Book Review: Disunited Nations

I have a love/hate relationship with Peter Zeihan's new book, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in a Disunited World.

Let's start with the bad news first.

Apart from editorial asides by the author, the book has no footnotes. The bibliography only includes five titles. There is no reference to historical models of geopolitics. Facts are offered without citations. Now I'm not a great fan of scholarship--academic monographs are not just boring, but useless. Reading through a forest of footnotes is tedious.

But without any context I have no way to know how trustworthy Mr. Zeihan's sources are. Is he just cherry-picking factoids to fit his story? Is he really such a genius that he can develop a whole geopolitical theory de novo out of thin air?

Is the man a serious thinker?--or merely a huckster trolling for consulting dollars? Yes, and yes.

I loved this book!

For clarity and concision it is unmatched. He tells a simple (too simple by half) story of the globe's future for the next generation. Story is the operative word--the book reads like a well-plotted novel. That makes me suspicious (is life really that straightforward?), but it's very readable. I think he's wrong in big ways, as I'll explain below. But the basic story seems true enough.

It goes like this:

After WWII, the Soviet Union, despite its intrinsic weaknesses, represented an existential threat to the United States. Our ingenious counter was to mobilize the world to our side. This was not done by brute force, nor by appeal to humanitarian principles. For the most part we bribed other countries to be our allies. The bribe consisted of three parts:

1. The US will guarantee your current borders. You do not need to defend yourself against your neighbors.
2. The US will guarantee your trade routes. Our navy will patrol the world and keep the seas free of pirates and military foes. Not merely was transit through the Panama and Suez canals open to all, but also through the Malacca, Hormuz, and even the Bosporus Straits.
3. The US market was open to your produce nearly without restriction. Whether German cars, Japanese electronics, Bengali textiles, or Chinese toys--anybody could sell anything in the USA tariff-free.

It worked like a charm. Apart from the US and the Soviet Union, military spending decreased around the globe. The NATO allies, for example, couldn't rouse themselves to even spend 2% of their GDP on defense. Piracy and privateering on the high seas, along with toll-collecting at choke points disappeared. Countries as diverse as Germany, South Korea and China got rich selling into US market.

The world got rich, including the United States. Mr. Zeihan refers to this era--from 1945 to nearly the present day--as the post-war Order. But now the Order is breaking down, again for three reasons.

1. The Soviet Union is no more. The empire collapsed in 1991, and the successor state, Russia, is itself in terminal, demographic decline (so claims Zeihan).
2. Fracking changes everything. North America is now energy independent, and indeed, we're a net energy exporter. The result is we have little cause to police the Middle East anymore, and certainly not the Persian Gulf or the Straits of Hormuz.
3. While in 1950 the US produced about 50% of global gdp, today the number is only 25%. That's certainly not because the US is poorer, but rather because the Order hugely increased wealth globally. Thus we can no longer serve as a market of last resort, nor can we cover the world's defense costs.

As said, it's too simple by half. While the Soviets inspired NATO, it seems unlikely that they were the only reason for the Order. Surely American business understood the virtue of global markets, even in 1945. There were strong economic reasons for the Order. Accordingly, the collapse of the Soviets did not presage the imminent demise of the Order--it's hung on for nigh 30 years--again for its economic benefits.

Mr. Zeihan's tale leaves out some important trends. New technology spread around the world--the rise in global wealth is as much due to that as the American policeman. The Order’s decline may be due to a sharp drop in global productivity beginning in the mid '70s as much as anything else. Indeed, Mr. Zeihan’s story depends too heavily on geography and demographics--important topics to be sure, but not necessarily more important than technology, history, culture, or even genetics.

Still, I think he's mostly right, and the Order's inevitable demise may lead to the consequences he foretells. I think he's right about China. I think he's wrong about Germany.

China has five existential problems, and while it might survive one or two of them, solving all five of them simultaneously is impossible. The Chinese economy will crash, and Zeihan predicts the country will not survive as a unitary state. The five issues are:

