positions.

• Inserting theocratic rationales into law, as they just did in Alabama, and supporting white Christian nationalism.

• Politicizing the military as a physical club against opponents and 'the deep state' - which is really just the administrative state.

• Making sure political appointees are loyal to the plan and Trump, not any law.

• 'Marxists' and dark-skinned people will be the first targets, especially inside the government.

• Outlaw Mifepristone, Misoprostol and institute a national anti-abortion law while tracking anyone who has an abortion. No birth control will be promoted except the rhythm method or abstinence.

• Change the census to apply to only U.S. citizens.

• Remove the fight against unemployment as a goal of the Federal Reserve.

• Reduce the corporate tax rate again.

• Eliminate the independence of the DOJ, FCC, FTC and other agencies, putting them under direct presidential control.

• Rescind prohibitions against discrimination of LGBT people in government and law.

• Outlaw pornography.

• It also recommends the gold standard as their 'solution' to the federal debt. No shit.

This Project reflects a split between two factions of the bourgeoisie. Carrying out some of these points could result in widespread violence and a hard battle between corporate factions - but especially against the proletariat. Project 2025 functions as a reactionary 'wish list' but it is also an 'action plan.' What is not mentioned is that a display of government force against the Left and some Democrats will encourage extra-legal fascist and ultra-nationalist militias to physically attack leftists and anyone else they can. 

Can this reactionary program be achieved? There are real roadblocks in the way, but as we've found before, Trump and the government do unexpected things and sometimes 'quantity leads to quality.'  Trump will put his own megalomaniacal, vicious stamp on this program and speed it up as fast as possible. According to trackers he's made 250 suggestions on how to limit or upend U.S. bourgeois democracy. Complacency is not a solution, nor is simplistic 'both sidesism.'

British anti-fascist painting against Mosely in 1930s

The answer is unity between unions, political, community and socialist organizations, along with all other anti-fascists, to form an Anti-Fascist Front in the worst case scenario. The AFF would defend the class against fascists first of all. It would recruit in the military and national guard and field its own political representatives to run in local elections. It would form armed defense units. It would recruit from the ranks of Democratic Party (DP) voters, and even some political reps of the DP - but not form a political block with the leadership of the DP. It would gather the majority of independents and recruit worker voters from the Republican Party who would soon feel the damage. It would become an uncompromising left pole of attraction for every force opposed to Project 2025.

From my information Project 2025 has nothing yet explicitly attacking unions except those in federal agencies. There is nothing about international policy - yet.  Not a word about Bannon's 'Chinese Bio-Weapons.'  There nothing yet about new rules for Wall Street or eliminating rules for Wall Street, as perhaps Wall Street already has everything it wants. There is no direct mention of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other 'safety net' programs - as yet. But this is only a matter of time.  One of the authors, Stephen Moore, is a fervent supporter of privatizing social security for Wall Street.  The Heritage Foundation itself has advocated raising the retirement age to 70.  

The wish and fantasy is for the Far Right to thoroughly control the military, the legal system, the media, the educational system, the police, the financial system, welfare programs and every branch of government through 'semi-gradual' means – small, medium and large shocks short of a violent coup.  Victor Orban's rule in Hungary is a partial example, though he is heavily funded by the EU and usually sells his politics for a dime. Other authoritarians like Putin and Netanyahu do not. This plan actually reflects weakness of an astounding kind - a crisis of the capitalist form of bourgeois democracy and profit economics that is happening across the globe - and now in the heart of the world capitalist system.

In response, the most Left elements in the AFF can promote a transitional approach to socialism as the only way out in their bid to defend the great majority of workers, unemployed, self-employed, retired, students, minorities, small businessmen and farmers in the U.S. But any AFF will come under increased attack by the police and government entities.  Just look at the violent threats and actions already against anyone the hard right dislikes.  This will not be pretty if it comes to pass, especially in its worst form.  Be prepared!

