Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

Louis Proyect worries a lot.

There is climate change--a boogeyman that's supposed to destroy civilization within the next 12 years (I guess since the New Year it's now only 11 years). All this because of modest increases in CO2, which despite being only 0.04% of the atmosphere is nevertheless supposed to heat up the world's oceans lickety-split. Recall that the oceans represent 99.9% of global heat capacity--many orders of magnitude more than atmospheric CO2.

Rumors of our imminent demise from climate change are exaggerated way beyond any credible belief.

Then he frets over GMOs, or genetically modified plants that manufacture their own insecticide and thus don't need to be sprayed. While in principle just an improved method for breeding agricultural plants as has been done for millennia, the specific technique has been used since 1983. It saves farmers huge amounts of money in pesticides, along with greatly reducing the quantity of pesticide in the environment from any source. Despite trillions of GMO meals having been served, there is absolutely no evidence of any threat to human or ecological health as a result.

Mr. Proyect's aversion to GMOs is less rational than the fear some people have of measles vaccines. That is, completely irrational.

He worries about fracking. Here he is on more solid ground since the industry clearly has some environmental costs, though they are increasingly under control. But the benefits of fracking are huge, reducing fuel expenses across the entire society. Natural gas just fell below $2/Mbtu. The cost of gas to heat my 1800 sqft house was only $88 this past December, a nearly trivial expense. If you're against poverty and want poor people to be able to heat their homes, then this is really a good thing.

But Mr. Proyect probably agrees with President Obama: that we'd all be better off if all fuels cost three or four times more in the future. What a guy!

Mr. Proyect doesn't like nuclear power, either. He writes 

In his letter urging Bernie Sanders to embrace nuclear power, Phillips assured him that the human costs of Chernobyl were exaggerated. Even though there were likely 4,000 people who would die eventually because of exposure, it was a lot less than Greenpeace and other groups alleged.

The implication is that today's small, completely redesigned, Generation IV, nuclear power plants are just like Chernobyl. Which is like saying a modern Prius is the same as a Model T. With Gen IV, the residual radioactive waste decays in a few hundred years rather than a few billion. Unlike, say, coal ash waste, the volume of generated nuclear waste is very much smaller. It could all be stored in Yucca Mountain with plenty of room to spare. And it emits no CO2 (if that's important to you) or other atmospheric pollutants.

He worries about tourism--especially "mass tourism." He approvingly quotes Richard Smith: 

Take just one: Cruise ships are the fastest growing sector of mass tourism on the planet. But they are by far the most polluting tourist indulgence ever invented: Large ships can burn more than 150 tons of the filthiest diesel bunker fuel per day, spewing out more fumes—and far more toxic fumes—than 5 million cars, polluting entire regions, the whole of southern Europe – and all this to ferry a few thousand boozy passengers about bashing coral reefs. There is just no way this industry can be made sustainable.

This, presumably, is in addition to AOC's effort to ban airplanes--in Mr. Proyect's perfect world nobody will be allowed to travel at all. At least not unless you're exceptionally Woke. Only really Woke, pre-approved, certified people could get a passport. The rest of us will have to make do with three hots and a cot (aka free food and housing).

All for the sake of saving the planet.

Tens of millions (perhaps even hundreds of millions) of people depend on tourism, directly or indirectly, for their livelihood. Of those, some millions earn a living specifically from cruise ships. Mr. Proyect will throw all of these people into abject poverty.

Tourism is one of the most efficient ways of transferring money directly from rich people to poor people. And Mr. Proyect has, as a first order of business, a desire to stop it. What a guy!

Then, of course, he and Mr. Smith have their facts all wrong. Modern cruise ships don't run on oil at all, but instead on liquefied natural gas (cheaper, cleaner, and doesn't spill into the ocean). More, eco-cruises are growing faster than the industry as a whole--e.g., to the Galapagos and Antarctica. These ships, along with their customers, have a strong self-interest in protecting the resource they want tourists to see. If there was ever a lobby to protect the environment, the cruise industry is it.

Finally, Mr. Proyect writes off the people who live along Bangladesh's coast.

Huber certainly feels sorry for some Bangladeshi farmer or fisherman whose life will be destroyed by rising ocean levels but has to question how such struggles could ever have the social power capable of taking on a capitalist class that is responsible for the dispossession and pollution in the first place.  ... For a Yanomami or a Bangladesh farmer or fisherman, the stakes are very high. For a machinist working at Boeing or a Verizon lineman in suburban New Jersey, there are worries about climate change but it doesn’t have the same immediacy as living in a village near the Indian Ocean.

Rich people are able to take care of their environment--that's why America is much cleaner today than it was 50 or 100 years ago--and why the average New Jerseyan doesn't care. Poor people don't have that luxury. Mr. Proyect's solution is to make the rich people poor, which is truly perverse. The best solution is to make the poor people rich.

Perhaps Mr. Proyect has never heard of the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove swamp in the world, located in Bangladesh. Wouldn't part of a realistic solution be to attract more tourists to visit it? People who would buy fish from local fishermen, tours from local guides, handicrafts from local women, and food from local farmers. Plus they'd leave tips. Plus the travel company will have a strong vested interest in preserving the ecosystem.

Nah! That's much too practical. Mr. Proyect is against that. He thinks Bangladeshis should just remain poor forever so that some kooky folks on the Upper East Side can power-trip by banning air travel and cruise ships. What a guy!

I agree with Mr. Proyect that human civilization will come to an end some day--nothing lasts forever. We've been around (as a civilized species) for some 7000 years now, and perhaps we've got a few thousand more to go. I don't know how it ends, but I do know that we're not gonna run out of environment in the next eleven years. Not even in the next millennium. Mr. Proyect needs to get more sleep at night, and stop worrying about silly things.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• The Pro-Poverty Crowd
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

Note: Due to health issues, blogging may be light for the next few months.

Venezuela

Pity the poor petrostate! They have a tough life no matter who is in charge.

Venezuela, which  possesses the world's largest known reserves of oil, is therefore in hock to the global economy for its well-being. Without being able to sell its oil it can't buy the consumer products its citizens demand.

