The Harm Reduction Team

Physician Mike Pappas works for a "harm reduction facility" in New York City, and writes a piece for Left Voice entitled Eric Adams Prescribes More Cops and Prisons for New York’s Poor and Oppressed. Who can be against harm reduction? And whose harm are they reducing?

Dr. Pappas' lede (link in original):

Last week, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced his new directive allowing cops to forcibly remove people from public areas and involuntarily detain them for transport to hospitals. The mayor’s guidance expands previous definitions which allowed cops and qualified professionals to involuntarily detain someone if the individual is deemed to be a threat. Now, the new recommendations allow cops to detain people if they deem they are “unable to meet their basic needs.”

My wife and I spent two days in Singapore last month, sightseeing. The most striking feature is that there are no beggars or homeless people on the streets or in the subway. It's the only city in the world that I've been to with that feature. This makes the city much more pleasant for the tourist. It is safe to walk around late at night. One doesn't need to fear pickpockets or muggers. One certainly doesn't have to worry about aggressive panhandlers on the subway.

It's much easier to be a tourist in Singapore than in New York. The no-beggars policy is obviously successful--this site claims that the "city of Singapore is very popular with international travellers. In 2019, it reached the 4th place of the world's most popular cities with 19.76 million tourists." For a city with less than 5.5 million people, this is pretty impressive (and even more impressive if you consider there isn't really very much to see there!).

Of course tourists aren't the only beneficiaries. The city hosts lots of hotels--we stayed in a big one--employing thousands of people. A key draw is the food--there are hundreds of restaurants at competitive prices. (For a delicious cheap-eat, go to the Chinatown Market.) The shopping centers are to die for. A rule of thumb is for every two tourists you need one employee. There are nearly 70,000 hotel rooms in Singapore, which at double occupancy results in 140,000 tourists every day. That means 70,000 people are employed taking care of them.

No wonder Singapore is such a rich country! When it comes to harm reduction, getting the beggars off the streets earns city residents some serious cash!

But Dr. Pappas will undoubtedly ask What happens to the mentally ill? the indigent? the addicted? Fair questions, those. Given the city-state's draconian drug laws, the addicted are probably in jail. The mentally ill are housed in hospitals--or at least some place that pretends to be a hospital. And the indigent are likely provided with subsidized housing--and told to stay there.

Singapore is not a free country. Civil liberties don't carry much weight. A harm reduction method that works there will not work anyplace else in the world--certainly not in messy, rambunctious, lively New York City.

At the same time, what Dr. Pappas calls "harm reduction" doesn't really cut the mustard. His horizon of "harm" extends only as far as the homeless--he wants to make their lives more comfortable. He ignores the welfare of an urban neighborhood when a few dozen homeless people camp out in their park, depriving them of its use. He doesn't see the effects on city life when homeless people shelter in subway stations or on trains. He pretends that mentally ill people pushing people on to subway tracks is not a real problem (only isolated incidences, he'd claim). He forgets that for every shooting in Times Square, there are thousands of potential tourists who decide they'd rather not spend their money on Broadway.

A New York Times article from this past March says that there are about 50,000 homeless people living in shelters. Nevertheless,

While it is difficult to accurately count the number of people living unsheltered, the city’s most recent estimate, conducted in January 2021, tallied about 1,300 people sleeping in subways and about 1,100 on the streets. Many advocates consider the estimate to be an undercount.

Those 2400+ people living rough are doing great harm to the remaining 8.465 million New Yorkers who don't sleep in subway cars or commandeer park benches. They scare tourists, commuters, restaurant patrons, pedestrians, and anybody else who wants to live in a civilized world. Mr. Adams' proposal is a perfectly reasonable effort to get people who for whatever reason can't follow rules of common decency and courtesy off the streets. This looks to be a police function--harm reduction for that small group of people can happen at the facility where the cops drop them off.

I also strongly urge the mayor to arrest turnstile jumpers and panhandlers. These are a small group of uncivilized people who hijack public conveyances for their own selfish purposes. Securing the right of 8.465 million New Yorkers to enjoy public spaces that they pay for constitutes a much greater degree of "harm reduction" than anything Dr. Pappas proposes.

In his headline, Dr. Pappas claims the homeless are "oppressed." This is not true--not even by Marxist standards. "Oppression" happens when surplus value is taken from workers in the form of profit. Homeless people are not workers, and they contribute nothing of value, much less surplus value. Instead they are thieves, stealing public spaces from workers who pay to ride the subway to work every day, and who deserve the quiet enjoyment of their ride.

The homeless, the turnstile jumpers, the squeegee guys--they're not oppressed. Instead, they are the oppressors. One can certainly feel sorry for them at some level, but they have absolutely no right to take over the subway or other public spaces.

Unfortunately, the harm reduction crew, which includes Dr. Pappas, isn't entirely innocent. Here is what it seems they're really interested in.

Workers at OnPoint NYC [a city-funded harm reduction outfit--ed] officially submitted their demand for voluntary union recognition on Thursday, December 8. The workers, who are demanding union recognition with the New England Joint Board of UNITE HERE, are calling their union OnPoint United. They are fighting for a wall-to-wall union, greater job security for employees, better healthcare, and a democratization of the workplace.

The truth will out! The harm reduction folks are more interested in their own bennies than in any serious harm reduction. Indeed, their incentives look to be entirely in the wrong place. The more homeless people there are, the more their services will supposedly be needed, and the more money they'll get. Rather than "harm reduction," their goal appears to be the exact opposite. They benefit most when the homeless population expands.

The vast majority of New Yorkers are civilized people. They deserve to live in a civilized city.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
• Unionizing Hotels?

Shootings

This post is in response to the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, TX. I find the whole thing horribly depressing, partly because it is inherently depressing, and also because I can't think of any solution to the problem. The proposed solutions--e.g., gun control, or arming teachers--all seem likely to fail.

Ezra Brain, a talented correspondent for Left Voice (published by a group of NYC college professors and their groupies), describes what he thinks is the root problem. The article is entitled The Uvalde Massacre Is the Product of a Heinous System.

He uses a rhetorical technique common to Trotskyism that may be called bait and switch.

The responsibility for this horrendous crime, of course, lays first and foremost with the killer himself who made an evil and reprehensible decision to kill children. Yet, this shooting doesn’t happen in a vacuum and we can’t individualize it. This horror comes within a much larger context of the violence inherent to the capitalist system and the violence particular to the United States empire in decline.

The first sentence is a truism that everybody will agree with. I think it is the only intelligent thing one can say about the event. But the rest of the paragraph, and indeed the rest of the article, dismisses any notion of individual responsibility. He claims "we can't individualize it." The ultimate cause of the massacre is an ill-defined something that Mr. Brain calls "capitalism."