P.S. - Trump just said he'd cut Social Security, the plan of his Wall Street backers.  He also promises 'a bloodbath' if not elected.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Fascism,” “Trump,” “Who Were the January 6^th Rioters?” “Capitol Riot,” “Anti-Fascism Series,” “In the Red Corner,” “Transitional Program,” “United Front,” “Anti-Fascist Front,” “It Can't Happen Here” (S. Lewis), "The Shock Doctrine" (Klein).

May Day Books has many books, newspapers and pamphlets on the fight against fascism and its variations. Buy one and educate yourself.

Red Frog

February 28, 2024

Shipboard Rebels

 “The Creole Rebellion – the Most Successful Slave Revolt in U.S. History” by Bruce Chadwick, 2022

...and, if that's true, it happened on a ship in 1841. The Creole was a slave ship heading from Virginia to New Orleans to deliver its 'cargo' to the large plantations of the deep South. It had to 'round Florida and that meant sailing close to the British Bahamas and Nassau. In 1833 the U.K. had outlawed slavery so any U.S. slaves were free from servitude if they got to British soil. The leader of the rebellion, Madison Washington, a formerly free man who had been captured trying to free his wife, knew that. He planned a slave uprising on the ship and an eastern voyage to Nassau Town on the former pirate island of New Providence that was now a multi-ethnic haven.

It's an extraordinary story that mostly devolves into a legal and political struggle between the U.S. and Britain. Unlike the prior story of the Amistad that was loaded with Africans who had never been formally put in bondage, the U.S. considered the 140 slaves on board the 'property' and 'cargo' of slave buyers in New Orleans. They were just like bananas or guns or barrels of oil. Earlier slave ships had foundered on the reefs of the Bahamas - the Hermosa, the Comet, the Enterprise and the Encomium - and all slaves aboard were freed by British Bahamian authorities. Nassau itself was now mostly a black town with black police and soldiers. The twist in this story is that the 19 mutineers, in the chaotic fight onboard, killed one passenger who was a slave trader and severely injured the captain. When the rebels arrived off Nassau in control of the ship it became a legal question of murder and violence.

In an amazing scene off the harbor of Nassau, dozens of boats manned by black Bahamians surrounded the anchored Creole hoping all would be freed. The U.S. tried to seize the vessel with a small group of soldiers from a nearby fleet ship. Their boat was blocked by the civilians around the Creole and Bahamian soldiers on board. 116 slaves who had not participated in the mutiny left the brig and later escaped to the rest of the Caribbean. The tough British Governor did not stop them, as he told them there were no charges against them. 5 women and children stayed onboard. The remaining 19 were locked up, including Washington, pending a decision on what to do by London.

Politics, Slavery and War

To abolitionists in the North and a few in the South they were heroes. Washington, a strong, careful and smart leader, was lionized. Frederick Douglass wrote a novella about him. Washington had protected the crew and captain's family, nursed all the injured and tamped down any further bloodshed – perhaps to his detriment. Some thought he should have run the ship aground and fled onto the island, avoiding any legal process at all.

However to president Tyler, a Whig Virginian who inherited the presidency after the death of Harrison, these men were pirates and murderers. Prior to this Tyler had vetoed a proposal for a National Bank of the United States that was passed by Congress in the face of a disastrous recession, showing his free-market 'Jacksonian' tendencies. This is something that would get Congress labeled communist nowadays, but then it was just a sensible solution the insolvency of so many private banks. This veto had brought the ire of Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams and nearly all of his Whig Party. The Creole changed that. Now Tyler could play the nationalist hero by thundering against Britain, even though he himself supposedly opposed unpaid forced and imprisoned labor. The Creole was part of a line of uprisings on ships – the Deux Soeurs, the Augusta, the Decatur – that had freed captive slaves. The British, with international support, had even boarded suspect U.S. slave ships in the Atlantic and released the captives. This had all pissed off U.S. nationalists and Southern slavers to no end.

