This Week In the Media: The Globalization and Totalization of Capital

It’s been a bit of a hectic week here in the Wheat State. While I did try to get some writing done, mostly my primary concern has been scrambling around desperately trying to get a job started up. On Tuesday I did have an interview (which I think went well) for a substitute teacher position that will allow me to pick up jobs here in Lawrence, I did have to drive through a winter storm dumping sleet on to one of the most dangerous roadways in Kansas to get there. Then yesterday the moving cube arrived from Seattle, so I lost another day to unpacking. The house is still a mess from it, and even as I type this I’m trying to juggle the next four loads of laundry that need done and all the boxes of books that still need unpacked. To top it all off, I’ve been coming down with a bit of a head cold, and despite my best efforts not to become the huge whiny baby that I am typically reduced to whenever I get sick, it has definitely sapped my work ethic for the week. Maybe this “new post every Thursday!” thing I tried to set myself to was a bad idea…

Ultimately though, while I was hoping to use these anomalous conditions to justify the delay on my “Making a Murderer vs. an Enemy of the State” piece, the truth is it just isn’t ready yet. Despite the premise of the article being so clear when the inspiration first struck me, I’ve been having trouble getting my thoughts on the matter organized. I’ve been jotting down bits here and there as they come to me, and, though I think the individual thoughts do have their own value, without the more concrete and logical progression of ideas that I’ve been struggling to produce. If I were to post what I have at present I’m afraid it would fall somewhere between the categories of “a crazy person’s diary” and “manifesto” (which has some rather toxic connotations these days, given their prevalence in the world of domestic terrorism… remember when manifestoes were actually rallying cries meant to attract people to an idea, not just “HNNNGGGGH I’M SO MAD AT THE GOVERNMENT/WOMEN/BROWN PEOPLE THAT I’M GOING TO GO ON A KILLING SPREE NOW MAKE SURE THIS GETS ON THE NEWS”?) I had also been trying to get more of Grossman’s Everything Flows read to head ground my positions on the Soviet 1930s side of things, but I’ve actually probably got less reading down this week than writing, which is kind of pathetic. Basically, I’m going to give myself another week on it because I think that there are things there that are important, and I want to give them the proper treatment they deserve. So we’ll return to that next week, and today we’re going to do something a little different.

While I haven’t been all that productive this week in my fight against global capitalism, American oligarchy, and institutional racism, others have been. This week in various forms of media there was important work being done, and I thought it would be good to highlight some of them as what I see as required reading/viewing.  These are three works that had an impact on me this week, and in the way I perceive the world in which we live—I hope that you will look into them for yourself once we’re done here.

The first piece I want to highlight is a new book that came out this week, investigative reporter Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

(You can listen to the full interview with the author on NPR here: http://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-koch-brothers-traces-their-childhood-and-political-rise. It’s quite long, but quite extensive. I highly recommend it.)

This book is of course quite topical, written in the wake of Citizens United and published at the start of an election year. Also, ever since 2008, the Koch brothers (Charles and David) have been an increasingly household name, as well as political flashpoint, buzzword, and bogeyman ever since they became more deeply embroiled in politics following the election of President Obama back in 2008, as they were instrumental in helping organize and fund the “grassroots” Tea Party movement (aka the American Taliban). However, for all the attention that gets thrown on them, for most people little else is known than they have money and that they are willing to spend inordinate amounts of it to influence the American political system to favor their socially conservative, economically libertarian agenda. That all we know has to be gleaned from inferences of what has become visible in the media is no accident: the Koch’s are deliberately secretive and Machiavellian in their machinations. As such, they probably get directly attributed to just about everything progressives see as wrong with America today, whether that’s grounded in any evidence or not. What Jane Mayer shows, however, it seems like more often than not, blaming it on the Kochs is probably completely justified, one way or the other.

Mayer traces the story of the Koch family, who made most of their wealth leading up to and through the Great Depression. Based out of Wichita, KS (just 60 miles south of my hometown), the progenitor of the current generation of Kochs, Fred Koch, specialized in building oil refineries, which had been a boom industry in America before the depression hit. Looking for investment opportunities abroad, Fred found them in the only two economies that seemed to be capable of weathering the depression: first in Stalin’s industrializing Soviet Union, and the other in Hitler’s Germany.

Now, here Mayer clearly is trying to draw a direct comparison, as many are often want to do, between Hitler and Stalin. There is a certain shock value here, that lo! The “all-American” Koch family worked with two authoritarian regimes, which is of course in such stark contrast to their libertarian ideology today, right? Well… no. Not really at all. The first rule of capitalism is make money, disregard who said money comes from, it all spends the same. That’s one point that I want to drive home, because it will be something of an overarching theme throughout these pieces.

