The complicated life and career of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb,' who refused to develop a more dangerous weapon

James Pasley
Sat, July 1, 2023

The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Princeton, New Jersey.AP

In the 1940s, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led a team to develop the world's first atomic bomb.


His work garnered him the title "father of the atomic bomb," but he wasn't an obvious choice for its leader.


He was a complicated, intelligent man known for being condescending, volatile, and impractical.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the architect behind the atomic bomb.

He spent decades working as a physics lecturer and made several notable scientific discoveries, including forecasting black holes thirty years before it became a common theory.

He was called "Oppie" by colleagues and friends. He was a 6-foot-tall skinny man with a stoop. He could be condescending, volatile, and impractical.

During the paranoia of the Cold War in the 1950s, his political enemies used his colorful past to remove his security clearance and he ended up retreating back into academia.

Director Christopher Nolan's upcoming film about his life, called "Oppenheimer," will be released in July, with actor Cillian Murphy portraying the titular character.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City.

J. Robert Oppenheimer with his father.Corbis/Getty Images

The Oppenheimers were a rich German Jewish family; his father made his money manufacturing clothes, and they lived in a high-rise apartment in the Upper West Side.

Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, Guardian

Oppenheimer went to the Ethical Culture School, which was focused on creating students who were devoted to service.

J. Robert Oppenheimer playing with blocks with his brother Frank.Corbis/Getty Images

For hobbies, he collected minerals and read poetry. He graduated at the top of his class.

Source: New Atlantis

In 1922, he went to Harvard College. His plan was to be a chemist, but he quickly swapped to physics.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1945.AP

He studied intensely and widely — taking classes in philosophy, literature, and Eastern religion alongside his major — and finished the four-year degree in three years, graduating summa cum laude.

Oppenheimer then went to Cambridge University to study atomics under the physicist Lord Rutherford. While there, he took issue with working in a laboratory.

He later transferred to the University of Gottingen in Germany to study under Dr. Max Born, a famous atomic scientist.

He graduated in 1927. After he left his Ph. D. exam, the administering professor reportedly sighed in relief.

"Phew," he said. "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."

Sources: New York Times, New York Times, IAS

Dr. Born later said Oppenheimer was obviously intelligent but could be snide in class and interrupt speakers to explain to them what they had been trying to say.

J. Robert Oppenheimer with the Nobel Prize-winners Paul Dirac and Robert Millikan in 1935.AP

Around this period, Oppenheimer had also been struggling with depression.

He saw several psychoanalysts but credited a Corsica biking tour and reading Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" for making him better again.

Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, PBS

Oppenheimer was a complex character. He was known as "Oppie" by colleagues and friends.

J. Robert Oppenheimer photographed upon arrival at Orly Airport in Paris.Bettmann/Getty Images

He was 6 feet tall, skinny, and had a stoop. He could be condescending, volatile, and impractical.

He drank liquor, smoked constantly, and was recognizable by a porkpie hat that he always wore.

Source: Guardian

He could be reckless. For instance, while he was a student he raced against a train and ended up crashing his car.

J. Robert Oppenheimer sits in a chair holding a cigarette.Corbis/Getty Images

While he walked away from the accident unscathed, his girlfriend at the time was knocked unconscious.

Source: New York Times

He was also criticized for spreading himself too thin intellectually.

J. Robert Oppenheimer working with Albert Einstein.Corbis/Getty Images

But there was never any doubt of his intelligence. He knew Latin, French, German, and Greek, and later studied Sanskrit so he could read important Hindu texts.

Sources: Guardian, PBS

In 1929, Oppenheimer returned to the US and began to lecture. He taught at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the University of California, Berkeley.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in front of a blackboard in 1947.AP

While his work in the field was often noted for being good but not quite as good as some of his peers, in the classroom he excelled.

Unlike other lecturers who could be bogged down in unimportant details, Oppenheimer had a sense for real-world implications stemming from theories and kept his students' interest piqued.

According to physicist Hans Bethe, he was one of the most sophisticated physics lecturers in the US.

"Here was a man who obviously understood all the deep secrets of quantum mechanics, and yet made it clear that the most important questions were unanswered," Bethe said.

"His earnestness and deep involvement gave his research students the same sense of challenge," he continued. "He never gave his students the easy and superficial answers but trained them to appreciate and work on the deep problems."

For a while, Oppenheimer lived an entirely academic life.

He later said during the early years of teaching he did not read anything to do with politics or economics and he never listened to the radio or even had a telephone.

Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, IAS

During the 1930s, he made several notable scientific discoveries including forecasting black holes 30 years before it became a common theory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer with the physicist Gregory Breit.Corbis/Getty Images

Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis

It was also during the 1930s that Oppenheimer began to spend time with communists.

J. Robert Oppenheimer writes on a blackboard.Corbis/Getty Images

In 1936, he had an affair with a female communist named Jean Tatlock. She introduced him to left-wing politics.

Sources: Guardian, New Atlantis, New York Times, NPS

Tatlock and Oppenheimer's relationship didn't last, and in 1940, he married Katherine "Kitty" Puening, a biologist and former communist, whose first husband had been a communist who died in the Spanish Civil War.

Katherine Puening smiles in a photograph.Corbis/Getty Images

Sources: New Atlantis, New York Times, IAS

They had two children, Peter and Katherine.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine and children Katherine and Peter, circa 1940.Corbis/Getty Images

Sources: New Atlantis, New York Times

Oppenheimer, who had previously considered himself apolitical, began to see the impacts of the depression and fascism in Germany. He later said he was furious at how Jews were treated in Germany.

