Bidder 70

As one of the more counter-intuitive economics departments in the United States, the University of Utah has not only been the long-time host of the Marxmail server but also where Tim DeChristopher was a graduate student. When you first take a look at Tim’s face in the documentary “Bidder 70” that opened yesterday at the Quad in New York without knowing anything about him in advance, you might assume that he was just another conservative Mormon student especially with his military-style haircut.

It turns out that he was one of the most courageous and principled civil disobedience activists in recent American history, standing in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. The title of the film refers to Tim’s taking part in an oil and gas lease auction on December 19, 2008 in which he bid $1.8 million for 14 parcels of land without any intention of paying for them. Although there was a well-organized environmental movement in Utah to protect the pristine land that was at stake, he decided to put his body on the line and face the consequences. And some consequences they were. He faced up to 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.

Since Tim was from West Virginia, he knew first-hand what energy corporation despoliation of the wilderness amounted to. Mountaintop removal in that state has generated enormous profits for the coal companies while leaving the water and forest ruined forever. Not only is there an injury to the natural world, there are few benefits economically to the working class. In one scene, where Tim returns to survey the latest damage, a long-time environmentalist tells him that in the richest parts of the state from a corporate standpoint, the local businesses remain hanging on a thread. And once the coal is gone, the small businesses and population become totally superfluous.

While I paid close attention to the incident that led to Tim’s arrest, I realized that I had heard little about the case in the intervening months. This led me to sit at the edge of my seat in suspense wondering whether he would have to spend a decade in prison. Usually I don’t mind including a “spoiler” in my film reviews, but in this case will not include one since it would rob the documentary of its powerful dramatic tension.

The film is not only valuable for telling Tim’s story but that of the movement in Utah as well. You hear from dedicated activists and see how they organize their creative and compelling protests. While Utah might seem like the sleepy boondocks to people living in blue state America, the truth is that it is in the vanguard. This might be expected since the stakes are so high. As one of the most beautiful and environmentally endowed states in the country, its citizens would have to be sick with shortsighted greed not to take a stand against energy company rape.

Of course, there are those who don’t mind seeing Utah suffer the same fate as West Virginia, starting with a Democratic Party Congressman who is in the back pocket of the energy companies. Tim and his comrades support a more progressive candidate against him in the primaries but the immense wealth of the corporate polluters make electoral bids almost futile.

“Bidder 70” is a character-driven documentary that is a success on its own terms but one might have hoped for more expert testimony on the environmental issues that provide the backdrop for Tim’s heroic intervention. It probably would have to be the subject of another film unless a decision had been made to double the length of the film.

There is little doubt that if the public was aware of the disaster that it awaits it because of global warming, it would be driven to offer vocal support for Tim DeChristopher as well as other leading figures such as Bill McKibben and James Hansen who are seen in the film.

At one point Tim expresses his worries over the mounting presence of greenhouse gases. At the time of the filming, he said that we were rapidly approaching the tipping point of 380 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Just a week or so before the film opened at the Quad in New York, the news came out that we were now at 400 ppm.

On Democracy Now, climate change expert Michael Mann spoke about what this meant:

So, this number, 400 parts per million, what does it mean? It’s the number of molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of air; 400 of them are now CO2. Just two centuries ago, that number was only 280 parts per million. So if we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere at current rates, we’ll reach a doubling of the pre-industrial levels of CO2 within the next few decades.

Now, 400, what does that round number, 400, mean? Well, what it means is that, as you alluded to, we have to go several million years back in time to find a point in earth’s history where CO2 was as high as it is now. And, of course, we’re just blowing through this 400 ppm limit. If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades. We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.

So, what we are already witnessing, in fact, the effects of climate change. If we look at the past year here in the U.S., last summer, the record heat, the record drought, the record wildfire that destroyed large forest areas in Colorado, New Mexico. We saw, you know, tremendous damage to our crops in the breadbasket of the country. We saw Arctic sea ice diminish to the lowest level we’ve ever seen, and it’s on a trajectory where there will be no ice in the Arctic at the end of the summer in perhaps a matter of 10 years or so. We also saw the devastation of Superstorm Sandy. Now, we can’t say that Hurricane Sandy was caused by climate change, but many of its characteristics are precisely the kinds of characteristics that we predict tropical storms and hurricanes will have if we continue to warm the planet. We will see more destructive tropical storms. We’ll see more flooding. We’ll see more drought. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because, remember, we’ve only just crossed 400 now. We will reach 450 ppm in a matter of a couple decades if we continue with business as usual.

Who knows how many will die because of the consequences of global warming? One expert predicts as many as 100 million. Ironically, “Bidder 70” connected to “Hannah Arendt”, the film I saw the day before. Based on actual footage of the Eichmann trial, it takes up the question of the “banality of evil”. If six million Jews died because of a combination of anti-Semitism and bureaucratic indifference, who could deny that the ethical path practically forced on Germans in the 1930s was resistance to Hitler, including the young people who posted anti-Nazi posters in the name of the White Rose. While we by no means face the same kind of killing machine as the Nazi state, there are huge risks involved in standing up to the bureaucratic petro-military machine. Tim DeChristopher is the living embodiment of White Rose values.

New York Ecosocialism Conference: a resounding success

Last Saturday’s conference was a success beyond the organizer’s expectations and mine. They would have been happy with a hundred attendees but 240 showed up. Before offering my own thoughts, let me start off with what Bard College composition professor and long time Green activist John Halle had to say on Facebook:

Some off-the-cuff reactions to the Ecosocialist Conference at Barnard on Saturday:

1) Much larger, focussed, informed and energetic than I, and I would imagine others, were expecting. (Plenaries filled a large lecture hall.)

2) Clustering of ages-most were between 20-30 or 65 and 80. (My age cohort seemed conspicuously underrepresented).

3) Impressively ecumenical: ISO, it appears, were the initiators, but in no way dominated the panels or the proceedings . e.g. substantial representation of the Green Party, labor (e.g. Bruce Hamilton head of Amalgamated Transit Workers) and academics (Cornell’s Sean Sweeney, Nancy Romer)

4) Joel Kovel’s talk brought in an absolutely necessary, albeit uncomfortable recognition that the ultimate stakes of climate change are meta-economic, meta-social, and meta-political, which is to say they are transcendental or, to use his vocabulary, spiritual.

5) Capitalists were described on several occasions as “blood suckers”, a term I quite like, most notably by TWU leader Marty Goodman.

In short, great conference-provided a small emission of light after a fairly dark week.

I concur with John’s observations but would add this one. As I sat through the various workshops and plenary Q&A’s, I fully expected someone to announce themselves as a member of the Bolshevik League and launch into a speech about the need to abolish the capitalist system on the basis of the Transitional Program or some such thing. Instead, the comments were universally cogent and to the point. And, more importantly, reflected the difficulties that many were having in figuring out how to deal with the environmental crisis that brought us together. For example, in the Q&A on “Both Red & Green”, I spoke to a point about the dangers of neo-Malthusianism that had been raised in the discussion. I said that I could understand the racist uses of the overpopulation argument, but can we really expect a world’s population to have all the Bluefin tuna it wants to eat. Isn’t the idea of ecological limits true no matter what social system we live in?

