BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : ‘Love Goes to Buildings on Fire’

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire:
New York City, just like I pictured it

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale.

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | April 17, 2013

Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes (2012: Faber and Faber); Paperback (Reprint Edition); 384 pp; $16.

My stated reason for being in New York in 1973 was to go to school, but my real intent was to immerse myself in leftist politics and rock and roll culture. Almost every weekend I headed to the Village and Lower East Side in search of weed and music or politics.

There were plenty of protests even after the heyday of 1968-1972 and the issues were still the same. Imperialism, war, poverty, racism, and police brutality. The music, however, was starting to change. There were rumblings of something new in the dives and occasional street fair.

I remember seeing a band (I think it was the New York Dolls or their predecessor) near St. Mark’s Place one Saturday afternoon. I was not into the poor quality of the music, but found the presentation fascinating and unlike anything I had seen before. Still, though, my primary musical preferences were Bob Dylan, the Stones, the Grateful Dead and the Beatles.

One weekend a friend and I saw a poster for a rock show at the Hotel Diplomat near Times Square. The show featured a woman whose book of poetry I had just bought on the Lower East Side. The book was called Witt and the poet’s name was Patti Smith. The show I remember I remember because of Smith. The hotel I remember because it’s where Abbie Hoffmann got busted for coke and then went underground.

I was a scholarship student at Fordham University in the Bronx. So was almost everyone else on the floor of my dorm. There were only a couple of us white-skinned guys on that floor. The rest were Puerto Rican and African-American. I heard more salsa than I knew existed. Smoking pot, discussing Marxism and Eddie Palmieri was how I spent many Saturday nights.

Sometimes, nobody in the dorm would go home for the weekend. On those weekends, the music leaking under the dorm room doors with the pot smoke included the Allman Brothers, the aforementioned Palmieri, Earth, Wind and Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, the Dead, and Bob Dylan.

I left New York after seven short months. A floormate from Teaneck, New Jersey, had just introduced me to a new band on the scene known as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I saw him in Maryland a few months later.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

The changes I felt were soon to rule the world of popular music. This is the story rock music writer Will Hermes tells in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever. Recently released for the first time in paperback, Hermes’ text is more than a look at music in New York. It is a history of the city during the period covered that rarely mentions economics and politics yet ekes them.

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale. Like his namesake, he carries the message that punk rock shouted and salsa sang. The period herein may have been the last time New York mattered as much as it did in the world of popular culture.

Jay-Z may still be there, but there is no creative center any more. In fact, the dispersion of that center into the global world may have been the unforeseen result of the bands, beats, and jazzmen Hermes writes about so wonderfully.

Lurking behind Hermes’ tales of Patti Smith and Richard Hell; Afrika Bambaata and David Murray; and the multitude of others that star in this book is the spectre of corporate greed destroying culture and pretty much anything else it touched. Indeed, this included an attempt by Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld to make Manhattan default. Yet, while this attempt to force austerity on the world’s cultural capital ultimately succeeded only partially, the mélange of cultural mixes did create what became termed world music.

This is a book about Debbie Harry and Eddie Palmieri; Bruce Springsteen and Grandmaster Flash; Abe Beame and CBGBs; Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton. It’s a book about the clubbers and the brothers and sisters attending the DJ contests in the Bronx and the punkers bleeding in the Bowery. The names are so familiar that some are forgotten.

The cover art is by Mark Stamaty, formerly of the Village Voice (back before Murdoch destroyed it). He is also the author and illustrator of one of my favorite children’s books, Who Needs Donuts? The drawings he does are cartoonish, encompassing and busy, as if he was on stimulants. They are the artistic representation of the story Hermes has written down.

In a nutshell, that story is about the birth of hip hop via the transition of the beat; the C-section that was punk and the future of rock and roll that was Bruce Springsteen. Love Goes to Buildings On Fire isn’t about passing a torch. It’s about that torch enveloping the past and the future of popular music in its flames.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator’s Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Dave Zirin : ’42’ is Jackie Robinson’s Bitter Pill

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

A Review of ’42’:
Jackie Robinson’s bitter pill

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.

By Dave Zirin | The Rag Blog | April 17, 2013

See “Dave Zirin Writes from the Busy Intersection of Sports and Politics” by Thorne Dreyer at Truthout, and listen to Dreyer’s March 22, 2013, interview with Zirin on Rag Radio.

This week in Major League Baseball was Jackie Robinson Day. This is when Commissioner Bud Selig honors the man who broke the color line in 1947 and pats MLB on the back for being “a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.” It’s possible to appreciate that Selig honors one of the 20th Century’s great anti-racist heroes. It’s also possible, out of respect for Jackie Robinson, to resent the hell out of it.

Ignored on Jackie Robinson Day are baseball’s decades of racism before Jackie broke the color line. Ignored are Robinson’s own critiques of baseball’s bigoted front office hiring policies. Ignored is the continuance of the racism that surrounds the game in 2013. Ignored is the fact that today in Arizona, Latino players live in fear of being stopped by police for not having their papers in order.

The recent film 42 about Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Major Leagues shares this contradiction. I can certainly understand why many people I respect love this film. I can understand why a teacher I know thinks it’s a great primer for young people who don’t know Jackie’s story. I understand why, given the high production values and loving depictions, Jackie Robinson’s family has been outspoken in their appreciation.

But I didn’t like it, and with all respect, I want to make the case that I don’t believe Jackie Robinson would have liked it either.

Early in the film, Jackie Robinson, played by newcomer Chadwick Boseman, says, “I don’t think it matters what I believe. Only what I do.” Unfortunately that quote is like a guiding compass for all that follows. The filmmakers don’t seem to care what Robinson — a deeply political human being — thought either. Instead 42 rests on the classical Hollywood formula of “Heroic individual sees obstacle. Obstacle is overcome. The End.”

That works for Die Hard or American Pie. It doesn’t work for a story about an individual deeply immersed and affected by the grand social movements and events of his time. Jackie Robinson’s experience was shaped by the Dixiecrats who ruled his Georgia birthplace, the mass struggles of the 1930s, World War II, the anti-communist witch-hunts, and later the Civil Rights and Black Freedom struggles. To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all.

This is particularly ironic since Jackie Robinson spent the last years of his life in a grueling fight against his own mythos. He hated that his tribulations from the 1940s were used to sell a story about an individualistic, Booker T. Washington approach to fighting racism.

As he said in a speech,

All these guys who were saying that we’ve got it made through athletics, it’s just not so. You as an individual can make it, but I think we’ve got to concern ourselves with the masses of the people — not by what happens as an individual, so I merely tell these youngsters when I go out: certainly I’ve had opportunities that they haven’t had, but because I’ve had these opportunities doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten.

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.He wanted to shift the discussion of his own narrative from one of individual achievement to the stubborn continuance of institutionalized racism in the United States. The film however is a celebration of the individual and if you know how that pained Mr. Robinson, that is indeed a bitter pill.