J.Robert Oppenheimer sits at a desk holding a pair of glasses.Bettmann/Getty Images

"I saw what the Depression was doing to my students," he said. "Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives."

"I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community," he added.

Sources: PBS, New York Times

In 1941, President Theodore Roosevelt established the Manhattan Project in response to news that Germany had managed to split the atom, meaning they could potentially create atomic weapons.

Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer.Corbis/Getty Images

He appointed Gen. Leslie Groves to run it and allocated the project $2 billion in funding.

He needed someone to lead his bomb laboratory and chose Oppenheimer.

Sources: New York Times, History, PBS, New Atlantis

There were concerns about Oppenheimer's loyalty.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves examine the remains of one the bases of the steel test tower at the atomic bomb test site in September 1945.Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Groves managed to address the concerns by noting they could count on his loyalty due to the intensity of his desire to make history.

Oppenheimer previously had concerns about working on the war effort. But he accepted Groves' offer and tracked down the best people for the job. They would spend the next two years working with him in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

He enlisted experts who had worked in different areas relating to atomic energy, including some of the world's brightest people, like Dr. Niels Bohr and Dr. Enrico Fermi.

Sources: New York Times, History, PBS, New Atlantis

During this period, Oppenheimer was under constant surveillance.

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security badge for the Manhattan Project, circa 1940.Corbis/Getty Images

His calls and letters were monitored. In June 1943, he was seen spending a night with Tatlock, his former communist lover. By then she had left the communist party.

He also unexpectedly admitted to a government agent that Russians had been trying to learn more about their work in the Manhattan Project.

In response, he was interrogated three times. On one occasion, he provided a list of communists and sympathizers.

Source: New York Times

But he wasn't removed from his job. He carried on and directed about 4,000 people to build the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It took a little over two years.

J. Robert Oppenheimer poses for a photograph in front of a map.Corbis/Getty Images

Despite being known for his impracticality, he was praised for the way he ran the project, notably for his efficiency and his charismatic leadership. But at times, some of his staff raised concerns about whether they were doing the right thing.

Oppenheimer managed to convince them that it was. He told them though an atomic bomb would create its own problems, it was also a way to end the war.

Sources: Mercury News, History, Atlantic, Guardian

At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first man-made atomic bomb was detonated. The mushroom cloud reached 40,000 feet into the sky. It was a success.

This photo shows the explosion eight seconds after detonation in 1945.Corbis/Getty Images

Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, History

Oppenheimer watched from afar and as he saw the mushroom cloud form he famously thought, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1950.Corbis/Getty Images

It was a line from the 700-verse Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.

The quote is from when the Hindu god Vishnu orders a prince to execute his duty and achieve militant success.

He later said, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent."

Source: Wired

In a matter of weeks, the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending World War II, killing 80,000 people in Hiroshima and 40,000 people in Nagasaki.

The atomic bomb explosion on Hiroshima in 1945.Roger Viollet/Getty Images

Thousands more later died of radiation poisoning.

At the time the bombs dropped Oppenheimer celebrated and even said he wished the bomb had been made earlier so that it could have been dropped on Germany.

But he also spoke of his sadness on behalf of the Japanese victims.

Later, he addressed the American Philosophical Society and told them: "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world… a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing… we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man."

Sources: New Atlantis, History

In October, Oppenheimer met with President Harry Truman and told the president he felt he had blood on his hands.

J. Robert Oppenheimer looking at a photo of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki with two officials in 1946.Bettmann/Getty Images

Truman was reportedly disgusted and rebuffed him.

Sources: New Atlantis, History

Despite his guilt, over the next few years Oppenheimer became a well-known public figure.

J. Robert Oppenheimer poses for a photo in April 1946.Clarence Hamm/AP

He appeared on the covers of magazines and became chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, which was formed to replace the Manhattan Project.

He was given awards for his work, like the Army-Navy Award of excellence in the 1940s.

Sources: PBS, New Atlantis, IAS

But he was also openly reluctant to develop a hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb.

J. Robert Oppenheimer testifying before the Senate in October 1945.AP

His stance was controversial since it was the beginning of the Cold War, and Russia and the US were grappling for dominance.

Truman approached the commission in 1949 to create a hydrogen bomb and Hungarian scientist Edward Teller, the future "father of the H-Bomb" publicly called for it too.

But Oppenheimer reportedly said, "I neither can nor will do so."

He also publicly backed an international group having control of atomic weapons, rather than the US.

Sources: New Atlantis, New Atlantis, History, Guardian, IAS

But his reluctance didn't matter. The H-bomb was developed and tested in 1952.

A mushroom cloud forms after the first H-Bomb explosion in 1952.Three Lions/Getty Images

Source: History

Oppenheimer's time at the top came to an end in December 1953.

J. Robert Oppenheimer smokes at a hearing in 1949.Bettmann/Getty Images

President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered a ban on all secret data going to him. On December 23, 1953, he received a letter informing him his security clearance had been suspended.

Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist sympathizer. A secret trial was held. In June 1954, after 19 days of hearings, Oppenheimer's security clearance was permanently revoked.

The committee found no evidence of him having mishandled any classified information or any sign of disloyalty.