Madison Washington - Knowledge, kindness & force

The Crown's barristers concluded that the murder happened in international waters, so the U.K. had no jurisdiction. There was no present extradition treaty with the U.S., so the men were not required to be sent back. The Governor had acted correctly in not blocking the remaining freedmen from leaving the Creole. The action of the slaves was not an act of piracy and the assertion that 'cargo' and human beings were equivalent was nonsense. They concluded that the only way for the 19 to be returned to the U.S. for trial would be by a voluntary act of 'international goodwill.' A U.S. Supreme Court justice and the head of the DOJ privately agreed that the U.S. had no legal jurisdiction over the matter.

It was up to the politicians to negotiate in the context of an outraged South gunning for war and many irritated nationalists of both parties. Daniel Webster, an ostensible U.S. opponent of slavery and Lord Ashburton, a prominent British lawyer and politician, conducted the talks in 1842.  Ashburton was part of the Baring family of prominent bankers.  At the same time J.Q. Adams was advocating the freeing of the 19 anti-slavery rebels. He thundered against Southern human bondage in an address to Congress over his being accused of criminal treason and breaking a gag order. The Creole issue had reinvigorated the abolitionists in the U.S. and this had intruded into the Congress. The ghosts of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, the Stono rebels and various lessor insurrectionists haunted the South, and now Madison Washington had done the same.  Some white men were hung for helping the rebellions, such as in north Georgia and other southern areas.

What happened? Chadwick covers the micro-history of all the twists and turns of the Tyler presidency, the chief characters involved, the testimony of the crew, a look at the anti-slavery movement; the end of the gag rule in the House over talking about slavery and the inclusion of Texas in the U.S. as a slave state. Tyler wanted to absorb Texas as part of compensation for losing the Creole case. On April 16, 1842 a Nassau court released the remaining 17 freedmen prisoners, as 2 had died in gaol. No one knows what happened to Washington after that. In 1855 the blasted slavers got partial compensation from the U.K. for their losses from ship incidents like the Creole. They nevertheless hoped that Britain would eventually take their side in a war, given it needed cotton. But like the Bahamians surrounding the Creole, the British people would have no truck with bondage. All of this, partly spurred by the national sensation of the Creole mutiny, became a prelude to the Civil War 5 years later.

P.S. - Slaver ship wrecks found off Bahamas far north of Nassau - 2/25/24 Guardian story: Sunk Slave Ships Discovered

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “American Myth,” “Black Sails,” “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); “Mr Turner” (Mike Leigh); “12 Years a Slave,” “Slavery By Another Name,” “Caste” (Wilkerson); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “Life Under the Jolly Roger,” “Spartacus” (Fast); “Class Struggle in the Roman Republic” (Woods).

And I got it at the Athens, GA library. Support your local library!

May Day has books on slavery, both fiction and non-fiction, where every month is 'black history month.'

Red Frog / 2/25/24

College Library Browsing #10: Sadness is it's Own Reward

 “Left-Wing Melancholia – Marxism, History and Memory” by Enzo Traverso, 2016

This book looks at the situation of the Left after what Traverso considers a world-historic defeat of communism. That consists of the fall of the bureaucratic 'socialist' USSR, the central-eastern European workers' states and the degeneration of the mass Socialist and Communist parties in various countries. Gramsci's 'war of position' was posed in the 1920s and Traverso considers it lost. Traverso seems to be unaware of present vital efforts to keep Marxism alive, but lets hear what he has to say. Traverso dates the change in socialist attitudes to the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1970s and before Left victories over colonialism, apartheid, various dictators, capitalism and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam gave the Left an optimistic, emancipatory boost. After this period he considers the Marxist goal of a human 'utopia' off the table. The future now no longer exists in his view, just an endless 'presentism' and the dead hand of the reactionary past.

These defeats take the form of a Leftist melancholia, which in Traverso's survey is part nostalgia, part tragedy, part defeat, part memory, part history, part sorrow, part martyrs, part tradition, part inspiration. Victims became the special focus in this vein, especially the memory of the Holocaust, slavery or Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Shirtwaist or the hanging of Joe Hill in the U.S. Agency and Left victories are forgotten in the general warp and weave - except in the small circles of the hard left. My main issue with this book is 'why'? Is the book only an elegiac and academic description of the present or does it posit some move forward beyond melancholia?