1. While Americans do farming, the Chinese do gardening. This is because they had a surplus of agricultural labor, and gardening is more productive per acre than farming. By shipping labor off to the cities, China was forced into mechanized farming, which hasn't worked too well. Despite the huge capital investment, agricultural productivity has not grown proportionately. Mr. Zeihan predicts famine in China's near future.
2. China has over-invested in housing. Housing is the primary investment tool for middle-class Chinese, including many second- and vacation- homes, similar to what the stock market is in the US. By building too many houses, there will inevitably be a crash in prices, wiping out the wealth of much of the population.
3. Chinese demography is terrible. Unlike the US (with our large Millennial Generation), Chinese baby boomers were limited to one child each. Thus China is older than the United States, and it's labor force is actually shrinking. It's very difficult to grow an economy when your labor force is shrinking and the bulk of your population is retiring.
4. China has insufficient natural resources. It produces very little of its own energy, importing most from the Persian Gulf (to which, absent the US Navy, access is not guaranteed). It can't produce enough food to feed itself, and also must import the fertilizers and other inputs for its agriculture. Given the shortage of labor, the reversion to labor-intensive gardening looks unlikely. 
5. China is too big to be an export power. Economic success depends on a sharp increase in domestic consumption. But consumers are in the ages 30-50 demographic, i.e., the generation that doesn't exist in sufficient numbers in China. And they're not having any children, either. The result is Chinese consumption is purchased only by government debt, i.e., the government buying all kinds of products that citizens can no longer consume. Every financial institution in the country is insolvent. It will end badly.

Moral: Don't invest money in China!

Now for Germany: Mr. Zeihan takes the Marxist saw too literally: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce. The "Germans" invaded Russia first in 1914, and then again in 1940. Contrary to Marx, Mr. Zeihan thinks they'll do it a third time. I believe he's ignoring history.

There were three "German" empires (Reich). The First Reich was under Charlemagne, founded in the Eighth Century, and that really was a German empire (without scare quotes). The capital was in Aachen, in the Rhineland. The Second Reich was founded by Bismarck in 1871, with it's capital in Berlin. But it wasn't really a German Empire, but rather a Prussian one.

The Prussians are originally a Baltic people--Old Prussian, spoken until the 18th Century, is related to Lithuanian. Ancestral Prussians lived in what became known as East Prussia, today parts of Lithuania and northeast Poland. They were first conquered by one of Charlemagne's heirs, and took to German language and culture with some enthusiasm. But they are not ethnic Germans--neither then nor now. They're Prussian. Mr. Zeihan seems to think they're just another species of "German."

Bismarck was very aware of this--his goal was a Prussian empire, not a German one. Indeed, he wanted the Kaiser to be dubbed the Emperor of the Germans rather than the German Emperor (it is only by accident that he didn't get his wish). He treated Germany proper (the Rhineland, Baden-Wurttemburg, Bavaria and Austria, along with Alsace and Lorraine--i.e., Catholic or Roman Germany) as colonies to be exploited. (This was especially true in Alsace and Lorraine.)

And even though Hitler was an ethnic German, the Third Reich was also a Prussian empire, not a German one. It's the Prussians who had an issue with Russia. The Drang nach Osten was never a German emotion, but solely a Prussian one.

In the meantime, Prussia has been completely destroyed. They've been ethnically cleansed from their native homeland. Today they live mostly in the former East Germany--a geography that has long been a Prussian satrapy. Berlin is the capital of Prussia, not Germany.

The Germans, properly understood, have no cause to pick a fight with Russia. And I doubt the Prussians have the resources to even think about it. More likely is Germany will re-divide into two states along the former iron curtain: proper Germany to the West, and a rump Prussia in the East.

I don't think Mr. Zeihan's story about Germany makes much sense, for this and other reasons. But his book is a lot of fun and well worth reading.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• Comrade Keith L. Writes About China
• Book Review: The Absent Superpower

Book Review: Human Diversity

The full title of Charles Murray's recent book is Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class. It's a dense, tightly-reasoned, data-packed, expertly-written tome that will change the world. Or rather, the subject it discusses will change the world.

The major purpose of the book is to bring the educated layman up to date on the science of human genetics. Thanks to spectacular advances since 1980, and especially since the complete mapping of the genome in 2005, it is now possible to shed some serious light on the old nature vs. nurture question. While these results have until now stayed mostly within the specialist, scientific community, it is Mr. Murray's view that before the end of this decade, the consequences of this new knowledge will impact every aspect of our lives.

A short, oversimplified summary of the story goes like this: Back in the old days (before 1980) it was supposed that most human traits were the result of a gene or two, or perhaps maybe half a dozen. In this context we are using the word gene to refer to a bit of DNA that actually codes for a protein. In those days people supposed there were 100,000 or more genes.

This had numerous consequences. First, there was fear of genetically modified babies. If we could just change a specific gene, then we could make children much more intelligent. This possibility was never remotely realistic.

Then people assumed that evolution happened very slowly. Most mutations in actual genes are deleterious--resulting in birth defects or death. Only a very few are beneficial, and even those will need about 2000 generations (40,000 years) to spread from one individual to the entire human population.

Even then, it was understood that the bulk of our DNA was not part of a gene, i.e., didn't code for anything. Folks didn't know what that excess DNA did--it was often called junk DNA. Today we know different. It appears there are only about 20,000 actual genes in the entire genome. By far most DNA is in the non-coding portion. It appears that non-coding DNA regulates gene expression in some complex way.