So the disastrous decline of that country is not entirely due to abysmal governance under Chavez and Maduro. Part of it was baked into the cake. Still, other petrostates--Canada and Saudi Arabia come to mind--have fared much better, despite hard times. Chavez and his successors and sycophants have turned a bad situation into a complete and irreversible catastrophe.

Among those sycophants is a fellow by the name of Chris Gilbert, a professor of political science at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela. This institution was founded by President Chavez in 2003 and is open to all Venezuelan citizens (contingent only on having completed high school). This is the "Let them eat college classes" strategy--food, toilet paper, electronics, and just about everything else in the country is in short supply. But never mind--you can still catch the pearls of wisdom from Professor Gilbert's lips for free.

Isn't socialism wonderful?

But even Professor Gilbert is forced to admit that things in the socialist petrostate have not exactly gone swimmingly, as he admits in an article entitled The Chavez Hypothesis: Vicissitudes of a Strategic Project. (h/t Louis Proyect)

Professor Gilbert accuses his fellow Leftists of many strange things. The lede paragraph:

What does Chavism really stand for? What are its main accomplishments and its main failures? What was the soldier-become-president Hugo Chávez trying to achieve, and how far did he go in achieving it? Most often it is taken for granted that Chávez, who was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, began with an anti-neoliberal project that became, with time, anti-imperialist and then later aspired to socialism. It is also usually argued that, unfortunately, Chávez went very little of the way to achieving the latter goal. Chávez’s project suffered, this story goes, because it was only discursively socialist; that is, it proposed socialism as a goal but could not really begin the transition, being unable to go beyond mere discourse to concrete social and economic facts. That being the case, a part of the Left praises the Venezuelan leader for what it sees as an essentially verbal achievement. This group contends that Chávez fulfilled an important task for humanity by merely recovering and promoting the word socialism after the fall of the Eastern bloc. Others, generally from the so-called Hard Left, are more skeptical. They highlight Chávez’s failure to significantly alter the structure of the society or the economy.

The unreality of this paragraph is stunning. It stretches credulity to think that anybody today will think that Chavism "recover[s] and promote[s] the word socialism after the fall of the Eastern bloc." Are there any American Leftists who still believe that the Venezuelan experiment has "fulfilled an important task for humanity"?

The alternative view is similarly detached--that Chavez, while "discursively" socialist, failed to properly implement socialism. This will be the view of my Trotskyist friends in the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Action, who believe that if Mr. Chavez had simply uttered the proper magic words and followed the correct policy as prescribed by a true revolutionary party, then the results would have been much different. As it stands he betrayed the working class.

Professor Gilbert finds both criticisms "impoverished," and that leads to a long critique of the Marxist movement generally. Marxists, he claims, have ignored politics, which the professor describes as a "semiautonomous sphere."

On the procrustean bed of vulgar historical materialism, it generally spreads the Chávez phenomenon between, on the one hand, a mere discourse that is acknowledged to be avant-garde and interesting and, on the other hand, the unaltered hard economic facts. Yet this view leaves out almost entirely the specifically political mediation between these two realms.

And that takes him off on philosophical excursions, commenting on Derrida, Gramsci, and Lenin. Indeed, he attributes to the latter an opinion that is decidedly heretical: "that political consciousness is essentially separate from the economic struggle."

And it is in politics that Chavez apparently excelled. We're informed that he actually wrote books: "Even before taking power, he produced the Libro Azul (1992), the Agenda Alternativa Bolívariana (1996), and La propuesta de Hugo Chávez para transformar Venezuela (1996). This substantial body of writing constitutes less than a third of his output!"

If any of this oeuvre has been translated into English, it doesn't show up on Amazon. Never mind--the fact that Chavez remains mostly unread results from the ur-prejudice against politics by Marxists, and/or blatant Eurocentrism by the rest of us.

Professor Gilbert criticizes people like my Trotskyist friends for not having a strategy to achieve socialism. Simply mouthing words like "revolution" and "vanguard party" is not a strategy--there has to be something more specific than that. He cites Lenin--the man with the plan--as a counter-example borrowing from Lars Lih's biography (which I reviewed here). Whether Lenin had a strategy, or was merely a tactical genius, or was just plain lucky, is to me unclear. Probably a combination of all three.

Chavez's strategy (per Professor Gilbert) revolved around communes:

The Venezuelan commune was conceived as a profoundly democratic territorial organization. Though local, the commune aspired to be part of a future Communal State. The commune was also to be both political and economic, incorporating means of production under a regimen of social property that were projected to assume an important part of national production.

Any beginning student of economics can see why communes must inevitably fail. Unlike a firm, which responds to the market, communes are first and foremost tasked to make their members happy. It seems happiness does not arise from the production of toilet paper--apparently there were no communes in all of Venezuela which saw fit to produce it.

Far be it from me to defend traditional Marxism, and Professor Gilbert's emphasis on politics does have merit. But surely the "procrustean bed of vulgar historical materialism" will eventually raise its ugly head. Our professor barely alludes to that fact, mentioning "oil" only in a single, vaguely parenthetical paragraph. And yet oil is the final nail in Chavez's communal coffin.

In 2012 Mr. Chavez decided to redistribute capital away from the oil companies and give it to the poor. To which, in March, 2013, Mr. Proyect responded:

I’ve always thought that a good way to test the sincerity of anyone who claims to be on the Left is to find out their attitude to Hugo Chávez. Those who try to disavow him tend to be, in general, useless: they want a pure, ideal socialism, not socialism as a real material movement. Chávez wasn’t perfect. In some areas he went too far; in many he didn’t go nearly far enough. Nonetheless the immense good his Bolivarian Revolution has done for the people of Venezuela – and for people across Latin America and the world – is undeniable. What must be remembered, though, is that Hugo Chávez didn’t do any of this alone. His achievements were those of every doctor, teacher, worker, farmer and organiser who worked to improve the lives of those around them. The social movements he helped build and connect will long survive him. Descanse en paz. La lucha sigue.

Mr. Proyect's assessment was spectacularly wrong. Not only did Mr. Chavez make all Venezuelans much poorer, he destroyed their oil industry. Indeed, he has destroyed their country. It will take many generations before Venezuela regains the standard of living that existed prior to President Chavez.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl
• Book Review: Is Socialist Revolution in US Possible?
• Punching Counterpunch

Working on the Railroad

This post is inspired by Guy Miller's reminiscence reprinted (from Counterpunch) in Socialist Viewpoint, entitled Blood on the Tracks. The title is misleading. Despite Mr. Miller's efforts to be angry at capitalists like Warren Buffett, I sense more an overwhelming pride in his profession. This fellow loves the railroads and all they stand for.