Traverso tracks how defeat has always been a part of the Marxist revolutionary myth. Supposedly you 'lose until you win.' Defeats and heroism are remembered in order to give historic impetus to further class struggle and victories. The 1848 Paris revolt and the later 1870 Paris Commune especially played that role; the defeat of 1905 as a 'dress rehearsal' for the Russian revolution of 1917; the crushing of the various 1919 revolutions in Europe inspired the revolts of the '30s and '40s, including the Chinese Revolution. In our time the death of Che Guevara, the assassination of Malcolm X, the crushing of the Panthers, the overthrow of Allende all 'infuse' this myth. Prior to the 1990s a certain teleological, optimistic certainty about 'the future is ours' was more common among many leftists. Earlier, in the face of fascism, both Luxemburg and Trotsky had spoken of 'socialism or barbarism.' That seems to be our present 'melancholic' situation. The environmental situation does not encourage optimism either, though it destroys 'free market' logic in spades.

Traverso hints that actual socialists must embrace both the past, present and future. However it is obvious that many far leftists dwell in the past in various ways, and have no conception of how the future will actually arrive. Traverso ignores China, but some find their 'optimism' in the CCP and state-led development of China. It's a thin reed that does not translate in a mass way even in China. Nor does China make any effort to export 'revolution' and actually never has. Others cling to anyone who opposes the U.S., no matter from what position – authoritarian, leftist, theocratic, conservative, Republican or fascist. This kind of reflexive 'anti-imperialism' abandons a socialist future or any actual plan to get there. It is another 'melancholy' symptom.

Cultural Arty Facts

To make his points other than through voluminous and erudite quotes, Traverso looks at various Italian communist neo-realist films, along with political ones from Latin America. As he puts it “Defeat had turned communism into a realm of memory.” Pontecorvo's 'Battle of Algiers' and the anti-colonial film 'Burn' come in for special attention. Others are the post-Soviet film about central Europe, “Ulysses Gaze;” the French film, “A Grin Without a Cat;” Ken Loach's “Land and Freedom” about the Spanish Civil War and films about post-Allende Chile – in particular “Santa Fe Street” and “Nostalgia for the Light.” He brings up C.L.R. James' analysis of Moby Dick as Melville's 1851 parable about capitalism leading to totalitarianism. Quite prescient!

Courbet self-portrait:  Desperate Man

Traverso looks at 1800s 'Bohemia' in Paris – at the time the marginal realm of anti-government plotters, anarchists, dissident artists and intellectuals, petty criminals, drinkers and layabouts who were neither part of the intelligentsia nor full-on lumpens. Marx was mostly hostile to this strata, considering them basically lumpen-proletarians, but Traverso sees this sub-cultural strata splitting or shifting based on the times and political situation. Bohemia went on to be called the Lost Generation, the Flappers and Jazzmen, the Surrealists, the Existentialists, the Beats, the Hippies, the Punks, then the Rappers, Hip-Hoppers and the Hipsters. But these counter-cultural strata changed or were crushed, to the point that a real Bohemia is invisible now. The real Bohemia has become a semi-proletarian underground of marginalized persons with no public face. It's public U.S. face – hipster and hip-hop - has been commodified and captured, another melancholic development.

Traverso chooses to highlight Courbet, a Bohemian utopian-socialist painter who put 'le peuple' and symbols of the people at the center of his art, an art that mourned the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1871. Baudelaire, Heine, Flaubert and Herzen all reflected these bloody defeats as well. Baudelaire, the author of “La Fleurs de Mal,' took part in the 1848 revolt, manned a barricade and escaped the slaughter. But Baudelaire was also an anti-Semite, reflecting the Janus-faced nature of this unstable 'declasse' artistic strata. This strata eventually produced revolutionaries like Breton and outright fascists like Celine and Marinetti. As Traverso points out Marx, Benjamin, Lenin and Trotsky, along with Greenwich Village's John Reed, all lived unstable 'bohemian' lives for a long time.