"Capitalism" isn't just the cause of mass shootings--it's the cause of all bad things that ever happen anywhere in America or the world. For Mr. Brain it is the synonym for the Devil.

There are 330 million people in America, all of whom live under "capitalism." Of that number, approximately a dozen turn in to mass shooters each year. (I'm excluding the now ubiquitous gangland-style shootings in our major cities, which I think have a different cause--though no doubt Mr. Brain would blame "capitalism" for those as well.) "Capitalism" offers no clues about how those dozen individuals differ from the rest of us. Indeed, religious language like "possessed by demons" is more informative.

The paragraph following that just quoted introduces "capitalism's" evil sidekick, namely white supremacy. (Links in original.)

This shooting comes just ten days after a white supremacist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo left eleven, all Black, people dead. While there is no evidence currently that today’s shooting was racially motivated, the specter of white supremacy still hangs over the tragedy. Uvalde is 78 percent Latine and, currently, the border patrol — the same institution that detains and abuses migrants and chases them with whips — is currently at the school, potentially intimidating any undocumented parents who need to go pick up their traumatized children.

Three things come immediately to mind. First, despite there being no evidence, Mr. Brain can't help but suggest "white supremacy." This tells us more about Mr. Brain than about the shooting. Second, he uses a word new to me, namely Latine. I'm no expert on silly, petty bourgeois lingo, but I assume it's intended to replace the hopelessly unpopular Latinx--which I described as a degendered dysphemism for Latino and Latina. Latine doesn't seem to be an improvement. Why not just use the word Latin?

And third, the link attached to "chased them with whips" has nothing to do with whips, or with the now thoroughly discredited story that border patrol agents were whipping migrants. Mr. Brain doesn't tell us that the Spanish-speaking residents of the Rio Grande Valley have roots in this country that go back centuries and are in absolutely no danger of being deported. It turns out (Mr. Brain wrote before this was widely known) that a border patrol agent is the guy who finally took out the shooter.

A much more perceptive analysis of who mass murderers are is given by Park Macdougald, in a piece entitled Why young men become shooters. The lede paragraph:

Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. “I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman,” begins an entry dated five months before the Columbine shooting, which later devolved into psychopathic fantasies of torture and mutilation. But in an entry from five days later, written after purchasing his first guns, Harris is exuberant. “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.”

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge.  

Men, especially adolescent boys and young men, are in a life-and-death competition for access to female mates. The losers have little to lose and occasionally respond violently. This is a much more specific cause for mass shootings than "capitalism" is--but it's still not very helpful. There are, after all, millions of social outcasts, incels, disabled men, etc., out there, yet only a very few of them become mass shooters. It's still too crude a screen to identify them before they start killing people.

Mr. Brain writes,

It’s a system that has told angry young white men that it is people of color and queer people who are the cause of their distress, a system which has alienated so many young people and left them without hope, a system that has accepted near-constant school shootings in the years since Columbine.

This seems not true. The "angry young men" who become mass shooters are driven mad because of women--not race or homosexuality. Most school shootings are like Uvalde, Columbine and Sandy Hook--they've got nothing to do with race and even less to do with homosexuality. Even the rare cases where race seems to be a factor--Charleston, Waukesha, Buffalo--it probably isn't as much a factor as Mr. Brain thinks. 

The common wisdom is that Mr. Gendron drove to Buffalo to shoot people because he was a racist. I think the causal arrow is precisely the reverse. Mr. Gendron wanted to shoot people, and then devised a post hoc reason (racism) that justified to himself why he was shooting people.

We have to cut Mr. Brain some slack here. If the ultimate motive for mass shooters is frustration with the opposite sex, then Mr. Brain knows nothing about that. He's gay. His solution to what he might call toxic masculinity is for everybody to be androgynous. That's probably why he champions the word Latine. Of course androgyny is not an option for most men--who want to father children and eventually celebrate grandchildren. Whatever the virtues of the LGBTQIA+... community, fertility is not one of them--they don't have a lot of kids, and they're not good at raising them. 

An androgynous, gay man is poorly equipped to understand the psychology of mass shooters. That's why Mr. Brain blames everything on "capitalism."

Further Reading:

• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist
• Book Review: Bronze Age Mindset

Elections, 2021--Race & Transgender

Source: Andrew Harnik/AP, as published in Left Voice

Ezra Brain, a regular columnist for Left Voice, is a smart and interesting guy. His election night summary is excellent, and dated Nov. 3 is entitled  Election Night 2021: The Right Strikes Back. Another well written post from Left Voice author Tatiana Cozzarelli is dubbed Teachers Unions Must Fight the Attacks on Critical Race Theory and on Trans Kids. We'll also take a look at Terry Evans' piece from Nov. 22nd Militant headlined What do the 2021 election results mean for the US working class?

I don't have a big problem with Mr. Brain's Election night summary. The article is very well written and definitely informative--but there is nothing in it that is especially Marxist, much less Trotskyist. It is mostly a well-phrased rehash of Democratic Party talking points. The accompanying picture (shown above) is most revealing of Mr. Brain's biases: it shows a bunch of smiling white people, who have deceptively traded in a white hood for a red blazer, and who must all be racists because they're white, and you know they're white because they are so unWoke that there are no Black faces in the picture, and whenever white people get together for any reason, it's because they're racists. And did I mention that they are all white!

The problem for the progressive left is that one can't win people's votes by constantly accusing them of being racists. Surely reporters like Mr. Brain have to make some effort to understand what people are really thinking rather than just assuming they're all hopelessly obsessed with race and can't think about anything else. The best way to understand what people actually believe is to listen to what they say and to take them seriously--and then not assume you know more about their motives than they do themselves.

For example, Mr. Brain writes 

"Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican, also ran against critical race theory in schools. Ciattarelli essentially argued against the teaching of the terrible history of racism in the U.S."

I don't think CRT was the primary issue in New Jersey, and nobody is saying that racism and its history shouldn't be taught in schools. That's just a red herring. The real issue in New Jersey was exemplified by Governor Murphy's gaffe, when he said “If taxes are your issue, then New Jersey’s probably not your state.” A vote for Ciattarelli was a vote for lower taxes--not a vote for "racism."

Ms. Cozzarelli apparently imagines that on those rare occasions when us white folks aren't thinking about race, then we're thinking about sex. She writes.

Attacks on trans kids in schools take many forms, from the right to bathrooms to the right to play on sports teams. Eight anti-trans sports bans have passed in the past few months in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Montana, West Virginia, and Texas. These laws ban trans kids from playing sports on teams that correspond to their gender. Texas’s law  was publicly litigated, and trans kids came in to plead their case. 8 year old Sunny Bryant told the Texas State Legislature: “My first visit to the Capitol should have been on a school field trip, not defending my right to exist, but if I don’t show up, you won’t see the real stories. Kids like me whose futures will be crushed, opportunities taken away even before I’m given a chance to try.” Her powerful testimony didn’t stop the bill—it passed in Texas, and others like it passed in multiple states across the country.

