American Airlines to furlough 13,000 pilots, flight attendants, other workers


American's pilots union places some of the blame for the furloughs on the carrier's past fiscal decisions. File Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo

Feb. 4 (UPI) -- American Airlines has sent out furlough notices out to about 13,000 employees, as federal coronavirus relief aid will soon expire.

Among those getting notices are 1,800 pilots, 4,200 flight attendants, 1,400 maintenance workers, 3,100 in fleet services, 1,200 passenger service staffers, 100 dispatch employees and 40 cleaning crew members, the carrier said Wednesday.

"We are nearly five weeks into 2021, and unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation similar to much of 2020," American said in a filing with federal regulators.

"We fully believed that we would be looking at a summer schedule where we'd fly all of our airplanes and need the full strength of our team. Regrettably, that is no longer the case."

American said the national distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is moving at a much slower pace than expected and new restrictions on international travel, which require customers to provide negative coronavirus tests, have "dampened demand."

"We will fly at least 45% less in the first quarter [of 2021] compared to what we flew for the same period in 2019, and based on current demand outlook, we will not fly all of our aircraft this summer as planned," American added.

"Consequently, like last fall, we will have more team members than the schedule requires after federal payroll support expires April 1."

The Allied Pilots Association, the carrier's pilots union, said it hopes for an extension of the federally funded Payroll Support Program, but placed some blame for the furloughs on American's past fiscal decisions.

"Management's unilateral actions over the years, along with their treatment of our airline's balance sheet, have placed American in a more precarious situation than our competitors," the union said in a statement.

"Collaboration with APA will be key if management hopes to successfully navigate these turbulent times."

United Airlines recently said it may have to lay off as many as 14,000 of its workers.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Mining company to pay $7B for deadly Brazilian dam collapse


The Brumadinho dam disaster in Brazil left 270 people died in January 2019. 

File Photo by Antonio Lacerda/EPA-EFE

Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Brazilian mining company Vale on Thursday agreed to pay $7 billion in compensation for a 2019 dam collapse that killed 270 people.

Prosecutors said the reparations will go to the government of Mines Gerais state, where the Brumadinho dam disaster took place.

Minas Gerais Gov. Romeu Zema praised the settlement on Twitter, saying it wouldn't affect any other criminal or civil claims against Vale.

"We can't change the past but we can improve the future," he told Brazilian newspaper Estado de São Paulo.

The Wall Street Journal said it was the largest settlement in Brazilian history. The funds will pay for the environmental and economic impact of the disaster.

The dam, operated by the Vale mining company, collapsed Jan. 25, 2019, sending a wall of water and waste sludge slamming into homes, vehicles and a group of miners taking a lunch break.

More than a dozen Vale executives have been charged with murder and environmental crimes for the disaster. Prosecutors said Vale officials knew the dam in Brumadinho was at risk of collapse since at least November 2017 and it was on an internal list of 10 dams at risk of bursting.

Vale CEO Eduardo Bartolomeo issued a statement Thursday saying the company has "work to do" in response to the disaster.

"Vale is committed to fully repair and compensate the damage caused by the tragedy in Brumadinho and to increasingly contribute to the improvement and development of the communities in which we operate," he said.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

SEC: 17,000 investors defrauded in $1.7B Ponzi-like scheme


Feb. 4 (UPI) -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged investment adviser GPB Capital Holdings as well as three executives and their related entities for running a Ponzi-like scheme that defrauded more than 17,000 retail investors of $1.7 billion.

The SEC charged GPB Capital's owner and CEO David Gentile; Jeffry Schneider, the owner of GPB Capital's placement agent Ascendant Capital; and GBP Capital's former managing partner Jeffrey Lash of using investors' own funds to pay distributions rather than placing them toward customers' investments as well as violating whistleblower protection laws.

The complaint alleges that GPB Capital told investors that distribution payments were paid exclusively with funds generated by its portfolio companies when in reality it used investor money to pay portions of the annualized 8% distribution payments.

Additionally, the company also allegedly manipulated financial statements to present the false appearance that the funds' income was closer to "generating sufficient income to cover the distribution of payments" than it was in reality.

"As alleged in our complaint, the defendants told investors that they would be paid distributions from profits of the portfolio companies when, in reality, many of the payments were being made from the investors' own funds," said Richard Best, director of the SEC's New York Regional Office. "This action shows our continued pursuit of those who deceive investors and conceal their misconduct to reap profits for themselves."

The state of New York also filed a lawsuit against GPB Capital over the scheme.

"Investors put more than $1.8 billion into GPB funds but were left without a single cent of profit," New York Attorney General Letitia James said. "GPB and its operators fleeced New Yorkers and investors around the country while subsidizing their own lavish lifestyles."