While mutations in the genes are still usually deleterious, mutations in the non-coding parts of the genome tend to not have much effect. Therefore mutations accumulate there. Many of them spread across the human species: certain mutations that occur in more than 1% of individuals are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced snips). Wikipedia claims that more than 335 million SNPs have been found in our species, while any given individual will have between four and six million SNPs.

While an individual SNP has little effect, cumulatively the SNPs make a big difference. For example, it is now known that millions of SNPs help determine how tall you will be. With enough data and a big enough computer, one can isolate those SNPs that correlate with height.

So today we understand there isn't a "gene" for height, nor for personality/behavioral traits like intelligence, empathy, honesty, conscientiousness, etc. Yet we know that all these traits are significantly heritable--that is depend on our DNA. But instead of counting genes by the handful, we count SNPs by the thousands. Thus almost all traits (both physical and behavioral) are polygenic, in some cases nearly omnigenic (involving contributions from nearly all your DNA).

It's the SNPs that drive human evolution, and sufficiently fast that evolution can (and does) happen in historical time.

It is possible to count SNPs that enhance a certain trait, such as height or tendency toward schizophrenia. This leads to the polygenic score for that particular trait. Since your SNPs are fixed at birth, one can readily calculate your odds of being schizophrenic later in life. (It will never be 100%--environmental effects alter the odds significantly).

Likewise, there is a polygenic score for IQ. It cannot predict your IQ as an adult--for which the environment contributes about 40% of the variance--but it definitely narrows the field. If your child is born with a high polygenic score for IQ, then it might be worth saving money to send her to Harvard.

There are polygenic scores for things like criminality. The optimist will say that by judicious interventions we can prevent that outcome from occurring. The pessimist will fear that we'll be punishing people in advance of any crime--simply on the basis of their polygenic scores. I think they're both probably right--it is a brave new world coming on.

A second theme in Murray's book is an argument against the socialization theory. This theory--standard groupthink at American colleges--maintains that all differences between genders, races, and classes are merely social constructs, and have no underlying basis in biology. I'll mention that prior to 1980 this was a plausible idea, but since then, and especially since the rise of modern genomics, it becomes completely untenable.

Mr. Murray discusses at length the differences between men and women, who differ by an entire chromosome. There are genetic, physiological and psychometric differences between the sexes, compared to which "socialization" pales into insignificance. That said, it is not a simple switch--there is a continuum between male and female in nearly all traits. Few men have exclusively "male" traits, while few women are exclusively "female."

Murray uses facial features as an example. Consider the kinds of metrics facial recognition software might use: relative length of nose, relative distance between the ears, etc. Suppose there are twenty such metrics. It may be that women have slightly shorter noses (relatively) than men. But the effect is not very large--many women have noses longer than the average man, but most women don't.

So it is with all the other metrics. Women congregate slightly on one side of the spectrum, while men predominate mostly on the other, with a large overlap in the middle. Very few men are "masculine" on all twenty measures, and neither are many women "feminine" on all measures.

And yet it is easy to distinguish male faces from female faces. Even though each effect is small, the accumulated effects are big enough to see the difference. Only in a few cases is it truly ambiguous--I think of Rachel Maddow, for example. Two corollaries: facial recognition software can distinguish between male and female faces most of the time; it takes a skilled artist to draw an obviously female face, since most of the differences are so subtle.

Similarly, racial and ethnic differences show up in polygenic scores. That's how sites like 23&Me work their magic. Those very same polygenic scores imply ethnic differences in disease susceptibilities, physical attributes, and personality traits. Race is not just "skin deep" as the pre-1980 school would have it.

Class differences also depend on polygenic scores.

I'll close with some comments on how I think Murray's book will be received, especially by my former colleagues at Local State College.

First, most of the people who fancy themselves as experts on Race, Class and Gender are committed to the social construct theory and won't change their minds. But science progresses one retirement at a time, and these folks--tenured baby boomers--are not that long for the academic world. I don't think they're being replaced.

Second, those same self-proclaimed experts are typically in English and education departments. They know nothing about statistics. (Yes, I know--education faculty should know some stats, but I don't think they generally do.) One doesn't need a lot of statistics to read Murray's book, but a college-level introduction to the discipline strikes me as a prerequisite. (Sociologists have no excuse here.)

Finally, "Charles Murray" is a dirty word in those quarters. He should have written the book under a pseudonym. As the book has just come out, I can't blame them yet for not having read it, but they won't have read it five years from now, either.

So yes, while it will pass the academy by, I predict there will be a revolution in our understanding of human behavior. I'm not sure it will all be good. Lots of people (e.g., inhabitants of red states) will be classed as vaguely subhuman because of their average polygenic scores, as will many other groups of people.