The film’s original sin was to set the action entirely in 1946 and 1947. Imagine if Spike Lee had chosen to tell the story of Malcolm X by only focusing on 1959-1960 when he was a leader in the Nation of Islam, with no mention of his troubled past or the way his own politics changed later in life. Malcolm X without an “arc” isn’t Malcolm X. Jackie Robinson without an “arc” is just Frodo Baggins in a baseball uniform.

The absence of an arc, means we don’t get the labor marches in the 1930s to integrate baseball. We don’t get his court martial while in the army (alluded to in the film without detail). We don’t get Jackie Robinson’s testimony in 1949 at the House Un-American Activities Committee against Paul Robeson. We don’t get his later anguish over what he did to Robeson. We don’t get his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a barnstorming speaker across the south.

We don’t get his public feud with Malcolm X, where Malcolm derided him as a “White man’s hero” and he gave it right back saying, “Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners where militancy is not that dangerous. I don’t see him in Birmingham.” We don’t get his daring, loving obituary to Malcolm after his 1965 assassination at a time when the press — black and white — was throwing dirt on his grave.

We don’t get his support of the 1968 Olympic boycotters. We don’t get the way his wife Rachel became an educated political figure who cared deeply about Africa, as well as racial and gender justice in America. We don’t get the Jackie Robinson who died at 52, looking 20 years older, broken by the weight of his own myth. We don’t get Raging Bull. We get Rocky III.

But if the focus of 42 is only going to be on 1946 and 1947, then there is still a lot to cover: namely Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and their relationship to the Negro Leagues. Rickey — with Robinson’s support — established a pattern followed by other owners (with the notable exception of Bill Veeck), of refusing to compensate them for their players.

On the day Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Rickey said, “There is no Negro League as such as far as I’m concerned. [They] are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them.” This led to the destruction of the largest national black-owned business in the United States.

You would never know this from 42. Instead the film chooses to affix a halo to Branch Rickey’s head. Instead, under a prosthetic mask, Harrison Ford plays Rickey as a great white savior, and not even Han Solo can make that go down smoothly.

Fairing better than Ford is the terrific performance of Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Jackie Robinson could be sensitive about his voice, which was clipped and somewhat high-pitched. Boseman’s voice is so smoky it could cure a ham and his eyes and manner give hints of an internal life the film otherwise ignores.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, if alive, would call on Bud Selig and Major League Baseball to stop using his history as an excuse to do nothing about the racial issues that currently plague the game. But there is also no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, ever the pragmatist, also would support this film publicly.

He was an honorable person who would have been humbled by the effort made to make him look like a hero. He would have seen the value in being a role model of pride and perseverance for the young. But at home, alone, he would have thought about it. And he would have seethed.

This article was also posted at The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Civil Rights, SDS, and Student Activism in Austin, Texas, 1954-1973

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Massive march against the War in Vietnam, Austin, Texas, May 8, 1970. Image from The Rag Blog.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/2 — Student Activism and the Anti-War Movement at the University of Texas

By Bob Feldman | The Rag Blog | April 17, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman’s Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.

There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin — which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm — would become one of the nation’s New Left hot spots.

As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)”:

The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.

The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants… In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally… SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council…

SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]… At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag… Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media… During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women… held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town… Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center…

The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week… SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by… Stokely Carmichael…, an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday… The activities attracted several thousands… The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS distributed flyers… to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol… On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization…

UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest… against Hubert Humphrey… Simultaneously the UT administration… called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police… The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union… Over 250 outraged students and faculty members… founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].

University Freedom Movement rally,
UT campus, 1967. Photo from The Rag.

But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration’s failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .

African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:

In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed… During the spring of 1967, NAP… members converged on the office of… athletic director and… football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes… In October [1967]… NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights… In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]…

In May [1968]… the owner of a Conoco station… attacked a black musician… Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]… Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations… That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies…

And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:

I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearn… And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights… I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool… I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there…

And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern… And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston… And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967… And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas… And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin…”

Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women’s liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, “was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Alan Waldman : ‘A Touch of Frost’ Was Excellent, Clever British Cop Series

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

Waldman’s film and TV
treasures you may have missed:

Beloved comedy star David Jason achieved new and long-running acclaim as crusty, amusing detective inspector Frost.

By Alan Waldman | The Rag Blog | April 16, 2013

[In his weekly column, Alan Waldman reviews some of his favorite films and TV series that readers may have missed, including TV dramas, mysteries, and comedies from Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Most are available on DVD and/or Netflix, and some episodes are on YouTube.]

A Touch of Frost is an outstanding, fun British cop series that aired 42 exciting episodes from 1992 to 2010 (all of which are on Netflix and Netflix Instant, and many of which can be seen on YouTube). Here is the first episode.

Beloved Britcom star David Jason (Only Fools and Horses, The Darling Buds of May, Open All Hours) was asked by the show’s producers to star in a detective drama series, and only after he accepted did they decide to base it on R.D. Wingfield’s Frost novels.

The show was a long-running hit and won 11 awards and 13 other nominations (11 for Best or Most Popular Drama and 12 for Jason himself). Before and after A Touch of Frost, Jason earned 11 other top awards and five more noms for six other series. In the 2002 National Television Awards, Jason won both the “Most Popular Actor” award for A Touch of Frost and the “Most Popular Comedy Performance” honor for Only Fools and Horses (which a 2004 national poll chose as the best Britcom ever).

The series has aired in more than 20 countries, including Croatia, Lithuania, Finland, Japan, Brazil, and New Zealand. More than 92.8% of the 2,267 viewers who rated it at imdb.com gave it thumbs up, and 25.4% consider it a perfect 10.

In the fictional town of Denton (somewhere in Oxfordshire), Jason plays police detective inspector “Jack” Frost, an observant, acerbic, old-school, nonconformist investigator who has an unsatisfying home life but who is greatly respected by those who work under him. He is assisted by able, loyal detective sergeant George Toolan (John Lyons) and is often thwarted by his ambitious, social climbing, bureaucratic-minded boss, detective superintendant Norman Mullett (Bruce Alexander), with whom he has a consistently humorous (uncooperative) relationship.

Those were the only three characters who ran through all 15 seasons of Frost, but in every episode Frost was teamed with a different assistant, and his verbal byplay with them was always interesting and entertaining. Inspector Frost is full of wisecracks, and Jason handles the consistently clever dialogue masterfully.

Many talented and subsequently popular young actors had their major debuts as supporting cast in the show, including Neil Stuke (Reggie Perrin), Nathaniel Parker (Inspector Lynley), Colin Buchanan (Dalziel and Pascoe) and Marc Warren (Hustle, The Vice).

Between takes, the cast (particularly David Jason) and crew were forever playing pranks on John Lyons (DS Toolan). They devised fake scripts which Lyons had to learn at short notice, involving ludicrous situations. Once they made his character wear a neck brace; another time they made him ferret around in a smelly rubbish bin, looking for evidence. Each time, Lyons vowed “You won’t catch me out like that again,” but he always fell for the next prank.