After reflecting on the seriousness of the discussion for a day or so, it dawned on me that the environmental movement, unlike those that the disorganized left traditionally “intervenes” in does not lend itself to pat answers. What is there in Lenin or Trotsky that can serve as an off-the-shelf solution to climate change?

Indeed, we are dealing with the problem of being in uncharted territory. This makes it difficult for activists to recite dogmatic mantras of the kind that are usually heard around issues of war and peace or labor struggles, etc. And this is not to speak of the inadequacy of the Great Men of Marxism when their productivist formulas are applied to a world in which productivism—either capitalist or “socialist”—have cast a shadow over our futures. Take, for example, what Trotsky wrote in 1934: “It is the task of your communist statesmen to make the system deliver the concrete goods that the average man desires: his food, cigars, amusements, his freedom to choose his own neckties, his own house and his own automobile. It will be easy to give him these comforts in Soviet America.”

Just a few highlights:

Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in 2012, spoke at the morning plenary. She is really dynamite, using Powerpoint slides to illustrate how fucked the system was. I am not sure how well organized her campaign was but she is capable of turning around the minds of millions of people given the chance. No wonder she was prevented from taking part in debates. She really knows how to speak to working people using concrete examples like people and loaves of bread. With the current income disparities in the USA, there is one person at the top with fifty loaves of bread and at the bottom fifty people to share one loaf. That’s the kind of talk that Ralph Nader used to give and that Green candidates need to develop.

In the morning workshop I attended, I got a chance to hear John Ridell who wears two hats. In addition to being a scholar of the early Comintern, he is also an ecosocialist. He spoke about the resistance to the Canadian Tar Sands project that the ruling class hopes would turn the country into the next Saudi Arabia. Christ, just what Canadians need… John started out as a Latin America solidarity activist but moved into environmental activism after Hugo Morales told a group that the best way to show solidarity was to fight global warming. John is a terrific speaker, by the way. What a waste of cadre—all the talented people who went through the revolving door of the Trotskyist movement.

In the afternoon, I attended a workshop on Hurricane Sandy that was basically a discussion of its impact on the Rockaways, a topic close to my heart since I have been going out there to play chess with an old friend from Bard College for 25 years or so. I made a video about the hurricane that some Rockaway folks think is the best they have seen:

One of the panelists was Josmar Trujillo, who works with a group called Wildfire that is geared to the needs of the predominantly Black and Latino housing project residents on the east side of the peninsula. When you look at Josmar, your immediate reaction is that he must be a Con Ed or UPS worker. Working class to the bone. That being said, he was really political and sharp. When I used to be in the Trotskyist movement in the 60s and 70s, we used to talk a lot about how the working class would radicalize. I suspect that it will be the environmental crisis as much as the economic crisis that gets working people moving.

The last workshop was on the history of the green left that included Richard Greeman as a speaker. Greeman has been around forever and writes many interesting things, especially about Victor Serge. I was a little bit skeptical about his tendency to view the state as an unqualified evil—almost in Hardt-Negri terms. Commenting on the failure of the city government to get involved with hurricane relief and the people’s need to rely on Occupy Sandy, he said that this was a good thing. This made me uncomfortable since it reminded me of the movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild” that said just about the same thing. Ugh.

The evening plenary featured Joel Kovel, whose remarks John Halle summed up admirably. The other speaker was Chris Williams, who I knew by reputation as someone who Pham Binh admires greatly. That’s good enough for me.

A Fierce Green Fire; Greedy Lying Bastards

Opening today at the Cinema Village in New York, “A Fierce Green Fire” is an intelligent and dramatically compelling history of the environmentalist movement directed by Mark Kitchell, whose last film was “Berkeley in the Sixties”. Although I have followed the movement closely since the late 80s, much of the film came as a revelation especially the story of how ideological and strategic differences within the movement led to the formation of new groups, a process I am more familiar with as a long-time student of the Marxist left as well.

The film is divided into five parts, each narrated by a notable (Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende, Meryl Streep).

The first deals with conservation, the hallmark of the Teddy Roosevelt presidency so sweeping in its ambitions that Lenin used it as a model for similar efforts in the infant Soviet republic (my factoid, not the film’s). We learn that John Muir founded the granddaddy of all environmentalist organizations, the Sierra Club, at a time when the citizenry was becoming enraged over the loss of wildlife, including the magnificent birds like the Snowy Egret that were supplying the feathers for hats sold in department stores. As someone who has observed these creatures in Central Park, one can well understand why people would be moved.

Eventually David Brower, who I never met but with whom I was familiar his support for Tecnica in the 1980s, assumed the reins of the Sierra Club in 1952. At the time Brower was working with Lindsay Mattison in the International Center for Development Policy, a group that provided behind-the-scenes support not just for our organization but a host of others as well. Whenever Michael Urmann, our executive director, referred to Brower, it was in hushed and reverential tones. It is easy to see why from this film. He was a heroic figure who elevated the Sierra Club into a fighting organization that stopped the government dead in its tracks in 1965 from building dams in the Grand Canyon.

When the Sierra Club board voted to back the construction of a nuclear power plant in Diablo Canyon in 1967, Brower and his supporters split to form Friends of the Earth. As someone who admired Brower from afar for the past 25 years, it was deeply satisfying to see him speak and to lead protests in the film.

The next part is an account of the Love Canal struggle of the late 70s in which families living in Niagara Falls demand to be relocated from a toxic dump that has left most of their children suffering from birth defects. Although I have vivid memories of what took place, it was thrilling to see ordinary people fight like hell for the basic human right not to be poisoned by corporate polluters. People too young to remember Love Canal will find it inspiring since it is a reminder that a massive resistance is possible once the victims of corporate malfeasance decided to take matters into their own hands.

Part three covers the formation of Greenpeace as a response to Japanese whaling. One of the interviewees is Paul Watson, a former board member of Greenpeace who split with them over a perceived lack of militancy. He went on to form Sea Shepherds, a group that I have had some problems with in the past over their opposition to Makah whale hunting. I recommend an article by Jim Craven, an economics professor of Blackfoot descent, making the case for aboriginal rights.

Next the film deals with the spread of environmental activism, focusing on the struggle of Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper who led nonviolent resistance to rancher incursions into the Brazilian rainforest in the 1980s and who was murdered for his efforts. Again, this is a heroic figure whose story younger people would find most inspiring. There is a sad irony reflected in Mendes’s electoral bid as Workers Party candidate. Despite the party’s radical roots and the promises of its leaders to defend the Amazon rainforest and its dwellers from commercial exploitation, the relentless drive for profits continues apace.