There are some things this book should never change, concepts of morality, justice, and human worth among them. No polygenic score is an excuse to deny anybody their human rights. As Mr. Murray recently opined, religion becomes more important. Absent some kind of revival, the temptation to equate polygenic scores with human worth becomes irresistible.

You should definitely read Charles Murray's book. But whether you do or not, for better or worse it will definitely change your life.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: By The People
• Book Review: The Righteous Mind
• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance

Trotskyists on the Pandemic

My Trotskyist friends have all opined on the coronavirus crisis. And well they should, because finally they have something that might actually rise to the level of a "crisis," unlike all the other mythological "crises" they have previously invented (climate, education, decline in living standards, etc.).

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Here is a brief review of relevant articles. Let's begin with the Statement By Socialist Resurgence  (SR), which sums up everything wrong with Trotskyist economics.

Slowing down the initial spread of COVID would have meant paying for massive testing campaigns in every country as soon as the virus was identified in China. In itself, this act would have meant large payments for doctors and equipment, not to mention the inevitable slowdowns in production as workers test positive and choose to self-quarantine. A rational response to the virus means workers and their dependents must not engage in productive activity while also being sustained in all of the necessities of life.

Consider the last sentence: workers and dependents must not engage in productive activity. Presumably "workers and dependents" include people employed by grocery stores, pharmacies, delivery services, not to mention farmers, tractor mechanics, grain haulers, meat packers, etc. None of those people can go to work. Yet everybody is gonna get free food? How?

Further, doctors (who presumably are also banned from working) are now supposed to provide "free" healthcare. I assume that means they're supposed to work for free, like they do in Cuba. At very best they'll get paid in little green pieces of paper--with which they'll be able to buy nothing at all because nobody else will be producing anything.

The ridiculous assumption is that the "bourgeoisie" have some huge stash of food held in reserve that they can now personally distribute to the working class. Imagine Bill Gates riding a bicycle delivering pizzas.

This is the free unicorn theory of economics. It makes no sense.

SR can't help but resurrect old eco-wheezes, blaming the virus on: deforestation and forest fires; global trade, especially with more remote areas; industry reaching deep into hitherto untouched forest uncovering disease-ridden animals ready to transmit to humans (a silly thesis); the stock market. Ultimately, they blame civilization--we should all return to some primitive hunter-gatherer existence when everybody was happy and life expectancy was 32 years.

The truth is that Covid-19 originated in a live-animal market in Wuhan. Or, for the more conspiracy-minded, it was caused (probably inadvertently) by an escaped virus from a nearby research lab. None of this has anything to do with forest fires.

James Fortin, in an article in Socialist Action (SA), is absolutely obsessed with Donald J. Trump. In his imagination the spread of the virus was caused by: Trump refusing to implement the Defense Production Act; Trump suggesting that "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF" (caps in Fortin's original); Trump disobeying his own medical advisers; Trump personally responsible for denying masks and PPE to healthcare workers; Trump originally underestimating the seriousness of the disease; and last but not least, Trump wanting the stock market to go up.

If only Hillary had been elected president! The world would just be so much better!!

Like SR’s piece, an article by Roy Landerson in The Militant concentrates on economic issues, albeit much more intelligently. Mr. Landerson (who I believe is a pseudonym for Brian Williams) is a competent economics reporter. The problem with being competent is that it becomes impossible to issue the radical-sounding but ultimately really stupid demands. Accordingly The Militant comes across as veritably reformist. They're not really--they're just sane.

A key graf:

In the U.S. and around the world, the capitalist rulers are trying to stem the virus tide by shutting down much of the economy and globalized world production and trade, apart from “essential” industries and services. Borders have been closed, lockdowns and curfews imposed in ever more far-reaching fashion. As the social dislocation for hundreds of millions of working people increase, so too will attacks on our rights and political space.

Mr. Landerson's account is much more specific about what has and has not been shut down. Further, he never criticizes the principle behind the closures--namely to prevent the spread of the virus. His final sentence also rings true, albeit he uses weird, SWP language to express it.

Attacks on "our rights and political space" supposedly refers only to the working class, but really it affects everybody--especially academics and journalists. The warning is echoed by many others, including the prominent libertarian, Arnold Kling, who suggests that once governments obtain power, they are reluctant ever to concede it. I'm sympathetic to Mr. Kling's and The Militant's concern.

Mr. Landerson is alone on my list who mentions the other principle reason for economic distress.

