BLOODSHED IN BAYONNE

October 8, 2016 is the 100th anniversary of the strike at Standard Oil’s Bayonne refineries. In the course of the ten-day strike, 4 people were killed and 86 wounded. The free press demonstrated collusion between the corporation and the city authorities in what John Reed described as a police riot. Yet, not a word of this is mentioned in the Rockefeller biographies.

Since the publication of his Reminiscences in 1909 and the incorporation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, that great “gift to the nation,” the common opinion of John D. Rockefeller had begun its metamorphosis from the devil incarnate to grace-endowed benefactor, philanthropist, and all-round great American. Though the vast number of ordinary people succumbed to the propaganda, most anti-capitalists were not fooled. In London, G. K Chesterton reviewed the memoir:

Catholics cheat and bargain and hoard money; they do it stubbornly, sullenly, as they do any other wicked thing. Mr. Rockefeller does it vastly, magnificently, poetically, because in his religion it has often been counted an admirable thing. Avarice is a sin of Christians; it is an ideal of individualists. Millionaire worship is as much a mark of a Protestant country as Ancestor worship of China.

Rockefeller’s undying conviction that God had blessed him with success and wealth conflicted with his ungodly treatment of his workers who endured scanty wages, dangerous conditions, miserable housing and persistent debt to the company store.

In the late Autumn of 1913 the Herculean effort to deodorize his reputation was embarrassed by a strike by coal miners at a Rockefeller investment in Colorado which led to the Ludlow Massacre. After months of denying family responsibility, John D. Junior reacted with an industrial relations policy at Rockefeller controlled companies that was highly praised as “enlightened” by every business journal in the land and the family reputation rebounded. Yet, a far more significant step was the hiring of Ivy Lee as public relations manager for the Rockefeller interests.

Twitter Users: Let's Convert Twitter to Cooperative Ownership

Twitter seems to be for sale.

Let's us, Twitter users, turn it into a cooperative. 

WHAT? You don’t have $16 billion in your savings account? Neither do any of the other potential purchasers. Keep reading.

Here’s how it works:

PURCHASE

Less than 1% of Twitter users (3 million) buy 100 shares each at the current price (assume this morning's price of $23 per share. Cost of 100 shares = $2,300). (Among this 1% will be users who already own shares, like the coop idea and are willing to pledge those shares for cooperative ownership).

If 1% of all Twitter users purchase (or pledge) 100 shares or more, that would represent about 40% of all shares. These insiders then vote to convert to cooperative ownership.

The $16 billion price tag would be financed by

1) a one-time membership fee of $25 paid by 60% of current users (the other 40% of current users fall away). This generates $4.5 billion.

2) a loan for the rest: $11.5 billion. I've assumed a 10 year fully amortizing loan at 4% in quarterly payments.

The users who buy in now are basically lending the money to make this happen. They would get paid the agreed purchase price when the deal closes and, hopefully, that would be the same price that they pay for the shares now.

ANNUAL OPERATIONS

The members of the new Twitter cooperative would each pay the $25 one-time membership fee, PLUS an annual assessment of about $9.80 per member. 

The annual fee would cover the $400+ million annual deficit that Twitter has been running ($450 million in 2015 and about $410 million for the past 4 quarters) PLUS the amortization of the loan. With the loan repaid after the first 10 years, the annual assessment would go down to less than $2.50 per year (assuming no inflation and no reduction of the deficit).

Critical assumptions:

- Share price: one analyst predicts the share price will fall to $17 (vs today's $23+)

- Number of users who will agree to be members of the cooperative. I changed the assumption to 50% of current users. This increases the loan amount and reduces the users to divvy up the annual obligation increasing the annual assessment to $12.40 per member.

I’m looking forward to your comments. My numbers are based on a spreadsheet that I'm happy to send to subscribers of my blog.

LET'S DO THIS!

Henry Dubb Comes to New York

Labor Day, 1916

Henry Gets An Inspiration From the Statue of Liberty

Ryan Walker, nationally known for his character, Henry Dubb, who had campaigned for Eugene Debbs in the elections of 1908 and 1912, took employment at The New York Call, the official organ of the Socialist Party and Henry Dubb made his first New York City appearance at Battery Park on Labor Day, 1916. 

A few months later, electric lights were installed in the crown of the Statue of Libery for its thirtieth anniversary, and all the luminaries of New York society attended a gala celebration. The Call commented the following day:

Liberty. We had a lot if it in New York yesterday. That is, we had a lot of talk about it. Also, a lot of eating and drinking in celebration of it. That is, a celebration of putting an electric light on top of a huge figure representing said Liberty. The celebration was organized and conducted by a little group who possess the liberty of picking the pockets of the rest of us.