I knew Mr. Miller--more an acquaintance than a friend--back in the days when the Chicago branch was at 180 N. Wacker. I vaguely recall a conversation I had with him after he first got a job with the Chicago & Northwestern. I was one of those College Boys who didn't know too much about real work, so he and I didn't have much in common. But I was genuinely curious what railroad guys did all day.

I confess that I underestimated him. I thought his getting a union job was just a political ruse and that eventually he'd get tired of it and go back to college like the rest of us. So I'm pleased to read that he retired 37 years later from the Union Pacific. That actually squares with my impression of him back then. Mr. Miller was a man you could trust.

You don't work for the railroad for 37 years unless you're trustworthy, reliable, and sober. The best thing the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) ever did for me was the drug discipline--its absolute prohibition on using any illegal drugs. No doubt that was true for Mr. Miller as well. Even today, a primary criterion for employment at the Union Pacific is that you be drug-free. How many children of the 60s could meet that standard?

Railroading is not like working in a factory. It's a skilled job that requires close attention. There is little room for error (as the accident at Lac-Megantic, Quebec, illustrates, where 42 people died). Mr. Miller describes it nicely.

You’re given a stack of track bulletins, each one with specific, complicated instructions. Each one of these bulletins can be a question of life and death. In the course of your run you are constantly interacting with dispatchers, train masters, yardmasters, track foremen, control operators, other trains and emergency personnel. Many of these radio conversations require exact wording, and a long ritualized formula: “Engineer on UP7215 East calling foreman Brown in charge of track bulletin 624 issued on September 24, between mile post 281.6 to mile post 285.7, over.” And so on back and forth the exchanges go over and over, with every word repeated exactly.

It's like being an airline pilot.

Or at least it was like being an airline pilot. For as in that profession much of the work is being computerized and automated. Voice radio communication is what we, today, would call low bandwidth. Much more efficient is the high speed, digital communication from computer to computer. Both the track bulletins and the operator's response can be computerized, and you can take humans out of the equation. Just as the military flies drones all over the world piloted from a bunker outside Las Vegas, so the Union Pacific could drive trains from a control room in Omaha.

Mr. Miller recounts how train crews have gradually been shrinking over the years. Firemen got off in the 1960s. Apprentice engineers disappeared with the shift from steam to diesel. Brakemen and helpers left the tracks with the caboose. Today trains are run by two-man crews: an engineer and a conductor.

Recently the union signed a tentative agreement with BNSF to move to one-man crews--just an engineer. The conductor would work from an office off the train. The company added all kinds of bennies to sweeten the pot, buying off the union negotiators. But, as Mr. Miller reports, it wasn't good enough. The union rank & file voted down the deal, so BNSF is stuck with the two-man crews for the moment.

But only for the moment. Automating trains is a compelling project. Most accidents are caused by human error, so taking humans out of the loop will surely improve safety. No longer will one need to worry about misunderstanding static-filled radio lingo, fatigue, or lack of complete information. A computer can track sensors on every wheel every second--no human could do that. Engineers will stay on board for a few more years as a sentimental relic, but soon they, too, will be gone.

Factory jobs are increasingly done by robots. Over-the-road truck drivers will be displaced within a decade. Airline pilots have ever less and less to do (though they're furthest from redundancy). That railroads should be exempt is impossible.

And now the rot spreads into the white collar workforce as well. Us College Boys can't sleep well anymore, either. Computers have eliminated my dad's old profession--travel agent. Human lawyers are increasingly unemployed because of computers. IBM is working hard to displace the doctor. And we professors are finding our jobs increasingly automated.

So Mr. Miller, retired, speaks fondly about the job he did in the past. And his pride is well-placed. He is an honorable man who did an honorable job. And judging from his article he must have done it very well. But the times they are a changing, and the job that Mr. Miller did doesn't need to be done anymore. That's sad, but that's the way it is.

Further Reading:

• Robots of the World, Unite!
• Your Future Job: Building a Career in the New Normal
• Book Review: The Second Machine Age

Election Eve: Greece

We'll let Tariq Ali (a long time British Leftist who at least orbits Trotskism) be our guide to tomorrow's Greek elections. An interview with him appears in Counterpunch.

Let's stipulate that Syriza, the radical Leftist party headed by Alex Tsipras, will probably win the election. That's not in too much doubt. The interesting question is what happens after that. Mr. Ali's lede indicates.

If SYRIZA wins it will mark the beginnings of a fightback against austerity and neo-liberalism in Europe. Two concurrent processes will be in motion from the beginning of the victory. There will be a strong attempt by the EU elite led by Germany to try and tame SYRIZA via a combination of threats and concessions. The aim of this operation is simple. To try and split SYRIZA at a very early stage.

Let's leave aside the term neo-liberalism for the moment--that ill-defined boogeyman. Mr. Ali predicts that the EU (specifically Germany) cares enough about Greece to engage in ornate political machinations, eventually reaching some compromise accord with the new Syriza government.

I don't think that's likely. I think Germany wants to expel Greece from the Eurozone. They have no interest in any compromise.

In 2010 Greece signed an agreement with the EU, the IMF, and the ECB (the Troika) in exchange for a bailout. This prevented a default on Greek debts. In return, Greece agreed to austerity measures, including structural reforms and privatization of government assets. Austerity has been especially difficult.

Greece hugely over-regulates large swathes of its economy, as this article about drug stores indicates. One needs a government license to sell products such as Tylenol or Advil. Thus Greece is plagued with an overpaid, inefficient workforce, along with under-served, needlessly poor consumers. Regulations prevent people from buying products they want and need, much as the taxi medallion system prevents consumers from procuring taxi services conveniently and cheaply.

Syriza represents the protected workers, who despite their inefficiency nevertheless feel entitled. This is the conservative movement in Greece, doing everything possible to maintain the status quo. They want to stay in the Eurozone, because their standard of living depends on cheap credit from Germany. But they don't like structural change, because that will open up the market to the benefit of consumers.