All it noted was that he had "fundamental defects in his character."

Bethe said, "Oppenheimer took the outcome of the security hearing very quietly but he was a changed person; much of his previous spirit and liveliness had left him."

Sources: New York Times, SFGate

Without his security clearance, Oppenheimer couldn't continue his work. He moved back to academia, running the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, while also delivering public lectures and publishing scientific essays.

J. Robert Oppenheimer with the mathematician Oswald Veblen at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947.AP

Sources: Guardian, Smithsonian, IAS

The atomic bomb and its repercussions never left him. Years later, in 1961, when he was asked about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, he said it wasn't on his conscience.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1958 in Athens, Greece.AP

"Scientists are not delinquents," he said. "Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists."

Source: New York Times

In 1962, Oppenheimer was invited to a Nobel Prize dinner at the White House by President John F. Kennedy, and the following year, he received the Fermi Award, the AEC's highest honor.

President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes hands with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer at a ceremony presenting him with the Enrico Fermi Award in 1963.Corbis/Getty Images

Source: IAS

On February 18, 1967, just one year after retiring, Oppenheimer died of lung cancer. He was 62 years old.

J. Robert Oppenheimer smoking from a pipe in 1963.Eddie Adams/AP

"Such a wrong can never be righted; such a blot on our history never erased," physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth said at his memorial service. "… We regret that his great work for his country was repaid so shabbily."

Sources: New York Times, Princeton Magazine, Smithsonian

The role the government played in his fall from grace was raised occasionally and in December 2022, the US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm nullified the decision to revoke his security clearance.

J. Robert Oppenheimer in the classroom.Bettmann/Getty Images

The process was described as flawed and stemmed more from disagreements over his stance on nuclear weapons rather than any real security concerns.

In a statement, she said, "As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to, while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed."

Sources: New York Times, Princeton Magazine, Smithsonian

Aggression, Guns, and Marcuse

by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / April 25th, 2023

Better not knock on the wrong door or drive into the wrong driveway, you may get shot. Kids are afraid to go to school for fear of getting killed, as the body count from mass shootings climbs every day. Hate crimes are increasing, and just driving to work is potentially dangerous. Think of tailgaters honking their horns and flipping you the bird as they speed past. Politicians address these issues by calling for gun safety legislation, increasing the number of police, and so on. But these policy responses accept the existence of aggressive behavior as a given and only treat the symptoms. The jugular question focuses on why people are becoming increasingly more violent and aggressive in the first place. We think Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of the relationship between late capitalism and the human psyche provides a good tool to answer this question.

Marcuse claims that the United States is a sick society, sick because its basic institutions and structures “do not permit the use of available material and intellectual resources for the optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs.” In other words, Marcuse saw that late capitalism possessed the material potential for people to enjoy much more freedom from want and work than they realized, but capitalism would never permit the fulfillment of this freedom because it would threaten the privilege and power of its ruling class. He calls this disparity between the potential for free human development and the constrained conditions of society “surplus repression.” In late capitalist society surplus repression is so strong and prevalent that social stability necessitates the opening of the human psyche for manipulation and control, thus creating human automatons, one-dimensional beings incapable of critical thought. This invasion of the mind, he argues, is not a conspiracy. It’s rooted in the very structure of power in an advanced consumer capitalist society.

The objective of late capitalism to negate consciousness of the rupture between the individual and the societal imposed mode of existence has implications for the human psyche. Marcuse assumes the validity of Freud’s concepts of Eros – the life instinct – and Thanatos – the death instinct – to explain how the structures of late capitalism breed aggressive behaviors. In arresting the development of human potential, late capitalism stifles Eros and fortifies Thanatos, he claims. This dynamic, he argues, creates destructive energy that is socially useful not only to maintain but to reproduce the dominant system of economic, political, and technological power. In short, the ascendancy of Thanatos creates the aggressive psyches necessary for the stability of late capitalism. The abundance of goods and services available provides almost unlimited opportunities for consumers to buy goods that reproduce the system of domination and create an endless supply of aggressive human beings. In other words, in a supposed exercise of freedom., individuals embrace a consumerism that ultimately increases their subordination to the structures of late capitalism.

Ignoring the fact that the exercise of liberty is a social act (my freedom to throw a punch stops at the end of your nose), individuals frequently equate freedom as the absence of restraints. Every day the media report on clashes, sometimes violent, between self-styled “freedom fighters” and those whose views they oppose: masks, abortion rights, election results, guns, you name it. Rational societies resolve these conflicts through an appeal to a larger communal interest. But fueled by a right-wing media and demagogic politicians unconstrained by facts, these psychically compromised individuals reject the notion of the common good as just another attack on their liberty.

As surplus repression increases, so does human aggression, and even uglier manifestations of liberty become acceptable to many, what Orlando Patterson describes as “the power to restrict the freedom of others.” Put more bluntly, this notion of liberty calls for the use of power over others. So, when members of the far-right call for freedom of religion, for example, they’re calling for suppression of those who don’t share their religion. The Second Amendment morphs not only into the right to own AR-15s and other weapons of mass slaughter, but to use them at will, and the First Amendment functions to justify their attacks on civil liberties.