Colonialism and Imperialism

Traverso places an emphasis on how Marx's situation in Europe in the 1800s conditioned his world-view. While Marx understood capitalism and traced the roots of colonialism, he was not the theorist of imperialism and the revolutionary role of national-democratic struggles as was Lenin. Marx was critical of Toussaint l'Overture, the Mexican Revolution's Zapata and Villa and Latin America's Simon Bolivar. These had to wait for later Marxists to trace their emancipatory role or to lead national-liberation and anti-dictatorial struggles. He makes the point that Marx's concept of an unchanging 'Asiatic mode of production' was an approximation regarding relatively unknown economies to Europeans, mostly based on Morgan's work. Later Marxists have refined that analysis of early production economies. Traverso, a French academic, does not believe that capital played a revolutionary role in developing the forces of production. What role did it play then? A continuation of feudalism? Marx excoriated colonialism over its violent and exploitative 'primitive accumulation of capital' in Ireland, in India, in Peru and the slave economy of the U.S. Yet why this discussion is in a book on 'left-wing melancholia' I do not know.

The connection seems to be the development of 'Western Marxism” (a misnomer) and post-colonial theory. The Frankfurt School, in the face of the triumph of bureaucracy in the USSR, advent of fascism in Germany and Italy and the decay of the European Left reflected a retreat from 'classical' Marxism into a cultural refuge. Their product is what the Republicans call 'cultural Marxism.' Similarly “post-colonial theory' grew out of opposition to classical Marxism based on the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracies.  Absent any class and economic analysis, post-colonialism diverted the struggle against capitalism into an ethnic conflict, even when using the term 'intersectional.' The two – post-colonial theory and 'Western' Marxism - finally united in the university academy, a fusion we live with to this day. I guess this is melancholy as theory. It also has the smell of revolutionary defeat.

Traverso looks at the sadness of Benjamin and Adorno in the face of the twin defeats of the 1940s, fascism and the brutal bureaucracy in the USSR. They argued over jazz, over Surrealism, over culture, over how to defeat fascism, over capitalism. Benjamin thought Marxism had to become 'messianic' – a Red version of liberation, a religio-secular movement. Traverso then moves on to Daniel Bensaid, a younger French Trotskyist involved in May-June 1968, who later played a role as a bridge between different Marxist currents. Bensaid embraced both a utopian vision and Benjamin's messianic method - or something like that according to Traverso. This is the kind of vague direction that makes you yearn for 'classic' Marxism.

At the end Traverso has no answer to Left melancholia, so this is purely an analysis of the present and near past and nothing else. In its own way it is an academic product of that tendency. Not that there is nothing to mourn about. But as Joe Hill pointed out: “Mourn but Organize!”

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “One Way Street” (Benjamin); “Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?”(Zizek); “The Melancholia of the Working Class,” “How to Read a History Book,” “How Will Capitalism End?” “A Walk Through Paris,” “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “Transatlantic,” “Marxist Theory of Art.”

May Day Books has many volumes on Left cultural and theoretical writing. Educate yourself!  I got this from the UGA Library.

Red Frog / February 22, 2024

The Carceral State of Florida

 “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead, 2019

This is a true fiction story based on a state boys 'reform' school in Marianna, Florida in the Florida panhandle. The place was called the Arthur Dozier School for Boys at the time, but here it is named the Nickel School. It was established in 1900 and closed in 2011 due to overwhelming problems. Like the Christian/Canadian Govt. indigenous boarding schools in Canada and the U.S., or the Catholic/Irish Govt. Madeleine Laundries / Asylums in Ireland, bodies and bones were found in unmarked graves on the school grounds. You can still look at the remains of the school on Google Maps, see it's most notorious building and locate its official cemetery off in the woods. 