The second point is that let’s be clear as to what these oil refineries were being built for: in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Stalin was undergoing a massive campaign of industrialization to drag Russia and the other Soviet republics out of decades of governmentally enforced poverty. Before the revolution, only something like 20% of the entirety of the Russian population would have had access to electricity and petroleum based heating (in, mind you, one of the coldest countries on earth). Tsarist policies had been so sure that industrial growth would lead to social unrest that other than a few very controlled locations, there was no chance of the benefits of modern industry would have reached the vast majority of the population. In addition, with no real production economy to speak of at this time, the production and export of refined oil was one of the only reliable sources of income that the Soviets could use to attract investment from the suspicious and often overtly hostile West. Stalin had a goal for oil that was to benefit Soviet society, regardless of his other social policies.

Hitler’s Nazi regime, on the other hand, had made it very clear what oil would be used for. The plant that Fred Koch helped to build in Hamburg was there to produce high octane fuels for use in aircraft. Particularly the Luftwaffe, which, you know, bombed the shit out of London, Paris, Sevastopol, Minsk, and Stalingrad. Plus, the decision to go into Germany wasn’t just out of purely monetary concerns. According to Mayer, Fred Koch quite admired the precepts of the European right in the 1930s, which stood in sharp contrast to Roosevelt’s New Deal in America. Even the, in the tradition of anti-labor politics that stretch back to the Haymarket massacre and hell, even back to slavery (the quintessential opposite of the power of organized labor), Koch was all too comfortable with Hitler’s stance on “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Hell, to get permission to build the plant, Fred and his partners went to Germany to meet with Hitler, even greeting him with the typical “heil” salute.

Don’t get me wrong, neither I or nor Mayer is accusing Fred Koch of Nazism. But to say the family wasn’t touched by the precepts of the ideology… well, the brothers Koch—there are actually 4, Bill and Frederick aren’t mentioned as much, because they got cut out by Charles and David, but that’s an entire story of shittiness of its own—had a German nanny… who WAS an ardent Nazi, hired by Fred, himself a Germanophile. I don’t think that you can really escape from that, to just entirely separate it, when your dad agreed with Hitler. As we learned last week, sometimes family histories matter. Sometimes they don’t. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions here.

Anyway, that’s the story of how the Super Koch Bros. ended up with more money than they knew what to do with, besides find ways to make more money. Unfortunately, they’ve done that in spades. The Kochs are smart, both hold engineering degrees from MIT. They know how machines work, particularly machines that are designed to build capital. They have exploited about every game in the system to increase their net wealth, and much of it is perfectly “legal.”  That’s not so far as to say they haven’t gone outside the law, enacting their libertarian ideology even outside the bounds of legality. One particularly gross story is how they made billions by stealing oil from Native American land holdings. This is another theme I want to point out: nothing quite screams unregulated, uncontrollable capitalism like blatant, upfront racism.

                These ill-gotten gains have been used by the Kochs to manipulate the American political scheme, not just in the short term like the present election cycle where they plan to spend nearly $900 million supporting conservative candidates, but systematically to push American politics to the right for decades. Even back in the 1980s, they ran a campaign from the right against Ronald fucking Reagan.

The machine they’ve put in motion works on the long term. According to Mayer, the goal was “to build up an infrastructure that can fight a war of ideas and pull the country to the right.” The Kochs and their allies like Richard Fink, have developed a “three phase takeover of American politics” in order to “mass produce political change.” The first step is to build up an ideology—the money doesn’t go straight to politics, but rather to fund think tanks and establish ideological schools, on the model of the Freedom School that established in Colorado Springs back in the 1960s (where it was taught that the Civil War should never have been fought and that slavery was fine). Once you have the ideas in place and a doctrine for your followers to espouse, you then find a way to make those policies palatable to the American public. In 2008, we saw this happen in the fight over the budget, which was high-jacked by the Tea Party, as well as opposition to the President that was marketed to racists of all stripes.  After this, you can begin to form pressure groups like “Americans for Prosperity,” that in name call themselves grassroots but in reality are funded by an elitist boys club of other capitalists, all trying to prove their own commitment to the cause by how much money they can throw into the fund. They even have secret, exclusive retreats where no cell phones, cameras, or even copies of paperwork are allowed. This is the closest thing we’ve ever actually seen to an Illuminati, folks.

                The thing about capitalism is that it accumulates money in the hands of the worst people. That’s the nature of the system: your ability to make money is based on your willingness to fuck over others. More often than not, this is done under the pretense of legality, as if somehow because something is legal that also makes it moral. So what do you get? You get 400 of the world’s most preeminent racists exploiting Third World labor, manipulating markets and politics to bend to their will, and patting themselves on the back about it as if they’re what’s making the world go round. This is the world that we’ve all helped build, ladies and gentlemen. We are culpable for allowing this system to develop, and we are culpable in the fact that it still exists. This is where I think coming full circle to Mayer’s comments on the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—supposedly “totalitarian” societies. Capitalism is just as totalizing an ideology as communism or Nazism have ever been. Even if you wish it didn’t, it is effecting your day to day life more than you would ever realize. It is an inescapable aspect of living in the West, in this country, it is implicit in our politics, in our lives.