The final part on global warming dovetails with the documentary “Greedy Lying Bastards” that opens next Friday at the Village East and AMC Empire 25 in New York and in Los Angeles as well. (Full screening information is here: http://greedylyingbastards.com/) Directed by radical environmentalist Craig Rosebraugh, a former member of the Earth Liberation Front, it is a no-hold’s barred attack on global warming denialism. If “A Fierce Green Fire” was all about heroes, this is a documentary about villains. The two films actually complement each other and should be seen by anybody who cares about the future of the planet.

If the situation was not so dire, the film almost would play as a comedy with a rogue’s gallery of denialists parading across the screen. Among the most grotesque is Christopher Monckton, the bowler-hat wearing Third Viscount of Brenchley and one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Yes, I know, this sounds like something I lifted from a P.J. Wodehouse short story but this is a real person—in a manner of speaking. Monckton specializes in making outlandish statements such as declaring that there has been no evidence of warming over the past 16 years. As the documentary points out, it does not really matter if denialists lie. It forces scientists to spend an inordinate amount of time correcting the record and has the effect of changing some peoples’ minds after the fashion of Goebbels’s “big lie” technique.

People like Monckton make a good living from stipends paid by energy company executives to speak at their bashes. Among them are characters like the Koch brothers who are as disgusting as ever.

The film gives the victims of climate change to tell their story, from homeowners in the Southwest devastated by wildfire and survivors of Hurricane Sandy. The film also interviews some of the major figures of climate change science, including Mark Serreze and Pieter Tans. It also features Representative Henry Waxman who comes across as more determined to stop the Koch brothers and Christopher Monckton’s of the world than most politicians.

But one can’t help but feel a sense of dismay at the tendency of the environmental crisis to deepen no matter which party is in power. One of the final interviewees in “A Fierce Green Fire” is Robert Bullard, the African-American author of author of “Dumping in Dixie” and “Toxic Waste and Race.” He plaintively asks why there should not be unanimity on the need to save the planet, since all of us—rich and poor—live on it. This, of course, is a question that has nagged at me for years. Why doesn’t the ruling class of today look after its long-term interests in the way it did a hundred years ago? Just compare Teddy Roosevelt who set aside huge amounts of land so greedy corporations would not despoil it to Barack Obama, who despite paying homage to Roosevelt, has shown willingness to let oil companies drill in formerly protected areas—not to speak of his utter ineffectiveness in halting climate change.

Perhaps there is no sense in trying to psychologize the people in power who like all ruling classes in a period of steep decline show an utter inability to think about the long term. Despite Obama’s Columbia and Harvard education (or maybe because of it), he may not be that much different than the Czar taking advice from Rasputin.

If the solution to the environmental crisis is eliminating the profit motive, there’s not much engagement with that in either documentaries despite their many virtues. If I were Mark Kitchell, I might have made an effort to grill some of the environmentalist leaders he had a chance to interview like Barbara Bramble, the head of the National Wildlife Federation. Her predecessor Jay Hair built up a huge $100 million endowment. You’ll never guess how? Well, let Counterpunch editor Jeff St. Clair explain:

Under the firm hand of Hair’s leadership the Federation’s membership doubled and it’s budget tripled. His strategy was simple: market the Wildlife Federation as a non-confrontational corporate-friendly outfit. Hair created the Corporate Conservation Council and forged relationships with some of the world’s most toxic corporations: ARCO, Ciba-Giegy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Penzoil, USX, Waste Management and Weyerhaeuser. The corporations received the impriatur of the nation’s largest environmental group, while the National Wildlife Federation raked in millions in corporation grants.

The conservation giant showed less deference to its members. In 1975, Dr. Claude Moore, a long-time member, donated a 367-acre tract of forest land in Loudon County, Virginia to the Federation to be managed as a wildlife sanctuary. The land provided rich habitat for an extraordinary number of birds. A Smithsonian guidebook called the area a natural gem.

Then in 1986 the National Wildlife Federation decided to sell the sanctuary to a developer for $8.5 million and use the money to help pay for the construction of the Federation’s new seven-story office building on 16th Street in DC. Outraged, Dr. Moore and other members sued the Federation, alleging it had violated a contract to manage the land as a nature preserve. Moore lost. The land was sold and 1,300 houses constructed on the site.

What was it that Malcolm X used to call this? Asking the fox to guard the henhouse?

Why does my heart feel so bad?

From the liner notes of Moby’s “Everything is Wrong” CD recorded in 2000:

1. in the past 20 years approximately 1 million species have disappeared from the world’s tropical forests.
2. from 1960-1985 over 40% of the Central American rainforests were destroyed to create grazing land for cattle.
3. the United States imports over 100,000 tons of beef from Central America each year.
4. it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes, it takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.
5. one acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes. one acre of land can produce 165 pounds of beef.
6. the U.S. cattle industry produces 158 million tons of waste per year.
7. livestock production is the #1 cause of water pollution in the U.S.
8. 22 million acres of land have become unusable due to desertification.
9. 85% of the topsoil loss in the U.S. is the result of livestock production.
10. in the U.S. 33% of ALL raw material consumption is used solely in the production of meat, egg, and dairy products.
11. it takes 1 pound of grain to make 1 pound of bread.
12. it takes 20 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of beef.
13. 75% of the grain sent to 3rd world nations goes to livestock production.
14. the countries with the highest in animal products are also the countries with the highest rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, etc. 50 percent of men who eat meat regularly die of heart disease.
15. 4 percent of men who eat no animal products die of heart disease.
16. 80% of USDA chicken inspectors no longer eat chicken.
17. if the average commuter passenger load in the U.S. were increased by just 1 person per day we would save 33 million gallons of gas each day. Americans spend over 1 billion hours stuck in traffic each year.
18. 30% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from cars.
19. air is sold in Mexico city for $1.15 a minute by sidewalk vendors.
20. what Greenpeace spends in a year general motors spends in 4 hours.
21. 3.5 million children under the age of 6 suffer from lead poisoning.
22. in Europe 50% of the cars still use leaded gas.
23. 2 million gallons of motor oil are dumped in American waterways each year.
24. over 8 million tons of oil are spilled into the world’s oceans every year.
25. 5 billion gallons of water are flushed each day in the united states
26. sewage treatment facilities in the U.S. discharge 5.9 trillion gallons of sewage wastewater into coastal waters every year.
27. U.S. tuna fishermen are permitted to kill over 20,000 dolphins every year.
28. 2 million sharks die in driftnets in the north pacific every year.
29. only 1 in 10 baby chimpanzees survive the trip from the jungle to the zoo.
30. 1 billion animals are killed each year in experiments.
31. 17 million animals are trapped in the U.S. each year for fur.
32. many traps are so painful that animals chew through their own limbs to escape.
33. for every fur animal trapped two other animals (dogs, cats, deer, etc.) are trapped and killed.
34. in 1987 450,000 minks died on fur farms from heat exhaustion. 1 ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water, & enough energy to heat the average home for 6 months.
35. six times more jobs are created by recycling as opposed to landfill operations.
36. the amount of money spent on trash disposal in American schools is equal to that spent on new textbooks.
37. out of every $10 that Americans spend on food, $1 pays for packaging.
38. 65% of garbage in the U.S. is packaging.
39. 50% of all trash thrown away could be recycled into new products.
40. 500 new dumps are built each year in the united states.
41. over 1 billion trees are used to make disposable diapers every year.
42. Americans throw away 20 billion disposable diapers each year.
43. Americans dump the equivalent of 21 million shopping bags full of food into landfills every year.
44. 2.5 billion batteries are thrown away each year by Americans.
45. over 700,000 tons of hazardous waste is produced in the U.S. every day.
46. Americans throw away 10 million cigarette lighters every week.
47. 500,000 people die of cigarette related diseases in the U.S. each year.
48. pesticides that are banned in the U.S. (such as ddt) are regularly sold to third world countries.
49. 90% of all food borne pesticides are found in meat and dairy products.
50. 10% of nursing mothers who were vegetarians had ddt in their breast milk.
51. 90% of nursing mothers who were meat eaters had ddt in their breast milk.
52. in 1945, before widespread pesticides were use, U.S. corn growers lost 3% of their crops to insects, last year they lost over 12%.
53. 74 different kinds of pesticides have been found in drinking water.
54. over 100 chemical contaminants have been found in the breast milk of nursing mothers in the U.S.
55. of the 34 chemicals most widely used on lawns, 25% are widely believed to cause birth defects, genetic mutation, and cancer.
56. Americans spend 6 billion dollars on their lawns each year.
57. 25% of U.S. nuclear reactors would not be able to contain a core breach meltdown.
58. a 1985 study predicted a 45% chance of core breach meltdown in the U.S. before 2005. in 1992, 430,000 people in the world died from cancers resulting from nuclear testing radiation.
59. more money is spent in the U.S. on nuclear weaponry in one year than was spent on housing from 1980-1992.
60. to date, cleaning up storage facilities for nuclear debris has cost taxpayers 200 billion dollars.
61. in 1989 the U.S. military used 200 billion barrels of oil, enough to keep all American public transit systems running for 22 years.
62. 1 ton of toxic waste is produced by the U.S. military every minute.