I confess I find the problem trans people pose to be intractable. I do know a couple trans women quite well, and both have undergone a strenuous and debilitating medical procedure to make the transition. They are smart, honorable people who have overcome serious odds. I honestly wish them the very best, I hope others treat them courteously and respectfully, and I strongly oppose any infringement on their Constitutional rights. I have no problem with them using the women's washroom--and I can't see why anybody else should have an issue with that, either.

But...

I do have a problem when a junior high or high school boy wakes up one morning, puts on a dress, changes his pronoun, and then claims he's a girl--asserting for himself the right to use the girl's toilet and play on girl's sports teams. Perhaps he's legit--i.e., he really does think he was born in the wrong body and will eventually undergo the medical procedure. Or maybe he's just pwning us, or just trying to get on a varsity sports team, or something less honorable than that. Either way, he devalues the travails of real transgender people, such as the two women of my acquaintance.

My basic disagreement with the Woke left is that I don't believe gender roles are fluid. For almost all of us sex and gender are fixed at birth. For a very few (<1%), something goes wrong (or at least different) and they really are transgender. But the notion that some kid can switch genders at will--which seems to be the dogma of most Trotskyists these days--is simply wacko. I can't take that seriously, and therefore I can't take the Woke notion of "trans rights" seriously.

Men and women, boys and girls, are different--even from birth. Their bodies and brains are constructed differently. Boys are bigger and stronger; girls have a thicker corpus callosum that connects the two halves of the brain. Boys excel in visuo-spatial skills, i.e. they can throw a ball further and aim it more accurately. Conversely, girls excel in verbal skills. Etc. 

Letting boys play on girls' sports teams is just unfair, and therefore trans people are going to be left out. I'm sorry--as I said, the problem is intractable. But bathroom rules can be very simple: if you have a penis, you need to use the boys' bathroom. If you don't have a penis--either you weren't born with one or you've had surgery--then you may use the girls' bathroom.

I think a large majority of the world's population agrees with me, and the Woke effort to radically remake gender roles is doomed to failure.

If Mr. Brain and Ms. Cozzarelli articulately represent the Democratic Left, then the The Militant's Terry Evans is similarly adept at arguing for the Republican Right. It's odd that they both identify as "Trotskyists," at least in some loose sense of the term. They both agree on what the end outcome should be: we need a mass labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans, and the working class eventually needs to take state power.

Mr. Evans insists that blue collar white people are members of the working class. Our friends from Left Voice suggest that white folks can be workers only if they're grad students or somehow otherwise associated with the academic left. You need a graduate degree to not be a racist.

Mr. Evans' lede paragraph, in my opinion, represents an accurate description of Left Voice's authors.

The 2021 elections registered a sharp rejection of the anti-working-class politics of the liberal and middle-class socialist wing of the Democratic Party by workers and farmers across the country. From “defund the cops” referendums in Minneapolis and Seattle to the election results nationwide, candidates reflecting these views went down to defeat, taking other Democrats with them.

Regarding defunding the police, Mr. Evans quotes a fellow comrade this way: 

“What is of great concern to workers, however, is anti-social violence within working-class communities. In addition to the immediate consequences for those affected, it saps workers’ confidence and tears at social solidarity,” Nelson said. “The rulers’ cops and courts are aimed against us, but it is far better to live under their rule of law than without it, where warlords, gangs and vigilantes fill the gap. ..."

I've expressed a similar point of view, and still assert that our Left Voice friends unwittingly want to deny Black citizens access to the 911 emergency system. This is a shameful position.

The true home for working class Americans of all races--as opposed to the top 10% and the lumpen intelligentsia--is the Republican Party.

Further Reading:

• The Fourth International--Trotskyist Faction Tried to Ruin my Breakfast
• Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"

The Lumpens Hate Eric Adams

Eric Adams (source)

Eric Adams, likely New York City's next mayor, just won the Democratic Party nomination after a kludgy, ranked-voting, election. At the end, Mr. Adams won by 8,426 votes--but he would have had a larger margin were the votes counted as in a normal election.

Left Voice (LV), the publication representing a loose collective of NYC college professors and their groupies, is so far the only blog on my Beat to say anything about the election. The article, Eric Adams is a Cop and a Zionist, was penned by Tatiana Cozzarelli.

Because of his tough on crime campaign, Mr. Adams carried the vote in all boroughs except Manhattan. The NY Post reports that "Inhabitants of lower-income, high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods turned out for Adams in huge numbers, up to 70 percent of votes." Working-class Black voters turned out for Mr. Adams in droves, presumably because they are far disproportionately victims of crime. 

He spent 22 years as a member of the NYPD, retiring at the rank of Captain. So on the first charge Ms. Cozzarelli is correct--the man is a cop, or at least a retired one. Though he's not oblivious to police brutality, noting that he and his brother were beaten up by a couple of racist cops when he was 15 years old. He says that experience convinced him to join the police force. He was obviously really good at his job--only 1% of the force gets to be a Captain.

None of this was a secret--everybody who voted for him knew he'd been a cop. They voted for him precisely because of that experience--crime is out of control in Black and Hispanic working class districts. Murders, or course, are the worst, but fortunately are relatively rare (and NYC has a comparatively low murder rate). More common and corrosive are property crimes, destroying livelihoods and opportunities. Stores close because of robberies and shoplifting. The shops that remain have to raise their prices to cover the cost. The victims are working class and elderly people who lose their possessions and jobs, and have to travel outside of the neighborhood to go shopping. Of course they want more cops on the beat.

That's all news to Ms. Cozzarelli, who thinks the fix is in. First, she claims that only 950,000 people voted in the election--which she compares to NYC's population of 8.5 million. Of course many of those people are recent immigrants and not yet citizens, and many others are too young. The relevant number is the 3.8 million folks registered as Democrats--of which 25% went to the polls. That surely is sufficient to represent the will of the public. Anybody who cared, voted. And the people who didn't vote don't count.

Then she claims he was supported by all the wrong people. She writes,

Adams was endorsed by the pro-Trump New York Post, and is strongly pro-charter schools and vocally opposed to laws protecting tenants. And it’s no wonder — he is a wealthy landlord himself, with ties to and funding from real estate developers. Three millionaire hedge fund investors provided almost $2 million into the super PAC backing Adams’s campaign.

Charter schools are very popular in Black and Hispanic communities, who want to get out from under the thumb of the teachers' unions. They want their children to at least be literate and numerate--skills which the public school system no longer provides. For many families, structure and order in their kids' lives is similarly important. Ms. Cozzarelli's blind allegiance to the teachers' union reflects her own self-interest--not the opinion of voters.