Which brings us to piece number two. Think of what we’ve learned about the Koch’s as a case study, as  one significant indicator of a much wider whole. Some of you may have watched this when I first posted it on Facebook earlier this week, but The Guardian ran a great video piece about what lies behind the façade of the aversion to Donald Trump. I think it’s incredibly important to understand why just simply voting against Donald Trump in this election season isn’t going to make the problem of right wing radicalism go away, because Trump is just a symptom, a tip of the iceberg. He is not a threat to democracy, but rather a sign of democracy already in crisis.  This piece, linked here, I think speaks for itself:

                I offer this piece after our discussion of the Koch brothers very deliberately: they are shapers of not just an American system, but of a globalized system. Though they all have their own power bases and local flavor to their rhetoric, the rise of the global right has only been gaining strength through the eighties and nineties—the fall of the Soviet Union was perhaps the greatest victory of the right, but it was not a victory for democracy in the world. Look at Russia today. I think what disturbs most people about the resurgence of Russia on the world stage is that they can’t quite conceive that they’re looking in a mirror darkly. A society ran by oligarchs, ideologies and personalities entrenched in leadership positions election cycle after election cycle, cuts to education made to fund defense… That’s just my two cents of course, but I can’t honestly imagine how anyone seriously critical about Russia today doesn’t see it as a state remade in our own image.

                It’s not just about states however, either. Because as the video makes note of, big business now has more power than even the strongest of governments. The main reason here is that they don’t have constituents to please that steer or even drive policy, they only have shareholders who are concerned with profit margins. American “leadership” of the world in the almost three decades following the Cold War has been the chief enforcer of a Western Ponzi scheme, where investment is withheld from the developing world unless “competive” conditions are in place to attract investment. Governments in the Third World are often cash strapped themselves, and the global financial system has encouraged a transnational culture of graft and shady dealings. There may be layers and layers of transactions that happen before you got your current cell phone, but there is a pretty good chance that the lithium in its battery was mined by child slaves working in an unregulated Cobalt mine in Africa that was then bought by a Chinese company before being sold to Apple or Samsung. In most of our pockets at this very moment lies a harsh reminder about the cost of globalization, and more often than not we find it just best not to think about it.

                Finally, we come to the rather grim wrap up of our week in review: another book under review by NPR: Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales (linked here: http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/01/20/463600820/todays-slaves-often-work-for-enterprises-that-destroy-the-environment)

I can’t even give this one full treatment, this was a rather depressing part of my week and I really am still just now trying to process it. A rough estimate today counts around 30 MILLION people still enslaved in the world today. The slave trades that hold this many human lives in bondage are typically centered on the extract of raw materials, primarily the precious metals that make all the gadgets and doodads of modern life in this country run. The reason that armed gangs are able to set themselves up in place of failed states to run their own slave enterprises is because they don’t have any trouble finding buyers. In an environment of global competition, all that it takes to turn a blind eye to the mass atrocity is a lower price point.

More often than not, these gangs exist within failed states, many in Africa. Those who know nothing of African history (and racists) blame this as some sort of timeless backwardness. Without this knowledge it’s hard to see that this continent has been ripped apart time and again by colonial exploitation and the destructive ethnic nationalism.  The continent was used as a chess board for the proxy wars fueled by the United States trying to eradicate communism at all cost, and weapons of war now saturate the region. Note that American “leadership” has done nothing to try to support these states. There will never be serious American commitment to helping struggling African nations out of the poverty they were forced into during the twentieth century. Not while the price of Coltan is so low.

These slavers are not part of some system apart from global capitalism. Slavery is the purest, most distilled form of capitalism in the world today. These slavers both are sustained by global capitalism, and in turn by buying in to the capitalist model they help to sustain it. These stats, horrifyingly enough, don’t even begin to account for prison populations that are made into slaves in all but name. It doesn’t account for the American prison industrial complex, but if it wanted to expand its definition of slavery, there certainly would be a good place to start.

The worst part about this is that all this drive for profits has only served to increase a trend that has been an integral component of the capitalist model: ecological destruction. Except, according to the law of maximums in the modern world, environmental destruction is now taking place on a truly massive scale. This story focuses on localized tragedies, but as more and more of these sites spring up… where is the tipping point? Not only is the human cost of these slave enterprises atrocious, but compared to global, even legal corporate entities? Just the sheer amount of irreparable damage being done to ecosystems on a global scale… well, let’s just say 2015 sure was a warm one, wasn’t it?

So there you are, three stories, all variations on a theme. A sort of start/middle/end, if you will. Maybe it’s just pure chance that this, that I came across all of them in about this same order in a single week. Perhaps I’m just too well trained. I’ve been spending the last 8 years at my life looking at how information fits together to tell a story, and well, this story grabbed me.

                I think I will leave off here for the week. Next time I promise we’ll actually get to Making a Murderer, so if you haven’t binged that baby yet, I highly encourage it before next week’s posting. We’re going to have a lot to discuss there; be ready for a bit more original analysis and insights (that hopefully won’t come across as the ramblings of a crazy person!). I everyone enjoyed this week’s WSP and will give some time to read, watch, listen, and reflect on the pieces highlighted above.

Until next time, Comrades…

-MDC