Will Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion be the victim of the next Frankenstorm?

Counterpunch November 01, 2012
Frankenstorms, Climate Change Denial and the Consequences of Neoliberalism
New York Was Warned
by RITT GOLDSTEIN

“Oh Great Lord of the Almighty Dollar”, the panicked voice cried out, its Wall Street owner realizing he was indeed in truly deep-water, “how could you have forsaken your devoted and faithful?” But though this poor soul lifted entreaty after entreaty to what had become his sacred deities — those of Narcissism, Hubris and Greed — reality swept in like the hurricane it was, flooding Wall Street and much around it.

The Ancients knew what happens when one worships false gods, and today many are hopefully learning a lesson long forgotten, forgotten even though the biblical proportions of Sandy’s flooding were predicted a year earlier.

In 2011, a report by New York State upon the impact of climate change had described the potential for the flooding news media have now allowed the world to witness. New York was warned, and even warned again just this September.

In September, an article in The New York Times — ‘New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn’ – contained comments by Prof. Klaus Jacob, lead author of the transportation section of the state study, Jacob quoted as observing that if the storm surge from Hurricane Irene had been about a foot higher, “subway tunnels would have flooded, segments of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and roads along the Hudson River would have turned into rivers, and sections of the commuter rail system would have been impassable or bereft of power”.

Hmmm, it seems Prof. Jacob had the right idea, especially as he went on to note that some of New York City’s (NYC) under-river subway tunnels “would have been unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55 billion”. The study outlined NYC needed to invest between ten and twenty billion to avoid such calamities; though, it didn’t. Not a good decision.

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—

Village Voice, Wednesday, Oct 1 2008
Columbia Ignores Peril
When Klaus Jacob talks, important people take action. Except the important people paying him.
By Elizabeth Dwoskin

Columbia geophysicist Klaus Jacob is such a highly regarded expert on urban environmental disasters related to climate change that governments and scientists all over the world take him seriously, revising building codes and altering the construction of dams as a result of his warnings

Except, it turns out, at his own place of employment, where he’s spent almost 40 years as a research scientist.

Jacob tells the Voice that he’s repeatedly been given the brush-off by Columbia officials regarding his specific and detailed warnings that their ambitious development plans in Harlem could lead to a wide-scale disaster.

Much has been written about the university’s plans to spread northward across 17 acres of developed land—but Jacob is concerned less about the school’s move outward than he is about something that’s garnered less attention: Columbia’s intention to dig deep into the ground.

Expansion plans call for the largest underground complex in the city, a massive, 80-foot-deep basement that will extend only a block from the banks of the Hudson River. That’s an underground space large enough to hold an eight-story building, lying only a few hundred feet from water that’s susceptible to storm surge.

Imagine this scenario, based on Jacob’s research: It’s the year 2065, and Columbia University’s 17-acre West Harlem expansion is abuzz with activity. Students hurry through rainfall along a tree-lined promenade overlooking the Hudson. In a biotechnology lab nearby, scientists are engineering lethal pathogens to respond to the next generation of infectious diseases and bioterrorist threats. Deep down below, engineering majors use the future version of Facebook to instant-message their friends.

Warnings, meanwhile, are steadily being broadcast about an oncoming storm. A Category 2 hurricane with 110-mile-an-hour winds is barreling down on the city—a more frequent occurrence than in decades past. New Yorkers have become familiar with the drill: They evacuate to local shelters set up by the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Over several hours, the Hudson rises 10 feet, flooding the waterfront promenade and the rest of the campus. Many, but perhaps not all, have heeded warnings to leave the deep basement. Damage will be extensive and exorbitantly expensive. And some of the sprawling labs that contain biohazardous material may become another kind of floating threat to the city.

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Hurricane Sandy and the Second Contradiction of Capitalism

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy as I pondered the insanity of the bourgeoisie once again neglecting its infrastructure, I found myself thinking about James O’Connor’s Second Contradiction of Capitalism theory for the first time in a while. When I first began reading and writing about ecology  back in the early 90s, O’Connor was a major influence on my thinking. Now 82 and in poor health, O’Connor is pretty much retired from writing and editorial work. Joel Kovel has taken over the editor position at “Capitalism, Nature and Socialism”, (http://www.cnsjournal.org/) the journal that O’Connor launched in 1988.

Here’s O’Connor on the ruling class’s failure to look after its long-term interests:

An ecological Marxist account of capitalism as a crisis-ridden system focuses on the way that the combined power of capitalist production relations and productive forces self-destruct by impairing or destroying rather than reproducing their own conditions (“conditions” defined in terms of both their social and material dimensions). Such an account stresses the process of exploitation of labor and self-expanding capital; state regulation of the provision of production conditions; and social struggles organized around capital’s use and abuse of these conditions. The main question — does capital create its own barriers or limits by destroying its own production conditions? — needs to be asked in terms of specific use values, as well as exchange value. This is so because conditions of production are not produced as commodities, hence problems pertaining to them are “site specific,” including the individual body as a unique “site.” The question — why does capital impair its own conditions? — needs to be asked in terms of the theory of self-expanding capital, its universalizing tendencies which tend to negate principles of site specificity, its lack of ownership of laborpower, external nature, and space, hence (without state or monopolistic capitalist planning) capital’s inability to prevent itself from impairing its own conditions.