A political theory is only as good as its ability to help us understand the society we live in. Marcuse’s analysis marries the conceptual framework of Marxism with the categories of Freud. Marcuse recognizes that Eros and Thanatos aren’t empirically verifiable categories, but as assumptions they function as guides to understanding the human condition in contemporary America. But as Marx wrote, understanding a problem is not enough. The real issue is changing the conditions that created the problems in the first place. But how do you change the existing system of late capitalism when the automatons are unaware of their slavery and are free to express their liberty by firing AR-15s into a crowd?TwitteRedditEmail

Sidney Plotkin is a Professor of Political Science, Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair of Social Science, at Vassar College. He is the author of many articles and several books, including Veblen's America: The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump (Anthem Press, 2018). William E. Scheuerman is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at SUNY Oswego. He is the retired President of the National Labor College and past President of United University Professions, the nation's largest higher ed union. A long-time labor activist, Scheuerman has written several books and numerous articles in both scholarly and popular journals. His most recent book is A New American Labor Movement: The Decline of Collective Bargaining and the Rise of Direct Action (SUNY Press, 2021). Read other articles by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin.

Fiscal Insanity: The Government Borrows $6 Billion a Day, and We’re Stuck with the Bill

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 16th, 2023

We’re not living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

The U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:

The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come, and will require cuts to critical programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is not a future anyone wants.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $31 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. That translates to roughly $246,000 per taxpayer or $94,000 for every single person in the country.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Interest payments on the national debt are estimated to top $395 billion this year, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This is financial tyranny.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, the U.S. has allocated nearly $115 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine since the start of the Russia invasion.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.

Playing with Financial Fire

by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / March 29th, 2023

Capitalism, Marx said, is unceasingly prone to crisis. His observation applies as much to financial capital as to industrial capital, as the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank of New York attest. In their pursuit of profits, banks make loans that borrowers cannot repay or back the loans with assets that lose value. Why has this scenario become so deeply rooted in American capitalism and what is the state’s role in restabilizing the financial system once the house of cards begins to tremble?

This banking crisis seems to have ebbed as federal regulators decided to guarantee all deposits, regardless of the usual FDIC limits, at these two banks. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve Board carefully punted on its recent interest rate hike, hoping to locate a sweet spot between a higher anti-inflationary rate and the need to stabilize a quaking banking system with a lower one. It settled for a modest 0.25% increase. These federal actions are band aids on a gushing wound. Before considering steps government should be taking to avert future banking crises, we need to understand why they happen. The foundation of finance capital is loan credit. This means not only that finance capital and all the economic activities that it supports depend on a faith that mounting loans and debts will be repaid, but that the intangible financial assets used to repay the loans will retain enough of their value to keep the system going. In Silicon Valley’s case, for example, the long-term low-interest government bonds it used to back up its capital lost their value as the Fed raised interest rates to battle inflation and triggered a run on the bank. Put simply, newer government bonds paid more interest so old ones lost value. Depositors followed the money.

Karl Marx brilliantly explained how contradictions of capitalist production fueled emergent crises. For example, as capital replaced labor with technology, both surplus value and the rate of demand for goods would fall, raising barriers to further accumulation. And when capitalists stop accumulating capital, the system grinds to a horrific halt. Think 1929. Frederick Engels drew on Marx’s work to reveal much about the financial aspects of business as usual in Vols 2 & 3 of Capital that he edited, but Marx’s work on this score remained under-developed. Analysis of finance capitalism, a capitalism led by banks and financiers, not industrial corporations, awaited its fuller development in the early 20th century. Rudolf Hilferding’s path breaking work Finance Capital dissected the case of banker dominance in Imperial Germany. For the American variant, however, there was no more acute guide than Thorstein Veblen. His Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and Absentee Ownership (1923) remain invaluable guides to our current situation. Together, these books clearly chart the transformation from corporate to financial governance of the capitalist class and its changing system of industrial-pecuniary relations. With the advent of the increasingly monopolistic, cartel-like structure of “key industries” such as steel, oil, communications, and automobiles plus establishment of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913, in the two decades that span his analysis, we can see how and why Veblen was impressed by the enhanced governing capacity to manage money values achieved by an informal alliance of extraordinarily concentrated public and private powers, “the general staff of financial strategy.”

But – and this qualification is critical as we stumble in the dark of financial uncertainty in days and months ahead – the impressive growth in finance capital’s governing capacity is and never can be equal to the ephemeral, intangible, and unstable make-believe of asset values. All the computers of all the financial kings’ math whizzes cannot put finite, predictable quantities to values that elude tangible measurement. As Veblen explained:

…The fabric of credit and capitalization is essentially a fabric of concerted make-believe resting on the routine credulity of the business community. It is…conditioned on the continued preservation of this…credulity in a state of unimpaired tensile strength, which calls for eternal vigilance on the part of its keepers. The fabric, therefore, is always in a state of unstable equilibrium, liable to derangement and extensive disintegration…at any point.