The key character is Elwood, a 17 year old high school student. He's a bright, dark-skinned boy from Tallahassee who gets caught in a stolen car while he's hitch-hiking to attend a college course. He's sent to Nickel as a car thief even though the driver was the thief. It's 1963 or so and the U.S. legal system, especially in Florida, is racist and ridiculous. So what does Elwood learn in his time at Nickel?

He meets a street-smart friend, Turner. He learns that the education there is a joke. After he tries to break up a fight, he learns that vicious corporal punishment is administered in a small storage shed called the 'White House.' The White House is where torture and beatings are administered under the loud whir of an industrial fan. He is beaten bloody. He learns that medical care consists of aspirin and aspirin only. He finds out that state goods for the school are sold to local businesses by the managers of the school and that kid's labor is loaned out to various local big-wig business people for free. He understands that several are killed for standing up to the top boss or escaping and later, secretly buried after being taken 'out back.' He learns that some boys are raped in closets by staff or other boys; some stuck in sweat-boxes as punishment – one dying. Tiny rooms at the top of the dorms become isolation cells. He finds out that the schools' products – bricks, harvested food and a print shop – are profitable for the state, while the boys are paid nothing. He learns how to hide his feelings and curb any visible instinct to rebel or help.

The 'white house' at Dozier / Nickel

At the time Elwood attends, the school is segregated by skin color, as its still Jim Crow time. 600 boys are incarcerated there, of all skin colors - but the darker got it worst. After his ordeal, Whitehead tells the supposed story of a person named Elwood in New York where he meets and hears about some other former boys from Nickel or places like it. The bosy are dead in Vietnam or former army, alcoholic and drugged, unable to hold a job, violent or troubled in many ways. Elwood seems to be doing the best, if he is indeed Elwood.

How does Elwood try to get out? He rejects 'loving thy enemy' preached by Dr. King. Instead he writes to the Chicago Defender and takes notes of all the goings on – especially the embezzling of food. He believes the white Florida state inspectors will take heed and he won't get caught. After all, it's the civil rights movement and he's inspired by letters like the one from King's Birmingham jail cell. But inspiration isn't enough. Hey muthafucka, it's the Jim Crow South, as (Nat) Turner might have told him.

Whitehead ignored the white boys in the school, betraying a bit of Black nationalism in his writing.  The only good white person is one of the staff who hauls Elwood and Turner around town to deliver stolen goods to local businessmen.  While the dark-skinned kids get it far worse, the light-skinned kids were abused too, given the testimony. This is the method of racism in a class society, as both are the real targets.  White rednecks, wiggers, crackers, hillbillies - all were also looked down and made poor by Jim Crow and the present South.

Eventually, after reporting by the Tampa Bay Times, the school becomes a national scandal full of gruesome discoveries. It is perhaps worse than a Dickensian orphanage and work house, but also a commentary on the incarceration state in the U.S. that is still going on. It is important that this story is not just located in the distant past, but was uncovered somewhat recently. So many current historical anti-racist novels only center slavery or Jim Crow without touching the present. After all, the 'present' is the thing that we deal with now and ignoring it is a form of safely historicizing social reality, of shoving it into the past, of distancing. This is a riveting personal story of two boys, based on historical truth. It will keep you glued to your reading chair.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The South – Jim Crow & It's Afterlives” (A. Reed); “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “Caste” (Wilkerson); “Rustin,” “No Name in the Street” (Baldwin); “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (A. Davis); “Selma” (Duvernay); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Just Mercy,” Slavery by Another Name.”

May Day Books has many leftish fiction books and books on Jim Crow.  I got this from the Athens GA public library.

Red Frog / February 19, 2024

Who Do You Owe?