From: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/second_contradiction.htm

If this Atlantic Monthly article doesn’t summon up images of the second contradiction, I don’t know what does:

The 2011 Report That Predicted New York’s Subway Flooding Disaster

• Eric Jaffe
• Oct 30, 2012

Last fall, as part of a massive report on climate change in New York, a research team led by Klaus Jacob of Columbia University drafted a case study that estimated the effects of a 100-year storm on the city’s transportation infrastructure. Considering MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota’s comments today that Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the subway was “worse than the worst case scenario,” it seems pretty safe to put Sandy in the 100-year category. In that case, assuming the rest of the report holds true, the subway system could be looking at a recovery time of several weeks, with residual effects lasting for months and years.

The researchers modeled a potential 100-year storm that consisted of either a category 1 or 2 hurricane hitting nearby, or a severe nor’easter that coincided with high tide. (As we know now, Sandy was a hybrid of all three events.) The models predicted complete flooding of several tunnels after such an event, including all the tunnels in the East River:

Based on their models, Jacob and colleagues wrote that a 100-year storm could leave roughly 1 billion gallons of water to be pumped from the city’s network of subway tunnels. (To give you an idea of scale, that’s equal to the average daily consumption of drinking water in the city.) If all 14 tunnels flooded, it would take about five days to pump each one clear, according to the report. However that’s the best-case scenario; a week per tunnel is more likely.

Immediate flood-clearing isn’t the only concern. As Ted Mann writes for the Wall Street Journal, salt water is likely to have considerable residual effects on the aging subway system. Jacob and colleagues write that equipment damaged by brackish water will at least require time to clean and could also require time for replacement. In some cases, when the parts are too old and no longer in production, it could require completely new infrastructure:

There probably are not enough personnel trained to rebuild and refurbish equipment simultaneously in multiple subway lines even if the equipment could be procured. There is some existing equipment that, if damaged, cannot be replaced because it is obsolete and is no longer manufactured, nor are there replacement parts for it. Such equipment would have to be redesigned and then installed — a process that can take a long time.

* * * *

The citation from  O’Connor above was from the introduction to the collection of CNS articles titled “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism” that can be read here in its entirety. The book contains articles by Michael Lebowitz, Samir Amin and John Bellamy Foster among others.

(I took the liberty of reformatting O’Connor’s article since it was not that eyeball-friendly in the original.)

It has been quite a number of years since I had anything to say about O’Connor’s theory but this is from something I wrote about 15 years ago, I guess. It is from an article titled “David Harvey, James O’Connor and Engels’ “Conditions of the Working Class in England” that I wrote long before I began blogging. For that matter, it was probably written before blogs existed.

James O’Connor has developed a theory of the “second contradiction” of capitalism that addresses these sorts of concerns.

In an essay “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible” that appears in a collection “Is Capitalism Sustainable” edited by Martin O’Connor (no relation), he defines both the first and second contradictions of capitalism.

The first contradiction is generated by the tendency for capitalism to expand. The system can not exist in stasis such as precapitalist modes of productions such as feudalism. A capitalist system that is based on what Marx calls “simple reproduction” and what many greens call “maintenance” is an impossibility. Unless there is a steady and increasing flow of profits into the system, it will die. Profit is the source of new investment which in turn fuels technological innovation and, consequently, ever-increasing replacement of living labor by machinery. Profit is also generated through layoffs, speedup and other more draconian measures.

However, according to O’Connor, as capital’s power over labor increases, there will be contradictory tendency for profit in the capitalist system as a whole to decrease. This first contradiction of capital then can be defined as what obtains “when individual capitals attempt to defend or restore profits by increasing labor productivity, speeding up work, cutting wages, and using other time-honored ways of getting more production from fewer workers.” The unintended result is that the worker’s loss in wages reduces the final demand for consumer commodities.

This first contradiction of capital is widespread throughout the United States and the other capitalist countries today. No amount of capitalist maneuvering can mitigate the effects of this downward spiral. Attempts at global management of the problem are doomed to fail since the nation-state remains the instrument of capitalist rule today, no matter how many articles appear in postmodernist venues about “globalization”.

The second contradiction of capital arises out of the problems the system confronts in trying to maintain what Marx called the “conditions of production”. The “conditions of production” require three elements: *human labor power* which Marx called the “personal conditions of production”, *environment* which he termed “natural or external conditions of productions” and *urban infrastructure*, the “general, communal conditions of production”.

All three of these “conditions of productions” are being undermined by the capitalist system itself. The form this takes is conceived in an amorphous and fragmented manner as the environmental crisis, the urban crisis, the education crisis, etc. When these problems become generalized, they threaten the viability of capitalism since they continue to raise the cost of clean air and water, raw materials, infrastructure, etc.

During the early and middle stages of capitalism, the satisfaction of the “conditions of production” were hardly an issue since there was apparently an inexhaustible source of natural resources and the necessary space to build factories, etc. As capitalism reaches its latter phase in the twentieth century, the problems deepen until they reach crisis proportions. At this point, capitalist politicians and ideologues start raising a public debate about the urban and environmental crisis (which are actually interconnected).

What they don’t realize is that these problems are rooted in the capitalist system itself and are constituted as what O’Connor calls the “second contradiction”. He says, “Put simply, the second contradiction states that when individual capitals attempt to defend or restore profits by cutting or externalizing costs, the unintended effect is to reduce the ‘productivity’ of the conditions of production and hence to raise average costs.”

O’Connor cites the following examples: Pesticides in agriculture at first lower, then ultimately increase costs as pests become more chemical-resistant and as the chemicals poison the soil. In Sweden permanent-yield monoforests were expected to keep costs down, but the loss of biodiversity has reduced the productivity of forest ecosystems and the size of the trees themselves. A final example is nuclear power which was supposed to reduce energy costs but had the opposite effect.

If capitalism was a rational system, it would restructure the conditions of production in such a way as to increase their productivity. The means of doing this is the state itself. The state would, for example, ban cars in urban areas, develop non-toxic pest controls and launch public health programs based on preventative medicine.

Efforts such as these would have to be heavily capitalized. However, competition between rival capitalisms, engendered through the pressures of the “first contradiction” (in other words, the need to expand profits while the buying power of a weakened working-class declines), destroy the possibility for such public investment. As such possibilities decline, the public infrastructure and the natural environment continue to degrade. Each successive stage of degradation in turn raises the cost of production.

What Engels observed in the Great Towns of England was an acute crisis based on the Second Contradiction of capitalism. Places like Manchester were becoming uninhabitable due to the necessity of capital to maximize profits without being ready to make the commitment to defend the conditions of the reproduction of capital itself: clean water, fresh air, public health, education, etc.