She attributes the union support only to the bureaucrats--forgetting that many union members (largely public employees) live in high-crime neighborhoods and need more police support.

Then she obviously believes Black voters are really, really stupid. From her account, the only reason Black folks voted for Mr. Adams is because some hedge fund bozos contributed $2 million to his campaign effort. So yeah--all that money got the word out that he's a retired cop, will be tough on crime, and supports charter schools. There is nothing shocking about that.

Ms. Cozzarelli apparently thinks that Black folks--by a large majority honest and upstanding citizens--should not be entitled to 911 services. This is pathetic.

Finally, she writes

Further, Adams is a proud Zionist and has said that he would like to retire in the occupied territories in the Golan Heights. Like many of the city’s top cops, he’s traveled to Israel twice, seeking to nurture the already-cozy relationship between the NYPD and the Zionist occupation forces. He put out a strong statement in support of Israel last month, as the Zionist state murdered Palestinians, saying, “Today on Yom Yerushalayim, Israel came under attack from Hamas-fired rockets in Gaza. Israelis live under the constant threat of terrorism and war and New York City’s bond with Israel remains unbreakable. I stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel at this time of crisis.”

Mr. Adams later walked back moving to the Golan Heights, saying he was joking, but he stands by the rest of his statement. Of course this is politically expedient--Jews make up 13% of NYC's population. An antisemite isn't going to win their vote.

And that's the problem with Left Voice and much of the progressive Left--they're antisemitic. My working definition of antisemitism is anybody who supports Hamas--an avowedly antisemitic organization dedicated to Jew hatred. Mr. Adams' enthusiastic endorsement of Israel--while nice from my point of view--wouldn't be necessary to earn my support. All he would have to do is repudiate Hamas.

So who is this Tatiana Cozzarelli who writes such gibberish? The question is important because Marxists put weight on a "class analysis", of which a person's "origins" are important. For whatever reason, Left Voice has scrubbed the brief biographies of their contributors from their webpage. But Google helps, and from this site I recovered what I believe used to be there:

Tatiana Cozzarelli is a former middle school teacher and current Urban Education PhD student at CUNY.

It turns out that she graduated from Swarthmore in 2008, and taught middle school for a few years at a private school (charter school?) in Rhode Island before going to grad school. This establishes her as a card-carrying member of the lumpen proletariat. Here is the Communist Party's definition of the term.

LUMPENPROLETARIAT - German for "rag proletariat." Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them "most radical" because they are "most exploited," but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle. 

Much of this doesn't apply to Ms. Cozzarelli, but the phrase makes no positive contribution to an economy certainly does. Grad school is a waste of time for almost anybody--and grad study in "Urban Education" is a total loss. Any job she ever gets will come at taxpayers' expense. She will never provide any service that people are voluntarily willing to pay for. The derogatory name for somebody like her is welfare queen. A more piquant term is lumpen intelligentsia.

Here she is--already in her mid-thirties--wasting her time and our money, faking it as a scholar while engaging in "more radical" political activism, which goal is to impoverish the lives of honest working people around the globe. She merely wants to defund the police so that law enforcement can be turned over to "community organizations" like street gangs and drug dealers, who will then be more effective in ripping off poor people. 

Look--I'm petty bourgeois from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. But at least I know where the class line is. I understand that the true party of the working class is the Republican Party. And absent that, they vote for Eric Adams. 

Further Reading:

• Elise Stefanik
• Amazon Defeats the Union
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

The June 21st Militant

The June 21st issue (pdf) of The Militant gets two things wrong and one thing right--which together makes for an interesting read. (The Militant is published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP.)

A front page article by Terry Evans entitled Working people worldwide look to fight effects of rising prices leads with this howler.

Food prices and the cost of other necessities for working people are soaring worldwide, highlighting the urgent need for workers to join together to fight for jobs, higher wages and automatic cost-of-living adjustments on our wages and retirement pay. Millions face hunger, especially in the semicolonial world, because under capitalism food is produced and marketed solely to generate the highest profits for the employing class, not to meet the needs of humanity.

The last sentence is completely wrong--of course food is grown to meet the needs of humanity. Otherwise there would be no market for the stuff and the capitalists wouldn't make any money. Capitalists (aka farmers) want to sell as much food as they can to the largest number of people. There is no way that farmers are purposely causing world hunger.

But Mr. Evans is correct that world food prices are rising. That's because there is a global shortage of food, forcing the market price higher. I surmise that shortage is because of China, which is not self-sufficient in food and has had a bad crop year (flooding, swine flu). If you believe Peter Zeihan, China no longer has the workforce necessary to engage in the labor-intensive gardening that maximizes yield per acre, but instead has been forced to mechanize, reducing yields.

The financial fixes Mr. Evans lists will not increase the amount of food available. It will just distort the market and render food distribution inefficient.

He also writes,

In 2020 some 155 million people faced what the U.N. World Food Program euphemistically calls “food insecurity,” a rise of 20 million over the previous year.

This is astonishingly good news! Of a global population of nearly eight billion, fewer than 2% are food insecure. A generation or two ago that number would have been closer to 50%. So much for the notion that capitalism increases poverty. The suggestion that Mr. Evans and his ilk are gonna devise a more efficient method of food distribution is gonzo.

The photo accompanying Mr. Evans' article (below) shows some relatively well-fed Yemenis protesting high food prices. Note that Yemen is in the middle of a brutal civil war--a problem that has nothing to do with global food production or distribution.

(Source)

In a campaign statement by Joanne Kuniansky headlined Fight for workers control of production!, she claims (emphasis mine),

Under capitalist rule, production is organized with no concern for workers’ lives or limbs, on the job or for others living nearby, nor for the soil, air and water being fouled by pollution.

As written, this is just wrong. Of course capitalists have some concern for the welfare of their workers, for otherwise they would all quit or go on strike. More--capitalists are human beings, too, and share the moral and fairness impulses we all have. If she'd phrased it less strongly--too little concern or insufficient concern--then the case is arguable. But in today's environment, with labor shortages looming, especially for skilled labor, it behooves the capitalist to be extra solicitous of his employees' well-being.

Life is full of trade-offs. Any mining or manufacturing activity will incur some risks--both to workers and to the environment. Unlike what Ms. Kuniansky claims, it is impossible to eliminate that risk--only to reduce it at a higher cost. The cost the capitalist is willing to pay depends much more on the consumer than on the capitalist--for if the costs of safety are too high, then high prices make the market too small to justify the enterprise. So workers are more in conflict with consumers than with their bosses--which is why workers' control of production won't solve anything.

One has to note that labor and environmental protections in socialist societies (e.g., former Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela) are awful. It's much better to be a worker in the United States.