An additional external shock, in the midst of this crisis, is the collapse of the crude oil production quotas and price fixing deal between the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Russia. This caused a glut amid falling demand and already plummeting prices. Low prices will hit highly indebted U.S. shale oil producers hard as well as the budgets of governments dependent on oil exports like Venezuela, Nigeria and Iran.

The US used to be a net energy importer, which means that falling oil prices were an unalloyed blessing to our economy. But now we're a net exporter and the shoe is on the other foot. The benefit to the American consumer (which given the lockdown they can't avail themselves of) are outweighed by the collapse in energy sector employment.

The Militant's sober analysis of the crisis leads to a sober list of demands, most of which have already been met by the government.

• They demand "emergency relief for the working class" and others, such as farmers and shop owners. The $1200 checks issued to each adult meets this request.
• They ask that the government build emergency hospitals--now being done in New York at the Javits Center and in Central Park, along with a hospital ship. Similar efforts are underway elsewhere.
• They request "weekly unemployment relief that working people can depend on — not just a one-time check in the mail that falls far short of what is needed." Indeed, unemployment benefits have been juiced by $600/week, and extended to 39 weeks.
• They want a "government-funded public works program to put millions to work at union-scale wages." In government they call that an "infrastructure bill," and it does look like it's coming. I oppose it because I think it's mostly wasteful pork.
• Finally, they want "a crash government program to greatly expand the resources to produce a coronavirus vaccine." I think that's happening. The problem with vaccines is they have to be proven both safe and effective, which takes time. No amount of money will make that time any shorter.

Two of the SWP's demands are out of sync with the public's. First, they want emergency and unemployment benefits to be extended to illegal immigrants. This is a political nonstarter. 

And second, they want the Federal government to take over the production and distribution of essential supplies. For some reason they think that the government will be better at logistics than Walmart or Amazon!? The government--which ordered hospitals to use virus tests that didn't work; that couldn't get the Obamacare webpages to work; which allows the military to buy hammers at a thousand dollars each; which can't get the 737-Max plane back in the air--that government is now supposed to be given a monopoly on essential medical supplies.

No thank you!

Finally, let me link to a wonderful article by Louis Proyect. It's not really political, but instead is a beautifully written memoir of what it's like to be a septuagenarian in New York City during a pandemic.

Further Reading:

• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers
• Book Review: Kim Jong Un
• The SWP Defends Civilization

The SWP's 2020 Campaign Platform

The Transitional Program is among the founding documents of modern Trotskyism. Written by Trotsky in 1938, it describes a method by which the revolutionary party can hasten the radicalization of the working class.

The original text is turgid prose--I don't recommend it. But in brief summary, the Party (in this case the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) should put forward seemingly reasonable demands that workers will all agree with, but which are impossible for the ruling class to accommodate. Out Now, referring to American troops in Vietnam, is a classic example. Workers thrilled to the call, demonstrating by the hundreds of thousands against the war, but it was impossible for the US government to precipitously end the war. (Though they came pretty close.)

Trotskyist presidential campaigns are supposedly designed around these so-called transitional demands. Impossible on the one hand; reasonable on the other. The thirteen demands that constitute the SWP's 2020 campaign platform (offered in support of the Alyson Kennedy/Malcolm Jarrett ticket) fail this test. They're completely unreasonable. No doubt the bourgeoisie will be flummoxed--but so will everybody else.

Here is the list:

UNIONS/FOR A LABOR PARTY Support workers’ struggles to organize to defend themselves, to use union power on behalf of ourselves and all working people. Workers need their own party, a labor party. One union for all drivers — taxi, Uber, Lyft, other app-based and car service drivers! Support farmworkers in their fight to organize unions and for safe working conditions.

This is a demand on the working class--not the bourgeoisie, and as such is not transitional. Every Trotskyist grouplet makes the same demand--even the laughable Jeff Mackler. The sentence about drivers is a non sequitur--they're effectively self-employed and can't meaningfully organize.

 AMNESTY FOR ALL UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS in the US, a life-and-death question for the unions to unite workers and cut across divisions the bosses use to drive down wages. For access to driver’s licenses for all.

Should people who arrive on tourist visas be granted the same amnesty? Or should they get amnesty only after they overstay their visas? Immigration laws don't drive down wages, but instead raise them because they lower competition for jobs. Not clear why they don't demand an end to all driver's licenses--what's the point of issuing them to all? Should 2-year olds be granted driver's licenses if they're undocumented?

JOBS Fight for a federal government-financed public works program to put millions to work at union-scale wages building roads, bridges, hospitals, child care centers, mass transportation and quality affordable housing workers need. Set the minimum wage to allow workers to have a home and support a family.