They appreciate this liberty very much. Never tire of orating about it. Whenever any of us show that we do not appreciate having our pockets picked as much as they appreciate picking ‘em, they tell us we’re not “patriotic.”

The Call is the only daily paper in this city today that tells the people the truth about the buncombe ladled out yesterday in big chunks by orators, to the clinking of champagne glasses, while, on the outside, the people were wondering where they would get enough money to buy the necessaries of life at sky high prices.

The plute press is published to keep the minds of the people so muddled that they won’t think anything about how they’re being robbed. The Call is published for just the opposite reason. To show them how they are begin robbed and how they could stop the robbery. That’s the reason the robbers would like to stop The Call. (December 3, 1916)

Will the Free-Willists Lead Us Out of the Bog?

Floyd Dell, managing editor of The Masses until the Federal government shut it down and then The Liberator, was a highly respected book reviewer, especially of books that took on capitalism and the status quo. 

As he matured in his thinking he was conflicted as to just which flavor of anti-capitalism would best bring us to a future worth living in. Writing just after the Russian Revolution, when many Marxists were boasting that economic determinism had been proven, Dell wasn't so sure. He admired the free-willists who had faced the Czarist guns with hope and determination.

Reviewing G.K. Chesterton's A Short History of England, he wrote:

The movement for the creation or restoration of a small peasant (or as Mr. Chesterton genially prefers to say, “pleasant”) holdings of land, is one which has already begun to bear fruit in almost every European country. Not less ambitious, and very similar, is its newest outgrowth, Guild Socialism – an off-shoot of Syndicalism, arriving in the same way at the supercession of capitalist production, but frankly intending to restore to labor the chief of its medieval virtues, the ancient virtue of handicraftsmanship. In this intention it is more far-seeing than Syndicalism, which has not been able to imagine away our present mode of machine production. It will be noted that the mind which is free from the obsession of the Present is free to conceive a restoration of the Past. To the determinist there is something at once sacrilegious and wasteful in this attempt, which he describes as “setting back the clock.” To the free-willist, however, this is no clockwork universe. Going back to the path from which we wandered a few hundred years ago may be the most progressive thing to do – particularly if we have wandered into a bog.

Chesterton's A Short History of England is a must-read. He argues that we have to go back in order to go forward. Too many blithely assume that means turning off the lights and wearing homespun. This is not the essence of his message and Dell knew it. He was attracted to the future that Chesterton foresaw, the Shire with Wifi.

Whose War?

John Reed wrote this emotional appeal to his country as the United States plunged into World War I (The Mass, April, 1917, redacted). I offer it here in the light of the Chilcot Report to demonstrate that lies have been used before to justify war. 

I know what war means. I have been with the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen men die, and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell; but there is a worse thing than that. War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists, side-tracking reforms, revolutions and the working of social forces. Already in America those citizens who oppose the entrance of their country into the European melee are called "traitors," and those who protest against the curtailing of our meager rights of free speech are spoken of as "dangerous lunatics." We have had a forecast of the censorship – when the naval authorities in charge of the Sayville wireless cut off American news from Germany, and only the wildest fictions reached Berlin via London, creating a perilous situation… The press is howling for war. Lawyers, politicians, stock brokers, social leaders are all howling for war. Roosevelt is again recruiting his thrice-thwarted family regiment.

Whose war is this? Not mine. I know that hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great financial "patriots" are not paid a living wage. I have seen poor men sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even without any charge. Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children, have been shot to death, burned to death, by private detectives and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionally poorer. These toilers don't want war - not even civil war. But the speculators, the employers, the plutocracy – they want it, just as they did in Germany and England; and with lies and sophistries they will whip up our blood until we are savage – and then we'll fight and die for them.

We are simple folk. Prussian militarism seemed to us insufferable; we thought the invasion of Belgium a crime; German atrocities horrified us, and also the idea of German submarines exploding ships full of peaceful people without warning. But then we began to hear about England and France jailing, fining, exiling and even shooting men who refused to go out and kill; the Allied armies invaded and seized a part of neutral Greece, and a French admiral forced upon her an ultimatum as shameful as Austria’s to Serbia; Russian atrocities were shown to be more dreadful than German; and hidden mines sown by England in the open sea exploded ships full of peaceful people without warning.

Other things disturbed us. For instance, why was it a violation of international law for the Germans to establish a “war zone” around the British Isles, and perfectly legal for England to close the North Sea? Why is it we submitted to the British order forbidding the shipment of non-contraband to Germany, and insisted upon our right to ship contraband to the Allies? If our “national honor” was smirched by Germany’s refusal to allow war-materials to be shipped to the Allies, what happened to our national honor when England refused to let us ship non-contraband food and even Red Cross hospital supplies to Germany? Why is England allowed to attempt the avowed starvation of German civilians, in violation of international law, when the Germans cannot attempt the same thing without our horrified protest? How is it that the British can arbitrarily regulate our commerce with neutral nations, while we raise a howl whenever the Germans “threaten to restrict our merchant ships going about their business?” Why does our Government insist that Americans should not be molested while travelling on Allied ships armed against submarines?