England, Germany, the United States and Japan of course made great headway in the twentieth century in resolving these types of contradictions at the expense of the colonized world. While the air and water of Manchester may have became *relatively cleaner*, the air and water of Calcutta worsened as the satanic mills of England migrated overseas.

The big question before working-people today of course is the emergence of the “second contradiction” on a global scale. Now that capitalism has become a genuinely global system, what new areas are capable of being despoiled. Scientists have discovered that vast portions of the central African rain-forest have disappeared, and that the environment has consequently undergone radical transformations. These transformations, according to journalist Laurie Garrett in her “The Coming Plague” are responsible for the outbreak of AIDS, Ebola and similar viruses.

Socialists have to begin thinking much more in global terms to confront these problems. We have to stop behaving as if it were the 1840s. The world is a pretty interconnected place today and it is about time that we related to this rather than schemas from a hundred years ago based on a form of the class-struggle that no longer exists.

I will probably have much more to say about O’Connor’s theory and the Hurricane Sandy catastrophe in a subsequent post.

Hurricane Sandy

This is the last storm that hit the Northeast that is on the scale of the one we face now:

Even if I lived within the vulnerable Zone A that has been designated as an evacuation area by the authorities, I would still have few worries about flooding since I am on the thirteenth floor of a high-rise.

My old friend Jeffrey is not so fortunate. His house is a block from the Atlantic Ocean on the Rockaways, a peninsula that is 100 percent Zone A. CBS news reported:

Rockaway Beach was on the list for areas of New York City deemed Zone A for evacuation purposes, and by Sunday night, Hurricane Sandy had sent the floodwaters rising.

As CBS 2’s Jamie Yuccas reported, Yuccas was knee-deep in brown, foamy water as she stood on the Rockaway Beach each late Sunday night. The water was funneled through two areas where sand breakers were located and pushed its way toward 137th Street.

Jeffrey lives on 138^th Street.

As I am writing this, it is 1:28 PM in NYC and the rain has a taken on a horizontal trajectory while the winds are capable of turning even the stoutest umbrella inside out. And this is a good five hours until the storm has achieved its maximum force.

Frankly my biggest concern is not about being hit by a falling tree or losing my belongings due to a flood. Rather it is loss of electricity. While this is nothing more than an inconvenience, it is a major one nonetheless since I live on the thirteenth floor. A few years ago, during a blackout, I had to walk up and down for necessities and it was not fun. People in their 70s and 80s had it worse. They were just stuck until the power came back on.

Just as was the case during Hurricane Katrina, there are those who pose the question whether this looming disaster is a function of climate change. The New Yorker Magazine offers this:

As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change. However, it is possible to say that the storm fits the general pattern in North America, and indeed around the world, toward more extreme weather, a pattern that, increasingly, can be attributed to climate change. Just a few weeks before the Munich Re report appeared, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York, published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the apparent increase in extreme heat waves. Extreme summertime heat, which just a few decades ago affected much less than one per cent of the earth’s surface, “now typically covers about 10% of the land area,” the paper observed. “It follows that we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies”—i.e., heat waves—“such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.” It is worth noting that one of several forces fuelling Sandy is much-higher-than-average sea-surface temperatures along the East Coast.

You will note that the New Yorker makes the customary caveat: As with any particular “weather-related loss event,” it’s impossible to attribute Sandy to climate change.

This enables scientists on the payroll of energy corporations to cast doubt on any major storm’s tie to climate change in the same fashion as the “experts” who testified that smoking does not necessarily lead to cancer, emphysema, etc.

As a rule of thumb, the biggest environmental crises we face are subject to the same kind of plausible deniability alibi. For example, there will always be corrupt scientists eager to step forward and argue that pesticides and herbicides do not cause cancer. Since the exact biological process in which cells mutate has not been revealed, this will always provide wriggle room for those disposed to getting some payoff from a multinational corporation.

If cancer remains something of a mystery on the cellular level, there will continue to be debates about whether a particular storm was caused by climate change. While it is becoming more and more difficult to sustain the fiction that greenhouse gases do not lead to climate change, the likelihood of “proving” that a storm was caused by it will remain daunting.

It is obviously left up to socialists to create a world in which humanity strives to create an environment where either catastrophic storms or diseases are minimized. As the rather off-putting Sandra Steingraber put it to me an interview a couple of weeks ago, cancer can be linked to three different conditions: 1. Life-style, such as smoking; 2. Genetic predisposition; and 3. Man-made carcinogens that we have little or no control over, such as PCB’s, etc. While all three interact with each other, it is only the third that we need to wage a political struggle to overcome.

The same thing is true of climate change. There will obviously always be terrible storms. But we need to wage a political struggle to control the emission of greenhouse gases that are the byproduct of petroleum-based energy production, which finally can only be consummated through the creation of a worldwide socialist system.

In 2007 Obama was running as the best friend environmentalists ever had. In this stump speech given in New Hampshire, he says all the right things about climate change calculated to get the votes of those listening to him.

But here’s the reality we face now:

NY Times October 25, 2012
Both Romney and Obama Avoid Talk of Climate Change
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.

Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general-election debates asked about climate change, nor did either of the candidates broach the topic.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Tweedle-dee. Tweedle-dum.

Living Downstream, the documentary

Film Society of Lincoln Center – Mountainfilm Series
LIVING DOWNSTREAM by Chanda Chevannes
Canada, 2010, HD, color, 55 min.

Screening October 20 at 2pm at the Walter Reade Theater
Followed by a 45-min Q+A moderated by Mountainfilm director David Holbrooke.

Click here for multi-city US tour dates

National broadcast on Outside TV: November 2012

From the film website:

Based on the acclaimed book by ecologist and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., Living Downstream is an eloquent and cinematic documentary film.

This poetic film follows Sandra during one pivotal year as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links. After a routine cancer screening, Sandra receives some worrying results and is thrust into a period of medical uncertainty. Thus, we begin two journeys with Sandra: her private struggles with cancer and her public quest to bring attention to the urgent human rights issue of cancer prevention.

But Sandra is not the only one who is on a journey—the chemicals against which she is fighting are also on the move. We follow these invisible toxins as they migrate to some of the most beautiful places in North America. We see how these chemicals enter our bodies and how, once inside, scientists believe they may be working to cause cancer.

Several experts in the fields of toxicology and cancer research make important cameo appearances in the film, highlighting their own findings on two pervasive chemicals: atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and the industrial compounds, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Their work further illuminates the significant connection between a healthy environment and human health.

At once Sandra’s personal journey and her scientific exploration, Living Downstream is a powerful reminder of the intimate connection between the health of our bodies and the health of our air, land, and water.

Big Boys Gone Bananas!*; You’ve been Trumped

At first it seemed like a coincidence that two documentaries opening in New York would pit two leftist European filmmakers against prototypical scumbag American multinational corporations, but upon further reflection it seemed almost inevitable given today’s geopolitical realities.