 Debt, Prices & Credit:

The U.S. Blue Collar Recession

1. Auto loan debt: $1.607 Trillion - Q4/2023

2. Avg. auto loan outstanding: $23,809 - Q3/2023

3. Avg. New Pickup Truck price: $60,000 - Q3/2023

4. Avg. New Car price: $49,388 - Q2/2023

5. Median U.S. House price: $387,600 - Q4/2023

6. Mortgage debt: $12.252 Trillion - Q4/2023

7. Derivatives held on Wall Street & elsewhere: $268 Trillion - Q3/2023

8. Student debt: $1.601 Trillion - Q4/2023

9. Credit Card debt: $1.129 Trillion - Q4/2023

10. Total household debt: $17.3 Trillion - Q3/2023

11. U.S. Government debt: $34.233 Trillion - February 14, 2024

12. U.S. Corporate debt: $3.1 Trillion - Q3/2022

13. Medical Debt: $220 Billion, Q4/2021 - 22% over $5,000 2023

14. Avg. insurance price for houses: $1,678 yr. - Feb, 2024

15. Avg. insurance price for cars: $1,982 yr. - Feb. 2024

16. Avg. Rent: $1,372 mth. - Q2/2023

17. Median House Price: $417,700 - Q4/2023

18. Home Foreclosures: Up 9% from 2022, up 193% from 2021

19. Commercial property foreclosures: Data? A 'bad outlook.'

20. Car Debt Delinquent: 7.7% - Q4 /2023

21. Car repossessions: Up 20.4% - Q4/2023

22. Credit Card Debt Delinquent: 8.5% - Q4/2023

23. Commercial Chap. 11 Bankruptcies: 6,569 - Q4/2023

24. Personal Bankruptcies: 419,550 – Q4/2023

The Debt Bomb

Note the number of derivative debts and bets – 10 times larger than the whole world GDP economy. This is also part of the 'Snowball' crash in the Chinese stock markets, the shadow banking shortfalls, as well as the severe real estate recession in China.  This is a crisis for the large capitalist sector in the Chinese economy.  The Snowball crash is explained by Ellen Brown in Scheerpost: Chinese Market Crash  5 large investment banks hold most of these derivative bets here in the U.S. according to Wall Street on Parade.

Even buying a new car now is prohibitive, and that has always been a key 'American right.' Nearly all of these numbers are at all time highs except house prices, which have fallen in some areas due to high interest and insurance rates. Government CoVid and recession funding slowed debts like medical and student for awhile. Some figures are delayed or hidden. Yet now trying to buy a new or used car, rent, buy a house or get sick is going up again. The debt levels on some items will never be re-paid – like derivatives, federal, corporate debt or even mortgage, credit card, medical and student debt. I suspect the 'corporate debt' figure is a great undercount.  It all adds up to a very shaky capitalist economic structure, but also a vast burden on the working class in all its aspects – the low-skilled, youth, minorities, women, old people. This can't be fixed by some patchwork legislation or tweaks. Debt is how workers have afforded to buy things in the U.S. - but this kind of spending has limits beyond which capital has no plan except immiseration.  

Michael Roberts has pointed out that 'debt,' speculation and recession are signs that the ordinary profit rate based on exploiting labor is not enough to float the capitalists.  In other words profits are falling right now.

So ... open the books, social control of the Federal Reserve, cancel debts, nationalize the banks, outlaw derivatives, social ownership of land, introduce a real 'sharing' economy, limit and control interest rates, free education, public ownership of housing, bring back Glass-Steagall, revoke Taft-Hartley and CFMA 2000, fight climate change through transitional steps towards full social control of production.

Sources: Investopedia, Federal Reserve, Wall Street on Parade, Cars.com, Kelly Blue Book, BLS, Federal Debt Clock, Bankrate, Moodys, Reuters, Guardian, Statistica, Car Price.com, Petersen Study on Health Care.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Debt System,” “Debt & Capital,” “Debt – the First 5,000 Years” (Graeber); “The Debt Trap,” “J is for Junk Economics” (Hudson); “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “The Deficit Myth”(Kelton); “Liar's Poker” (M. Lewis); “Bad Money” (K. Phillips).

Red Frog

February 16, 2024