The SEC's complaint also alleges that GPB Capital violated the SEC's whistleblower provisions by including language in termination and separation agreements that impeded individuals from coming forward to the SEC and retaliating against a known whistleblower.

In a statement to CNN Business, GPB Capital denied the claims and said it acted in good faith when managing the funds of its investors.

"GPB denies these allegations and intends to vigorously defend itself in court where, for the first time, the firm will be able to present significant evidence in its favor," the company said.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Popular baby food brands contain toxic heavy metals, says U.S. report

Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Many commercial baby foods "are tainted with significant levels of toxic heavy metals," a report released Thursday by a House subcommittee said, raising concerns over the safety of the products industry wide.

According to the staff report by the House subcommittee on economic and consumer policy, leading brands of U.S. baby foods contain dangerous levels of inorganic arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury, heavy metals that even at low levels pose particular risk to babies and children, both the U.S. Federal Drug Administration and the World Health Organization have said.

The report was based on internal documents and test results voluntarily submitted to the committee by Nurture, Beech-Nut, Hain and Gerber, showing that the companies were aware that their products were contaminated and to what degree but continued to sell them to unsuspecting parents anyways. 

Walmart, Campbell and Sprout Organic refused to participate with the subcommittee's investigation, leading it to have "grave concerns" about the quality of their products, it said.

"The subcommittee is greatly concerned that their lack of cooperation might be obscuring the presence of even higher levels of toxic heavy metals in their baby food products than their competitors' products," the report said.

The report also found that the levels of toxic heavy metals in the foods often exceeded the companies' own internal standards that already permitted dangerously high levels of such contamination.

Arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury were found in food produced by all four companies, the report said, adding they were found at levels "multiples higher" than allowed under existing regulations for other products

It also said that the administration of former President Donald Trump ignored a secret industry presentation to federal regulators that revealed the increasing risk of heavy metals in baby foods and that product testing was inadequate.

"The Trump FDA took no new action in response," the report said. "To this day, baby foods containing toxic heavy metals bear no label or warning to parents. Manufacturers are free to test only ingredients, or, for the vast majority of baby foods, to conduct no testing at all."

The subcommittee recommended for the FDA to require baby food manufacturers to test their finished products for heavy metals and not just their individual ingredients, for product labels to include levels of toxic heavy metals the foods contain, for the voluntary phase-out of ingredients that contain such metals and for the FDA to set maximum levels of toxic heavy metals permitted in baby foods.

Subcommittee chairman Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., said baby food manufacturers hold public trust and consumers mistakenly believe that they would not sell unsafe products.

"I hope companies will commit to making safer baby foods," he said in a statement. "Regardless, it's time that we develop much better standards for the sake of future generations."

Campbell, which makes baby food under the brand name Plum Organics, said it responded quickly to the subcommittee's questions and that "we are surprised that the committee would suggest that Campbell was less than full partners in this mission."

Walmart, which sells baby food under the brand name Parent's Choice, said in a statement to UPI that it provided the subcommittee with information nearly a year ago and invited more dialogue on the issue but never heard back from them.

The company said its manufacturers must comply will all laws and regulations while its own private table product suppliers must meet its own internal goods specifications.

"We will review the report now that it is available," it said.

Nurture's Happy Family Organics said on its website that it was "aware" of the report while stating it is "proud" of its testing protocols.

"We only sell products that have been rigorously tested and we do not have products in-market with contaminant ranges outside of the limits set by the FDA," it said.

Krishnamoorthi said he expects the FDA to make changes to how it regulates baby food following this report.

"I look forward to FDA's careful regulation of these toxic heavy metals in baby foods, followed by strict compliance requirements and mandatory consumer labels," he said.


upi.com/7073219

BURNING QUESTION OF THE DAY

Scientists figure out why food sometimes sticks to nonstick pans

Dry spots form in the middle of frying pans and cause food to stick, even "non-stick" ones pans, because of something called thermocapillary convection -- but researchers say this situation can be avoided. Photo by Alex Fedorchenko

Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Nine out of ten times, the eggs, perfectly cooked, slide seamlessly from pan to plate.

That kind of performance is good enough for most home cooks, but researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences found themselves perplexed by that tenth breakfast.

Even the best nonstick pans don't work 100 percent of the time -- occasionally, food sticks.

To find out why, scientists coated a variety of pans with a thin sheen of oil, turned on the burner and filmed the action from above.

Using the camera footage, researchers measured where dry spots formed and how quickly they grew inside the oiled pan.