An article by Mary Martin, entitled The working-class road forward in tackling crime and cop violence, tries to split the difference between Trotskyist boilerplate and reality. The boilerplate quotes SWP Minneapolis mayoral candidate Doug Nelson:

“Crime is defined by the capitalist rulers to maintain their power and privileges,” Nelson said. “Their laws and the way they’re enforced are designed to keep workers in line and to brand substantial layers of us as criminals, particularly those who are Black or from other oppressed nationalities. To the bosses and landlords in power, all workers are viewed as potentially dangerous. ..."

And this is at least partly true. No doubt the police exist to defend the status quo, which certainly includes capitalist property relations. But it's a stretch to suggest that laws are arbitrary artifacts designed for capitalist convenience--crimes such as murder, theft, and rape have been forbidden since the Ten Commandments, and are fundamental for any society, not just a capitalist one. The last quoted sentence is surely an exaggeration--capitalists are more likely to feel threatened by other capitalists or politicians rather than workers. It is standard Trotsky-talk to claim that cops are always and only agents of the bourgeoisie, and that's precisely what this paragraph claims. 

But the rest of Mr. Nelson's statement belies that narrow view. He says,

“What is of great concern to workers, however, is anti-social violence within working-class communities,” he said. “In addition to the immediate consequences for those affected, it breeds fear and demoralization; it saps workers’ confidence and tears at social solidarity. This in turn feeds into more anti-social behavior and spreads the infection of capitalist dog-eat-dog morality. The rulers’ cops and courts are aimed against us, but it is far better to live under their rule of law than without it, where warlords, gangs and vigilantes fill the gap.

“One of the obvious factors in the recent rise in violent crime has been the systematic withdrawal of police in certain working-class neighborhoods, particularly those with the highest crime rates,” Nelson said. “The effect was no surprise to anyone, least of all the government officials who organized it as part of the rulers’ political responses to the broad popular demonstrations that exploded across the country following the death of Floyd, as well as the unpopular and anti-social rioting and looting. They decided to sacrifice some beat cops responsible for Floyd’s death, and to have the police pull back from many of our communities. ..."

This is reality speaking: the only real alternative to a police force (what the Constitution refers to as a "well-formed militia") is a Hobbesian world of all against all. That's what life is like in today's Yemen, where there really are food shortages. So The Militant, true to its masthead, understands that working people need protection from criminals--as much or even more than folks in wealthier communities. Those who will withdraw the cops from poor neighborhoods are acting as agents for street gangs and the lumpen proletariat.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party represents all lumpens--both the lumpen proletariat and the closely aligned lumpen intelligentsia. On the other hand, a newspaper that claims to speak in the interests of working people has to realize that Black citizens (95% of whom are honest, upstanding, hardworking people) deserve to have their 911 calls answered.

So I'm down with The Militant on this one. I only wish that they'd drop all the silly Trotsky-talk.

Further Reading:

• Has the SWP Moved Right? Or the Republicans Left?
• Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

Is Jeff Mackler a Racist?

Jeff Mackler writes a long article (3000+ words) published in the July print edition of Socialist Action, entitled U.S. Fight Against Racism and Repression Reaches New Heights (pdf). Despite Mr. Mackler being a talented writer, it's one of those that I've read so that you don't have to. Frankly, it's boring.

Setting the tone, in the lead paragraph he writes,

Unprecedented, multi-racial, daily mobilizations against the ingrained institutional racism that permeates every aspect U.S. society have exploded in scope and intensity. Recent surveys estimate that 15 million to 26 million Americans have taken part in the widespread demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd. They continue to this day.

The exaggerations are stunning. Taking the obvious first--that 15 to 26 million people have participated in the protests--my back-of-the envelope calculation comes to about 600,000 demonstrators. Perhaps that's a low estimate--multiply by two or three if you want--but Mr. Mackler's is 25 times bigger--in other words, just way out of line.

Then he says the demonstrations were over the murder of George Floyd. That's rather like protesting child abuse--everybody is against it. Everybody from across the political spectrum--from Steve Bannon to Jeff Mackler--agrees that Mr. Floyd was murdered, and that his killer should be brought to justice. Even the police unions--who almost always stand up for cops no matter what they do--agree that he was murdered! So I don't know who the demonstrators are protesting against.

Even Mr. Mackler indirectly admits that the fuss was not about George Floyd's murder, which by all accounts was a once-off crime committed by a rogue cop. But in his view it is symptomatic of "ingrained institutional racism that permeates every aspect [of] US society." He offers some statistics revealing the depth of the problem.

About 63 percent of those shot and killed by police in Minneapolis between 2000 and 2017 – 19 people – were Black, while only 17 percent – 5 people – were white.

So--to fill in the missing data--over a 17 year period 30 people were shot and killed by police in Minneapolis. That's less than two per year--police shootings are not a major cause of death in Minneapolis or the country. Most of those shootings were justified in the sense that the police's mandate to protect public safety sometimes requires them to use force.

On the basis of this small, statistically meaningless dataset, Mr. Mackler infers a giant racist conspiracy. He offers no other evidence.

Though it is true that Blacks are stopped, arrested and prosecuted at a rate exceeding their fraction of the population. Mr. Mackler will attribute that to "racism." Like most Republicans, I think it's because of higher crime in Black communities, as illustrated here.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Though the reasons for higher crime might in part be racism, surely the actual causes are far more complicated than that. Racism is likely only a minor contributor.

Which is not to say there aren't any problems with the police. The police department in Ferguson, MO, for example, was running an extortion racket. The Black residents of that city had every right to be upset--though burning down stores in your own neighborhood is not an especially helpful tactic. Likewise, a Black woman from Minneapolis interviewed on Fox News was all in favor of the police, but she wished they better represented the neighborhood. According to her most cops didn't even live in Minneapolis, and no matter how good their intentions they didn't really understand what was going on.

While there is certainly room for improvement, polls show that Black people do not support defunding the police. This recent Gallup poll  reports that 81% of Black citizens want the police present in their community. This makes sense--like the rest of us, Black people are civilized and want to live in a civilized world.

Here is what Mr. Mackler proposes instead of the police:

The right of Black, Brown and Native American people to control and govern their own lives and communities, free from white racist police brutality and corporate exploitation, can only begin with a fundamental change in relations of power. The struggle to disarm, defund, and disband the racist institutions of police power begins with the emergence of new organs of democratic control of the communities of the oppressed themselves.

Civil order requires a "well-regulated militia" (as the 2nd Amendment puts it). Today we call that the police department, and it has a monopoly on violence in civil settings. Well-regulated means subject to civilian and ultimately democratic authority, for otherwise it becomes just another street gang (which is always a threat, see, e.g., Ferguson).

Absent the police, chaos ensues. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of a well-regulated police department, one gets only street gangs. We can call this the Mogadishu solution, in honor of the city which, for the past several decades, has been unable to field a well-regulated militia.