Accordingly, Syriza wants to ditch "austerity," and replace it with a free lunch, i.e., more cheap loans from abroad. It won't work. The Germans won't lend the money. Further, I think Germany believes they can expel Greece relatively painlessly now, i.e., it won't result in a Euro-wide financial crisis.

So contrary to Mr. Ali's prediction of a tense negotiation, I predict an early Grexit. The Troika will yield only on the most superficial, cosmetic points. Syriza can't give that much away--they campaigned on their ability to renegotiate. But they won't be able to deliver. So unless Syriza completely caves, Greece will default on its debt.

Default means that the ECB will cut off the Greek banks. Euros within Greece will flee the country as fast as they can. The Greeks will be forced to print up Drachmas in order to pay their employees. Greeks, who don't yet know the meaning of poverty, will soon find out.

Neo-liberalism is a dysphemism for efficiency and globalization. Contrary to what Mr. Ali maintains, efficiency benefits consumers first and foremost. Walmart, for example, assures always low prices because of the efficiency of their supply chain. Globalization gives consumers more choices in what to buy. They can purchase the best possible product and the cheapest possible price from anywhere in the world.

So neo-liberalism, properly understood, is good for human beings. It has pulled 400,000,000 Chinese out of poverty. But I take Mr. Ali's point--it's bad for the workers in highly protected, over-regulated, uncompetitive industries. Those, unfortunately, are Syriza's constituents.

Countries that have rejected neo-liberalism are either poor, very poor, or total basket cases. Argentina is perhaps the best off of the bunch. Because of an earlier default, they haven't been able to access foreign capital markets for a couple of decades now. But they're still able to buy products on the global market.

Venezuela, while not yet in default, has destroyed its own economy. Its trade with the rest of the world is in terminal decline. The oil industry lies in ruins because of stunningly bad management and lack of foreign investment. Shoppers Beggars now wait in line for things like milk and toilet paper.

Cuba has long since renounced trade. Recent TV clips filmed on Havana's seaside boulevard show as much--the dilapidated buildings, the ancient cars, the small-town traffic, etc. Like Venezuela, even common consumer goods are tightly rationed. Nobody is allowed to buy anything. This is the socialism of poverty.

We need not speak of North Korea, the current socialist utopia.

There is much in Mr. Ali's article that I agree with. He says,

[The European Union is] in a very bad state. It subordinated politics to economics and was undemocratic from the very beginning. Blaming ‘lazy Southerners’ for the crisis is grotesque. Its not just the Left which argues this (in fact the Left has been with some exception very weak on the EU), but hedge-fund kings like George Soros who recently said: “My worst fears are confirmed…This is what I was afraid of, that the Euro would be preserved. …pervert the venture, and destroy the European Union. Instead of the solidarity (the EU) was supposed to have embodied, it became every country for itself.” And Pope Francis in the Vatican, to the left of every EU govt today proclaimed that: “The great ideas that inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.” The single-formula approach on the currency union is dead in the waters of the Mediterrenean. An alternative needs to be developed. It would be better if this were done by common agreement, but that is unlikely so new radical governments might have to take unilateral decisions.

This is mostly correct. And the first step to dismantling the euro is a Grexit. A more graceful way will be found to facilitate a further breakup. The euro was always a very bad idea.

Just to be clear, this post predicts that:

• Syriza will win tomorrow's election.
• Greece will be out of the Eurozone before the end of 2015.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

Further Reading:

• Are Swiss Bankers Stupid?
• Left Labor's Lost Cause
• Book Review: Nigel Farage

Trotskyists Down on the Farm

I respond to an article appearing in Counterpunch, written by Carmello Ruiz-Marrero, entitled Toward the Agro-Police State. That title is over-the-top. The content is succinctly represented by the sub-heading: "You'll need an iPad if you want to be a farmer."

Horrors!

Mr. Ruiz-Marrero reports that Monsanto is buying some small technology companies, none for more than a billion dollars. (For comparison, Monsanto is capitalized at around $18 billion, and Apple Computer at over $500 billion.) The first company is The Climate Corporation. Mr. Ruiz-Marrero quotes from their mission statement:

The Climate Corporation aims to help farmers around the world protect and improve their farming operations with uniquely powerful software and insurance products. The company’s proprietary technology platform combines hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver climate.com, a solution that helps farmers improve their profits by making better informed operating and financing decisions, and Total Weather Insurance, an insurance offering that pays farmers automatically for bad weather that may impact their profits.

Farmers are more likely to earn money and less likely to lose it. Consumers will get cheaper prices. The environment benefits because fewer resources are wasted. It's hard to find fault with this. What's Mr. Ruiz-Marrero's problem?

It gets worse.

In 2012 Monsanto bought a similar company, Precision Planting, for $210 million. The biotech behemoth was after the company’s FieldView platform, a hardware/software package that monitors the performance of farm machinery and pretty much tells the farmer how to do everything, determining even the spacing between crop rows.

Yet another evil plot to make food cheaper and better, using fewer chemicals while wasting less land and water. These awful capitalists! What will they think of next?

Mr. Ruiz-Marrero lays out the benefits of this new technology rather clearly.

Welcome to the brave new world of precision farming, in which every farmer will need a wifi connection and an iPad. Precision ag, as it is often called, is the collective name of a series of new agricultural data and crop monitoring technologies. The alleged benefits of these new techno packages include increased yields, better information for decision making in the farm, reduction in the use and overuse of agrochemicals and fertilizer, and increased profits. It relies on cutting edge technologies like geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, wireless internet, portable computers, high-speed data processing, and global positioning (GPS).

Again, I still fail to see the problem. How can he possibly be against any of this?

I'll summarize his complaint in bullet points.

• It employs military technology, specifically drone aircraft. The connection is to Big Data in the cloud. The farmer will be cut out of the loop. Further, data will be readily available to adjudicate patent violations or lawsuits.
• Farmers will be deskilled. There will be a "loss of local farm knowledge and the erosion of farmer's rights." (Though probably with less erosion of the farmer's land.)
• On the other hand, many farmers in Mr. Ruiz-Marrero's native Puerto Rico are illiterate. Only 14% have college degrees. Deskilling notwithstanding, they won't be able to cope with the intellectual demands of wifi and robotic drones.
• Adopting this new technology, at the low end, costs  $1,000,000, $100,000, $20,000. Frankly, that's just not a lot of money--not even for a family farm. A farmer without that much capital has a title: subsistence farmer. Mr. Ruiz-Marrero's fears that farmers will be forced into debt seems unwarranted.

