Men are Men and Women are Women

Men are men and women are women. So claims The Militant. Sort of. Somehow.

A feature article in this week's paper written by the Editors, entitled A working-class road to expand rights for all the oppressed, leads with this paragraph (link and emphasis mine).

An article in last week’s issue of the Militant — under the headline “Supreme Court: Job Discrimination for Being Gay, Transgender Is Illegal. Ruling Includes ‘Poison Pill’ Against Women’s Rights Fight” — was wrong. It erroneously implied that the June 15 court decision, though flawed, should be welcomed by the working class and others fighting to eradicate prejudice, bigotry and discrimination in employment and other areas.

"Implied" really is a weasel word--apparently the offending article, by Emma Johnson, never actually said anything wrong. Indeed, after reading both articles, wrong seems much too strong a word. At worst it's slightly unclear. Surely no reason for Ms. Johnson to be rendered an unperson.

The articles concern the recent 6-3 Supreme Court ruling stating that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” The decision--authored by Justice Gorsuch--was based on an interpretation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The surprising ruling has drawn much conservative ire.

The Militant isn't precisely against the outcome, as the second paragraph of the Editors' article makes clear.

The stakes for the working class and our allies in opposing each of the three separate firings at issue in the court case are indisputable. The bosses themselves readily acknowledged they had fired the workers only upon learning they were gay or transsexual, without the pretense of any work-related reason. If employers get away with arbitrarily singling out a worker for firing or other penalties, then any fighting capacity of the workforce and unions for unity in protecting one another is set back, irreparably so if not combated and reversed.

The problem isn't the decision, but rather the way it was reached. Gay and transgender rights are to be won by working class activism following a debate within the working class itself. Instead the rights were awarded on a silver platter, offered up rather arbitrarily by the Supreme Court.

The analogy Ms. Johnson offers is Roe v. Wade, which preempted any discussion of abortion in this country. In her telling, American workers would have reached a consensus guaranteeing a woman's right to choose, and instead of it being hopelessly controversial, abortion would have been widely available. The result of Roe v. Wade is paradoxically not more abortion, but rather less as the working class can't speak with one voice on the issue.

The Editors, meanwhile, cite the 1979 Weber case, where a white worker sued on grounds that an affirmative action program resulted in "reverse discrimination." The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Weber, which the Editors claim was "a victory for working people."

That is the kind of working-class action needed to defeat arbitrary and discriminatory hiring, firing or promotion practices of any kind by private or government employers. Changing attitudes about countless forms of discrimination and bigotry are not the product of either legislation or court rulings but of unity forged in struggle by working people, the oppressed, and our class organizations.

So let's try to figure this out.

• The Gorsuch decision, while nominally correct in guaranteeing gay rights, nevertheless preempted working class action. Both Ms. Johnson and the Editors agree with that.
• Roe v. Wade, mentioned by Ms. Johnson, and also nominally correct, has also preempted working class action, paradoxically making abortion less available.
• The Weber case, cited by the Editors, is still nominally correct, but in this case it is a reflection of working class sentiment rather than an arbitrary Court ruling.

Huh?

Honestly, I'm stumped. I can't make head or tail of this. Where did Ms. Johnson go wrong?

The problem isn't really anything that Ms. Johnson says. It's rather that she's succumbed to reactionary petty bourgeois thinking--nothing that a good dose of humiliation self-criticism won't solve.

Because--while the outcome of Gorsuch's ruling is correct--the reasoning is straight from the reactionary, petty bourgeois Left. The Editors write:

The court’s contorted ruling as to what constitutes discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” is a blow to working people and the oppressed. It lends credence to the utterly anti-scientific notion promoted by many who consider themselves enlightened, progressive, that human beings (unlike almost all other animal species) are not born as either female or male. ...

Those holding this unscientific view demand that “gender” — solely a grammatical term until only several decades ago — instead be left open at birth, to be “chosen” by the individual sometime later in life from literally dozens of possible options. Anyone can supposedly be a woman or a man, or virtually any variant in between, merely by declaring themselves so.

And true enough--men are men and women are women. Vive la différence! The Editors accurately mock the ridiculous opinion common in academic circles. It's easy to do--we conservatives do it all the time. That Ms. Johnson fell for the academic BS shows her lack of proletarian sensibilities.

But wait! Turns out she's just as sensible as the Editors, perhaps even more so. She writes,

But the fact is, the court’s way of handling the case assures that years of litigation will follow. Reactionary forces that advance a gender-over-sex agenda will weaken the fight for women’s emancipation. They will seek to use the ruling to demand admittance to women’s bathrooms, sports competitions, locker rooms and other sex-separate spaces, and to attack freedom of speech and health care.