Opening Friday at the Quad Cinema is “Big Boys Gone Bananas!*” that recounts the ordeal that Swedish director Frederik Gertten went through after making a documentary titled “Bananas!*” in 2009 described as follows on his website (the asterisk in the films’ titles refers to the fact that they are about more than bananas):

Juan “Accidentes” Dominguez is on his biggest case ever. On behalf of twelve Nicaraguan banana workers he tackles the Dole Food Company in a ground-breaking legal battle for their use of a banned pesticide that was known to cause sterility. Can he beat the giant, or will the corporation get away with it? In the suspenseful documentary BANANAS!*, filmmaker Fredrik Gertten sheds new light on the global politics of food.

One third of the production price of the average banana is used simply to cover the cost of pesticides. All over the world, banana plantation workers are suffering and dying from the effects of these pesticides. Juan Dominguez, a million-dollar personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles, is on his biggest case ever representing over 10,000 Nicaraguan banana workers claiming to be afflicted by a pesticide known as Nemagon. Dole Food and Dow Chemicals are on trial.

Just before the film was scheduled to premiere at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival, Dole went on a fierce three-pronged offensive. Its public relations machinery lined up mainstream journalists to back their claim that the film was a fraud, mostly revolving around “evidence” that Juan Dominguez was a crook who lined up false testimonies from workers who had never suffered any damage from chemicals. The second prong was a lawsuit that would ensue once the film was released for general distribution. The third and final prong was heavy pressure applied on the film festival’s organizers to not show the film and if they did to preface it with a statement concurring with Dole’s charges. The fact that the festival was produced by the LA Times explains why the organizers acceeded to Dole’s demands. This is the same newspaper whose owner Sam Zell makes Rupert Murdoch look good, a greedy bastard who once told a conference on subprime mortgages: “This country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have bought in the first place, and not give them sympathy.”

The mainstream media fell into line, buying into Dole’s talking points. Some of the television and radio coverage from back in 2009 is enough to make your blood boil with smarmy public tv and radio hosts wisecracking about Frederik Gertten’s documentary, making it sound like Clifford Irving’s Howard Hughes autobiography hoax. I was particularly incensed to hear a snatch of this sort of thing from KCRW, Los Angeles’s “alternative” radio station that is a disgusting outlet for NPR type cant.

Thrown back on the defensive, Gertten eventually wins support in his native Sweden, including both social democratic and conservative parliamentarians. Apparently the Swedes take their free speech rights far more seriously than the country famed for its bill of rights, eroding nowadays faster than Louisiana marshland.

Back in 2007 I reviewed “Michael Clayton“, a movie that like so many others in this genre (“Pelican Brief”, “The Net”, etc.) pitted an idealistic crusader against a malevolent corporation that stopped at nothing, including murder. I thought the film was good but qualified that with my feeling that:

Finally, it has to be said that the almost inevitable decision to make the corporation resort to murder undermines the credibility of the film. Since any such film today has to operate according to the conventions of drama, an old-fashioned villain is necessary. And what can be more villainous than murder? However, after Michael Clayton’s car was blown up, I began fidgeting in my seat and whispering to myself under my breath. What kind of corporation would take such enormous risks to stave off financial collapse?

In real life (and what better reflection of real life is there than the documenary?) corporations don’t go around blowing up cars. Instead, they do what Dole did. They buy off journalists and threaten legal action. The consequences are not as dire as murder, but they come close. Imagine what it feels like to spend three years or so in Nicaragua making a movie and then to have a bunch of bastards in suits telling you that your time and money were wasted?

I don’t want to give away any of the details of this gripping documentary but will say at this point that Bananas!* can be seen on Netflix streaming.

It is a toss-up to decide who is worse, Dole or Donald Trump—the villain in Anthony Baxter’s “You’ve been Trumped”, opening on August 3^rd at the Angelica in New York.

Baxter’s film documents the struggle of farmers and other townspeople in Aberdeenshire, Scotland against an environmentally-destructive, esthetically garish and socially destructive golf course and luxury hotel complex on the nearby coastline. The site is one of the last places in Britain that has the original wilderness consisting of dunes and marshlands that are scientifically priceless and incapable of being reproduced.

This is the first film made by Anthony Baxter, who lives in Montrose, a small town that is a short drive from the Menie Estate on Aberdeenshire’s coast. Having made a documentary for BBC about man made erosion, he had become interested in the conflict between development and ecology.

Perhaps nobody else better symbolizes the power of Mammon than the awful Donald Trump who swaggers his way through the film. He tells reporters that the project is environmentally aware despite the fact that no environmentalist organization in Scotland has given its blessing.

He has the blessing, however, of the ruling Scottish National Party that has been seduced by the promise of jobs. This is the party that Sean Connery has been a leading member of years but this did not prevent him from turning down an invitation to attend opening day ceremonies at the golf course.

When the local college decided to award Trump with a honorary degree, a former dean showed up at the school to protest. At Trump’s news conference, Baxter peppers Trump with questions about his bullying of local homeowners and proof of the jobs supposedly being created. As always, Trump treats his interlocutor as if he were a peasant and he was King Louis XIV.

In one of the film’s most compelling scenes, and one that relates it to the travails of Frederik Gertten, Baxter is seen being hauled off to a local jail for the “crime” of entering Trump’s property in order to find out why local residents’ water had been unavailable for over a week after excavation had begun.

Both Baxter and Gertten are heroes for out time, guerrilla filmmakers taking on the high and the mighty. I strongly urge my readers to attend screenings in New York and to check the film’s websites to see if it is coming to theaters near where you live.

http://www.youvebeentrumped.com/youvebeentrumped.com/THE_MOVIE.html

http://www.bigboysgonebananas.com/

Tony Buba retrospective; Patagonia Rising

Tonight is opening night for a retrospective of the films of Tony Buba at the Anthology Film Archives in NY that ends on June 12^th. Put this on your calendar since the “Bard of Braddock” is more tuned in to the American class system than any director I’ve run across in over 15 years of film reviewing.

As Michael Moore is to Flint, and Harvey Pekar was to Cleveland, that’s what Tony Buba is to Braddock, a town that was once home to steel mills, a prosperous working class, cultural attractions including 5 movie theaters, and all the other features that have largely disappeared from such rust belt towns and cities.

Buba actually combines the best of Michael Moore and Harvey Pekar in his most celebrated film, “Lightning Over Braddock” that will be shown this evening. Like Moore in “Capitalism: A Love Story”, the film is a tribute to an America that has almost disappeared, a blue-collar semi-paradise that enabled working class kids like Buba and Michael Moore to go to college and catch lightning in a bottle. (I am not exactly sure why the film has lightning in the title, but this would make about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.)