But the main problem is all this benefits the wealthy. Only rich people will be able to buy the wholesome, freshly-grown, organic vegetables at the local farmer's market. The rest of us shlubs will be stuck with cheap frankenfoods, plastics on a stalk. But Mr. Ruiz-Marrero surely exaggerates the difference. There are no nutritional differences between so-called "organic" foods and their GM analogs. In a few cases there may be a taste difference, notably with tomatoes. Personally, I think the "organic" label is just advertising hype and I refuse to buy the stuff.

Cheaper food is better than expensive food. Farming that uses fewer resources is better than farming that wastes resources. Mr. Ruiz-Marrero has got his priorities all wrong.

Louis Proyect contributed his two-cents with a post here. Revealingly, it's an ad hominem attack on a journalist rather than any kind of reasoned argument. On science issues (where Mr. Proyect is resoundingly ignorant) that appears to be the best he can do. The Pulitzer-winning reporter, Amy Harmon, apparently has the moral backbone of a dead rat, what defending GM foods as she does. Mr. Proyect delivers the laugh line:

Her sordid record is worth examining, as is the question of genetic modification itself that she practically likens to global warming denialism or creationism...

The irony is that Mr. Proyect is himself a quasi-creationist, denying as he does the overwhelming evidence of evolution on human behavior.

Of course it's not necessary to believe lock-step in everything that so-called "scientists" say. I myself take partial issue with the so-called "consensus" on global warming. There may be good non-scientific reasons to reject evolution. But Mr. Proyect can't have it both ways--that the "consensus" is always true except when he disagrees with it.

But, since he's in awe of science, here's the statement by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on GM foods.

The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe … The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.

I agree with this. If all the bad things that the anti-GM movement predicted were true, they would have happened by now. In the meantime, over two trillion GM meals have been served, with no evidence either of bad health or environmental destruction.

Misters Proyect and Ruiz-Marrero need to find themselves some new windmills to slay.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
• David Berlinski & Evolution
• Luddites Against Fracking

Ferguson Distinctions

Now that the Ferguson, Missouri, tragedy is winding down, now is probably a good time to take stock of the situation. My sources are three articles: from The Militant (by Dan Fein), Socialist Action (by Clay Wadena), and Counterpunch (by Ishmael Reed). Except for Mr. Reed's piece (dated this weekend) the other two articles are old news, reflecting Trotskyist publication schedules.

Mr. Reed's piece is completely over the top. He headlines the (irrelevant) fact that Gaza Palestinians are tweeting instructions about how to hold an insurrection. Further, supposedly some St. Louis County policeman once worked in Israel. This, to Mr. Reed, makes for just stunning parallels between Gaza and Ferguson.

So let's count the ways how Hamas and Ferguson demonstrators are different.

• Blacks are not lobbing random missiles into White neighborhoods.
• Blacks are not advocating the mass murder of American Jews (or anybody else).
• Blacks are not storing military weapons in apartment buildings.
• The US military is not bombing apartment buildings in order to destroy those weapons.
• Unlike Gazans and Israel, Black Americans are citizens, and entitled to full constitutional privileges.

Socialist Action repeats this particular slander, essentially accusing Black residents of Ferguson of being terrorists. They are not terrorists.

Indeed, far from being terrorists, Ferguson's Black residents are victims. First, Michael Brown (age 18) was shot and killed. That may or may not turn out to be a justified homicide in the law enforcement sense of the word, but it is in any event a tragedy. His family does not deserve the vitriol directed against them by some on the Right.

Second, there is no question that Ferguson's local government no longer serves the interest of its citizens. Both the city government and the police department are majority white, in a town that is now two-thirds Black. Megan McArdle convincingly explains why: the demographics of the community has changed dramatically over the last two decades. The police department, in particular, is unionized and they can't easily be fired. Further, just like college professors, police tend to hire their own kind. No question--Ferguson needs a different police department.

Third, law enforcement in America has clearly gone off the rails. Rand Paul (a Republican) is among the more prominent politicians to point this out, in a widely cited opinion piece in Time. Republicans have been loudest in advocating the repeal of punitive drug laws, of all sorts of nanny-state regulations, and of stupid laws that prevent honest people from earning a living. Some suggest that the average American commits three felonies per day. That may be an exaggeration, but Mr. Reed is absolutely correct when he claims that Black folks are disproportionately arrested. We need to stop doing that.

I watch Cops occasionally. One episode in particular disturbs me: an undercover cop arresting a Black teenager for drug possession. It's dumb, it's unAmerican, and that cop should be fired.

Fourth, I read somewhere (wish I could tell you where and when) that of 175 people arrested, only 7 were Ferguson residents. That is, the Black folks who live in Ferguson are civilized people. The looters, the rock-throwers, the gangsters--those come from outside the community. So in addition to the cops, Ferguson residents are being victimized by thugs. The thugs don't care that the QuikTrip store won't reopen, or that it might be impossible to buy a gallon of milk within the town. No--that's only a problem for the regular folks.

What Ferguson residents did do is exercise their right to free speech and for a redress of grievances. The "hands-up, don't shoot" demonstrators may be right or wrong on the issues, but they are NOT the problem. They are American citizens, and they have as much right to demonstrate as I have to write this blog. To the cops' credit, apparently they also understand that--they've only arrested 7 Ferguson people.

The Militant also gets it. Of the three articles, it is the only one that makes any distinction between honest citizens and gangsters. Socialist Action lumps them together, and Mr. Reed goes so far as to valorize the thugs--witness his favorable comparison to Hamas.

So what is the larger significance of Ferguson? One hopes that it leads to a change in our criminal code. We need a whole lot fewer felonies. The cops need to protect us, not harass us for non-crimes.

What most strikes me is that the unrest has not spread. Unlike 1967, there's no mass looting of stores in Black neighborhoods. That's because we have made a lot of progress on racial issues over the past half century. There is no reason to destroy your own neighborhood anymore (not that there ever was a very good reason).