Because the Frost mysteries are so well written and played, and because Jason is so entertaining in the lead role, I have gone to Netflix Instant to enjoy them again. There is a very good chance that you will enjoy them too.

[Oregon writer and Houston native Alan Waldman holds a B.A. in theater arts from Brandeis University and has worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Honolulu magazine. Read more of Alan Waldman’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Anti-Gun Violence Activists John Woods & Claire Wilson James

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Claire Wilson James and John Woods at the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, April 5, 2013. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Anti-gun violence activists
John Woods and Claire Wilson James

John’s girlfriend was killed at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Claire was shot by UT tower sniper Charles Whitman in Austin in 1966, losing her unborn child.

By Rag Radio | The Rag Blog | April 16, 2013

Amsterdam-based poet and legendary countercultural figure John Sinclair will be Thorne Dreyer‘s guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 19, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas, and streamed live. Sinclair founded the White Panther Party in Detroit in 1968, was involved with the underground newspaper, The Fifth Estate, and was the manager of the historic proto-punk band, the MC5. John Lennon celebrated him in song after Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years for giving two joints to an undercover cop in 1969. Since the mid-’90s he has performed spoken-word poetry with his band, The Blues Scholars.

John Woods was a student at Virginia Tech on April 6, 2007, when gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on campus, including his girlfriend, Maxine Turner.

Claire Wilson James was shot and seriously wounded by tower sniper Charles Whitman on August 1, 1966, on the University of Texas campus. James, then an 18-year-old anthropology student, spent three months in the hospital and lost her eight-month-old unborn child. Her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, was among Whitman’s victims.

Woods and James, who are now both active in the movement against gun violence, were Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio, April 5, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with John Woods and Claire Wilson James here:


Born in Alexandria, Virginia, John Woods was a National Merit Scholar who graduated magna cum laude from Virginia Tech in 2007 — after his girlfriend was shot and killed during the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history.

Woods moved to Texas to begin his doctoral work in molecular biology at UT-Austin, where he is a National Science Foundation Fellow. John was a founder of Students for Gun-Free Schools in Texas and is now a board member of Texas Gun Sense, an organization that opposes allowing guns on campus while stressing its belief in an individual’s right to bear arms. The Austin Chronicle named Woods Austin’s “best activist” in its 2011 “Best of Austin” awards.

Claire Wilson James, who teaches elementary school in Texarkana, was a student activist at the University of Texas in 1966, involved with SDS and the civil rights and anti-war movement, when the Whitman shootings occurred. She was Whitman’s first target in a spree that left 17 dead and 72 wounded.

James, who has recently joined in the fight for sensible gun control, testified before the Texas Legislature in March 2013, in opposition to a bill that would allow the carrying of weapons into college buildings.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, April 19: Amsterdam-based poet John Sinclair, legendary founder of the White Panther Party and former manager of the MC5.
Friday, May 3, 2013: Free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass of Pacifica Radio’s WBAI-FM in New York, with filmmaker Paul Lovelace (Radio Unnameable).

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Lamar W. Hankins : Fear and the NRA

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Political cartoon by Mike Luckovich / Atlanta Journal-Constitution / SECFanatics.com.

The NRA:
Perpetrator of ‘fear itself’

McClatchy reports that for the last 40 years the NRA has succeeded in limiting and now even preventing research into the effects of gun use, sales, and crime.

By Lamar W. Hankins | The Rag Blog | April 16, 2013

For most of my life, the NRA (National Rifle Association) has seemed inconsequential to me. But in the last few years, I have become more interested in its views, especially after the Supreme Court held in 2008 that Washington, D.C., could not prohibit hand guns.

Of course, the Supremes (in a majority opinion written by Antonin Scalia) had to ignore normal grammatical forms to conclude that the prefatory clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” did not affect the meaning of the second phrase: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

But I don’t want to quibble about grammar when bigger issues are at stake. Three concerns about gun regulation are at the forefront of the gun debate being dominated by the NRA:

  1. Should the federal government conduct research into the public welfare aspects of guns?
  2. Should all gun sales and transfers require a background check?
  3. Should all guns be registered?

Out of fear — real or imagined — the NRA answers “no” to all three questions. Regarding the first question, McClatchy reports that for the last 40 years the NRA has succeeded in limiting and now even preventing research into the effects of gun use, sales, and crime:

Each year, lawmakers quietly tuck language into spending bills that restricts the ability of the federal government to regulate the firearms industry and combat gun crime. It’s the reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can’t research gun violence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation can’t use data to detect firearms traffickers, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can’t require background checks on older guns.

The Center for American Progress and Mayors Against Illegal Guns have identified the following major efforts to prevent gun-related research and study, as well as the use of information found in government files, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and other federal agencies and entities:

  • 1979 – a ban on centralizing firearm sales records of federally licensed gun dealers
  • 1994 – a ban on transfer of functions, missions or activities of ATF to another agency or department
  • 1996 – a prohibition on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advocate or promote gun control
  • 1996 – a prohibition on placing records from federally funded gun dealers that go out of business in an electronic, searchable database
  • 1996 – a prohibition on redefining “curio or relic” gun, and prohibiting a curio or relic from being removed from the ATF list
  • 2004 – a requirement that records from approved instant background checks must be destroyed within 24 hours
  • 2004 – a prohibition on gun trace data being subject to subpoena for any state license revocation, civil lawsuit, or other proceeding unless filed by ATF
  • 2004 – a ban on requiring federally licensed gun dealers to keep a physical inventory
  • 2004 – a ban on allowing ATF to deny an application or renewal for a federally licensed gun dealer due to lack of activity
  • 2005 – a ban on allowing ATF to deny an application for a permit to import “curio or relic” firearms
  • 2005 – a prohibition on the admission of gun trace data in evidence
  • 2005 – a ban on the need for an export license to export certain firearms parts or accessories to Canada
  • 2011 – a denial of the right of the National Institutes of Health to advocate or promote gun control

What the NRA has to fear from public policy research or access to government information is beyond my imagination. But fear is the primary currency they use to buy the support of our politicians for their views and to frighten gun owners.

Research is intended to discover something new, inform citizens and lawmakers, and then use the new knowledge to promote the betterment of us all. But these goals do not serve the interests of the NRA’s primary beneficiary, the gun manufacturers and related industries, which have given almost $15 million to the NRA since 2005.

The NRA spent over $231 million in 2011 on its various activities (including lobbying), and contributes millions to political campaigns every election cycle. Its 4.5 million members, by virtue of their money and organization, dominate the other 310 million people who live in the U.S. to the point that only the NRA’s fears matter.

It is fair to say that the NRA leadership is ruled by people who are selected in a far from democratic process. A person has to be a member of the NRA for five years before becoming eligible to vote on any NRA governance matter or policy. A secretive nine-member board controls who can be nominated for positions of leadership.