This paragraph reads like a timewarp from 1932. How is said public works program gonna put millions to work? Most construction projects require very few workers these days. They built a new building on my campus and there probably weren't more than 20 people on the construction site at any one time. And aren't new roads and bridges mostly just pork barrel projects used to siphon money into the pockets of corrupt officials (union and otherwise)? Can The Militant provide even one example of a new road or bridge that is so desperately needed as to warrant such an emergency effort? 

OPPOSE WASHINGTON’S WARS US hands off Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. US troops out of Afghanistan, Korea, the Middle East. End US colonial rule in Puerto Rico.

The US is pulling out of Afghanistan, the Middle East, and (eventually) Korea. We don't have troops in Venezuela or Cuba (apart from the Guantanamo sideshow). And if Puerto Rico wants independence, then please don't let the door hit them on the way out.

CUBA’S REVOLUTION — AN EXAMPLE End the US rulers’ economic war against Cuba; US out of Guantánamo. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 showed it is possible for workers and farmers to transform themselves in struggle, to take political power and uproot capitalist exploitation.

Nobody--not even my comrade-friends--will choose to voluntarily live in Cuba. Those heroic workers and farmers--all they've done is transform themselves into impoverished slaves of the Castro regime.

HEALTH CARE FOR ALL Fight for universal, government-guaranteed cradle-to-grave health care, and retirement income for all.

We already have health care for all. In the worst case it's Medicaid, which is a far sight better than what they get in Cuba. Most Americans have much better health care than that. And apparently my comrade-friends have never heard of social security.

ABORTION Defend women’s right to unrestricted access to family planning services, including the right to safe, secure abortions.

Not clear why the Party takes a position on abortion--how does it further the World Revolution? Do they also support infanticide? What about killing unwanted two-year olds?

ISRAEL & PALESTINE For the recognition of Israel and of a contiguous Palestinian state. For the right of Jews to return to Israel as a refuge in the face of capitalist crisis, Jew-hatred and murderous violence.

I agree with this demand. Whatever else the SWP is, it is not antisemitic. Thank you!

WORKERS CONTROL OVER PRODUCTION The bosses and their government lie to working people about their production costs and profits, while they insist they can’t afford to pay higher wages. Demand they open their books for inspection by workers and consumers. To prevent capitalist collusion and thievery — and their production of shoddy and dangerous goods like the Boeing 737 MAX — workers in their millions will need to fight for control of production, a step towards taking political power and a school for running the economy for ourselves in the interests of all.

The real demand here is for democratic control over business decisions. This will never work because the primary beneficiaries of business are neither workers nor capitalists, but instead consumers. Businesses respond to the marketplace because it is the market that makes consumers happy. It's consumers who demand safe airplanes--not Boeing employees or managers. If Boeing can't deliver then they should go out of business.

“JUSTICE” SYSTEM Fight against police brutality, racist discrimination and the entire capitalist injustice system with its frame-ups, “plea bargains,” onerous bail and outrageous prison sentences, all of which disproportionately hit workers who are Black. For the right to vote for ex-prisoners and all workers behind bars.

So I'm against police brutality, racist discrimination, onerous bail, etc. as much as the next guy. I'm also against high crime. Crime causes poverty, which is the reason some Black communities are poor. Eliminate the crime and everybody gets richer. My neighborhood is mostly Black. Black teenagers play basketball on the street. But there are very few cops around here and nobody is stopped or frisked. That's because there is no crime. My neighbors--whatever their color--are civilized people.

POLITICAL RIGHTS Defend democratic rights — the right to vote, to free speech and assembly and to bear arms, under attack from Democrats and Republicans alike. Stop FBI and other government spying, harassment and disruption.

I know there is a lot of whining and complaining on both sides of the aisle, but I still think that police interference in our democracy is a relatively minor problem.

PRISONER RIGHTS End solitary confinement. End suppression of the Militant, books and newspapers by prison authorities. Abolish the death penalty, an anti-working-class weapon in the hands of the rulers.

I'm sympathetic to this. Prisoners are wards of the state and it is our collective responsibility to take care of them. I think we have not always lived up to the responsibility. I think we should minimize the number of people in prison and in solitary confinement. But some people are just criminals and have to be locked up. I generally oppose the death penalty.

FARMERS — WORKERS ALLIES ON THE LAND To put a halt to farm foreclosures, bankruptcies and skyrocketing rural debt, we demand nationalization of the land. This puts the soil at the service of the farmers who till it, as opposed to control by the banks and landlords. We demand the government guarantee farmers their costs of production, including their living expenses.

Yet another paragraph from 1932. In what parallel universe is The Militant living in? If the government guaranteed costs of production we would end up with huge surpluses of products that consumers don't want to buy. Like everybody else, farmers have to work for the consumer.