Blacks and whites are different people. We may not always like each other. But it looks like we have mostly learned how to live together reasonably peacefully. I think that's progress.

Further Reading:

• Subway Values
• Trotskyists and Gaza
• Christie vs. Paul

Book Review: Lih's Biography of Lenin

I just finished reading Lars Lih's short biography of Lenin. I'm ashamed to admit that it is the first complete biography of Lenin I've ever read. Mr. Lih's book is well-written and nicely researched. I understand that Mr. Lih has an atypical and tendentious view of Lenin. Indeed, he may have tried too hard to fit the facts into his storyline, though I certainly can't judge that. It all sounds a little too pat.

Born in 1870, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov morphed into V. I. Lenin only after his death. In fleeing from the tsar in 1900 he borrowed a passport from a man named "Lenin," which our hero turned into the pseudonym, N. Lenin. Legend has it that N stood for Nikolai. He acquired his birth initials only post mortem.

Three people had a profound effect on Lenin's life. The first was his father, Ilya, a teacher who became an organizer of village schools to educate the peasants. This the tsar viewed as subversive.

Lenin's elder brother, Alexander, was involved in a failed plot to assassinate the tsar, for which he was hanged. As much as anything, Lenin was motivated by revenge for his brother's death. More importantly, he resolved not to make his brother's mistake. He disavowed terrorism as a revolutionary method, and indeed, mostly disowned violence.

Finally, Lenin had a life-long, love/hate relationship with Karl Kautsky, the great popularizer and propagandist of Marxism, and a founder of the German Social-Democratic Party. It was pure love until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, after which it turned into hatred as Kautsky supported Germany's war efforts. Lenin remained resolutely internationalist.

The Leninist perspective was already sketched out in 1894. Mr. Lih calls it the heroic scenario, which Lenin laid out in one, long, banner sentence in an illegal publication entitled Friends of the People. I'll describe it in my own words here:

The beneficiaries of Lenin's heroism were to be the narod, perhaps best translated as the German Volk. The English word, people, does not convey the spiritual significance, though perhaps if you substitute in the American People as politicians do, you'll get closer. Mr. Lih uses the Russian term exclusively.

This Leninist emphasis on das Volk is ignored by my Trotskyist friends, perhaps in part because it doesn't translate easily into English. But more, it reveals the uncomfortable relationship between Leninism and fascism. While it's an overstatement to equate them, there is no doubt that Lenin and Mussolini were political cousins.

Lenin opposed the Russian entry into the Great War, not because he opposed Russian nationalism, but indeed the opposite. He thought the Russian bourgeoisie were betraying the Russian narod.

The agents of the heroic scenario were the Russian proletariat. It was the workers who actually had the power to overthrow capitalism, a power the peasants did not have. Their concentration in the big cities, along with their thumb on the means of production gave them unexcelled political leverage.

The implementation of the heroic scenario depended on the Leninist Party, though of course Lenin didn't know it by that name. The term he used were the praktiki, who were members of the Social-Democratic underground. These class-conscious workers were the communications link between workers in different cities and factories, and also with a class of intellectuals (including Lenin) who lived abroad and could communicate freely. Lenin's paper, Iskra, that he edited up to the 1905 revolution, was smuggled into Russia, and provided news to praktiki across Russia about what they were all doing.

The first order of business in the heroic scenario was to overthrow the tsar and establish a bourgeois democracy. Then it would no longer be necessary to operate underground, and the praktiki could organize for socialism directly. In this first step the peasants would be close allies. The second step--the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, would split the kulaks from the rest of the peasants, and impose a greater responsibility on the proletariat. After that the narod would all live happily ever after.

So what could go wrong? Surprisingly little, actually. Lenin's durable support from the praktiki meant he could not be dismissed from the emigre political scene, this despite his rabid sectarianism. Especially after 1914 his rhetoric against fellow emigres as opportunists waxed vitriolic. During a conference in Bern, he led a something known as the Left Zimmerwald Opposition, a short-lived organization that could rival the Spartacist League.

Lenin assumed that there would be an extended time between the bourgeois revolution and the subsequent proletarian, socialist revolution. When he returned to Russia in March, 1917, he realized this would not be the case. He seized the opportunity to take state power during the infamous October revolution. Mr. Lih devotes very little space to the October events, probably because they've been covered in great detail elsewhere.

And this is where the heroic scenario ends. Lenin had no blueprint for what would happen after the socialist revolution. He was like the dog who caught the car. He simply assumed that socialism was a superior form of economic organization than capitalism. Today, of course, we know that is not true, but Lenin can probably be excused for not realizing that. Accordingly, especially during the period of war communism (1918-1919), Lenin rather uncharacteristically resorts to force. During that time he thought that simply liquidating the class enemy would be sufficient to solve all problems--since, after all, the class enemy was probably the only problem.

But by 1920 it was obvious even to Lenin that murdering his way out of economic difficulty was not going to work. Of course he could never admit to either himself or anybody else that socialism failed. Still, some backtracking seemed necessary. Instead of liquidating the kulaks, he tried to engage them in production. And instead of pure socialism, he turned to the New Economic Policy, subsequently imitated by socialist countries from Romania to Cuba to Venezuela.

Lenin's political career ended in 1923 with a stroke, and he died in 1924. Trotsky's name appears in Lih's book, but not prominently. Trotsky was late to the Bolshevik Party, and thus not an important part of Lenin's life. He was probably more important to the survival of the revolutionary state. Stalin's name also appears, and Lih reports that Lenin consulted closely with Stalin in the writing of his Last Testament. Stalin, of course, did not share Lenin's distaste for violence.

So what of Lenin's legacy? His success depended crucially on his longstanding connection to the praktiki, who eventually became his foot soldiers. In this he had an edge over the intellectual emigres who had lost connection with Russia. Further, Lenin's attitude toward open political work and underground organizations meant that the praktiki were still on the ground in October, 1917, rather than cooling their heels in jail or in Siberia. Similarly, his opposition to terrorism served him in good stead.

Beyond that, Lenin's success looks to be pure luck. His small army of praktiki succeeded only because the Russian state was devastated by World War. Much to Lenin's surprise and dismay, similar organizations were not successful in western Europe. Indeed, Lenin's success has not been duplicated anywhere else in the world. In no place has a small, vanguard praktiki party taken state power. So it seems to be a once-off deal unique to Russian history.