Only about seven percent of NRA members participate in its elections, an indication that voting is an exercise in futility because of the tight controls on who gets nominated. Leadership is pretty much a closed shop, where outsiders are unwelcome. But most gun owners and NRA members, unlike the NRA leadership, have no quarrel with the common sense policies that most Americans support.

The second and third questions posed above are linked, at least in the fearful mind of the NRA’s Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre. In February, he said that background checks seem reasonable, but what they are really about is registering guns, and that concept is anathema. LaPierre believes that names and addresses of gun owners cannot be kept secret and would be published for people everywhere to see.

This happened to gun permit holders in two New York counties last December. LaPierre sees this as something approaching Armageddon. He imagines that gun owners would then be targeted by criminal elements intent on stealing the guns from law-abiding citizens, or by foreign governments intent on taking us over.

I find it difficult to imagine this as a reasonable fear because we have had car registration, for instance, almost as long as we have had cars. Cars usually are stolen while they are somewhere out in public, often because they are left unlocked or with the keys in them, not because they are registered. And we register constantly for gym memberships, Facebook, medical services, and a host of other activities with no thought of fear of harm.

Our houses are listed on public records that give their approximate value, but so far as we know, those public records have not led criminals to choose to break into them because of their value. Criminals rarely pick houses based on that criterion. They tend to pick houses to burglarize based on how easy it will be to enter them and get away with a burglary. Far more houses are burglarized during publicly-announced events like funerals and weddings than they are because they are on the tax roles for all to see.

And the government has done a good job preventing access to the home addresses of police officers, for instance, so they and their families will not be harmed by a criminal seeking retribution. It seems reasonable that gun registration data bases could be secured as well. But LaPierre fears that those data bases could easily be hacked and published for all to see.

In contrast to LaPierre’s fear-based views, a 2012 poll by Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that 82% of gun owners, 74% of whom either were or had been NRA members, favored background checks for purchasers of guns. A New England Journal of Medicine poll conducted this past January had almost identical results except that the figure for gun owners favoring background checks was 84%.

Another January poll by the Pew Research Center found that 85% of gun owners were in favor of making all gun sales, including those sold privately and at gun shows, subject to background checks — what is usually termed “universal background checks.” A CBS/New York Times poll, also in January, found that 85% of those polled who live in a household with an NRA member supported the kind of universal background checks LaPierre finds abhorrent.

Among Americans in general, the Pew poll found 85% in favor of universal background checks, whether the person was Republican, Democrat, or Independent. A CBS/New York Times poll found that that 92% favored universal background checks. Even a Fox News poll conducted in January found that 91% of respondents favored universal background checks.

What LaPierre really fears, based on an interview he gave to Fox News, is that universal background checks, along with registration, would lead to the confiscation of guns by the government. While this could be true for certain types of weapons — such as assault rifles or large gun clips — general confiscation of guns would violate the Constitution, something that LaPierre knows well.

LaPierre seems to believe that since we have the Second Amendment in the Constitution giving the people the right to own guns, this should trump the ability of the Congress to require that those constitutionally-approved guns be registered. This is a strange notion, considering that various other constitutional amendments also provide for the right to vote, but people are required in all jurisdictions to register to exercise that right.

Gun registration seems to be well within the parameters of Constitutional governance if only we had a Congress in tune with the will of the people. But we do not.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : Is Capitalism in Deep Trouble?

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Illustration by Latuff / Marxist.com.

Before the fall?
Terminal Capitalism / Part 2

We take a closer look at the role natural resource limits in combination with the excesses of unregulated finance capital are playing in blocking a global economic recovery.

By Roger Baker | The Rag Blog | April 12, 2013

In the first part of this series about “terminal capitalism,” we saw a collection of evidence that the global system of capitalism, the organized basis for most world trade, is in deep trouble. The situation has become so serious and the problems so self-evident that the polls show many average American citizens are questioning the viability of capitalism itself.

A U.S. economic recovery now seems little closer than when the current economic crisis hit hard about five years ago, with U.S. unemployment still at a near-depression level. The BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China have done better than the U.S., but recently slower growth has affected these countries too. In “Terminal Capitalism / Part 2” we will take a closer look at the role natural resource limits in combination with the excesses of unregulated finance capital are playing in blocking a global economic recovery.

The capitalist imperative: 
Grow or die

Richard Heinberg, director of the Post Carbon Institute, begins his book, The End of Growth, as follows: “The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.” He then presents over 300 pages of various kinds of supportive evidence backing up this conclusion. I will touch on some evidence in this essay, while saying that since the book was published in 2011, the evidence in support of this conclusion seems stronger than ever.

If that is indeed the case, the end of growth is very bad news for capitalism itself, since capitalism is based on an inherently expanding economy that needs to keep growing or it dies. The way the capitalist system works is basically that bankers or finance capitalists extend credit; they lend money that is invested in the production of goods that are then sold to pay off the loans plus make a profit sufficient to pay back the lenders, with enough left over to reward the lenders with interest.

If and when such a system starts contracting, profits suffer or may disappear entirely and there is an economic crisis until confidence in the system is restored and growth resumes. It is in the nature of the capitalist system to be subject to periodic booms and busts that comprise the capitalist business cycle. Most economists including Marx have been well aware of this fact. The remedy proposed by Keynes was to stimulate a contracting economy with government-sanctioned deficit spending, as I described in “Terminal Capitalism / Part 1.”

However, if the contracting global economy is unable to grow in real material terms due to some deeply rooted physical constraint or resource limit, then no governmental policy can revive the growth on which the system depends.

Governments can print money and inject it into the economy to try to revive spending, but If there is not enough cheap energy to permit a real economic expansion in terms of marketable goods, then the money will be spent sooner or later. Then the deception will be revealed by inflation due to a surplus of money and a shortage of goods.

There is a factor called the velocity of circulation of money, which is really psychological in nature amounting to a shift in consumer spending behavior from saving to spending. That leads easily to inflation or hyperinflation initiated when the public finally understands that there is more money than goods like food available for purchase. Governments can revive spending behavior by printing sufficient money, but they can’t restore genuine prosperity without more real goods being produced and made available for purchase.

The remainder of this essay will attempt to explain the physical factors which are working in opposition to a real revival of the global economy in terms of its ability to expand the production of material goods. If that can’t happen, then capitalists can no longer earn interest on their investments. Whenever a dollar invested or deposited in a bank is seen to buy less than before it was invested or banked, the incentive to invest, on which capitalism depends, disappears and the urge to buy commodities like gold that preserve their exchange value increases.

Growth may have already reached its limits and stopped forever! The global economy as a whole has not expanded since the energy and economic crisis hit in 2008. The numbers tell the tale. Stuart Staniford’s excellent blog, Early Warning, tracks many interesting and important trends, including in this case the volume of world trade as measured by the WTO.