So I count Ms. Johnson not guilty. Her article is actually a clearer statement of what I (sort of) understand to be The Militant's true position. She does not deserve her walk of shame.

So why does The Militant retract an article that doesn't need to be retracted? This is like Tweedledum retracting a piece written by Tweedledee. It makes no sense.

So I count three possible reasons:

1. Ms. Johnson is about to be expelled from the Party.
2. There is some very subtle point that I missed, but which nevertheless is of profound importance. In which case they need a third article to tell us what it is.
3. It's just clickbait. It did, after all, inspire me to write this post.

I vote for option three. I should probably retract this post--but I won't.

Further Reading:

• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Sex and the Alpha Male
• The SWP Defends Civilization

Let Them Eat Little Bits of Green Paper

From The Militant

People live well when they have enough money to buy the consumer goods they want and need.

People are poor when they either don't have enough money, or when consumer goods are not available at an affordable price. In Keynesian parlance, the former case is known as a demand side shock, while the latter is a supply side shock. (Without getting into any argument about the relevance of Keynesian economics, the nomenclature is helpful.)

The Great Recession of 2008 was a classic demand side shock. Housing prices collapsed, the stock market went down, and trillions of dollars of wealth were destroyed. The result was a sharp drop in the money supply, greatly reduced demand, after which followed bankruptcies, factory closures and unemployment. Everything spiraled downhill from there.

The Keynesian solution to a demand-side shock is for government to pump money into the economy by deficit spending, thereby putting people back to work again and so increasing natural demand until the economy recovers. This is called stimulus, and the federal government under Bush and Obama did approximately that. The economy has since recovered. At least that's the simple story--one can argue about how true it is.

The problem today is precisely the opposite--we have a supply-side shock. To illustrate, in January people used to eat in restaurants. By April, because of the virus, restaurants were deemed unable to serve food safely, and therefore nobody ate in restaurants. All of a sudden the supply of restaurant meals collapsed to zero--despite the fact that consumers had plenty of money to spend in restaurants.

A similar story can be told for airlines, hotels, and Uber rides. The problem was never lack of money, but rather the lack of safe supply of said services. Workers in those industries were laid off, unemployment ensued, rent and mortgages went unpaid, and it spiraled downhill from there.

Demand-side and supply-side shocks both end up in roughly the same place, but they get there by two different routes. The solutions have to be different. As mentioned, for the demand-side shock the government needs to provide stimulus. But for a supply-side shock that is precisely the wrong medicine.

The best solution for a supply-side shock is for the Fed to wave a magic wand and get all the restaurants to reopen again. (They'd also have to re-establish consumer confidence in restaurant safety. As said, it's a magic wand.) Then all the restaurant employees will be back at work and people will happily spend the money in restaurants buying the meals they planned on buying anyway.

But if the restaurants are all closed, more stimulus will not help. No amount of money will convince consumers to eat in a closed, unsafe restaurant. Instead of enabling consumers to eat in restaurants, all the stimulus did was pass out little bits of green paper. Consumers can't eat bits of green paper, nor will restaurant employees get their jobs back. This is the opposite of living well--I can't buy what I want, and the waitress can't earn a living. Stimulus doesn't change anything for either of us.

So instead of spending their stimulus checks, many people just put the money in the bank. That's what I did--because I'm retired my income has remained unchanged. Because of lack of supply (i.e., my wife & I can no longer go out to eat) and also because of the government's stimulus check, my bank balance has increased since the pandemic began. This drives up asset prices, such as the stock market. My experience is similar to others who haven't lost their job or otherwise been able to maintain their income. But for "non-essential" workers such as restaurant employees the outcome is very different. Their income has just gone to zero. 

Of course I don't have to save all my stimulus money. While I can't spend it on restaurant meals, I can spend it on something else. In my case home repairs took up a big slice. Others have spent it on used cars--the used car market is quite hot right now. There are a lot of people looking to buy a house, though inventory is very low. And, of course, especially since we can't eat in restaurants anymore, we will have to spend more money in grocery stores.

The result is more money (stimulus plus foregone restaurant meals) chasing fewer goods that remain in supply (cars and groceries). It's a classic recipe for dramatic inflation. Unless bits of green paper suddenly become edible, more stimulus will just make things worse and increase inflation even more.

An article in The Militant entitled Joblessness soars worldwide, spurs working-class resistance by Roy Landersen (likely a pseudonym for the competent Brian Williams) demonstrates this. The graph above reveals the sharp inflation in grocery prices that have resulted from both added stimulus dollars, plus the disruption in the supply chain. Grocery prices have gone up by 2.6%.