We have shipped and are shipping vast quantities of war-materials to the Allies, we have floated the Allied loans. We have been strictly neutral to the Teutonic powers only. Hence the inevitable desperation of the last German note. Hence this war we are on the brink of.

Don't Want Transgenders in the Ladies? Abolish Capitalism

In one of his most eloquent outbursts Chesterton denounced the proposal to give doctors the power to make parents 

have their little girls’ hair cut short in the interest of cleanliness and health.  He pointed out that this 
meant the hair of  poor little girls, not of rich little girls.  And he asked, Why not cut off their heads?  

And when it was very pertinently inquired how he thought the lice-problem ought to be dealt with, he replied,
Abolish capitalism.

Floyd Dell on G.K. Chesterton

My research on Dorothy Day’s early journalism led me to the issue of the Free press vs. the Capitalist press before and during the United States’ entry into World War I. The Free press was represented by various groups on the Left (anarchists, IWWs, Marxists, Socialists). They saw great evils in Capitalism and promoted the cause of the Workers and Peace on behalf of the Workers. Focused on a better world for all, the Leftists of 1917 were divided between those who wanted to work within the present system and those who saw the problem as Capitalism itself and wanted to embark on a future with an entirely new foundation.

Nevertheless, the militarists, that tiny minority of the population pushing for war controlled the Capitalist press and were able to convince Wilson that war was good for business. Once war was declared, the proponents of Peace encountered the fiery wrath of President Wilson. Hundreds were imprisoned and over 2,000 publications were closed by the Federal government. Wilson’s reign of terror was coordinated with propaganda from the Capitalist press to out, shame and persecute those who think differently.

The N.C. bathroom episode illustrates how the landscape has changed. The LGBT community, representing itself as the Left while controlling the Free press, is now working quite comfortably in partnership with the Capitalist press and the support of the President of the United States to convince corporations that transgender bathrooms are good for business and are intent to out, shame and persecute those who think differently.

In his book Gender Ivan Illich makes the curious point that Capitalism inevitably leads to gender obfuscation. Does this episode of public bathrooms affirm Illych’s thesis? Should those who want to return to the days of old-fashioned men’s and women’s bathrooms be advocating the overthrow of Capitalism?

Stifling Dissent to Maintain Order

Politico had a stimulating thought piece last week. Warning against Bernie Sanders’ Socialism, Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, wrote:

The process of transforming “capitalist property”—that is, something legitimately purchased, inherited or otherwise earned—into “social property” for everyone is when socialism becomes sinister. This promise of redistribution always involves winners and losers picked by the government. What if one has acquired capitalist property and does not wish it to become “social property?” Well, then the government might have to step in and take it.

The loss of private property—which ensures one’s independent livelihood—perforce erodes one’s ability to exercise free speech. What if the owner of some capitalist property taken by the government dares to protest its seizure? That sort of dissent must be stifled to maintain order, so free speech is replaced by government-sanctioned propaganda. Unpopular opinions are shamed, and those expressing them are barred from forums like colleges and universities.

How do we know? Because we’ve seen it happen time and again. Ninety-nine years ago the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia showed the danger of combining socialist ideas with totalitarian violence, which created modern totalitarian communism.

Politico, March 22, 2016

During my eight years in the post-communist Czech Republic there were ample opportunities to hear the stories and see for myself that all Mr. Smith states about communism is true.

And yet,

Socialism and Communism may be one and the same, but they are both an outgrowth of Capitalism and are intelligible without it. Neither Capitalism nor Socialism/Communism gives proper value to work and the person who works. Rather the question is always, “Will the ownership of the means of production be owned by a group of capitalists or by the government?” The worker remains the “slave” of one or the other.

The United States entered into its current Age of Militarism as it prepared to join the Allied forces in the winter of 1916-1917. People were being robbed of the wealth their work created, arrested for threatening the order of society and shamed as unpatriotic for urging peace. The son of Leo Tolstoy was banned from Columbia University where he intended to speak on his father’s thoughts on peace. Conscientious objectors were vilified as cowards and, sometimes, murdered by their prison guards. Over 2,000 publications were banned by the Federal government and hundreds of people, especially anarchists and IWWs, received long prison sentences for expressing views of the war contrary to those held by President Wilson and his militarist cronies.

As we conclude our first century of militarism, it is too comfortable to sink back into Marxist “science,” the binomial political climate of the Cold War with each side of the class struggle vying for power and control.

Let’s look deeper: to the dignity of each person, the value of human work, and the viability of a society organized on the principles of mutual cooperation and subsidiarity.