The following is Staniford’s description of the situation about six months ago, featuring a seasonally corrected chart which shows that the volume of global trade seems to have stalled at about the same level that it had reached in mid-2008. Since the BRIC group has done a little better than most, it follows that the USA, Europe, and Japan have lost ground.

“…after the 2008 financial crisis, global trade collapsed and then recovered strongly till early 2011. For the last eighteen months, however, it’s been basically stagnant. This likely reflects a combination of a sluggish U.S. recovery, a double-dip recession in Europe, and the slowdown in China. The global economy continues to act like an engine firing on only three cylinders.”

Grounds for denial

Anyone familiar with world history knows that both the global economy and human population have been growing, at least fitfully, for thousands of years, and that the rate of growth accelerated greatly following the industrial revolution in England hundreds of years ago, with the advent of steam power and vast factories and improved machines to produce ever cheaper marketplace goods..

We like to tell ourselves that continual progress in science and technology will keep paying off by creating the new energy sources and the improved technology that we need to maintain ourselves and solve our problems, especially when we take care to grow in a smart way with sensible restraints.

When there were few factories, there was little need to regulate toxic discharges into lakes and rivers. Now with many more people and factories, most of us are willing to accept that stronger regulation is needed for the benefit of the general public. Increasingly we can see there are limits imposed by nature. Expansion of industry in China using coal for power is becoming a major health threat.

Few economists in the day of Adam Smith or Marx, with the notable exception of Malthus, could foresee a day that there would be any important limits to economic expansion that could not be overcome by human ingenuity and continually improving technology. If there were such limits, it was presumed that these were local limits that could be dealt with rather easily. If natural resources such as metal mines were exhausted in one area, one could always move to a fresh area, and use the advantages of continually improving technology to keep production expanding, ad infinitum.

In reality it is found that technology tends to harvest the low hanging fruit in terms of available resources first and then moves on. While there was an abundance of cheap energy available, this exhaustion of resources and a simultaneous increase in unwelcome consequences could be concealed for a time. In the USA, there has been a well-funded, right-wing corporate disinformation campaign to lead the public to deny that burning fossil fuel is changing the climate for the worse. Now people are beginning to realize the unhappy truth.

According to a growing number of skeptics, including Heinberg, the fatal flaw of economics, as traditionally practiced, is that it is an abstract discipline, oblivious to the limits of the finite world that it claims to study and to model. Since economics is a system that assumes exponential growth, it is apparent that at some point an expanding economy has to run into natural resource limits on our finite planet. Most people have assumed that most such limits were far in the future.

As individuals, the human participants in the growth process have been unlikely to be very conscious of global limits; they were mostly concerned with the everyday challenges of surviving, or raising and feeding a family. However, now, when there are more than 7 billion people collectively involved in an effort to keep the global economy growing to satisfy their own needs, limits are starting to crop up everywhere.

Illustration from India Resists.

Scientists have been warning us, 
but are we ready to listen yet?

The end of growth is not a far-fetched possibility. In fact, there have been a number of credible predictions that this is bound to happen sooner or later because of the increasingly serious side effects of growth itself. The 1972 book The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome used a computer model to arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to the expansion of the global economy imposed by nature that are likely to lead to overshoot and collapse within the lifetimes of many now living .

The conclusions were updated in a sequel 30 years later. “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change” is another classic work that pointed out the radical implications of an expanding human population overshooting the resources of a finite planet, followed by collapse.

There has been no shortage of warnings from the scientific community that continuing economic growth would lead to disaster. It has now been more than 20 years since a majority of the world’s then-living Nobel Prize-winning scientists issued the “1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”. This is taken from the introduction:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

One might imagine that when the world’s most eminent scientists warn humans that they had better shift course to avoid a looming environmental disaster, their warning would get a lot of media attention. That didn’t happen. The World Scientists’ warning was mostly ignored because it interfered with the nearest thing most humans have to a global religion; a belief in endless progress based on the blessings of modern science in combination with expanding world trade.

New investment based on improvement in technology has always brought benefits like easy communication and an improved standard of living. The fact that the few capitalists who maintain control of the investment and economic expansion process tend to be the major beneficiaries has tended to be overlooked.

Global warming by itself probably has the potential to cripple the global economy, as does human population overshooting food supply. With a global population of 7.5 billion, we see natural limits of one kind or another cropping up everywhere and interacting to create converging crises. More and more, solving one growth-related problem tends to create other problems. Trying to deal with any one limit tends to reveal other limits.

These include such factors as a limit on arable land for farming, potable water availability, increasing soil erosion and depletion, air and water pollution, the fertilizer needed to maintain high crop yield, and the list goes on. “Convergent Crises and Why We Deny Them” discusses the fact that these limits tend to interact.

An excellent and easily accessible explanation of the natural limits to growth by Charles Hall (see below) and John Day is here.

If we are very lucky, the global economic expansion forces will be forced into an orderly retreat before they overshoot the resource base. If not, humans everywhere are likely to face an abrupt economic collapse in which the decline is a lot steeper than the preceding economic expansion. This tendency for decline to be faster than growth has been called the Seneca Effect.

Why expansionist economics can’t deal with a
falling energy return on energy investment (EROI) 

Rising energy cost, and oil in particular, is the factor that has the greatest ability to interfere with business as usual. The historical rate of global growth has fallen sharply in the last decade, and an important factor is the economic burden of rising energy costs. In Terminal Capitalism / Part 1, I cited the January 26, 2012, article in the distinguished science journal Nature by James Murray and David King, titled “Oil’s tipping point has passed.” This paper points out that the global economy seems to have permanently shifted to slower growth after the world supply of cheap conventional oil peaked in 2005, when we started to use much higher priced oil, like the oil we get by drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The International Energy Agency has made it very clear that the global economy is at risk when oil prices are greater than $100 per barrel — as they have been in recent years, and will surely continue to be, given the inelastic response of global production. Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth. If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either. This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.

Domestic oil used to be very abundant and cheap to produce in the United States; however U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, so the U.S. turned to cheaper imported oil. Now the cost of imported oil has risen sharply too, especially after the cheap conventional oil production hit its global peak.

The cost of oil or any other traded commodity is generally determined by the amount of work that it takes to produce that commodity. The concept of “energy return on investment” or EROI essentially means the payback ratio, or the amount of energy you need to put in in order to get even more energy back out.

The EROI concept is important from an economic standpoint whether it is applied to drilling for oil, or for the work expended in building a dam to generate hydroelectric power, or when building and using a wind turbine, or any other means of generating power. The April 2013 issue of Scientific American has an article by Mason Inman, “The True Cost of Fossil Fuels,” which explains the EROI concept and its important implications for our existing economy. The same EROI concept has important implications for any human economy, whether ancient or modern, capitalist or socialist.

The EROI concept was developed by environmental scientist Charles Hall, who says of oil and gas, “Everywhere you look, the EROI is declining.”