Disruptions in the supply chain include this: while restaurants all closed down, grocery stores got more business. The problem is that food for restaurants is not the same thing as food that's sold in grocery stores. For example, many people enjoy eating in Chinese restaurants, but only a few people cook Chinese food at home. So there's now a huge surplus of Chinese ingredients that used to be bought by restaurants but can't now be sold in grocery stores.

The result of all of this is higher prices.

At some level Mr. Landersen understands this; after all, he did compile the graph above. But his proposed solutions are wrong--they amount to Let them eat little bits of green paper. He condemns "paltry government handouts" as being woefully insufficient.

In the U.S., individuals have been forced to skip more than 100 million payments on student loans, auto loans and other forms of debt. A wave of apartment and home evictions loom, threatening millions with homelessness.

He has a point--all these defaults will lead to bank failures, and then we're all toast. So some short-term help for unemployed restaurant workers is appropriate. And that's been done--though it remains to be seen if it's enough. But it shouldn't be called stimulus, and to the extent it adds to the money supply it's inflationary.

Sending an extra "stimulus" check to somebody like me--who has suffered no income loss--is completely counterproductive.

His second suggestion is gonzo:

The Socialist Workers Party calls for workers and their unions to fight for a government-funded public works program to provide jobs at union-scale pay, building things working people need — hospitals, housing, day care centers, schools, and to repair the crumbling infrastructure.

Why build more hospitals when a) we have enough, and b) we don't have the extra doctors and nurses to staff them? Those professions are already in short supply, and jacking up the salaries of doctors and nurses won't help restaurant employees at all. This really is a Let them eat little bits of green paper strategy. It would be massively inflationary.

I want to eat in a restaurant, but Mr. Landersen will force me to buy a new hospital instead. How silly is that?

The solution--the only solution--is to find a way to reopen restaurants, airlines, hotels, and tourism and travel generally. Little green pieces of paper are useful only if there is something consumers want to buy with them.

Further Reading:

• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers
• Useful Marxist Economics: Michael Roberts
• The Militant Visits Manila

Left Voice on Trump's Tulsa Rally

I made some changes to This Blog's Beat, i.e., the list of blogs in the right sidebar I promise to cover fairly regularly. I deleted Counterpunch and the Freedom Socialist Party--the former because apart from Louis Proyect's articles I almost never read it, and the latter because it's boring and useless.

Meanwhile, I've added Left Voice (h/t Louis Proyect) which proves to be an interesting rag full of great discussion topics. I previously described it as "published by a collective of New York City college professors virtue-signalling their revolutionary socialism." That was slightly unfair: they're not all professors, some of them are adjuncts, others teachers, then there are grad students, and at least one taxi driver who's probably fallen off the academic ladder somewhere. But they're all educated, intelligent people who have something to say.

The article for today is entitled The Great American Comeback? Trump Resumes His Re-Election Campaign With Bizarre Speech in Tulsa. The author is Ezra Brain, "a NYC based theatre artist and teacher."

Mr. Brain echoes the MSM that Trump is likely to lose in November. The polls are against him, and now even the betting markets are against him. I will point out that both MSM and the polls were wrong in 2016--but being wrong once doesn't mean they're always wrong. I find Biden to be a singularly unfeasible candidate--an incompetent, senile reincarnation of Hillary Clinton. MSM notwithstanding, I can't believe he'll win the election. So I'm still putting my money on Trump.

Mr. Brain mentions Covid:

The rally was controversial from its announcement. To begin with, experts almost universally agree that holding a rally with thousands of people during the current pandemic poses significant risk to all participants.

I agree with him that holding the rally was a risky proposition. I was shocked and disappointed that most attendees were not wearing masks--it makes them look stupid. I'll also note (as Mr. Brain does not) that the arena was only half full, and that the overflow crowd was mostly nonexistent. There are three theories for why:

1. People were afraid of the virus and therefore stayed away. I know I would not have attended.
2. AOC has a theory that a TikTok mob post went viral and inspired folks to reserve tickets without any intention of attending the rally.
3. Scott Adams goes along with the TikTok theory, but suggests it was a Chinese plot--TikTok is a Chinese company.

I dunno--I think virus fear is the most likely culprit. But some version of TikTok foul play may also be possible.

Mr. Brain is obsessed with "dog whistles." These are words and phrases that are presumably used to communicate "racism" to the intended audience, while leaving the rest of us ignorant. But Mr. Brain is on to the scheme, and so acutely sensitive is he to these dog whistles that he thinks he understands Mr. Trump's motivations even better than Trump himself.