Researchers watched and analyzed how dry spots formed and expanded inside both ceramic and teflon coated pans.

The team of physicists detailed their observations in a new paper, published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids.

RELATED Nonstick chemicals may cut birth weight

"We experimentally explained why food sticks to the center of the frying pan," study author Alexander Fedorchenko said in a news release.

"This is caused by the formation of a dry spot in the thin sunflower oil film as a result of thermocapillary convection," said Fedorchenko, a researcher with the Institute of Thermomechanics at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

When any pan is heated from below, a temperature gradients forms within the layer of oil -- including sunflower oil, which the researchers used for their experiments.

Because heat lowers surface tension, a surface tension gradient followed the formation of the temperature gradient in the pan. Sunflower oil slipped away from the center of the pan, where it was hottest, and concentrated around the pan's outer edges.

This gradient creates what's called thermocapillary convection, researchers said. As heat flows through the middle and toward the outside of the pan, the oil film in the middle becomes stretched thin, destabilized and eventually ruptures.

Thermocapillary convection occurs within both flowing and stationary films. When the film becomes thinner than a critical value known as capillary length, the film breaks.

This deformity inhibits the performance of the nonstick film, whether flowing oil or the nonstick coating itself, and allows food to stick.

"To avoid unwanted dry spots, the following set of measures should be applied: increasing the oil film thickness, moderate heating, completely wetting the surface of the pan with oil, using a pan with a thick bottom or stirring food regularly during cooking," Fedorchenko said.

The phenomenon can help explain the behavior of films, not just in pans, but in electronic devices and other kinds of technologies.

"Dry spot formation or film rupture plays a negative role, resulting in sharp overheating of the electronic components," said Fedorchenko. "The results of this study may, therefore, have wider application."

Mammals are getting hit by airplanes at greater rates than ever before


In Britain, rabbits are the most common mammals hit by airplanes, according to a new study that shows an annual 68% global increase in mammals struck by aircraft. Photo by Samantha Ball


Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Pursued by poachers and pushed out by development and deforestation, many of the planet's terrestrial mammal species are increasingly threatened by human activities -- including air travel.

According to a new study, published Wednesday in the journal Mammal Review, mammals are being killed and maimed by aircraft at greater rates than ever before.

Every year, planes strike thousands of animals. Most of the animals are birds, but according to a newly analyzed strike data from national aviation authorities in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and the United States, mammals are also getting hit at prodigious rates.

Over the last decade, mammal strikes by aircraft have increased annually by an average of 68 percent.

"Mammals are incredibly diverse and those involved in strike events are no exception," lead study author Samantha Ball said in a press release.

"As we identified 47 countries which have reported strikes with mammals, the species involved ranged from some of the world's smallest mammals, such as voles, all the way up to the mighty giraffe and included mammals of all sizes in between," said Ball, a doctoral student in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University College Cork in Ireland.

Bats and deer are the mammals most threatened by aircraft in the United States. Bats are also the most common mammals threatened by airplane collisions in Australia.

In Canada, Germany and Britain, rabbits and dog-like carnivores (CAYOTES) are the mammals most frequently struck by aircraft.

Airports work hard to keep birds away from runways, but the increase in aircraft-mammal collisions may require new strategies for warding away animals.

Over the last three decades, mammal strikes caused more than $103 million worth of damage in the United States.

"As strike events can affect everything from passenger safety, airline economics and local conservation, understanding the species composition and ecology of the local fauna at an airfield is paramount for effective strike mitigation," Ball said.

#LEGALIZEALLDRUGS

Study: One-third of U.S. teens, young adults misuse prescription drugs


   

Almost 33% of teens misuse prescription psychoactive drugs they take for behavioral and mental health disorders, a new study has found. Photo by rawpixel/Pixabay

Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Almost one in three teens and young adults who take prescription stimulants or tranquilizers misuses the drugs for recreational purposes, according to a study published Tuesday by Family Medicine & Community Health.

This inappropriate use of these medications, known as psychoactive drugs and prescribed to address mental health or behavioral disorders, is even higher among older teens and young adults, the data showed.

"It is important to monitor the diversity of medication misuse behaviors among youth and young adults, given their potential for abuse liability," the researchers wrote.

"[Our findings] underscore the need for comprehensive approaches toward health promotion among youth and young adults," they said.

RELATED Oregon becomes 1st state to decriminalize cocaine, heroin, meth, other drugs

Psychoactive drugs can alter the consciousness, mood and thoughts of those who use them, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Examples of these drugs include prescription stimulants like methylphenidate, also known as Ritalin, pain relievers such as oxycodone and tranquilizers such as diazepam.