Despite the fact that the Kennedy-Jarrett campaign is a professionally run operation (unlike Jeff Mackler's), these demands aren't transitional. They're not even logical. I'm not even clear what the programmatic differences are with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

This blog endorses the reelection of Donald J. Trump for president.

Further Reading:

• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers
• Our President is a Pacifist
• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge

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

The Las Vegas Democratic Debate

I don't know if you watched the Dem debate last night, but it was a jolly good show. Unlike the others, nothing boring about it.

I can't believe anybody who watched it will come away thinking that Bloomberg is a good candidate. He got completely eviscerated. Liz Warren, whatever else you may think about her, is very, very smart, and definitely deserves her title as Harvard Law professor. She took Bloomie apart limb from limb, leaving him speechless and flustered. Bernie & Biden got in some good shots as well--Charles Hurt remarks that "it was almost like Mr. Bloomberg joined the stage to give Mr. Biden a hand. I mean, next to Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Biden came off like a brain surgeon."

Bloomie--visibly embarrassed--slunk off the stage at the end with his tail between his legs, He got very little air-time, and apart from calling Bernie a "communist" (true), he scored no punches. If debates count for anything this should end his campaign. I guess there's another one next week--we'll see if he even shows up.

Money will buy you a seat at the table. But after that a successful candidate has to connect with voters in some personal way. TV ads can never do that. The only candidates this round who have that personal connection are Donald and Bernie. Trump routinely draws crowds of thousands at his rallies, and that is the key to his success. The man is an expert storyteller and entertainer. He also has a compelling political message, which (contrary to rumor) is not far-right, but is instead dead center in the American political spectrum.

Bernie can also draw a crowd--I read that his Las Vegas rally scored 10,000. I don't get the attraction, but it's obviously there. None of the others--not Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Warren, and certainly not Bloomberg--can pull an audience.

So I think the election comes down to two competing visions for America, represented by Bernie and Trump. The odds strongly favor Trump given that Bernie is too far Left. But Bernie is a wildcard--he could pull off a victory. Some of his more reluctant supporters are suggesting "we should take him seriously, but not literally." That is, don't believe the hyperbole about Medicare for All, because that will never happen. What will happen is a change in the environment in which the current medical system works (or doesn't). I think that will be much for the worse, but it's not the same thing as a revolution.

Compare this with Trump (about whom Salena Zito coined the famous seriously...literally phrase) and his early promise to deport all illegal aliens. He's made no serious effort to do that. Indeed, I think actual deportations were higher under Obama. I don't think Trump was ever serious about that promise.

But Bernie just might believe his own bullshit. In that case his election will destroy the country.

By the way, I don't dislike Bloomberg. In terms of actual policy he's not that bad (apart from wanting to spend a trillion dollars on a mostly imaginary climate problem). His stop & frisk strategy was an anti-crime measure, not something racist, and arguably it worked. For a staunch supporter of gun control it's hard to imagine him doing anything different.

The Democratic Party is disintegrating before our very eyes. I'm not sure what will take it's place, but something will. Old-fashioned social democracy such as existed from Teddy Roosevelt through Obama is dying out--not just in this country but around the world. I suggest that's because since 1975 global economic growth per capita has slowed down, and in that environment people are less willing to pay taxes to support other people's welfare benefits. It's a much less charitable, zero-sum world that we live in today. Until and unless per capita growth can resume its earlier course, the call for ever more generous government bennies will fall on deaf ears.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• Book Review: Donald J. Trump
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

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

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.

Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers

The ridiculously named grouplet Socialist Resurgence (SR) is publishing its founding documents, among which is a political report entitled U.S. faces political, social, and economic crisis (pdf). Numbering at most 50 members, the new organization is compelled to issue mighty proclamations on the state of modern politics. The resulting document is incoherent.

Of course our comrades are not explicitly demanding steep wage cuts for healthcare workers. They'd definitely deny it if you asked them. Indeed, they write

Healthcare workers are under siege by employers. Hospitals and clinics are cutting wages and benefits while nurses and doctors are forced to see more patients, despite evidence that doing so increases errors with disastrous effects. Experienced nurses and doctors are being fired and replaced by fresh out of school nurses and doctors-they're paid less. Experienced staff not fired are leaving the profession due to ever increasing on the job stress. Suicide rates of nurses and doctors are on the rise.

The solution to this sorry state of affairs is this (emphasis mine).

Health care is a human right. This must include dental, vision care, and humane, non-punitive, and non-stigmatizing approaches to mental health care. No one should have to go bankrupt because of medical costs or decide whether one eats or gets medicine. Get the insurance companies out of the equation. Free quality universal public health care now!