The Lenin Mr. Lih describes was a very smart man who single-mindedly devoted his entire life to his heroic scenario. His success depended on that determination, along with a huge amount of luck. Obviously, Lenin played a crucial role in 20th Century Russian history. But I think his significance for the rest of the world is minor. His contemporary, Teddy Roosevelt, is probably of comparable importance. Lenin's lessons for world politics, never important, have faded into irrelevance.

I agree with Louis Proyect's conclusion, summarized by the title of his article, Goodbye Lenin.

Further Reading:

• What Would Lenin Do?
• Book Review: Changing Face Of US Politics
• Marxism Without The Leninism

The Race To The Bottom

One of the benefits of covering Counterpunch is that I get to read articles by Jack Rasmus, a Leftist economist whose work I (critically) admire. The piece in question is entitled Race to the Bottom, a phrase widely used by Leftists opposed to conservative government.

Mr. Rasmus puts the problem this way.

While the official state corporate tax rates range from 5% to 10%, states in aggregate are averaging only about 2% effectively in corporate tax payments. States across the US have been in a ‘race to the bottom’ to grant more and more corporate tax loopholes and exceptions in order to lure corporations from other states to their state.

In his view, this is a terrible, no-good phenomenon that cheats workers out of their legitimate wages and benefits. It is the major factor in the current difficulties facing state budgets and pension plans. He offers many suggestions about how to remedy this unfortunate state of affairs.

At least as interesting is the question he doesn't address. If the consequences of corporate tax breaks are so unremittingly bad, then why do states offer them? I can think of three overlapping answers he might offer.

First is corruption--the fix is in. The corporations own the politicians, who then pass out the goodies. Even Tea Party types like me will agree with this to some extent, for this describes crony capitalism. It fits Ayn Rand's account of big business in Atlas Shrugged to a tee.

But empirically, this cannot be the reason for the race to the bottom. If true, the most corrupt states would be the fastest racers. Thus we'd conclude that Texas (generous with the corporate candy) is more corrupt than Illinois (chintzy)--obviously not true. Corruption abounds, to be sure, but in this country it is thankfully still a sideshow.

Second, the relatively few people who get jobs from these schemes are visible and vocal, while the much larger number whose benefits are endangered are disenfranchised. While superficially plausible, this argument can't withstand scrutiny. The people who most profit from a bailout of Detroit, for example, are the disproportionately white, retired city workers, whose pensions have been stiffed. Meanwhile, the chief beneficiaries of Detroit's bankruptcy are the current residents, who certainly fit the description of disenfranchised. Far from reducing inequality, Mr. Rasmus' proposal to top off state and local budgets with corporate dollars will effectively transfer wealth from poor people in need of city services to the suburban middle class.

Finally is the Marxist rationale, which claims that We're poor because the rich people stole all the money. In this view, wealth is a zero-sum game, and the role of the State is to extort money from the working class by force, accomplished in part by lowering corporate tax rates. The dirty truth is hidden by the fig leaf of giving a few people some jobs. But then you'd expect every state to be liberal with the corporate discounts. How can a Marxist explain the difference between New York's high, effective tax rates, vs. Texas' low rates? Are New York's capitalists just a bunch of wimps?

The truth is these corporate tax breaks are popular with voters. When phrased in terms of jobs, voters understand that the private economy is vastly more productive than anything government can do. In this context, it becomes obviously clear that raising taxes hurts the economy and lowering taxes helps the economy. Even poor people--who don't generally pay much in taxes--realize that money paid by private business ultimately comes out of their pocket.

But I don't like the beggar-thy-neighbor approach anymore than Mr. Rasmus, albeit for different reasons. The selective tax breaks for footloose companies is grossly unfair to existing businesses (and their employees). Much better would be an across-the-board decrease in corporate taxes, with no loopholes. That way everybody pays the same low amount. (Ideally, we'd go the full Sweden on this, and abolish corporate taxes altogether.)

Taxes ultimately transfer wealth from productive enterprises to unproductive enterprises. Welfare may be necessary, but it is not a good thing. Likewise with healthcare--disease is a cost, not a benefit. Minimizing government expenditure for these items is essential. Rather than minimizing them, Mr. Rasmus supposes that not a penny of current expenditures is wasted, and every last nickel must be extorted out of the productive economy to pay for them.

Accordingly, his solution comes straight from Ayn Rand.

To avoid the state-state ‘race to the bottom’, an ‘Interstate Corporate Equalization Tax’ should be implemented. Corporations that move their (taxable) headquarters from one state to another should be required to pay the ‘losing’ state a fee equal to the difference in the two states’ corporate income tax for a period of three years into a special fund.

This sounds just like the anti-dog-eat-dog-rule from Atlas Shrugged.

The Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule is passed by the National Alliance of Railroads in section 145, allegedly to prevent "destructive competition" between railroads. The rule gives the Alliance the authority to forbid competition between railroads in certain parts of the country. It was crafted by Orren Boyle as a favor for James Taggart, with the purpose of driving the Phoenix-Durango out of Colorado.

As Ayn Rand effectively describes, eliminating competition just makes everybody poorer. An excellent example is found in the history of the shipping container, where the Interstate Commerce Commission successfully lowered everybody's standard of living for half a century. Obamacare will do the same thing for health care.

By preventing competition between the states, Mr. Rasmus' plan enables government to steal more and more money from their citizens with impunity. His scheme permits any state to raise taxes, and then collect even more revenue from other states via the equalization tax. Folks in Texas will be subsidizing New Yorkers even more than they do today. (Today's subsidy comes from the Federal deduction for state income taxes, from which residents of no-tax states derive no benefit.)

Allowing competition, on the other hand, forces states to grapple with the real issue--what is the optimal size of government? In a competitive environment it's hard to get it wrong: if you have too little government (high crime, homeless people on the streets), or too much government (limited opportunity, high unemployment, low wages) people will vote with their feet and their bank accounts. They'll leave.

Productive enterprises produce wealth. Mr. Rasmus and I both agree that some of that wealth has to be shared with people who, for whatever reason, are unable to support themselves. But Mr. Rasmus goes much further than that--he wants to punish productivity. Anybody who makes any profit, or who earns even a penny more than he does, needs to be beaten down and put out of business.