For example, Mr. Brain thinks "thug" is a racial term--a connotation that even I, a retired academic and dedicated right-winger, never realized. Thug is defined as "a violent person, especially a criminal." Mr. Trump has almost exclusively blamed white thugs for the looting and violence--first and foremost Antifa, and more recently also white supremacists. He even blamed the white, elderly bozo from Buffalo who got himself knocked over by the cops. I can't recall Trump ever blaming Black street gangs for the problems, even though they were obviously also involved.

Mr. Brain accuses Trump of using "Juneteenth" as a racist dog whistle. By originally scheduling the rally for that day, and then a few days before rescheduling it, Trump has somehow revealed his inner racism. Huh? If he was so racist, why didn't he insist on holding rally on Juneteenth just out of principle?

Then Trump held the rally in Tulsa--site of a racist pogrom against Black people in March, 1921. The problem with Trump is not racism, but rather ignorance--he doesn't read. All his information comes from cable news, and until Juneteenth and the pogrom hit the news networks he knew nothing about them. This is not dog whistling.

It's not just Trump, but also Joe Biden.

The contradictions in Trump’s rhetoric on the uprisings built to a head when he launched a hypocritical full-on assault on Biden’s record on race. Making a series of shockingly salient points, he pointed out Biden’s personal affinity for segregationists, his terrible voting record, and how the economic policies that Biden has long-supported have impoverished Black Americans. The climax of the attack came with Trump declaring, seemingly unaware of the irony that the statement could just as easily apply to himself, that “racial justice begins when Joe Biden retires from public life.” That Donald Trump, with his decades-long history of racism, was able to mount such a valid attack against his opponent is as clear a sign as any that many of the differences between the two parties are cosmetic. Both Biden and Trump are racists ...

I don't see "Donald Trump's decades-long history of racism." Nowhere has Trump demanded a return to Jim Crow. He doesn't advocate the repeal of the voting rights act. He'd oppose any change in the public accommodations law. Unlike Biden, he's never hung out with avowed segregationists. I've never even heard him criticizing affirmative action! Apart from largely imaginary "dog whistles", Mr. Brain has no evidence of Trump's enduring racism.

I don't think Biden is a racist, either--he's just a Democrat. Democrats are fundamentally unprincipled and don't believe in anything except "higher taxes" and "bigger government." Mr. Biden will go whichever way the wind blows on race. He once hung out with segregationists; today he wants to "defund the police."

Neither Donald nor Joe are more racist than the average septuagenarian white guy.

Mr. Brain writes:

It was on statues that Trump most clearly stoked white nationalist sentiment. After first referencing the Confederate statue in DC that had been taken down and burned by protesters the night before, Trump began to make a series of statements about “our heritage.” These remarks directly played to the most radicalized sectors of his base ...He also said the radical left wants to “tear down our statues and punish and cancel anyone who does not conform to their demands.” 

Some statues should be torn down, and some shouldn't be. The distinction needs to be deliberate and sensitive, and the process legal. What is unacceptable is for a mob of Antifa thugs to tear down statues as an act of violence.

He also made the intentionally vague declaration that “We used to have things, we don’t anymore, because we want to be open.” What exactly these things that we can’t have anymore because we want to be open are, he never clarified.

We used to have football games and tailgate parties. We used to go to concerts and theaters. We used to eat in restaurants. Yet Mr. Brain puts this all into his "dog whistle" category. He really is dense--bordering on kookiness.

Of all people, Mr. Brain should hope that Trump's rally is successful. If only a few people get sick, then likely we can open up theaters sooner rather than later. As a theater person Mr. Brain should appreciate that.

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on Reopening
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• Our President is a Pacifist

Who Are The Police?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(excerpts)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia defines lumpen proletariat this way (emphases mine):

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

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

And he calls himself a revolutionary.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

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

Malik Miah on the Virus

Malik Miah knows more about race and racism than I do.

He--a former comrade of mine in the Socialist Workers Party--is African-American and has spent his career thinking, reading and writing about race. I, meanwhile, am a white, upper-middle-class, retired academic who thinks about race occasionally, in between the 53 other political topics that sometimes get my attention.

I have nothing to teach Mr. Miah about race--he'd be insulted if I even tried. My opinions are mostly Republican boilerplate. Mr. Miah has surely heard all of that before.

Still--for the benefit of other readers--let me very briefly state my position. Human beings are loyal first to their own kin, and second to others who look and talk like themselves. Therefore racism is a part of human nature, and there is no human society where it doesn't exist. It isn't caused by capitalism, imperialism, socialism, or any other -ism. It just is. It's not a problem for which there is any solution, merely mitigation--such as with affirmative action programs.