Mr. Mackler definitely has "Trump" on the brain. Indeed, I think The Donald has built a golf course inside his head. The president is mentioned 19 times in the article. Some examples:

"...the posturing, chin up egomaniac President Trump..."
"...the racist bigot President Trump..."
"...fearful, bragging bigot Trump and his family..."

One concludes that Mr. Mackler doesn't like Trump very much, but aside from name-calling he presents no evidence that the man is especially racist. By comparison, George Floyd only earns four mentions.

Nevertheless, let's take Mr. Mackler seriously and take an example of what he would call "racism." Let's consider Chicago--a city I know well, and where my son currently lives. Chicago is really two cities in one--on the North Side it is a wealthy, global, cosmopolitan place--a slightly smaller version of Manhattan or San Francisco. On the South and West Sides it's a mostly Black, very poor, third world city.

My son is part of the global city. He earns six figures working in IT for a major financial institution. His salary is so high because people with his skill set are scarce as hen's teeth and there's a bidding war for his services. The man is entirely self-taught--he never got any formal education in IT--in fact he never attended college at all. Instead he worked toward certifications demonstrating the necessary technical skills. Anybody can do that--there are no admission's criteria, no interviews, nobody cares what race you are, nobody cares where you live or how old you are. Indeed, the certifying companies are often not located in the US.

Get one of these certificates and you will almost certainly get a job--the market is that tight. You'll have to start at the bottom, earning only $80K annually, but after a couple years experience you too will be in the top 10%.

Of course easier said than done. My son worked hard studying for the exams, and then often didn't pass the first time he took them (or even the second time).

So why can't people on the South Side of Chicago do the same? I admit--this is a variant of Hillary's advice to coal miners--that they should all learn to code. And certainly only a minority of South Siders could do what my son did, who is himself only among a small minority of his high school classmates. That said, the number of South Siders working in high-skilled IT professions for major financial institutions borders on zero. Why?

It certainly isn't Trump's fault. Even if the man were a racist, the problem is long-standing and predates him by decades. It's also not the banks' fault--they'd love to hire skilled African-Americans. I actually don't think it's any individual's fault, but if I were to blame one person, that would be Jeff Mackler.

Because my son had the advantage of an at least decent public high school education (nothing fancy--he grew up in small-town Indiana). The Chicago Public Schools, meanwhile, are execrable--basically glorified babysitting clubs. This is substantially the fault of the teachers' unions--who run the schools primarily for the convenience of the teachers and not for the students.

Jeff Mackler is a retired teachers' union hack. So if you gotta blame somebody, he's as good a fall guy as anybody--much better than Trump.

The unions blame parents and the community for their pupils' poor performance. They perennially claim they don't have enough money, despite the fact that Illinois spends $14,000 per student per year. Effectively, the unions believe that South Side children are ineducable. In other words, the unions--including Mr. Mackler--are racist.

You can't get any IT certifications if you're illiterate and innumerate, thus excluding most graduates of the Chicago Public School system.

The looters--who Mr. Mackler claims were only a "small percentage" of the protesters--destroyed Walmart stores, including those at 83rd St. just off the Dan Ryan Expressway, and in Austin on the West Side. Walmart--as an act of charity--promises to reopen the unprofitable stores. People do, after all, need to get their groceries and medicines. The city committed to help.

Ensuring competent police protection seems like the least they could do.

Further Reading:

• Who Are The Police?
• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade and China
• Unionizing Hotels

Who Are The Police?

The Trotskyist boilerplate is that the police are agents of the state, which in turn exists to serve the ruling class--the bourgeoisie. John Leslie made that case back in 2017 in an article recently reposted in Socialist Action (around June 1, 2020) in light of the Minneapolis events. He writes

The state does not exist to “reconcile” the interests of the various classes; The state exists for the subjugation of workers and oppressed people by the dominant, or ruling, class. This is expressed in the formation of police, the army, prisons, and other instruments of coercion aimed at keeping working people in line.

At some level this is obviously true. The police certainly are agents of the state, and whether or not the state exists expressly to defend the bourgeoisie, it certainly exists to defend the status quo. Given that the status quo benefits the bourgeoisie first and foremost, perhaps this is a distinction without a difference.

But the distinction does make a difference, for lots of people have a vested interest in the status quo. Any retiree (myself included) definitely depends on the social security checks coming in. Anybody who's bought a house assumes their property rights will be protected. An employee counts on the state to enforce contracts regarding pay and benefits. We all assume that a dollar bill will be worth something tomorrow--and not just tomorrow but thirty years from now--an assumption that depends on the indefinite duration of the status quo. Any serious disruption in any of these institutional arrangements will not likely auger in a better world, but rather the complete collapse of civilization. See, e.g., Venezuela.

It's not that Mr. Leslie is wrong--the police do, above all, defend the bourgeoisie. But they defend almost everybody else, too, and somehow he misses that.

This is illustrated most poignantly by an elderly Black woman living on social security in Minneapolis. She--interviewed by Fox News--was in tears: the grocery store, Target store, and the Dollar General in her neighborhood had all been looted and burned. The buses weren't running and she didn't have car. How was she supposed to buy food and necessities? Where were the police when she really needed them?

But, according to Mr. Leslie, she should be grateful. For the cops have a rap sheet a mile long that disqualifies them from stopping looters and arsonists in Minnesota. A partial list (my comments in italics):

• "The origins of police in the U.S., especially in the South, can be partially traced to the slave patrols formed to catch runaway slaves." The police are mentioned in the 2nd amendment to the Constitution, where they're called a "well-formed militia."
• "In Italy and Germany, during the rise of fascist movements, there was cooperation between police and fascist groups." I'm sure that comforts the lady from Minneapolis.
• "...in Houston, in the 1970s, it was estimated that as many as 40% of the police department were members of the KKK." This is likely not true, and Mr. Leslie cites no reference. Either way, why should Ms. Minneapolis have to go without groceries?
• The racist attitudes of the Philadelphia police department culminated in the May 1985 bombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue. ...Rather than use the fire department to extinguish the fire, the decision was made to “let the fire burn” ultimately destroying 61 homes, leaving 250 people homeless, and killing 11 members of the MOVE organization, including five children. This is at least half the truth--I don't know the other half. Mr. Leslie's implication is that cops always and everywhere behave that badly, which is obviously not true.

You get the idea--Mr. Leslie strings together random charges of malfeasance, not all of which are true and none of which reflect the true role of a police department. For every extreme, alt-right racist on the force, there's another guilty white liberal, or Black man trying to improve his own community.

Yet it is seemingly true that the police disproportionately target Black people. Isn't this on its face racism? The answer is no, as this data indicates.