Commercial products including tobacco, alcohol and cannabis and illegal drugs including ecstasy, cocaine and heroin also are considered psychoactives.

Each year, more than 33% of teens and young adults in the United States are prescribed a psychoactive drug to treat conditions that range from anxiety, depression and ADHD to pain and bipolar disorder, among others, researchers said.

For this study, they analyzed data on 110,556 U.S. residents aged 12 to 25 years who participated in the National Survey of Drug Use and Health Sampling, a federal government-led study.

Of these participants, 35% said they had taken a prescribed psychoactive drug in the past year and 31% reported that they had misused that drug, the data showed.

RELATED U.S. sees 5-fold increase in methamphetamine overdose deaths

Opioid prescription drugs were used by 19% of teens, while stimulants, tranquilizers and sedatives were taken by 7%, 4% and 2% of teens, respectively.

One in 10 respondents indicated that they took at least two prescribed psychoactive drugs, while 58% said they misused at least one of them, the researchers said.

Forty-five percent of those taking prescribed stimulants and tranquilizers admitted to misusing these drugs, compared with18% of those on prescription opioids and 14% in sedatives.

In addition, 87% admitted to misusing another substance, such as alcohol, cigarettes, cigars, marijuana, cocaine or heroin.

While one in four teens age 12 to 17 reported taking a prescription psychoactive drug over the past year, 41% of those age 18 to 25 used these drugs, the researchers said.

Among 18- to 25-year-olds, 35% reported misusing the drugs, the data showed.

Nearly 12% of the study participants in this age group indicated they were dealing with serious psychological distress, which was consistently associated with misuse of psychoactive drugs, the researchers said.

"Mental health and medical providers would benefit from using a team approach and having open communication with other health providers to ensure evidence-based guidelines are used when assessing for, and treating, mental health and substance use difficulties," they wrote.

WHO team visits Wuhan Institute of Virology, meets bat researcher

The World Health Organization team probing the origins of the coronavirus visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Wednesday. File Photo by Roman Pilipey/EPA-EFE

Feb. 3 (UPI) -- The World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the novel coronavirus visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology on Wednesday, a day after China called for similar investigations in countries like the United States.

The WHO team including Peter Daszak and Thea Fischer met with scientists at the Wuhan research lab and agreed to international scientific cooperation and exchange, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported. Chinese state media claimed the WHO team was "impressed" by the professionalism of the scientists at the Wuhan Institute

The international team did not disclose their findings after their visit, but the lab has been at the center of speculation about the origins of the novel coronavirus.

China has claimed the first COVID-19 outbreak occurred at a wet market in Wuhan and rejected theories about the lab's role in the epidemic. But the virology institute was known for conducting studies of deadly diseases.

Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York, tweeted he had met with key figures at the lab, including Shi Zhengli, the Chinese scientist nicknamed "Bat Woman" for her research into bat coronaviruses. Shi has denied SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, leaked from the lab.

As the WHO team continues its two-week investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 2 million people globally, China claimed it has "maintained close communication and cooperation with WHO on global origin-tracing in an open and transparent manner."

Beijing's foreign ministry spokesman has continued to deny COVID-19 originated solely from China.

"According to a U.S. CDC report, COVID-19 antibodies were detected in blood donations collected in December 2019, which means that the virus may have already been spreading in the United States by then, earlier than January 21," Wang Wenbin said Tuesday at a regular press briefing.

"More and more clues, reports and studies have indicated that the infections broke out in multiple places in the world in the latter half of the year 2019."

Analysts are divided about the theory the virus first leaked from the lab in Wuhan.

RELATED COVID-19: WHO investigators visit 2 hospitals in Wuhan

Looking Back at Maoism and the Global Left


January 31, 2021Length:2672 words

As against nearly a century of debates over Stalinism, the international left has never come to terms with Maoism, especially its global impact. Disillusionment with Stalinism is marked by clear, indeed tragic, dates in international politics: the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 that launched World War II, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These events are well remembered and sometimes debated, in this journal and elsewhere. With Maoism, the following dates also mark tragic events for the global left, yet they have not gotten the attention they deserve: the collapse of the Maoist Indonesian Communist Party in 1965 due to murderous repression by the military with the help of the CIA, China’s rapprochement with U.S. imperialism in 1971-1972 as Nixon was carpet-bombing Vietnam and embarking upon his reelection campaign, the Maoist Khmer Rouge’s autogenocide, or Mao’s lean toward South Africa and Mobutu’s Zaire against African revolutionaries in 1975-1976. To be sure, the fact that these Maoist-impacted events took place in the Global South rather than Western and Central Europe goes some distance toward explaining the relative lack of attention. But that is no reason to continue such a marginalization today.