That's enough about me. Let's talk about Malik Miah, and specifically his article in Against the Current entitled Virus is Color Blind, Not Humans. The post concerns the large racial discrepancy in Covid victims. Mr. Miah's data:

Statistics (from a selection of states) show this life gap. 

As of this writing (April 12): 

Illinois: Blacks are 15% of the state’s population, whites 77%. Deaths: 42% Black, 36% white. 

Michigan: Blacks are 14% of state’s population and 40% of deaths (heavily concentrated in the metro area of Detroit. The three counties of metro Detroit make up 83% of the state’s deaths).

Mississippi: Blacks are 38% of state’s population, 72% of deaths. 

Louisiana: Blacks are 33% of the population, 70.5% of deaths.

South Caro­lina: Blacks are 27% of the population, 46% of the deaths.

New York City (the epicenter of the virus): Blacks and Hispanics die at twice the rate of whites, who are 46% of the population. The racially diverse Elmhurst section of Queens is being devastated. 

Official figures are underestimated, as New York City has not counted deaths of many people who died at home and were never taken to hospitals. There were not enough tests to check.

A couple of quibbles: Mr. Miah reports death rates, which are likely more accurately reported than other data. But we don't know from this whether Blacks are more likely to get Covid, or simply more likely to die from it. That will make a big difference in any conclusions. Second, I tend to think deaths attributed to Covid are overstated. Mr. Miah's point is correct, but on the other hand anybody who tests positive for the virus is assumed to have died from it, when in many cases (esp. in nursing homes) they died from something else.

So to complement Mr. Miah's death stats, I looked for data on Covid infections by race. The CDC website reports (as of May 24, 2020) that 26.6% of all cases were among Black people, or roughly double their percent in population (13%). That this qualitatively corresponds to Mr. Miah's data is reassuring.

The conclusion then is that Blacks are twice as likely to contact Covid than whites. Mr. Miah attributes that to racism.

He might be partly right, but his reasoning is mistaken. Certainly his opening paragraph is wrong.

The coronavirus is color blind. It strikes whites, Blacks, Latinos, indigenous people, Asians, rich and poor. So why the higher number of cases and deaths for African Americans?

Susceptibility to any disease is significantly heritable, which means it varies by ethnicity. Dramatic examples include Tay-Sachs disease, which afflicts almost exclusively Ashkenazi Jews. West Africans suffer disproportionately from sickle cell anemia--a side effect from their relative resistance to malaria. Charles Mann points out that Black slaves in colonial Virginia had longer life expectancies than their white masters precisely because of that. I just survived a bout of bladder cancer, during which I learned that white men are twice as likely to have the disease than Black men--undoubtedly a genetic effect.

All diseases depend to one degree or another on the genetics of the host. That Covid is twice as prevalent among Blacks than whites strongly suggests genetics as at least a partial explanation. There will likely someday be a polygenic score that predicts susceptibility to this virus.

But genetic susceptibility cannot be the whole story. In Mr. Miah's telling, racism is the cause of Black poverty, and poverty leads to virus infections. That second premise is undoubtedly correct--poor people are more likely to get sick regardless of susceptibility. As a good Republican, I tend to attribute Black poverty more to the social dysfunction described by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1964. To which Mr. Miah will likely respond that that dysfunction is itself a product of racism.

To which I have no very good answer, except to note that racism is a very amorphous, ill-defined concept. As said, I freely acknowledge that it exists, and further I'd support some government policies to mitigate its effects (such as a narrowly-tailored affirmative action program). But if Mr. Miah wants to blame the Covid discrepancy on racism, he's gonna have to define racism much more precisely than he has, and then connect many more dots to show how it results in the Covid statistics. I don't think he can do that.

Looking toward the future, this is how Mr. Miah describes the path forward.

The United States is the only developed country in the world where there is no universal health care. The racial gap, however, has prevented united action — even though most people now support a single payer type system. Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans have never received fair and equal treatment. Many African Americans don’t have a primary care physician.

The ideology of white supremacy is so engrained that solidarity between whites and others has been difficult to forge. Racial inequality is exacerbated under a system that puts business and profits first. Yet the need for health solidarity is changing that.

I doubt Mr. Miah and I will find too much common ground here. I think a single-payer system is a lousy idea that will never work. I don't think racial inequality is exacerbated by capitalism--quite the opposite.

Still, there is a problem when many African Americans don't have a primary care physician. And while I'm skeptical we'll ever make much progress, I surely support the notion of health solidarity. I do think that people like Mr. Miah and people like me can reach common ground on at least some issues. And we should try to do that.