Even our Trotskyist friends are smart enough to know that nothing is "free"--everything has to be paid for somehow. Their conceit is that the disempowered bourgeoisie will foot the bill from all the huge profits they've stashed in some vault somewhere, accumulated over decades from the ruthless exploitation of the working class.

And that will work for a year, or maybe two, or at most ten. But eventually the 1% will be entirely dispossessed and no longer able to pay up. Then the cash has to come from someplace else. "Free" healthcare means that patients can't be charged, so the only other possible sources of money are either taxpayers or employees.

So it is instructive that the political report cites Cuba as a positive example for how healthcare should be funded. The bourgeoisie were eliminated 60 years ago, and any residual wealth they left behind has long since been squandered. So Cuba illustrates what happens when the piggy bank runs dry.

They write:

In Cuba, the healthcare system is publicly owned with several layers. There are community clinics, with doctor-nurse teams who live in the neighborhoods that they serve, local hospitals, and larger medical institutes. All healthcare is free, with some exceptions for some medicines and procedures for higher income people, and quality of life indices are impressive. Cuba enjoys one of the highest life expectancy rates in the hemisphere, with the average life expectancy at 78.05 years old, compared to the U.S. at 78.62 years. In 2005, Cuba had 627 doctors and 94 dentists per 100,000 population. That same year, there were 225 physicians and 54 dentists per 100,000 population in the U.S. All medical and nursing education in Cuba is free. Cuba has innovated in the realm of vaccines and cancer treatment. Unlike the U.S., which sends weapons around the world, Cuba sends doctors and nurses to disaster areas and semi-colonial countries.

One can certainly dispute the virtues of Cuban healthcare. Cubans have always had a long life expectancy since way back when--a trait that's likely more genetic than the result of good healthcare. Regards vaccines, all they've done (to their credit) is manufacture them--unhindered as they are by the liability faced by American firms. I'm unaware of any pathbreaking cancer research coming from Cuba. Medical research today is overwhelmingly done in the United States (which is one reason why drugs are more expensive here).

Those issues aside--the question is Who pays for healthcare for Cubans? The answer is obvious: the employees. According to Fox News, in 2014 Cuban doctors got a 150% pay raise--all the way to $67/month! Nurses also made out like bandits, with their monthly paycheck going from $13 to $25.

A homeless woman in any civilized country earns more than that just by panhandling. Our comrades will argue that Cubans are often compensated in kind rather than in cash, e.g., with "free" housing and a food ration card. Which is just like in the US: the bag lady gets to sleep for free in a shelter and is given a free meal (along with food stamps).

Life is much harder for US doctors, who have to pay their own rent and buy their own food. But they earn on average about $17,000/month, or a bit over 250 times what the Cuban medic makes. The median US salary for registered nurses in the US is about $6,000/month.

Healthcare is a labor-intensive business. While I have not been able to find a precise statistic, if it mirrors the economy as a whole 70% of costs are paid to labor. So obviously, if you want to reduce the cost of healthcare in America to be something close to "free", you will have to dramatically lower the wages of healthcare workers. The comrades never say that, but of course that's exactly what they mean. They think doctors and nurses, and phlebotomists and radiation technicians, and orderlies and laundry workers, should all take a whopping big pay cut--just so we can believe the fiction that healthcare is "free."

So I'll stand by my headline: a 100% accurate summary of Socialist Resurgence's true position. Socialist Resurgence demands steep wage cuts for healthcare workers.

The rest of the political report is not full of facts as much as factoids. The difference is context, and in every case our comrades leave that out. A few examples:

• They mention that despite low unemployment, labor participation has not budged. True, but it's due mostly to the on-going retirement of baby boomers, who are withdrawing from the labor force.
• They predict a new recession is looming. Of course they're right--eventually there will be a recession. The business cycle has not been repealed (except in places like Cuba which are in permanent recession). But it looks increasingly unlikely to happen in 2020.
• They write "the free speech rights of students and professors has come under attack. Critics of Israeli apartheid and advocates for BDS have been attacked as anti-Semitic by pro-Israel politicians and lobbying groups." Accusing somebody of antisemitism is not the same as denying their free speech rights. The campus Left's insistence on shouting down pro-Israel speakers is a much better example.
• "Living standards for U.S. workers are falling." This is manifestly not true.

But here is the biggest howler:

The wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80% own 7%. Eight people, six from the U.S., own as much wealth as half of humanity. Only the top 20% fully recovered from the Great Recession.

Do eight people buy half the cars in the world? Do eight people eat half of the world's food? Do eight people own half of the world's houses? Do six Americans receive half of all social security payments? Of course not! It is only by the narrowest, cherry-picked definition of "wealth" that our comrades can make such ludicrous claims.

This is one of those documents I've read so that you don't have to. Not recommended.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Socialist Action Goes AWOL