Number of murder victims in the United States in 2018, by race/ethnicity and gender

(excerpts)

	Total	Male	Female
Total	14,123	10,914	3,180
White	6,088	4,255	1,832
Black	7,407	6,237	1,168

Three premises: 1) Blacks are 13% of the population; 2) Homicide counts are pretty accurate since it's hard to hide a corpse, unlike, say, robberies, which often go unreported. 3) Blacks are overwhelmingly murdered by other Blacks, and whites are overwhelmingly murdered by other whites. Therefore the race of the victims (given in the chart) is a very good proxy for the race of the perpetrators.

Note that there were more Black victims than white victims--though for females that isn't true. But using the "total" values, and assuming a perfect relationship between race of victim and perpetrator, one gets that Blacks commit 52% of all murders, or a bit over four times their ratio in the population. (Hispanics are victims in about 15% of murders--roughly in proportion to their population.)

So the cops are not being irrational. It is obvious that Blacks are picked on because they're more likely to commit crimes. Scenes from Baltimore's Westside and Chicago's Englewood neighborhoods support the conclusion. Therefore the anecdotes Mr. Leslie presents are not evidence of "systemic racism" (at least not by police) but rather precisely the opposite--namely an effort by the police to stop crime that hugely and disproportionately victimizes the majority of Black people who are not criminals.

Attentive readers will recall that I claimed the police "defended almost everybody else," in addition to the bourgeoisie. Who is excluded by that almost qualifier?

It's certainly not the proletariat--or more precisely, the lower middle class--people including the Minneapolis retiree. People who work at Target or the grocery store or Dollar General have no interest in being unemployed. Even people who don't work there shop there--and especially for poor people it's difficult and expensive for them to travel far to other neighborhoods. None of these folks benefit from looting and burning their own stores.

Neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat benefit from looting and burning--the police are supposed to protect them all. The only people who come out ahead are the lumpen proletariat. They have no money and can't go shopping. They have no jobs--certainly not at Target or Dollar General. So for them--and them only--it's all just free stuff, celebrated by having a big party. No wonder they demand "Defund the Police!"

Wikipedia defines lumpen proletariat this way (emphases mine):

Lumpen proletariat is a term used primarily by Marxist theorists to describe the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, they used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed its revolutionary potential and contrasted it with the proletariat.

So there you have it: Mr. Leslie champions (or at least passively condones) looting of stores by "reactionary" and "counter-revolutionary" forces. What a guy!

And he calls himself a revolutionary.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect and the More Poverty Solution
• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge

Sex and the Alpha Male

What the mainstream media has to say about the slew of sexual harassment scandals is silly. In their telling women have finally had the "courage" to call out "unacceptable" behavior on the part of "men." We are now at a turning point, they claim, where the male psyche has been sufficiently tamed such that we stand on the precipice of a different world.

Hogwash! "Courage" is not a new attribute among women, but rather a function of new media. It's easy to be courageous in an era of Facebook, Twitter, and cell phone cameras. In an earlier day the best you could do is go to the New York Times and plead for coverage (which mostly didn't happen). Nor has the male psyche changed--it's just that any expectation of privacy is now non-existent. Whatever they do is likely to become public, much to the embarrassment of Alphas who preferred their failed efforts at conquest remained secret.

The world will adjust, and not by a decrease in sexual hijinks. Instead the constant scandals will wear on the public, they'll tire of them, and soon enough tune them out. This, too, shall pass.

The most perceptive post on the kerfuffle that I have read so far surprisingly comes from a music professor. Kristi Brown-Montesano (B-M) is on the faculty at Colburn Conservatory of Music, has authored a book entitled The Women of Mozart's Operas, and pens a piece entitled Holding Don Giovanni Accountable.* (h/t Tyler Cowen)

The opera revolves around three women, two aristocrats and a peasant girl. Donna Elvira is in love with Don Giovanni and feels betrayed by his infidelity. Donna Anna was either raped or seduced by him. Her father came to defend her honor and was murdered by Don Giovanni. Finally, Zerlina was also raped or seduced by the Don.

Professor B-M is convinced that rape is the appropriate descriptor in the latter two cases. Maybe. Though if I were Mr. Giovanni's defense attorney I could at least raise reasonable doubt.

For starters, rape isn't really an operatic subject, while seduction certainly is. If my client were intent on simply forcing himself on Zerlina, why did he sing her such a beautiful aria beforehand (Là ci darem la mano)? To which her reply was roughly I want to, but I shouldn't.

She eventually succumbs, after which she is deeply ashamed. She goes to her fiance begging forgiveness with what I think is the most beautiful aria in the whole opera (Batti, batti, o bel Masetto). Forgiveness is soon granted.

The professor has a stronger argument in the other case. According to Donna Anna (echoed by Lepporello), Giovanni sneaked into her bedroom and raped her, after which he murdered her father. We don't know for certain what happened--the events occurred off-stage before the opera even begins.

Donna Anna loudly proclaims her victimhood, and feels not ashamed but rather humiliated. Instead of seeking forgiveness, she goes to her hopelessly feckless boyfriend--Don Ottavio, a Beta male if there ever was one--and demands that he avenge the crime. He comically touts his pathetically unsuccessful efforts to redeem her honor.

And maybe a crime it was. But why? Giovanni is obviously very successful with the ladies and doesn't really need to force himself on anybody. She, meanwhile, has every reason to lie about it. That's my lawyerly response, and maybe it's true.

Were I producing Don Giovanni, I'd cast Anita Hill as Donna Elvira. She always struck me as the woman scorned, and had she become the Mrs. Clarence Thomas we'd never have heard another word from her.

Monica Lewinsky will get Zerlina's role, an innocent seduced by a charming man. She never claimed otherwise, and I don't recall her ever saying a bad word about Bill Clinton. Like Zerlina, all she sought from the public was forgiveness, which she never received. We were too mean-spirited.

Finally, I'd assign Juanita Broaddrick the role of Donna Anna. She claims she was raped by Bill Clinton, and perhaps that's true. Again, though, why? Rape is usually the last resort of low-status males who can't get it any other way. Bill certainly doesn't fall into that category--why would he force himself on somebody when there were any number of others eager for the privilege? So I don't believe her, just as I don't believe Donna Anna.

Mozart's opera is about a male predator and not a female manipulator (for that, listen to Bizet's Carmen). Women have a career option not open to most men--they can spread their legs in return for promotion. When men offer that bargain it is considered a fireable offense. But surely as often as not the offer comes from the woman. In the current environment the man is damned if he accepts her offer and damned if he doesn't. It's always his fault, no matter what the circumstances. That's what makes it an unfair witch-hunt.

So we need some rules about sex in the workplace. It's just that I don't know what they should be. Perhaps we should go by the Mike Pence standard: no man should ever be alone with a woman not his wife? That would end sexual harassment, albeit at the cost of putting the kibosh on most women's careers. Though we're headed toward a rule like that on college campuses.

Or perhaps it's a prohibition against sex in the workplace? My former campus recently instituted something very similar to that. I'm not opposed to it, but it has to be enforced against both genders--not just men.