Maoism became a pole of attraction in the 1960s for the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society in the United States, for a number of African revolutionaries and nationalists, and for the French far left, among others. Many saw Maoist China as the product of a successful socialist revolution carried out by people of color. And while it gradually lost its sheen as an international phenomenon, this came not so much with a bang as a whimper, without the furious debates that marked 1939, 1956, and 1968. The fact that there was no clear reckoning has helped the ideological influence of Maoism to persist to this day, often indirectly.

One example can be found in the structuralist and post-structuralist theories that have impacted so many academic fields. These theories pushed for a concentration on what orthodox Marxists termed the superstructure, especially its cultural and ideological dimensions. Here the affinity with Maoism lies not merely in the fact that some of the intellectuals associated with structuralism and post-structuralism were influenced by Maoism, people like Louis Althusser, or Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida early on. Their affinity with Maoism also lies in an indisputable theoretical point, that Maoist thought sought to displace structure with superstructure, most famously with the Cultural Revolution.

A second example is the extreme voluntarism of Maoism, from slogans like “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win” or “U.S. Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger” to adventurism or worse in the sphere of revolutionary politics: the Indonesian Communist Party, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Again, while few on the activist left today identify with Maoism, aside from groups like the Naxalites in India, the Maoist parties in Nepal, or the Communist Party of the Philippines, its voluntaristic spirit persists in more subtle and indirect ways in some of the far reaches of Antifa and anarchism. This continuity makes Julia Lovell’s brilliant book important for the left, and not just in historical terms.

While there are countless histories of international Communism focusing on the parties, groups, and intellectuals associated with Stalinism from the 1920s onward, Lovell’s book fills an important gap as the first comprehensive history of Maoism as a global phenomenon. It is the product of archival research, of participant interviews, and of a careful synthesis of previous scholarship. Lovell is not part of the radical left but an academic historian whose book is nonetheless of paramount importance for us. And some of her findings are eye-opening.

One of these concerns the gestation of Edgar Snow’s hagiographic 1937 account of Maoism just after the Long March, Red Star over China. Lovell shows that Snow’s book was choreographed and closely edited by Mao and other party officials: “Snow’s English transcript of the translator’s version of Mao’s words” was “translated into Chinese, corrected by Mao, then translated back into English” (76). As the book progressed, party representatives continued to shape its narrative: “As Snow toiled on turning notes into copy through the winter of 1936, his interviewees continued to send him a stream of amendments: telling him to remove any trace of dissent with Comintern policy, to expunge any praise for out-of-favor Chinese intellectuals, to tone down criticism of political enemies turned allies, to talk up anti-Japanese patriotism” (76-77). This was the first, but not the last, romanticization of Maoism on the part of the global left.

Another key juncture Lovell elucidates is the massacre of half a million Indonesian leftists and suspected leftists in 1965 by the army and its Islamist allies, with considerable assistance from the CIA. How did this transpire? It was widely known by the early 1960s that Mao had formed an alliance with the left-leaning nationalist Sukarno, who had sponsored the 1954 Bandung conference of “Nonaligned” countries. Attended by Chinese but not Soviet representatives, Bandung was an important marker in the birth of the third world. It was also common currency on the left that the massive, legal Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which after the Sino-Soviet split became the largest ally of China among the world’s Communist parties, was caught off guard by the ferocity of the repression in 1965-1966. Indonesia was also seen at the time as the greatest debacle of Maoism as an international movement by the independent revolutionary left, which noted that the PKI did not act substantially differently from the pro-Moscow Communist parties in opportunistically sidling up to a nationalist dictator without building up enough of an independent political or military capacity. But the truth turns out to be more complicated—and more damning to Mao.

The events leading up to the PKI-led abortive insurrection and the brutal repression that followed have long been shrouded in secrecy. Lovell does not succeed in fully cracking this secrecy, given the Chinese regime’s suppression of its own history. Nonetheless, she marshals enough evidence to confirm that the defeat of the Indonesian left lay at Mao’s doorstep as much as that of the PKI leadership and that the PKI’s disastrous miscalculations were impacted by Mao’s own voluntarism. To demonstrate this, Lovell reproduces a version of an August 1965 conversation between Mao and PKI leader D.N. Aidit, in which Mao calls upon Aidit to “act quickly” against the conservative army leaders at a time when Sukarno’s ailing health placed the PKI alliance with him in jeopardy (178). If this is true, Mao made a strategic miscalculation on a par with Stalin’s decision not to allow German Communists to ally with the Social Democrats as Hitler was coming to power. Be that as it may, the ideological influence of Maoism on the PKI was equally deleterious.