The Scientific American article is accompanied by an interview with Hall where he explains that different EROIs support different kinds of economic organization, and the mostly unwelcome economic implications of the currently falling EROI in the USA. As Hall says in this interview,

We know that the middle class has not increased its income now for 20 years. Behind that — not always the immediate cause, but looking over the shoulder of the causes — I find the decline in the availability of energy. It’s terrifying to people — politicians and economists — who base everything on growth. I think they won’t talk about it because the concept is terrifying.

Most people have little idea of how rapidly the EROI has been falling, and what this steep rate of decline implies for the U.S. economy, and indeed for the global economy. Richard Heinberg’s book The End of Growth, in Chapter 3, gives some numbers and EROI estimates by Hall (pages 118-119). It is estimated that circa 1930 we could get back as much as 100 barrels of oil for every barrel we expended through drilling, giving an EROI of 100.

Photo by Albert Bridge / Geograph / Earth Times.

By 1970, this had fallen to about a 30-to-one payback or EROI. By 2005, the EROI had fallen domestically to about 15, A fairly recent paper by Hall, et al, indicates a current U.S. oil and gas EROI below 11. However the EROI for imported oil produced where the fields are less depleted has stayed higher and is now estimated by the Scientific American article to globally be about 16.

Meanwhile, the EROI from coal is still about 20, as is the payback ratio from wind in a good location. Photovoltaic solar EROI is much lower at about six. These numbers are rough averages and of course vary with location. Chinese coal payback economics is different from that in the USA, but these numbers give a rough idea, and indicate a steady EROI decline.

A falling EROI tends to show up as a price increase for everything. There is no way to avoid using increasingly costly liquid fuels to transport coal and in the course of producing and transporting all other commodities.

The steady decline in EROI for liquid fuels is particularly worrisome because almost all global transportation is powered by liquid fuels. That is why an economic peak to the global oil supply can cripple the world economy. Even a nation that uses a lot of coal for power like China is in trouble if it tries to convert its coal energy into liquid fuel energy. It can be done, but this results in a much lower EROI for the coal-based liquid. Liquid fuel energy, electric power energy, and thermal energy each have their own EROI economics.

It is estimated that a modern industrial economy needs an EROI of at least five or greater to function properly. If global oil supplies have already fallen to only 16, and are still falling pretty fast, it is apparent that some economies, and especially an oil-addictive economy like the USA, is in trouble no matter what kind of leadership it has. This is true until the economy has the time needed to make a transition which, as the “Hirsch report” indicates, necessarily requires several decades of serious effort.

There is a theory of maximum possible complexity of a society related to the EROI level at its economic base. Without economic growth, the whole system, what was once termed the “political economy” runs into political trouble too. You can’t have a very technically sophisticated and centralized economy based on a low EROI. Nor can you maintain a complex legal and military support structure for global finance capital investment. Without cheap energy you cannot have a global system of finance capital that maintains an orderly system of global trade with its highly sophisticated and centralized production of complex goods.

American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter has written an important book, Collapse of Complex Societies in which he analyzes why civilizations like ancient Rome probably rose and fell in accord with a changing EROI, just as much as because of the abilities of their leaders. Ancient civilizations can’t control the far reaches of an empire if they can’t afford to feed the armies that maintain their central control.

There are analogies to be found today when the United States attempts to project its military power globally without the advantage of cheap oil. Similar limits apply when investment bankers attempt to organize complex global production systems which depend on complex global supply networks.

Why alternative energy probably
can’t keep our economy growing

Since the cheap energy that built the U.S. economy is rapidly being depleted and is being replaced by more expensive energy, there is a natural desire to try to replace our energy with renewable energy, especially with wind and solar power as an alternative. How hard that would be, what it would cost, and how long it would take are the key issues.

In 2009 the Post Carbon Institute did a study of this question and put out a report, “Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” which can be downloaded at this link. The abstract of this report concludes as follows:

Perhaps the most significant limit to future energy supplies is the “net energy” factor — the requirement that energy systems yield more energy than is invested in their construction and operation. There is a strong likelihood that future energy systems, both conventional and alternative, will have higher energy input costs than those that powered industrial societies during the last century. We will come back to this point repeatedly.

The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.

Currently the degree of alternative energy market penetration is low and is likely to stay that way. It is possible to cover our roofs with solar panels now, but if it were not difficult and expensive to get off the grid, it would probably already be common. President Obama started advocating wind and solar alternatives when he first came into office, yet these numbers are not increasing at nearly the rate that would be needed to replace fossil fuel energy before a declining EROI interferes.

Both Germany and China have industrial polices in place that mandate switching to alternative energy as soon as possible. Germany is running into limits caused by the need for backup power when the alternative energy level reaches about 10-20%. In China, about 70% of their power now comes from coal, with imported oil used as a supplement for transportation.

Making the switch from black to green energy is creating severe air pollution from the coal used for the transition. It is true that photovoltaic solar energy has gotten a lot cheaper in the last several years, due to a big push by China to expand its alternative energy industry. China has the advantage of a command economy to promote alternative energy which the USA lacks except for sporadic and controversial attempts like Solyndra.

Since the EROI for U.S. fossil fuel energy has been falling, it is becoming more and more costly to make the transition to wind and solar power alternatives. The average U.S. family is still in debt, and without real economic growth, those who can find jobs must now often work at the minimum wage. The economy is sending the message that alternative energy is becoming less affordable, even with much less expensive silicon photo-voltaic panels made in China.

Both wind and solar energy have the disadvantage of requiring high up-front capital costs. By contrast, gas turbines are an inexpensive way to generate electric power, and the natural gas produced by hydrofracturing or “fracking,” is cheap for now. However this low cost is probably unsustainable, both because of rapid horizontal well depletion and because we are drilling and depleting the best locations first.

Besides a falling EROI to power the transition to alternative energy, there are other problems. Intermittent power sources require storage or backup when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Texas has had a policy of subsidizing the power grid to deliver power from West Texas where wind energy is cheapest, but the grid itself is expensive and the state is strapped for cash.

At certain times of the day when the sun is shining, PV energy can already cost less than fossil fuel energy, but most people demand power when they need it. Rooftop power requires very expensive battery storage (lead acid batteries are expensive and only last about five years whereas nickel-iron batteries are durable but expensive). If the energy comes from a public power grid, a backup source of fossil fuel power is still needed due to the intermittent generation factor.

Certain types of solar energy, like home water heating and solar ovens for cooking, are already cost-effective, and will likely come into common use when people are obliged to conserve energy because of its rising cost. Better thermal insulation is likewise very cost-effective.

Illustration from Theprisma.

Capitalism has become a global Ponzi scheme

A global peak in oil production is likely to be fatal for capitalism soon thereafter, as the globally prevailing economic institution, as the author has argued here. Given the choice, it seems better to face economic crisis sooner rather than later, both in terms of the lesser total damage done and the better chances for eventual recovery. Of course such an outlook is not apt to be well received, or to be adopted as policy, but the argument seems valid.