In plain language, Veblen summed up his point this way: modern finance is, at its core, “a confidence game…to be played according to the rules governing games of that psychological nature,” like Three-Card Monte on financial steroids played by guys in expensive suits. The only certainty in finance capital is the absence of certainty. Its illusory quality both allows for the grossest forms of sheer inequality and disallows effective governance of the system that fuels such inequality. The only way to manage that contradiction, at least within the terms of capital itself, is to require banks to serve production, not their own financial interests. We need regulations to make banks serve the public, not themselves. That includes a stronger version of the Glass-Steagall rules that Congress adopted in 1935 and then abandoned in 1999, a decision whose effects were soon felt in the tech stock collapse of 2000, in the far greater housing value collapse of 2007-2008, and now again in our more recent financial rumblings and quakes. If we continue to let the financiers play with financial fire, we will all be burned again. This is finance capital’s other great certainty.FacebookTwitterREmail

Sidney Plotkin is a Professor of Political Science, Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair of Social Science, at Vassar College. He is the author of many articles and several books, including Veblen's America: The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump (Anthem Press, 2018). William E. Scheuerman is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at SUNY Oswego. He is the retired President of the National Labor College and past President of United University Professions, the nation's largest higher ed union. A long-time labor activist, Scheuerman has written several books and numerous articles in both scholarly and popular journals. His most recent book is A New American Labor Movement: The Decline of Collective Bargaining and the Rise of Direct Action (SUNY Press, 2021). Read other articles by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin.

 The Anxiety of Influence:

Adorno’s Grappling with Walter

Benjamin’s Mysticism

by Menachem Feuer




Anyone who reads Walter Benjamin can sense, from the very first sentences of any of his essays or books, that his writing is influenced by mysticism. But Benjamin was torn between mysticism and the political. While his friend Gershom Scholem encouraged him to pursue the mystical and the theological, other friends, like Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, suggested that Benjamin move more toward the political. With this tension in mind, it’s fascinating to see how Adorno describes Benjamin’s mystical tendencies in his essay “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin.” In Adorno’s descriptions we can see that he was grappling with Walter Benjamin’s mystical influences and the mystical aspects of his work. To be sure, one can sense Adorno’s anxiety around this subject.

Adorno begins his attempt with a simple statement about the main, singular theme of “Benjamin’s philosophy”:

The reconciliation of myth is the theme of Benjamin’s philosophy. (234, Prisms)

After he points this out, Adorno notes that this theme, “as in good musical variations,” “rarely states itself openly.” Rather, it hides and has to be read by way of hermeneutics that is acutely aware of the things we find in esoteric texts. Adorno associates this kind of hermeneutics with Kabbalah and, strangely enough, blames Kabbalah (and Gershom Scholem, indirectly) for the theme’s failure to be stated in a clear manner and “legitimated”:

Instead it remains hidden and shifts the burden of its legitimation to Jewish mysticism, to which Benjamin was introduced in his youth by his friend, Gershom Scholem, the distinguished student of cabbala. (234)

Because of this influence, Adorno is confused. He knows Benjamin was influenced by Kabbalah but he doesn’t know to “what extent” Benjamin was “influenced by the neo-platonic and antinomian-messianic tradition.” Apparently, Benjamin never told him and kept the extent of his influence to himself. Benjamin didn’t shoot from the hip; he kept his cards to himself. But there is much evidence that he did make use of the mystical-textual ruse.

There is much to indicate that Benjamin – who hardly ever showed his cards and who was motivated by a deeply seated opposition to thought of the shoot-from-the-hip variety…- made use of the popular mystic technique of pseudo-epigraphy.

Adorno suspects he did this because Benjamin no longer believed that one could access truth through “autonomous reflection.” The text is “sacred.” And like a Torah exegete, one needs to be surprised by the truth, to come across it by way of textual commentary and criticism. Instead of language being the “bearer of meaning or even expression,” Benjamin thought of language as the “crystallization of the ‘name.’”(234).

Why would Benjamin do this?

Adorno surmises, after grappling with Benjamin’s mystical tendencies, that Benjamin appealed to the notion of the sacred text because he was looking to save something of the “theological heritage” from oblivion:

He transposed the idea of the sacred text into the sphere of enlightenment, into which, according to Scholem, Jewish mysticism itself tends to culminate dialectically. His ‘essayism’ consists in treating profane texts as though they were sacred. This does not mean that he clung to theological relics or, as religious socialists, endowed the profane with transcendent significance. Rather, he looked to radical, defenseless profanation as the only chance for the theological heritage which squandered itself in profanity. (234)

The “key to the picture puzzles is lost,” but, says Adorno, they “must, as a baroque poem about melancholy says, ‘speak themselves.’”(235). Adorno mocks this when he suggests that this “procedure resembles Thorstein Veblen’s quip, that he studied foreign languages by staring at each word until he know what it meant”(235). In other words, simply looking at words – just looking at them – would in some way save something of a theological heritage. This suggests form, but not content. Adrono says that, given this approach to language, “the analogy” between Benjamin and “Kafka is unmistakable.” However, while Kafka retained, in his most “negative” moments, an “element of the rural, epic tradition,” Benjamin retains the more “urban.” Although Adorno’s rural/urban contrast is interesting, he doesn’t develop it. Apparently, it’s just a side note.

The next line shows us that Adorno just gives up: Adorno skips to Benjamin’s “mature period” because grappling with Benjamin’s mystical character makes him too anxious and, quite frankly, frustrated. This Benjamin, the mystical one, is “immature.” Adorno wants to deal with the more mature Benjamin who apparently leaves mysticism behind.

Adorno tells us that Benjamin exchanged the mystical exegetical hermeneutic for a more political one:

During his mature period, Benjamin was able to give himself over to socially critical insights without there being the slightest mental residue, and still without having to ban even one of his impulses. Exegetical power became the ability to see through the manifestations and utterances of bourgeois culture as hieroglyphs of its darkest secret – as ideologies. (235)

What many people might miss is that this kind of Benjamin, the more political one, is in Adorno’s comfort zone. He doesn’t have to grapple with this side of Benjamin’s work. To be sure, while Brecht wanted Benjamin to drop Kafka and the mystical, Adorno prompted Benjamin to create an “image of the bow” as the model for his Kafka essay: it would retain the tension between the political and the mystical.