I can tell you what the solution is not: the females in Congress want all men to behave like Don Ottavio--cowardly, weak, ineffectual. Alpha males are supposed to sacrifice their Alpha-ness and become wallpaper. It won't happen, and surely we don't want it to happen. What a boring world!

So I think (based only on what I know, which may not be enough) that Al Franken has done nothing to deserve losing his Senate seat. The Democratic women are stupid. John Conyers is on the bubble, but he's so old he should probably retire anyway. Donald Trump behaved in precisely the way you'd expect Donald to behave, and as far as I can tell has done nothing worse than Al Franken. He should not be impeached for sexual misconduct (or for any other reason).

Roy Moore's transgressions are much worse and if true are literally criminal. Though they happened a very long time ago. I surely wish that Luther Strange had won the primary. The fact that the allegations were made public only after the primary speaks to the dishonesty of Alabama Democrats, and also is a reason to doubt the whole story.

Still, I wish the guy would just disappear. Having said that (were I an Alabaman) I'd vote for him. He's a bastard, but he's our bastard.

The final scene in Don Giovanni is like the ending to a cheap, dance-hall rom-com. It's a we all lived happily ever after epilogue. The Human Comedy is indeed just that: a comedy. Complicated humans will rarely interact in straightforward, good/evil ways, especially when it comes to sex.

Shit happens. Get over it. Get a life. Enjoy the passing scene.

* Don Giovanni is an opera by Mozart about an aristocratic playboy (also known as Don Juan) whose mission in life is to f**k as many women as possible. A short synopsis of the plot is here.

Further Reading:

• Women are from Venus; Trotskyists are from Pluto
• Beware The Amazons
• Dorothy Day

Book Review: Popper's Bitcoin Book

Nathaniel Popper is the author of Digital Gold, an account of the short history of bitcoin. Bitcoin is a digital currency invented by "Satoshi Nakamoto," and released to the world in 2009.

The book is advertised as a business book, and no doubt some legitimate fortunes have been made and lost. A few of the characters are, indeed, entrepreneurs in the spirit of Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, or Aubrey McClendon. The name Wences Casares, the Patagonian founder of Xapo, comes to mind, though (apart from Satoshi himself) no bitcoiners rise to the rank of genius that one associates with those other giants of industry.

But two other less creditable strands are prominent, especially in the early years. First is a kind of crackpot libertarianism--a cross between Ron Paul and Occupy Wall Street. It's a paranoid world view that posits some grand conspiracy theory between the government, big business, and the Federal Reserve, among others. These are people for whom the dollar bill is an infringement on liberty, and the main object of activism is to protect one's privacy from the prying eye of government. Roger Ver, a longtime champion of bitcoin, who served time for illegally selling explosives and has renounced his US citizenship, is representative.

The second strand is outright criminality. The biggest use for bitcoin, even today, is buying and selling illegal drugs. The founder of the trade was a poor fellow named Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts. Along with belonging to the kooky Libertarian club, he also grew mushrooms in his basement and wanted to sell them. Apart from hawking them on a street corner, a bitcoin-enabled internet storefront looked to be a golden opportunity. And so Silk Road was born--the internet marketplace run along the principles of Amazon.com, but that used bitcoin as a cheap, relatively anonymous way to transfer money.

For this Mr. Ulbricht is now serving a life sentence without parole, a punishment which many (perhaps including me) think is excessive.

Other people got caught up in Silk Road, including an early bitcoin entrepreneur named Charlie Shrem. A born salesman and a natural champion for the new technology, he ran the first currency exchange facilitating bitcoin purchases. While great at raising capital, he wasn't a particularly good manager and had no interest at all in regulations surrounding financial transactions. So, despite likely having no criminal intent, he is now spending two years in the federal pen--a sentence that is surely unduly harsh.

And then there is Mark Karpeles, the French dude who bought Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, building it into the premier trading platform for bitcoin. Unfortunately his bookkeeping was not up to the challenge, and in 2014 Mr. Karpeles revealed that somehow the company had "lost" 750,000 bitcoins, worth as much as $500 million. That story is complicated (I don't think it is completely told in Mr. Popper's book), and some of the money has been recovered. Nevertheless, Mr. Karpeles is now charged with embezzlement.

Despite this, surprisingly bitcoin is still around. There are four reasons for its continued existence. First, successors to Silk Road have proliferated, and the technology remains today the best way to buy and sell contraband. This remains the biggest use for the currency and guarantees a market. Second, honest, non-ideological entrepreneurs have entered the market, of which Wences Casares is a preeminent example. He is looking for legitimate markets, and indeed, bitcoin is now popular in places where banks are unreliable, e.g., Mr. Casares' native Argentina.

Third, the dreaded establishment has latched on to bitcoin. Every major bank now has a research program on the technology. The blockchain (bitcoin) algorithm can be used to trade any number of things cheaply, e.g., stocks, bonds, and real estate. Blythe Masters, the lady wunderkind working for JP Morgan, actively disowns bitcoin currency, but is using the blockchain to trade derivatives. (Ms. Masters does not appear in Mr. Popper's book, but she is the first woman to play a significant role in any of the business books I have read.)

And finally, even the evil government is beginning to take notice. Much to the Libertarians' dismay, the gnomes at the Fed and the IRS have realized that bitcoin is not like cash. The latter is truly anonymous and can be used to evade taxes, among other things. Bitcoin is precisely not anonymous, but merely pseudonymous. Indeed, all transactions are a public record, just waiting for the police to figure out who hides behind the pseudonyms. That's how Mr. Ulbricht got caught.

So now some paranoid people are suggesting that the Fed wants to eliminate cash altogether and replace it with bitcoin or some similar system.

So what do Trotskyists think about bitcoin? I have absolutely no clue. My guess is that few of the papers on my Beat would know the difference between a blockchain and a cement block. If you're stuck in a 19th Century timewarp, then new technology becomes a mystery.

As for me, I'm cautiously optimistic about bitcoin. I took Mr. Casares' advice, which I paraphrase from memory here:  

Buy four bitcoins, which today costs about $1000. There's a good chance that you'll lose all your money--that the price of bitcoin will fall to zero. But there's also a chance that bitcoin will eventually be worth $1 million.

Paypal has about 200 million users in the world, and everybody acknowledges that Paypal is a success. But you need a credit card to use it, and only one billion of the world's population has a credit card. Bitcoin, on the other hand, only requires having a cell phone. Six billion people have a cell phone. So bitcoin has a much larger potential market than Paypal.

Today bitcoin has 13 million users. When it has 200 million (like Paypal) it will be a success. 

I bought the bitcoin lottery ticket. The most I can lose is a grand. But I might also become rich.

Further Reading:

• Capitalism Just Won't Sit Still
• Book Review: The Frackers
• Money and Gold