Mr. Rasmus may not describe himself as pro-poverty, but that is exactly what he is.

Further Reading:

• Labor's Final Step
• Crony Capitalism
• Are Rich People Rich?

Punching Counterpunch

At Louis Proyect's suggestion, I have added Counterpunch to the list of journals I regularly cover. They are now listed on This Blog's Beat blogroll. The narrowly defined Trotskyist papers already in my stable are not keeping me busy. Counterpunch provides a lot of material, and it certainly does come well-recommended.

To inaugurate this new effort I more or less randomly picked three articles from the November 15th Weekend Edition. I hope they are reasonably typical. I am pleased to note that they are mostly short--often shorter than my posts. This is a pleasant surprise coming from Marxists. Second, they are not relentlessly academic, which means they're not boring. And finally, Counterpunch casts a longer shadow than The Militant or Socialist Action. There's more to talk about.

The first article is by Chris Gilbert, entitled Refrigerator Wars In Venezuela. Mr. Gilbert is identified as a professor of political science at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. Unlike the Chavismo sycophants at US universities, this guy at least gets paid for it. He reports on the Venezuelan government's forced sale of televisions and refrigerators, using the military to occupy stores and to distribute the goods at very low prices.

The core decision is to limit the markup on certain products imported with subsidized dollars. Importers in Venezuela bring in goods with cheap dollars that they obtain through the state – dollars that come from the petroleum rent. They then mark up the goods 200% to 1000%. The government’s idea is to limit the markup to 30%. For this reason, state institutions such as INDEPABIS are now revising these importers’ books, while the army maintains order.

Why are there "cheap" dollars in Venezuela to begin with? If there was no black market in dollars, none of this would have happened. Supposedly the excess dollars come from oil sales, which have been rapidly declining as the government continues to defer maintenance. Megan McArdle suggests that Venezuela is descending into hyperinflation. Chavez and Maduro both graduated from the top of the class at the Zimbabwe School of Economics.

One thing is certain: no new refrigerators or television sets will be arriving in Venezuela any time soon.

The second article is entitled The Takedown of the Silk Road Drug Market, by Ryan Calhoun. Silk Road, for those of you who live clean lives, was (until the Feds busted it) a very successful, on-line market for illegal drugs. I followed it because it used bitcoin as its payment medium, and I've been interested in bitcoin. (This video argues that the take down of Silk Road is good for the currency. I agree.)

Mr. Calhoun is more interested in the drugs than the bitcoin, and from the article he sounds like an avid customer of Silk Road. Now I'm vaguely libertarian in my views about legalization (no strong opinions really), but I don't have much respect for people who actually use drugs. After all, I'm an alum of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)--the drug discipline is the best thing they ever did for me. I put drug users and casino patrons in the same category--losers.

Mr. Calhoun admits to being a loser in another respect--he's a PhD student at the University at Buffalo. That stunningly useless endeavor marks him as unemployable for any productive profession. So Mr. Calhoun models the conservative archetype of what a liberal looks like--somebody who wants us to bail him out of all the bad decisions he's made in life. We'll have to pay for his so-called "education," the welfare benefits he'll need because he can't earn a living, and then his medical care because of drug-induced health problems. What a guy!

Most interesting is the article by Ann Garrison, entitled Why is DRC “Negotiating” With M23, Not Rwanda and Uganda? It is an interview with Jean-Mobert N'Senga, a Congolese partisan in the recent defeat of M23, a guerrilla proxy for the Ugandan and Rwandan governments.

When I was living in Uganda in 1996, President Yoweri Museveni (he's still president) announced an inspiring dream to build a highway from Kisangani to the sea. That would make it possible to transport people and freight from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean, via Kampala to the Congo river port at Kisangani. From there one could travel by ship to Kinshasa, and thence by the 200-mile long road that circumvents Livingstone Falls to the Atlantic Ocean port of Matadi. The economic opportunities this would unlock are enormous--such a road would hugely enhance the standard of living for millions of people.

So the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries invaded Eastern Congo ostensibly to make that happen. But rather than build the road to Kisangani, instead the two had a falling out and destroyed the town in their battle for control.

It all derives from the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Whether motivated by revenge or paranoia, Rwandan Tutsi guerrillas emptied out Congo villages, chased the residents to the ends of the earth, and when they finally caught up with them massacred them all. The other side engaged in similar cruelty--five million Congolese died. You can read all about it in the horrifyingly depressing book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters.

Thanks to Ann Garrison, Mr. N'Senga gives one side of the story. It's worth reading.

So how does Counterpunch stack up? As a fellow SWP veteran, I can see why Mr. Proyect likes it. He rightly dings the Party for its brittle sectarianism, compared to which Counterpunch is a breath of fresh air. But the magazine has also lost some of the good things about traditional Trotskyism, namely efforts at intellectual consistency and self-discipline.

The Militant, for example, sees the world through its Theory of Everything, otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism. Now it's an unreasonably narrow and wrong theory, but it does enforce rigor. They can't just spout off at the mouth. Counterpunch, meanwhile, publishes a Bolivarian brown-noser and an anarchist druggie in the same issue, deluding themselves that these people are somehow on the same page.

On the other hand, The Militant has almost nothing to say about Congo. That's because events there don't fit into the Grand Synthesis, and are therefore best left ignored. At most they will complain about US or UN intervention, blaming the problem on "imperialists." So Counterpunch does us all a favor by reporting on Africa. It is a more eclectic, interesting, and informative read. But it is not in any way recognizable as Trotskyist.

The lack of both intellectual and personal discipline means that Counterpunch fades into feel-good Leftism. Trotskyists will correctly accuse it of not being serious. Both my Trotskyist friends and Counterpunch advocate free unicorns for all, but Trotskyists imagine that they have a practical way of accomplishing that.

As for me, I'm against poverty. I strongly support the highway to Kisangani. Mr. Museveni has let me down big time. This opinion puts me at odds with pro-poverty Leftists of all stripes--none of the publications I cover will support the road. They'd all find some excuse to oppose it--environmentalism, oppression, imperialism, or whatever gobbledy-gook term you can think of. That's why I'm a Republican.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• What Are Unions Good For?
• BRICS
• Democratic Centralism