But, as we can see from the above passage, Adorno had little patience for this. He had no interest in Benjamin’s mystical influences because, as we saw above, Benjamin could not “legitimate” his main theme. The “reconciliation of myth,” for Adorno, had to be legitimated through an exegesis directed at “bourgeois culture” and its “darkest secret…ideologies.” Anything short of that made Adorno anxious. We also see that what Adorno was anxious about is the fact that he had no idea how influenced Benjamin was by neo-Platonism and the antinomian-messianic tradition. One wonders why. Perhaps Adorno was worried that if Benjamin was very influenced by these mystical traditions and beliefs, his interest in political exegesis would ultimately be of secondary importance to him. And that worry is legitimate since that would suggest that Benjamin was more interested in the possibility of religion and faith than in politics.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html

Colorado’s Suburban Firestorm Shows the Threat of Climate-Driven Wildfires is Moving Into Unusual Seasons and Landscapes

Backyard fences, decks and landscaping helped spread the flames through suburban neighborhoods and shopping malls baked by global warming.

By Bob Berwyn
January 7, 2022

The Marshall Fire continued to burn out of control on Dec. 30, 2021 in Broomfield, Colorado. Credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

When he saw smoke in the air around Boulder, Colorado on Dec. 30, Tom Veblen walked up a trail near his home to check it out. Veblen, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who has been studying forest ecology, wildfires and climate change since the mid-1970s, said he could see that the Marshall Fire, on the southern edge of the city, was already jumping over distances of several hundred yards.

The winds were so strong that he said he struggled to open his car door, and to stay on his feet in the powerful gusts. Wooden fences separating yards in the suburbs sprawling in the distance looked like burning fuses, as winds gusting faster than 100 mph pushed the flames along them to ignite decks, roofs and residential landscaping. The firestorm would eventually engulf shopping malls and a hotel.

As a resident of a neighborhood he had previously believed to be a safe distance from the fire-prone forests, Veblen felt a sudden and unfamiliar sense of vulnerability.

“Sure, I knew that Chinook winds could drive winter grassland fires to spread very rapidly, but in the past we just did not have all the driving factors align so perfectly—wet spring producing abundant grass fuels, one of the warmest and driest June-Decembers on record and then an ignition at the base of the mountains.” Local topography also contributed to the intensity, with a canyon opposite the fire acting like a nozzle, blasting winds from the peaks onto the flames and pushing the fire east into suburban neighborhoods.

The Marshall Fire ultimately burned some 6,200 acres, destroying at least 1,084 homes and seven commercial structures, before it was largely smothered by a New Year’s Eve snowfall. On Wednesday, investigators reported they had found partial human remains assumed to be those of one of the two people still missing after the fire. Insured losses are estimated at about $1 billion, making it Colorado’s most destructive fire on record in terms of property loss.

In the days since the fire, Veblen said he’s had many conversations with neighbors and friends, some feeling a combination of survivor’s guilt and post traumatic stress disorder, and all wondering how worried they should be about wildfires burning into suburbia in the future.

“I told them that, this winter, we’re probably going to be OK,” he said. But with the warming and drying climate shortening the snow season and desiccating grasses and brush more each year, chances are growing that similar drought, heat and wind will align more frequently to drive wildfires into the cold seasons and developed landscapes where they were once rare.

In the meantime, few residents of rapidly expanding suburbs in which most of the vegetation has been planted by homeowners and developers realize that they are living in an expanding “Wildland Urban Interface,” or WUI, in which wildfires can threaten their homes and lives. In some areas with little natural vegetation, wooden fences and decks, wood-framed houses, flammable roofs and landscaping are the biggest source of fuel, which can burn down into glowing chunks that are lofted by high winds to help a fire hopscotch through neighborhoods.

“We could have another fire starting in Sunshine Canyon in some of those grassy areas and burn right down into Boulder,” he said. “We could call it a freak event, but we know that it’s not. It’s just a matter of those conditions setting up again.”

Jordan Hymes gets a hug from her grandmother Nancy Grigon, left, as her grandfather Guy, right, looks towards their burned out subdivision in the Coal Creek Ranch subdivision in the aftermath of the Marshall Fire on Dec. 31, 2021 in Louisville, Colorado. Hymes and her family lost their home of ten years. The fire may have potentially burned 1,000 homes and numerous business. The fast moving fire was stocked by extremely dry drought conditions and fierce winds, with gusts topping 100 mph, along the foothills. Credit: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A visit Friday to the towns devastated by the Marshall Fire by President Biden, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Boulder), could help jump-start the conversations needed to address the threat, he said.

“The important message our society needs to hear from them is that this is an example of a climate-enabled event, and the probability of similar events will continue to increase as we have continued warming,” he said. “Unless we keep fossil fuels in the ground, these events are going to get more frequent and worse.”
New Climate, New Fuels and New Fires

“It’s clear the climate change is increasing the likelihood of these types of events,” said University of Montana fire ecologist Phil Higuera, who is currently a visiting fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studying the relative influence of climate, vegetation and human activity on wildfire trends.