To that end, we need to tone down the partisan bickering. Solving the primary care physician problem does not mean we have to solve all problems of everything first. On my side of the aisle we need to avoid epithets like "race-baiter" or "race-hustler." Those are not helpful. And Mr. Miah really needs to stop using language like "white supremacy."

Advice to everybody: if you want to win friends and influence people, throwing around casual insults is not helpful.

Update: I erred in addressing Malik Miah as "Mr. Malik." I have changed those references to the correct "Mr. Miah."

Further Reading:

• Affirmative Action (mostly about the Harvard admissions case)
• If Everybody is a Racist, Then Nobody is a Racist
• The Dream 50 Years On

Trotskyists on Reopening

Reopening?

Generally they're against it.

The case is succinctly made by Socialist Action in a piece by Steve Johnson entitled Reopening schools: A dangerous threat to children and teachers. The lede paragraph:

Plans to reopen schools are being questioned by the international working class as the novel coronavirus COVID-19 continues to spread across the world. These plans are part of the mad rush of capitalist nations to re-open their economies, disregarding the health of the children and the working class of their respective societies.

Absent perfect safety and the once-and-for-all defeat of the virus, nothing should be allowed to reopen. Anything less than that "demonstrates the lack of scientific planning these nations possess in tackling the pandemic."

Despite claiming to represent the "international working class," not even the teachers' union (AFT) agrees with Mr. Johnson.

AFT president Randi Weingarten announced the union’s “Plan to Safely Reopen America’s Schools and Communities” wherein the AFT linked the re-opening of the economy to the re-opening of schools. The AFT’s proposal repeated the false notion that “To gradually reopen, we need to maintain physical distancing until the number of new cases declines for at least 14 consecutive days.” ...

The AFT’s criteria, essentially matched by the Trump administration’s and major U.S. corporations, for “gradually re-opening” public schools and businesses more generally, would undoubtedly place teachers, other school workers, and students in unimaginable danger.

I think the AFT understands that closed schools mean unemployed teachers, and most teachers are willing to take some risk to go back to work. (It's not like by staying home they're necessarily at lower risk.)

Socialist Resurgence (SR) holds a similar position. Author Andy Barns comes down hard on Elon Musk for opening the Tesla plant in Fremont, CA. In the process he defends such august, bourgeois institutions as the Alameda County health department--presumably because they're "scientists." But Mr. Musk opened up anyway, daring the petty fascists to come and arrest him. Needless to say they backed down.

To which Mr. Barns responds:

Supervisor Haggerty seems confused. That Musk is actively endangering 10,000 people during a pandemic should present cooler heads with the obligation to arrest Mr. Musk! And this should be easy since he is literally breaking the law!

Mr. Musk didn't endanger anybody--no Tesla employee was forced to return to work, and some undoubtedly stayed home. But like teachers, most autoworkers need jobs and want to go to work. It's bizarre that a supposed tribune of the working class is so keen on enforcing bourgeois law against them.

SR's Adam Ritscher is the only comrade on my Beat who's done some actual reporting. In a post entitled COVID-19: Farmers slaughter hogs as pork-processing plants close down he tells us how the meatpacking supply chain actually works. I learned something--the article is well worth reading. He points out that meatpacking facilities have gotten much bigger as the process has been relentlessly optimized. Obviously that benefits consumers in normal times.

But these times are not normal. If one link breaks then lots of other things go haywire as well. "And many processing plants are so huge that they alone process a couple of percentage points of the nation’s pork. So when just one of these plants closes down, it has a huge impact." For all its efficiency, the supply chain has become increasingly brittle.

And he does have a point. But his closing paragraph makes no sense.

Today’s industry was designed around the sole goal of maximizing profits. What we need is an industry that is designed for human needs, and that takes the environment into account. Let’s use this horrible crisis to redouble our efforts to help make such a more just and rational society a reality!

Wrong! The industry's goal of "maximizing profits" also includes getting as much meat into consumer's mouths as quickly and as cheaply as possible. That's meeting human needs! "Redoubling our efforts" to solve hopelessly vague, hypothetical, and very expensive problems will simply keep people hungry.

Better is the solution at the Smithfield Pork plant (also reported by Mr. Ritscher), which offered $500 bonuses to employees willing and able to come to work.

Shifting gears a bit, Socialist Viewpoint reproduces an article by James Dennis Hoff, entitled Get Militant or Die: Labor unions in the age of crisis. The piece originally appeared in something called Left Voice, published by a collective of New York City college professors virtue-signalling their revolutionary socialism.

While Mr. Hoff's article was published on April 3rd--too soon to pass judgement on any reopening--he was staunchly in favor of the shutdown.