As Lovell recounts, alluding to Mao’s disastrous effort to transform the Chinese countryside via “People’s Communes,” which caused the mass famine of the late 1950s, “In the voluntarist style of the Great Leap Forward, Aidit began to eschew the kind of careful, patient mobilization that had taken place through the 1950s, in favor of statements that emphasized high Maoism’s ‘spirit, resolve, and enthusiasm’” (168). And while Aidit talked of organizing a paramilitary force to counter the regular army, and Sukarno did so as well, and China promised vast amounts of armaments, nothing substantial was actually done even as PKI rhetoric against the military escalated. Then, on September 30, 1965, the PKI, acting with apparent Chinese encouragement, moved to incapacitate the military leadership. They killed a number of generals, but the action quickly backfired due to lack of support on the streets or within the military, especially after the ailing Sukarno refused to join their cause. All this allowed the remaining Indonesian generals to orchestrate one of the greatest political massacres in history and to set up a conservative, anti-labor regime that persists today in modified form in a somewhat more democratic polity.

A second revelation on Lovell’s part concerns Mao’s relationship with Pol Pot and what is sometimes called the Cambodian autogenocide, when up to two million people—a quarter of the population—died from starvation, overwork, and executions during the years 1975-1979. The U.S. war in Vietnam, which Nixon extended to Cambodia in 1970, had led to massive bombings that killed a large number of civilians. As peasants fled the bombs raining down on rural areas, where the Khmer Rouge—essentially the Cambodian Communist Party—was based, the population of the cities swelled, making famine a real possibility.

When the U.S. war effort collapsed in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took power, entering the capital, Phnom Penh, and evacuating virtually the entire population at gunpoint. This was part of a harebrained scheme, inspired by Maoist projects like the Great Leap Forward, to empty the cities and build “socialism” in the countryside based upon a precipitous increase in the working day along with minimal food allowances. It all came crashing down as Vietnam invaded in 1979, overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and installed a more rational version of Stalinism closer to the Soviet version to which it was allied.

While the fact that the Khmer Rouge was inspired by Maoism has been known for decades, Lovell puts a point on it: “The evacuation of the cities was an extreme version of Cultural Revolution-era rustification. The creation of the mess halls and the abolition of family dining replicated the collectivization of the Great Leap Forward” (255). Moreover, she shows that Maoist China was deeply committed to the Pol Pot regime, awarding it the biggest aid package Beijing had ever offered, $1 billion in grants and interest-free loans. Even the black cloth for the pajama-like uniforms imposed by the regime was imported from China. In 1975, soon after the Khmer Rouge came to power, but after they had completely evacuated the cities at gunpoint, top leaders Pol Pot and Ieng Sary met privately with Mao. During their conversation, Mao reportedly said, “We approve of you! Many of your experiences are better than ours,” to which Pol Pot replied, “The works of Chairman Mao have led our entire party” (241). The aging and infirm Mao, who had only a year to live, seemingly felt thwarted by the way he had been forced to call off the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He also stated, “What we wanted to do but could not manage, you are achieving” (241). Pol Pot expressed similar sentiments three years later but with the suggestion that he had outdone even Mao: “Mao stopped his Cultural Revolution, but we have a Cultural Revolution every day” (259).

The horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime led to a rude awakening for many left-wing intellectuals who had embraced Maoism as a more militant and anti-bureaucratic alternative to Russian Stalinism, especially in France. Foucault and others now distanced themselves not only from Maoism, but also from Marxism altogether. In this era, the Parisian New Philosophers targeted “totalitarianism” in such a way that they were unable to support genuinely left-wing movements like the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, all the while taking inspiration from the gifted but very right-wing Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. All of this helped usher in something like neoconservatism in France.

The chapter on Africa chronicles a remarkable and sustained commitment on Maoist China’s part to support African nationalists and revolutionaries in the 1960s, almost always in competition with the Soviet Union. China gained substantial support via Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, one of the few African countries liberated in the first wave of independence movements to avoid either right-wing military-strongman rule (Congo-Kinshasa[Zaire], Ghana) or ostensibly left-wing authoritarianism (Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea). Nyerere, who espoused ujamaa, a form of rural socialism, and who supported liberation movements in southern Africa as the leader of the chief “front-line” African state in the struggle with apartheid South Africa, received considerable Chinese aid. So did Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union, an avowedly Marxist revolutionary party that later established a brutal left-wing dictatorship. Lovell highlights these relationships and paints a much more positive portrait of Maoist policy toward Africa than other regions. This has some validity, given accomplishments like the Tan-Zam railway, completed in 1975 at tremendous cost to the Chinese and which freed Zambian copper mines from economic dependence upon South Africa by creating a rail line through Tanzania.