“What I don’t want to see is a reaction of, ‘Oh, this is such an extreme event that we can’t do anything about it,’” he said. “Yes, this fire was very bad luck, but we shouldn’t be rolling the dice with fire in December.”

Yet research, including a landmark 2019 study of fire weather indices, shows that global warming is loading those dice for more winter fires. Warmer temperatures and decreasing precipitation increasingly leave fuels like trees and brush tinder dry late in autumn and early winter, and increase the probability that snow-free Decembers will leave grasses, decks and roofs uncovered and vulnerable to wind-driven sparks and embers that could ignite them.

What used to be the start of the season that brought snow to the West and cool, rainy conditions to many other parts of the country is now sometimes more like late summer. Even if global warming didn’t ignite the Marshall Fire, “there really is a seasonality change that is the main climate factor,” said UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain, who studies extremes like fires and floods. “Usually by this time of year, there is just more moisture on the ground.”

For more than 20 years the region has endured alarmingly rapid aridification that has shrunk snowpacks, dried up river flows and lowered groundwater levels. Denver, just south of the Marshall Fire, experienced one of its longest snowless stretches on record just prior to the blaze, while much of the West blistered through an extreme autumn heat wave.

Winter fires are not unheard of in Colorado, or in grassland like where the Marshall Fire was first sighted, Swain noted.

“That is not quite as surprising as what happened next,” he said. “It started there, burned a few hundred acres within 10-15 minutes, then it came across shopping malls … a significant extent of tract homes, a fair bit of vegetation in people’s yards and city parks. This is not a wild place, not a remote place.”

“That’s why we get these eerie images,” he said, alluding to social media posts of people fleeing from shopping mall pizza parlors and medical workers watching the fire from a hospital window as near-hurricane force wind gusts pushed fire and smoke plumes east into the towns of Superior, with a population of 13,077, and Louisville, with 20,860 residents.

The images of fires around shopping malls are jarring, Swain said, “And yet as bewildering as it is, we’ve seen it in any number of large, wind-driven fires in recent years.”

Swain said several recent California fires were similar to the Marshall Fire, including the 2017 Tubbs Fire that burned more than 5,000 structures in Santa Rosa, the 2018 Camp Fire that killed more than 80 people when it destroyed the town of Paradise, and the Carr Fire, also in 2018, which jumped the Sacramento River in Northern California to spread into Redding, a city of 90,000 people.

Swain said the temperatures on the day of the Marshall Fire ignited were unremarkable for December in Boulder, with highs in the 40s. But that contrasted sharply with a “multi-month period of almost continuously balmy and record-warm temperatures leading up to this event, with many days making into the 60s and 70s during October and November and overnight lows rarely getting below freezing,” he said. “It was those antecedent record warm and dry conditions that were key in setting the stage.”

And the winds that drove the fire were like nothing he had ever encountered before. “The strongest I have ever experienced anywhere in the world while outdoors,” said Swain, who had to wear protective glasses to protect his eyes from airborne pebbles and roof shingles, with gusts “rushing downward over the Front Range foothills, creating very erratic windflow and occasional tornado-strength vortices. At one point, I witnessed one of these clear-air vortices cross the road and uproot a tree.”

With the increasing confluence of extreme fire weather conditions like high winds and extended droughts and heat waves, “there are a lot of places that are at similar risk, including many of the suburban areas around the Front Range,” Swain said. “But it’s really hard to prepare. There aren’t any simple interventions.”
Preparing for Wildfires in Suburbia

One part of the solution clearly lies in revising building codes to ensure that most construction and landscaping materials are non-flammable, even in areas that appear to be far from wildfire threats, said Veblen, an expert in the geography of fire. Such measures are becoming more common in areas where fire hazards are widely recognized, and the destruction of the Marshall Fire could inform how the boundaries of those zones are drawn in the future.

Since fires cross between jurisdictions, Veblen said that state rules would be most useful, but are unlikely to happen in Colorado, a home rule state where most land use decisions are made by local governments. So that leaves it up to county commissioners, “who need to feel they have the political support of the people so they can resist the influence of the building and real estate interests, which nearly always oppose any mandatory measures that make building more costly,” he said.

A meaningful change to building practices could also be spurred by the insurance industry, which could make sure that people who, for example, build with flame-resistant brick, pay less for fire insurance policies than those who build with flammable materials.

Apart from the built environment, he said the Marshall Fire will also trigger some “serious rethinking” of wildfire mitigation and the management of open space and parklands, which are among the key amenities that make the nearby homes desirable in the first place.

“We know that up until 1950 it was mostly ranchland,” he said, with grazing cattle keeping grasses short and less prone to fire. Residential development started after World War II and accelerated in the 1970s.

“The most important thing we’ve done is change the fuels by putting structures all over the foothill ecotone,” Veblen said. Some early reports on the Marshall Fire suggest the fire may have slowed down when it reached one of the few small areas where cattle still munch the grass, so it could be that managed grazing could be a fire mitigation strategy, he added. Restoring wetlands and stream corridors to the point that they sustain live vegetation could also help by adding moist fire buffers to the landscape.

The Marshall Fire and similar blazes burning in unusual landscapes and seasons could also challenge assumptions about how to reduce the wildfire hazard in areas far from the towns that burned—the fire-prone zone where forests spill off the lower slopes of the Rockies onto the plains. There, the long-standing thinking has been to thin woody fuels.