Recently Gail Tverberg’s excellent blog, Our Finite World, has done a good job of explaining and updating the problems facing an economy based on lending and credit; to generate a real return on invested capital it must necessarily face a decline in growth. The situation is outlined in her recent post, “How Resource Limits Lead to Financial Collapse.” As Tverberg says; “Many from the ‘peak oil’ community say that what we should worry about is a decline in the world oil supply. In my view, the danger is quite different: The real danger is financial collapse coming much earlier than a decline in oil supply.”

In theory, the world of banking, of finance capitalism, is supposed to be closely in tune with the physical world, since it controls and impacts the real world through investments like mines and factories that produce goods for markets and consumers with money to spend.

A close link between the world of banking and money and the real physical world was once maintained and enforced by declaring that dollars could be redeemed on demand for gold or silver. There is now nothing to link the dollars created by the Federal Reserve to the physical world. Nowadays the dollar is a fiat currency, backed up by nothing except its prevalence as the standard reserve currency used for most global trade, and the fact that it has little competition in this regard. The worth of a dollar is only to be judged by what it will buy. This has changed over time, and nearly always for the worse.

Since the availability of oil for transportation is arguably the single factor that currently limits the growth of the global economy, the real worth of a dollar might as well be judged by the fact that it will now buy about a quart and a half of Brent crude oil on the global marketplace. Since there is a long-standing agreement in place to price globally traded oil solely in dollars, and since all countries need oil, this has tended to preserve the status of the dollar as the one currency needed to buy the oil which every country needs.

In effect, this means that all dollars should really be seen as petrodollars. The dollar lacks any plausible value except for its current purchasing power in oil or other liquid fuel, which has declined sharply over the last decade.

With all this in mind, lets try to put our current global situation in perspective. The system of capitalism, which is the foundation of the global economy and world trade, needs to keep expanding to maintain its health and avoid sinking into a deflationary world depression. A handful of giant investment banks indirectly control the entire U.S. economy, because they function as the board of directors for the Federal Reserve. The unelected Fed sets the prime interest rate and regulates the creation of dollars, by allowing the banks to loan dollars into existence.

In the absence of effective banking regulation to maintain discipline, the system has become strongly biased toward permitting the infinite exponential expansion of fiat currency and investment in defiance of our finite world. In other words, the global economy has become a vast Ponzi scheme. The distinctions between investment bankers, finance capitalists, and global corporations have become blurred.

Strip away the smoke and mirrors and bankers are revealed as respectable, well-paid gamblers who risk public money on investments that are likely to fail because of a constantly falling energy return on energy investment. With the end of meaningful banking regulation, the giant investment banks have been free to place bets on practically anything that involves money, with the wagers insured by the federal government.

The biggest investment bankers and their banks are regarded as too big to fail, and so they are essentially permitted to gamble without risk. The elimination of risk has, over time, actually led them to gamble on the riskiest ventures. These tend to pay the best returns, exactly because of the high risk. This interview — “Our System is so Flawed that Fraud is Mathematically Guaranteed” — features Chris Martenson interviewing banking expert Professor Bill Black. It paints an appalling picture of investment banking as a racket and a confidence game, where capital investment has shifted to the areas of greatest risk.

The biggest banks now hold hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of paper agreements, pledges to pay off a huge accumulation of speculations and hedges amounting to gambling debts still on the books. These speculative paper banking agreements dwarf the entire global economy, which is only about $70 trillion a year.

Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades. That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.

This being the case, it becomes apparent that the American dollar is at the center of a vast global Ponzi scheme which can never pay back its lenders in terms of the anticipated buying power, simply because there is no longer enough cheap fossil fuel remaining for the global economy to recover after a severe crisis.

Nobody can accurately predict how long the current situation can be maintained but, given the facts of the matter, we can see that there is certainly going to be a global economic crisis. Only the timing, which is based on investor psychology and the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep the game going, is uncertain.

To sum up the situation we face, the scientists are warning us that even at best, a well-managed global economy can only avoid a severe environmental crisis for perhaps three more decades, because of the fundamental limits of nature. However, the chances of our poorly managed system of global capitalism lasting even that long are slight. Given the time typically needed to recover from a severe economic crisis like the Great Depression, this suggests that a severe global economic crisis or collapse must put an end to capitalism as we know it in the not very distant future.

James Howard Kunstler has outlined some of the social response scenarios in his books The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic. The potential for transition communities to help us through the hard times to come are a topic of frequent discussion on Resilience.org, sponsored by the Post Carbon Institute, a think tank devoted to coping with these sorts of problems.

Local economies centered around local agriculture and local production of the goods needed for survival are likely to be an important part of our future. We cannot start planning soon enough.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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James McEnteer : How Mass Media Enable the Zombie Apocalypse

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer
Zombies from Shaun of the Dead. Image from TheModerateVoice.

What if the dead stop staying dead?
How mass media enable the Zombie Apocalypse

When Mitt Romney rose from the grave of his own hypocrisy and insular privilege to oppose Barack Obama, even Americans who dislike Obama’s policies voted for him anyway, simply because he was a live human being.

By James McEnteer | The Rag Blog | April 11, 2013

Zombies dominate our nation’s airwaves. They have already devoured much of our rational public discourse and now threaten our social sanity. Zombies are hot commodities. They sell. That’s why they cannot be stopped or killed. Some editors and producers understand that zombies carry dangerous mental and moral infections that may already have doomed civilization as we (used to) know it. But profits outweigh the risks of parading zombies in prominent places.

Two factions promote the prevalence of zombies in mass media: True Believers and Snarky Ironists. Believer media managers feature the living dead as hosts or guests to flaunt their twisted catechism. Media Ironists recognize zombies for the frightening freaks they are, but trumpet their grotesque views anyway to whip up outrage and energize their often demoralized “normal” base.

Unsurprisingly, many True Believers are zombies themselves, like Roger Ailes, who presides over the Fox zombie empire. Ailes spent decades promoting undead candidates such as Nixon and Reagan and Bush, all of whom were morally moribund before entering the White House. Like all zombies, Ailes has never had any actual ideas, only tactics, an obsession with ratings, and an urge to rule.

He employs other soulless creatures like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, who substitute truculence for wit and shrillness for substance. Such tactics mesmerize the gullible and unwary, who fall under the zombie spell as their minds disintegrate and they too are doomed to wander empty-headed over the earth.

So-called progressive media are as guilty as Fox for promoting the zombie agenda. Salon and Raw Story and Talking Points Memo cannot resist quoting the mindless, outrageous comments of zombies such as Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum or Donald Trump, just to stir the pot. For liberal media, zombies are the freak show that helps lure rubes and readers into the main tent.

Irrational assertions by Robertson or other undead “ministers” who pretend to speak from religious conviction make for hilarious and/or infuriating headlines in otherwise supposedly rational publications. Robertson’s pronouncements, that Ivy League schools are preventing God’s miracles in America or that feminism causes women to kill their children and practice witchcraft, are simply too wackola not to report.