However, it is most important, in the short term at least, that unions fight to protect the immediate health of working people by demanding that all non-essential production be halted and that productive resources be repurposed in order to face the crisis, ...

So much for the lower-middle class--waitresses, retail employees, beauticians, hotel maids and flight attendants should all be thrown out of work because they're "non-essential." But no fear--they can all be "repurposed," just like recycled garbage.

Meanwhile, college professors--e.g., Mr. Hoff--who have never been laid off because they're apparently "essential", should now urge their unions to be more militant. No more playing footsie with Mr. Cuomo--the professoriate should demand "adequate funding for public services," even to the point of going on strike.

"Adequate funding," in Mr. Hoff's view, requires taxing the rich.

Meanwhile the Governor has made it clear that he has zero intention of raising taxes and has repeatedly argued that any new taxes on the wealthy or on Wall Street would lead to capital flight, a claim that doesn’t seem to be supported by any actual evidence, but which nonetheless shows where the governor’s priorities are and just how much political power capital wields in Albany when compared to working people.

There is plenty of evidence of capital flight. New York state lost more than 180,000 people to net domestic migration in 2019. Those weren't poor people--those were middle and upper middle class folks who don't want to pay New York taxes.

Because of the virus, the billionaires have already fled Manhattan for their second and third homes in Florida. Will they ever return as New York residents? Maybe not--there's no income tax in Florida. If the billionaires leave, then the millionaires leave, too. Indeed, many of them are already working from home in New Jersey. Will they return to Manhattan so they can pay more taxes? Probably not. And when the millionaires leave, so do the restaurateurs and the Uber drivers--people who need to work near their customers.

The only people left in Manhattan will be college professors, the welfare crowd and homeless people. All fine people, to be sure, but none of them pay taxes. Piss poor future that will be. But go for it, Mr. Hoff. Have fun on your strike--just don't count on having a job when it's over.

I'll close with an official statement from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) entitled Fight for gov’t-funded public works program to create jobs. They have two demands: one (apropos nothing in particular) is for full amnesty for undocumented workers. The second (relevant to jobs) is

A massive government-funded public works program to put millions to work at union-scale wages to build the hospitals, schools, affordable housing and all the other things we sorely need. We need to get workers back to work to strengthen our class consciousness and fighting capacity.

We have more than enough hospitals--they weren't even full during the height of the pandemic. We surely don't need any more schools--birthrates continue to decline, along with school enrollments. There's plenty of affordable housing--just not in places like Manhattan or San Francisco. The solution is to move more jobs and people to the suburbs. (For an interesting take see this article by John Sanphilippo.)

I'm all for getting workers back to work! But why can't they do useful things instead of stupid, make-work projects? What's wrong with restaurants, hotels, airlines, churches, beauty salons, meatpacking plants--hell, even college campuses? Why is it that Democrats and Socialists alike are so much against people being allowed to earn an honest living?

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on the Pandemic
• The Pro-Poverty Crowd
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

Book Review: The Decadent Society

The author is Ross Douthat and the complete title is The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Own Success. I very much enjoyed reading this book, and I might even agree with its conclusion--but in the end I think the argument fails.

Decadence, in Mr. Douthat's usage, does not imply a moral or bacchanal degeneration. Instead it means stagnation, complacency, lack of vigor. Unlike crisis, decadence doesn't auger imminent doom, but is rather a kind of purgatory--a changeless state that can last indefinitely. Decadence ends either because renewed vigor that moves society up and away, or because catastrophe brings stasis to a close.

Among the indicators of decadence is the slow-growth economy. The global economy began to slow down in the mid-1970s, and specifically productivity took a dive. That means technology wasn't advancing as fast as it had in the past. Apart from a decade-long productivity-growth-spurt beginning in 1995 (likely due to the PC), global productivity growth remains tepid.

Drawing on Robert Gordon's superb book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (my review here), Mr. Douthat doubts any resurgence in productivity. Gordon's book describes the miracle century, from 1870 to 1970. Beginning with the electric light, inventions included the telephone, the internal combustion engine, automobiles, municipal water and sewer systems, and much more besides. While everybody acknowledges that the Internet, Google, streaming, mobile phones, GPS, and Wikipedia are wonderful, they've done little to improve productivity statistics. The low-hanging fruit has already been harvested. No comparably important technology will be forthcoming.

So it is odd that Mr. Douthat never mentions fracking--arguably the most important new technology of our current century. Perhaps it won't dramatically change consumers' lives, but it definitely alters geopolitics--the US is now an energy exporter. See Peter Zeihan's book The Absent Superpower for more on that. Much of what Mr. Douthat describes as the end of neoliberalism is, in fact, because of fracking. In terms of geopolitics, fracking changes everything.