“But if you thin out ponderosa pine, it increases resources for grass to grow,” Veblen said. “So we said, ‘Sure, let’s have some grass fires, that will be beneficial.’ But no one was thinking about this. Wow, this fire event is changing my perspective on where it is or is not safe from fire.”

Bob Berwyn
Reporter, Austria
Bob Berwyn an Austrian-based freelance reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

Related

Dangerous Air: As California Burns, America Breathes Toxic Smoke


Fires Fuel New Risks to California Farmworkers


Europe Seeks Solutions as it Grapples With Catastrophic Wildfires

Conspicuous Consumption 

Black Friday Update – California Flash Mob Robbers Won’t Be Stopped, Will Spread, Says Ex-Chief


Bruce Haring
Sat, November 27, 2021, 9:30 AM·2 min read


A former Philadelphia police commissioner predicted Friday that mass robbery crews would spread out across the country, given their success in a recent spate of California attacks on retailers. His prediction proved correct on Black Friday.

Charles Ramsey, the ex-Philadelphia commissioner, said there’s “no question” that the trend will occur elsewhere.

“This is something now that I really unfortunately think is going to spread,” Ramsey told CNN on Thursday. “Right now it’s in California, but it will spread, there’s no question about it.”

UPDATE: The rising tide of flash mob thieves hit the Bottega Veneta store in the Beverly Grove shopping district on Black Friday at 5:21 PM. LAPD reports that one robber pepper-sprayed a victim as his teammates grabbed merchandise.

Elsewhere, a Home Depot in Lakewood, Calif. was hit at 7:55 PM. An estimated eight people stole sledgehammers, wrenches and assorted hammers, fleeing in 10 getaway cars.

In Minnesota, an estimated 30 people robbed a Best Buy store in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. They entered the Burnsville, Minnesota store shortly after 8 PM and made off with electronics gear.

Chicago saw three stores in the Wicker Park neighborhood robbed within one hour on Black Friday.

California’s Bay Area and Los Angeles have been particularly hard hit by the flash mob attacks in the last week. Six smash-and-grab robberies took place in the Fairfax District, Beverly Grove and Hancock Park on Friday.

Last Wednesday, another robbery happened at a Los Angeles-area Nordstrom. The store at the Westfield Topanga & The Village shopping center in Canoga Park was hit at about 7 p.m.

A group of at least five men, one wearing an orange wig, entered the store and stole seven or eight purses before fleeing the scene and jumping into a newer model gray Ford Mustang that sped away from the scene, according to reports from ABC7 and KCAL9. They stole an estimated $20,000 in merchandise.

Earlier in the San Francisco area, a crowd estimated at 80 people attacked another outlet in Walnut Creek.

Newsweek reported that a Burberry and Yves Saint Laurent outlet were also robbed last Friday.

Ramsey said that Philadelphia saw something similar a few years ago. “It was really, really difficult to get a handle on it,” said Ramsey. “What we found was, one, it was being organized through social media. So one of the things we started doing is paying close attention to social media.”

Flash mob smash-and-grabs continue at high-end stores in Los Angeles

Doug Smith
Thu, November 25, 2021

A security guard patrols the entrance of Nordstrom at the Grove mall on Tuesday.

 (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

A rash of flash mob thefts continued in Los Angeles as organized groups grabbed expensive merchandise in pre-Thanksgiving raids on stores in the Beverly Center and a Nordstrom in Canoga Park.

A security guard was attacked with bear spray as several people entered the Nordstrom at the Westfield Topanga & The Village shopping center in Canoga Park on Wednesday night, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a news release.

In interviews with local TV stations, LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said the burglars made off with several high-end purses.

Hamilton told CBS Los Angeles that extra officers had been deployed to the shopping center but the burglars were able to avoid them.

The LAPD was also investigating a similar incident in which groups entered several stores in the Beverly Center on Wednesday, grabbed merchandise and ran out.

Officers were pursuing leads to catch those involved, the news release said.

The break-ins came two days after an organized group broke into a Nordstrom at the Grove mall by smashing a window and stole thousands of dollars of merchandise.

Los Angeles police arrested three suspects in connection with that incident. Officers recovered several items of clothing, at least one cash register and gloves from the suspects' vehicle.

On Tuesday, LAPD Chief Michel Moore told the Police Commission that the department would be stepping up patrols and dedicating resources to some higher-end locations to deter the wave of mob thefts.

In another burglary Monday, six people entered a CVS pharmacy on the 5800 block of South Vermont Avenue in South Los Angeles and stole three cash registers, taking about $8,500 in cash, police said.

On Sunday, burglars used a sledgehammer to try to smash storefront windows at Louis Vuitton and Saks Fifth Avenue stores in Beverly Hills.

They were unable to get into the stores, and nothing was taken, according to police.

In Contra Costa County, Dist. Atty. Diana Becton announced Wednesday that three people have been arrested and charged in a burglary in which about 90 people stormed a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek on Nov. 20, using three separate entrances.

Parking 25 cars in front of the store, the group stole more than $100,000 in about a minute, a criminal complaint said.

One Nordstrom employee was pepper-sprayed, another assaulted with a knife and two struck or punched, the complaint said.

Dana Dawson, 30, Joshua Underwood, 32, and Rodney Robinson, 19, were arrested by the Walnut Creek Police Department and charged with conspiracy, burglary, robbery and organized retail theft.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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