But this mockery — often in bold headlines — still spreads the soul-destroying zombie creed. And even ironic renderings of zombie madness have actual consequences. Consider Newt Gingrich. Though politically dead since the last millennium, when he resigned from Congress in disgrace, Gingrich was kept artificially “alive” long years after his political demise by constant exposure on cryogenic “news” programs, enabling his 2012 zombie candidacy for president.

Fox sustains political zombies long after their sell-by dates in public life: Sarah Palin and Dick Morris and Herman Cain are some of Fox’s dead talking heads. Other mumbling, unkillable corpses haunt radio airwaves, like Oliver North and Mike Huckabee. Sunday morning TV talk shows feature zombie panels grilling zombie guests, though it’s likely only zombies watch these shows.

The Republican presidential primary season was a veritable zombie jamboree. When Mitt Romney rose from the grave of his own hypocrisy and insular privilege to oppose Barack Obama, even Americans who dislike Obama’s policies voted for him anyway, simply because he was a live human being. That could have been his campaign slogan: Obama. He’s not a zombie.

Americans are still hungover from the Bush-Cheney zombie era of death and detention. We watched horrified as humans degenerated into zombies in front of our eyes, like Colin Powell at the United Nations. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Woo — their names still sends shudders down the spine. Or the echo of their strange incantation: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud…”

The legions of political zombies who haunt Congress — McConnell, McCain, Hatch, Inhofe, Chambliss, Graham, et. al. — are a media cliché. Who keeps voting these creatures into office? Apparently others of their kind. Many so-called “reality” shows are mere zombie voyeurism: Survivor Housewives of the Jersey Shore. Shoot them, they get back up and keep coming.

For the common weal, it’s time for a mass media ban on zombies. True Believers cannot be dissuaded from their soulless course. Fox will be Fox. But progressive and mainstream media must cease offering zombies platforms to spout their venomous anti-life invective, even for scornful laughs. Exposure prolongs the power of the undead. Let them perish in a well-earned oblivion.

There is no reason to hear from — or about — the Westboro Baptist Church ever again. The living dead should not be given space to proselytize for their anti-human views, even when presented as freaks or perverts. Or from preachers of anti-gay sermons who turn out to be gay themselves. Religious hypocrisy is old news. Let Pat Robertson rant and rave only in the catacombs under the 700 Club.

Nor should media cover the mad posturings of notoriety-sucking undead like Donald Trump. Yes, Trump has completely missed the point of what it means to be human. But how often do we need to see him demonstrate that? Trump is like a race car driver with no brakes or pit crew, careening in circles. We watch him, waiting for his wheels to fly off, hoping no bystanders are seriously injured.

When you start to notice them, zombies are everywhere. We tend to take them for granted. But giving them free rein is a fatal mistake. Zombies won’t be content until they convert every last one of us to their ghastly ghetto of ghouls.

We’re fast approaching an apocalyptic tipping point. If we lived there we’d be home now. And we almost are. Klaatu barada nikto.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). He lives in Quito, Ecuador. Read more of James McEnteer’s articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Posted on April 11, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

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FILM / David McReynolds : ‘How to Survive a Plague’ Is the Remarkable Story of ACT UP’s Battle Against AIDS

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Thorne Dreyer

How to Survive a Plague:
The remarkable story of ACT UP

Panic spread slowly. Rock Hudson’s death gave the disease a public face, but took us no closer to the cause.

By David McReynolds | The Rag Blog | April 10, 2013

[David France’s critically-acclaimed and award-winning documentary film, How to Survive a Plague, saw limited release in the United States in 2012.]

Clancy Sigal’s advice to me is to keep it short — a skill he has mastered and I’ve not. This is a quick review of David France’s film (now on DVD), How To Survive a Plague, largely the story of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment Activist Group), the nonprofit organization that grew out of ACT UP.

As films go, this feels almost like a “rough draft” of a documentary, but how could it be otherwise? The technical limitations of this short documentary are overwhelmed by a remarkable story, one that makes the film worth watching by anyone concerned with social change. The producers had to hunt for bits and pieces of film over a period of years — this was not a film which had been assigned a staff photographer to follow events.

I’ve said to friends that if I were 10 years younger I’d have been dead long ago — but when AIDS was given a name, in 1982, I was already 53. It wasn’t just a “gay disease” — it was almost entirely a disease of the youth. It’s first name was GRID — Gay-Related Immune Deficiency — and even when it was given a name a year later, no one had any idea what caused it. Panic spread slowly. Rock Hudson’s death gave the disease a public face, but took us no closer to the cause.

My local bar — once probably the best gay bar in New York, right on my corner, at Fourth Street and Second Avenue — slowly emptied out. Bob, the sweet young bartender, fell ill, and then fell dead. Bar traffic slowed, as if perhaps breathing the same air would transmit the disease.

By 1987 ACT UP was formed. It had the enormous energy of youth. Watching this film reminded me, again, of why the young are almost always the cutting edge of social change. They are not always right — ACT UP made more than its share of errors, suffered the almost inevitable splits — but to watch this film is to see young men and women, frightened by the death which was marching straight towards them, organize and act. And to act with imagination and love — in things such as the moving “quilt” project.

They provided the people-power for major political demonstrations, but they did much more than that — they studied the disease, they examined alternative treatments, and methods for running trials that would speed up the information on what might work. In the end they cooperated with the scientists in finding the answer.

And that answer was not easy to find. The AIDS virus is remarkably tricky and defeating it has been an incredibly complex task. It was, for the men and women in ACT UP, a race against time.

Watching the film I felt a sense of guilt that I had not been more involved. AIDS, even though we didn’t know its cause, was around me. A neighbor who lived a floor above me came down with it, and while I was able to visit him at first, simply walking into his room (he had Kaposi’s Syndrome), when he was taken to the hospital his room was guarded as if a particle of the disease might escape. One had to put on gloves, mask, a gown before going in, and they were taken off and destroyed when you left his room.

All of us have sins of omission; I won’t belabor mine. I write this brief review because the beautiful young men and women in this film, so vital, so very young, so fierce in their struggle, and most of them now dead, succeeded in pushing until the labs delivered the drugs which have made it possible to defeat AIDS.

It isn’t, of course, defeated, not here (where unsafe sex is sometimes seen as exciting), much less in Africa. But because of ACT UP we have the means. The film, made in 2012, is one hour and 49 minutes. You can get it from Netflix.

[David McReynolds was for nearly 40 years a member of the staff of the War Resisters League, and was twice the Socialist Party’s candidate for president. He and the late Barbara Deming are the subjects of a dual biography, A Saving Remnant, by historian Martin Duberman. David retired in 1999, and lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his two cats. He posts at Edge Left.org and can be reached at davidmcreynolds7@gmail.com. Read more articles by David McReynolds on The Rag Blog.]

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