But Lovell ignores completely Maoist China’s greatest failure in Africa, one that sullied its reputation within the global left almost as much as did the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. This was the Angola war of 1975, which took place as this mineral-rich southern African country was prying itself loose from Portuguese colonialism. Over the years, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) became the most left-wing and deeply rooted of the country’s African liberation movements. But because the MPLA was backed by the Soviet Union, China from the 1960s onward supported the more right-wing National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which based itself in Mobutu’s Zaire. Mobutu, one of Africa’s most reactionary and kleptocratic rulers, had come to power by orchestrating the assassination of renowned African liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. Portugal began to pull out of Angola and its other colonies in 1975, having experienced in 1974 its own left-wing revolution to overthrow a fascist regime in power since the 1920s. Portuguese revolutionary officers, who had themselves been radicalized by contact with African revolutionaries, sought to hand over power to the MPLA.

At this point UNITA (and another smaller right-wing nationalist group) made a bid for power, backed not only by Mobutu and the United States but also by apartheid South Africa, which dispatched troops into southern Angola. This placed China on the same side as South Africa. When UNITA, Zaire, and South Africa suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of some 36,000 Cuban troops sent over with Soviet aid, that humiliation was also China’s, as Mao now found himself exposed to the world as an ally of South Africa. For those on the left with the strongest commitments to African and Third World liberation, China’s betrayal of the African liberation movement in Angola became a point of no return. Tragically, the MPLA regime, hardened by the long decades of civil war with the U.S.-funded UNITA that followed, devolved into an authoritarian and kleptocratic state. Still, Mao’s support for forces allied with South Africa played a role in the disillusionment with Maoism across many sectors of the left, especially those involved in Black liberation. For some, this resulted in a disillusionment with Marxism, period.

It is not surprising that Lovell, a scholar of China, is on surer footing when analyzing Maoism’s impact on nearby countries like Indonesia or Cambodia than in discussing Africa. Still, she is to be commended for having written the first survey of Maoism as a global project. Overall, this is a work of deep scholarship and careful judgment. It contains a wealth of material indispensable for the twenty-first century left to consider if we are to avoid the terrible mistakes of the past. And given the fact that Maoism—or at least theoretical and political patterns similar to or derived from it—persists today, from some forms of academic radicalism to some tendencies in the activist left, this book also speaks to us today, if one is able to read it with an expansive frame of mind.

Summary: Review of Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell, emphasizing Southern Africa, Indonesia, and Cambodia. First appeared in New Politics, Winter 2021, here https://newpol.org/review/looking-back-at-maoism-%E2%80%A8and-the-global-left/ – Editors

Postscript: A personal note: I participated in some of the debates over the 1975 civil war in Angola as part of the New York left, when I saw some activists long sympathetic to Mao — and with whom I had sometimes had bitter arguments — express a sudden and sharp disillusionment. Angola was also the topic my first article on international politics, “U.S. Imperialism seeks new ways to stifle true Angolan revolution,” News & Letters, May 1976 https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/news-and-letters/1970s/1976-05.pdf , written under the pseudonym Kevin A. Barry with considerable advice and help from Raya Dunayevskaya.

Kevin B. Anderson

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

https://imhojournal.org/articles/looking-back-at-maoism-and-the-global-left/

THE GAMESTOP BUBBLE IS A LESSON IN THE ABSURDITY AND USELESSNESS OF THE STOCK MARKET

BY DOUG HENWOOD

The online pranksters behind the great GameStop bubble of 2021 are probably going to lose a lot of money. But they’ve done the world a service by reminding us of the utter uselessness of the stock market, an institution that serves no purpose besides making a small number of undeserving people rich.
This drama, like the seemingly endless rise in stock prices since 2009, interrupted briefly by the COVID-19 scare last March, is a sign of a financial system totally out of touch with economic reality. (Flickr)

Who knew GameStop would itself become such a game?

Last summer, the video game retailer was seen as a fading brick-and-mortar operation. It was losing money, sales had been shrinking for years, and the stock was trading for around $4 a share. As I’m writing this on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 27, its stock is trading at $339 a share. At the close of trading on Tuesday, it was a mere $148. Not a bad overnight return, 129 percent. Three days earlier, it was at $38. It was up nearly tenfold in less than a week. Why?