Made in 1988, the film is a genre-bending affair that combines the kind of guerrilla film-making that Buba’s reputation rests on as well as farcical elements of a Sylvester Stallone comes to Braddock type film that represents the temptation of “selling out”. As a lapsed (or perhaps good) Catholic, Buba knows what it means to be tempted by the devil. In one scene, he confesses to a priest in an effort perhaps to put his Hollywood dreams behind him.

While he affects a humble son of the working class persona (or maybe pretends to affect), the scenario underlying “Lightning Over Braddock” is quite sophisticated in the way that it grapples with the perpetual dilemma facing film-makers: how do you keep art and mammon separated? I would say that “Lightning Over Braddock” does about as good a job of addressing this hoary issue as anything I have seen since Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece “Contempt”, a film whose producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine hoped would appeal to a broad audience, while exploiting their “edgy” young director’s notoriety. They were interested in a “product” that would sell in art-houses and shopping malls. Godard resisted them every step of the way and turned the film itself into a brilliant satire on Hollywood stupidity and greed, subverting the intentions of his producers.

Like Harvey Pekar, Buba has a great affection for the “characters” that he grew up with and who serve as a kind of repertory company in the same manner as Max Von Sydow and company once did for Ingmar Bergman. Instead of trained actors, Buba relies on the likes of Sal Carollo, a local street hustler who sticks out like a sore thumb in much of “Lightning Over Braddock”, a film whose preoccupations with art and politics Carollo mocks. His main concern is “getting paid” for his part in Buba’s films, either through cash on the barrel or press notices. Carollo is a rail-thin, scabrous-looking character who brags about being a mafia hit man at one point in his life. We must conclude that Buba’s attraction to Carollo defies an easy explanation, just as Harvey Pekar’s friendship with Toby, the attention-seeking “nerd” in “American Splendor”, does. The inclusion of the unlikely Sol Carollo, despite his often-grating interventions, is what in fact makes this film so compelling. It is Buba’s way of telling the audience to leave their conventional expectations of radical documentary in the theater lobby.

As I told Buba in a phone conversation last night, this was the first time I had interviewed a director in 15 years of reviewing films on Rotten Tomatoes as a member of New York Film Critics Online. It is standard practice for publicists to invite me to interview someone in town for a publicity tour, but I have never taken them up on it. Buba, on the other hand, was somebody I really wanted to talk to. Like Harvey Pekar, and like Michael Moore before he became a macher, this was an American original worth knowing.

The first question I had for him was how he reacted to a story in the NY Post yesterday about trade unionists voting for Scott Walker in Wisconsin, that despite the paper’s Murdoch ownership, does ring true:

Tom Fabitz, 66, a retired machinist and member of the United Steel Workers Union, said he voted for Walker because he brought taxes and spending under control. “Walker is saving the state money. You have to trim the fat someplace,” said Fabitz, a Marine vet and football fanatic.

This led to an exchange that confirmed for me that Buba was one of the sharper analysts of the class that he emerged from. He attributed Fabitz’s lack of solidarity to the biggest vulnerability of the working-class in the U.S., namely the rampant individualism that enables the rulers to divide and conquer. Unlike Michael Moore, and many of his co-thinkers at MSNBC like Ed Schultz, Buba does not romanticize the working class. He understands its failings, but at the same time puts the onus on the class that dominates it, the capitalists.

Also, unlike Moore, Buba does not hold out hope that some savior will come along any time soon to “rescue” the poor and the downtrodden. He says that the last time he voted for a Democrat was when LBJ ran in 1964, an experience identical to my own.

In many ways, Buba’s tough love for the working class is akin to Michael Yates’s. Yates is also a son of the Pittsburgh region working class who has seen first-hand how workers can defy rosy-hued “socialist realism” images and act as self-destructively as many oppressed groups have throughout history. For a literary counterpart to Buba’s documentaries, I can’t recommend Yates’s collection of stories “In and Out of the Working Class” highly enough. When I crossposted a NY Times article on the Buba retrospective to the Marxism mailing list, Yates had this to say:

Karen [Michael's better half] and I have met Tony Buba and seen some of his films. He is an exceptional filmmaker and a truly nice guy. It is great to see him get this kind of recognition. He told us that Michael Moore asked him to work on Roger and Me, but Tony was busy at the time with another project. He was his typical self-deprecating self about the irony of this. We went to a screening in Pittsburgh of a film he made. Many of his friends and family were there, and (no doubt) the women made good ethnic food for everyone.

The Tony Buba retrospective, be there or be square.

Also opening tonight at the Cinema Village in New York is the outstanding documentary on mega-dams versus the people titled “Patagonia Rising”. Directed by Brian Lilla, the film takes you into the windswept, rugged and isolated region of Chile (shared by Argentina) that serves as the corporate logo of a clothing company that sought to dramatize the sturdiness of its gear. This is not the most outrageous case of branding I can think of, considering the real human beings who exist beneath the label.

The film opens with a gaucho on horseback on his ranch in Patagonia that is surrounded by majestic mountains. Lilla has a real feel for the raw beauty of the region that makes the film appealing on a visual basis alone, even though the real aim is to educate viewers about the threat to the people who live there.

The villain of “Patagonia Rising” is HydroAysen, a Spanish energy company, with minority Chilean ownership, that seeks to build five huge hydroelectric dams. To his credit, and to the usefulness of the film as a true investigation of the issues, Lilla allows a corporate spokesman to make the company’s case throughout the film. (Of course, he follows up with rebuttals from experts, particularly Chilean scientists who are mobilizing to stop HydroAysen in its tracks.) He also interviews a farmer from Patagonia who candidly admits that he supports the corporation because it will benefit him. He hopes to sell his land at a premium and move to a better location.

Sitting through this masterful documentary, I could not help but think of the uses of “Greenmail” throughout the world, including my home county growing up in upstate N.Y. There the issue is “fracking”, an unwise method of drilling for natural gas that has awful consequences, including the spread of carcinogens in the water supply as well as making water the coming out of your tap ignitable by a cigarette lighter as was dramatically illustrated in the documentary “Gasland“. No matter how baleful the consequences, you will always find land-owners—particularly those who are economically distressed—ready to sell out.

Just as is the case with the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, the consequences of mega-dams in Patagonia will not be confined to the people living in the affected area. You will learn from Patrick McCully, one of the film’s most expert witnesses, that when a river is dammed, the ocean loses a source of fresh water and nutrients. The impact of a loss of such rejuvenation cannot be gauged completely at this point, but the risks to future sustainability are obviously immense. The ocean is rapidly becoming depleted of marine life, all because some big corporations seek profits in the same way that vampires seek blood. Something is deeply wrong.

On June sixth an article titled “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere“  appeared in Nature Magazine. It stated “Humans now dominate Earth, changing it in ways that threaten its ability to sustain us and other species”. While articles such as this have a way of changing attitudes, there is nothing like a good film to drive the point home since in the 21^st century, as was the case in much of the 20^th, that, TV, and radio is where ordinary citizens get their ideas about the world.

Mark Lilla deserves a lot of credit for making a valuable work such as this and I urge my readers in New York to see “Patagonia Rising” and spread the word.