Another symptom of decadence is sterility. Apart from Africa and South Asia, birthrates around the world have been in steady decline. In the developed world fertility rates are now below replacement, i.e., fewer than 2.1 children per woman. Fertility in Japan, for example, is only 1.43. The US is at 1.84.

Mr. Douthat is right to be concerned. A country without children is a country without economic growth, without cultural or technical innovation, and ultimately a country without a future. For some countries (perhaps Japan) the disease might be terminal. But I doubt it generally is. I'm old enough to recall the 1970s when expert opinion was predicting a population explosion--we were doomed to Malthusian disaster.

The experts were wrong. That problem corrected itself. And I'll suggest the experts will be wrong again. The current trend is self-limiting--people will start having babies again. Linear extrapolation rarely works.

In a chapter entitled Sclerosis, Mr. Douthat remarks that governance decays

...as popular programs become part of an informal social contract that makes them impossible to reform; as the administrative state gets barnacled by interest groups that can buy off and bludgeon would be reformers;...

Why are the "barnacles" today so much stickier than they were fifty years ago? I'll hazard a guess: social media. The book that Mr. Douthat really needs to read is by Martin Gurri, entitled The Revolt of the Public. Social media allows interest groups to proliferate. Back in the 70s people celebrated Earth Day. From that a population hived off to Save the Whales. Today there is undoubtedly a Facebook page about saving specifically blue whales. The moral is that mass movements get fragmented. Social media allows people with very specific interests to find each other and form a "public" for a cause. It's not that the barnacles are stickier. It's just that there are a whole lot more barnacles than there used to be.

If there is one silver lining in this whole COVID-19 fiasco, it's that it might crash higher education. A more sclerotic, decadent institution cannot be imagined. Perhaps the pandemic crisis can break up the higher ed cartel. Here's hoping.

Among reasons to think our decadence might endure is because we're comfortable. Most Americans live in suburban homes--a chicken in every pot and two cars in the driveway. We vacation in Cancun or Disneyworld, and get 500 channels on the telly. Plus we're getting older.

What more do you want? Not much, apparently--decadence works just fine.

Similarly, we're addicted. Mr. Douthat cites porn as an example. Many thought that porn would inspire harassment or rape or worse. It turns out it does the opposite--men addicted to porn are perfectly happy to sit in their mothers' basements and take care of themselves. Instead of incentivizing sex, porn deadens the urge.

Similarly, Grand Theft Auto does not teach adolescent boys how to steal cars--it makes them less likely to steal real cars.

Then government encourages decadence. The myth of cradle-to-grave security saps ambition--why bother? Today's argument concerns the extent government will insure all citizens from the effects of the virus. The pro-decadent party (Democrats) support major bailouts, while the (slightly) anti-decadent party desires instead to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.

Most irritating to me is that Mr. Douthat grossly misunderstands President Trump. He dismisses him as an incompetent, accidental figure who was never anything more than a Reality TV host. I think this is unfair.

So Mr. Trump a) won the Republican nomination; b) won the 2016 election; c) nominated and had confirmed 193 judges to the federal judiciary; d) changed public opinion by 180 degrees about our relationship with China; e) stopped the caravans from coming across the border; f) defeated the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax; g) survived impeachment.

Now you may or may not like his successes, but it surely isn't fair to call him "incompetent" or "accidental." That doesn't fit at all.

Likewise, on a planet where the majority get their news from social media, isn't Mr. Trump's background as a reality TV host just the perfect talent? Love him or hate him, you gotta admit he's using the skill set to the max.

Finally, Mr. Douthat suggests that Trump's MAGA promises are just hot air. For example, he faults

A conservatism with no vision of how to revitalize itself and, therefore, no defense except a wall, the moat, the rampart.

This is not a fair description of Trumpism. The wall by itself will not revitalize America--but surely it's an essential first step. A country without borders isn't a country. Add to the border: a repatriation of manufacturing to the US; an emphasis on personal responsibility for economic outcomes; the strengthening of the military; an effort to diminish the role of the federal government in people's lives; admitting immigrants "who love us" and who can provide for themselves, rather than just those who scramble over the fence; a resurgence of patriotism.

This is not an empty list. Indeed, it's a very ambitious agenda--not at all clear that Trump can achieve it. But lack of success and lack of vision are two different things. Mr. Douthat is wrong when he claims Trump has no vision.

The Decadent Society is a beautiful, entertaining book. Perhaps we are decadent, but nowhere near as much a Mr. Douthat claims.

Further Reading:

• Mr. Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• Book Review: Donald J. Trump
• Populism