To answer that requires explaining the concept of short selling, which most civilians find nearly incomprehensible. A short sale is a bet that a stock (or any other speculative asset, like bonds or gold) is going to decline in price. But to make that bet, you have to sell something you don’t already own, which is not normal behavior. To accomplish this, you have to borrow the stock from somebody who does own it. As with any loan, you have to pay interest on the borrowed asset. And you also have to keep some collateral on deposit with your broker as an assurance you’re good for the money. The hope is that the price will fall, and you can buy the shares — cover the short, in the jargon — at a lower price. Your profit would be the difference between the original sale price and the closing purchase price, minus any interest paid on the borrowed asset.

But what if you’re wrong, and the price rises? Then you’re in trouble. When you buy a stock, your risk is that you could lose the entire purchase price — but no more. With short selling, if you’re wrong, there’s no predetermined limit to how much you can lose if the price keeps rising. And if the price keeps rising, your broker will demand more collateral in the form of real money. You have a choice between giving up — covering the short and taking the loss — or keep pouring more collateral into a losing position in the hope that things will finally turn your way.


Back to GameStop. Last August, the investor Ryan Cohen, who founded the online pet food merchant Chewy and sold it for a handsome profit, started buying GameStop shares. He told the company that it needed to get with the digital age, close a lot of stores, and move online. Investors, expecting a better future for the flailing retailer, snapped up shares, tripling their price by the end of November. That was unjustified optimism, perhaps, but not outlandish. But some hedge funds, notably Melvin Capital Management, began shorting GameStop, believing the tales of recovery were delusional.

Cue the habitués of the subreddit Wall Street Bets, with a user known as DeepFuckingValue among the ringleaders, who began talking up the stock and buying shares. They were motivated not merely by the prospect of making money, but also for the lulz of bankrupting some hedgies. They began buying the stock in size, as they say on Wall Street. The ensuing price rise forced the shorts like Melvin to cover. Their demand for the stock, plus the Redditors’, launched the share price on a moon shot.

GameStop has turned into one of the great bubbles of our time. On Tuesday, January 26, more stock in GameStop was traded than in Apple, the biggest stock of all, with a total market value 108 times the retailer’s. As James Mackintosh of the Wall Street Journal put it, the price action and trading volume together suggest “widespread disturbance to people’s judgment.”

Bubbles like this always end in a crash, and those Redditors who haven’t sold their shares will be left holding a very depleted bag. (Surprisingly, news that Melvin closed out its short position late on Tuesday seems not to have dampened the party. A bubble usually goes on far longer than mere rationalists can predict.) In the meanwhile, it’s funny to see some Wall Streeters complain that there’s something unfair about this action, since these are the sorts of games they play with each other and the general public all the time. They talk up stocks or talk them down, depending on their interests, and plot against what they see as weak or vulnerable players all the time. It’s just that the speculators with names like DeepFuckingValue who are savaging them for now are the wrong kind of people. They don’t live in Greenwich in houses with twenty-car garages.

Even more amusing are the earnest sorts who think these games somehow pervert the function of the stock market. As Business Insider columnist Josh Barro declared on Twitter: “I know people think this is fun but — why do we have a stock market? So productive firms can raise capital to do useful things. Detaching stock price from fundamental value (Gamestop is now worth almost as much as Best Buy) makes the markets serve the real economy worse.”

What’s funny about these comments, aside from their earnestness in the midst of low comedy, is that the stock market has almost nothing to do with raising money for productive investment. Almost all the stock that trades on the market, including GameStock, was issued years ago, meaning that companies don’t see a dime of the daily action. Firms do issue stock now and then, in so-called initial public offerings (IPOs), but over the last twenty years, according to finance professor Jay Ritter’s data, IPOs have raised a cumulative total of $657 billion, well under 2 percent of total business investment in things like buildings and equipment over the same period. In the real world, as opposed to Barro’s imagination, firms raise almost all their investment funds internally, through profits. Rather than raising money from shareholders, businesses shovel out vast buckets of money to them. Since 2000, the five hundred large companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index have spent $8.3 trillion buying their own stock to boost its price — over half their profits over the period, and equal to almost 20 percent of business investment over the two decades. Stock buybacks not only make the shareholders happy, but they also fatten CEOs’ paychecks, since bosses these days are paid mainly in stock.

Lulz aside, this drama, like the seemingly endless rise in stock prices since 2009, interrupted briefly by the COVID-19 scare last March, is a sign of a financial system totally out of touch with economic reality. Trillions in government aid to business and Federal Reserve infusions into the financial markets have created a monstrous gusher of money with nowhere to go but speculative assets, at a time when ICUs are at capacity and 24 million people tell Census Bureau interviewers that they’re having trouble getting enough to eat. Barro would do better to worry about that.

Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer and is the host of Behind the News. His latest book is My Turn.