Month: December 2024

from the archives FOXCONN revisited

~ nicholasjayboyes

Foxconn, Wisconsin, and Delusions of Grandeur 10 23 2020

In 2017 Foxconn and Donald Trump announced they would be building an LCD screen factory in Wisconsin.  Mount Pleasant was chosen to host the factory, south of Milwaukee, near Racine Wisconsin.

This was when the bourgeois Paul Ryan was speaker of the House of Representatives, the congressman from the district of what was promised by Foxconn to be a huge project.  Scott Walker, another Republican bourgeois, was governor then.  Donald Trump came to Wisconsin to officially open the project, digging the first shovel of soil in 2018 with the leader of Foxconn, Terry Gou.

It was done with fanfare, and reported by the press as a major accomplishment for Trump and his followers Paul Ryan and Scott Walker.   But from the start there were strange things about the factory, a 4 billion dollar state subsidy approved by Scott Walker, that was to arrive as 250 million dollars a year to Foxconn.  There was also the diversion of 7 million gallons a day of water from Lake Michigan, which was to be returned polluted.

Along the same lines there was little or no Environmental Impact Statement, the project was simply approved by the government to go forward.  

Perhaps at this point it should have been clear something was wrong with this picture.  There were no protests, but opposition to the factory due to ecological concerns was common among the people who inhabited the regions near the Great Lake that was going to be polluted to make the LCD Screens, with heavy metals.  It was also going to create air pollution on a large scale.

But the project seemed to be going through, and by 2018 work was underway building the beginnings of the factory. There were huge buildings constructed on land that had to be removed from the residents, often against their will.   A dome started to take shape, and the factory was being built.  The state and local government began investing 400 million dollars into construction of roads and bridges for the factory in Mount Pleasant. 

“Hopes were high among the employees who joined Foxconn’s Wisconsin project in the summer of 2018. In June, President Donald Trump had broken ground on an LCD factory he called “the eighth wonder of the world.” The scale of the promise was indeed enormous: a $10 billion investment from the Taiwanese electronics giant, a 20 million-square-foot manufacturing complex, and, most importantly, 13,000 jobs.

“Which is why new recruits arriving at the 1960s office building Foxconn had purchased in downtown Milwaukee were surprised to discover they had to provide their own office supplies. “One of the largest companies in the world, and you have to bring your own pencil,” an employee recalls wondering. Maybe Foxconn was just moving too fast to be bothered with such details, they thought, as they brought their laptops from home and scavenged pencils left behind by the building’s previous tenants. They listened to the cries of co-workers trapped in the elevators that often broke, noted the water that occasionally leaked from the ceiling, and wondered when the building would be transformed into the gleaming North American headquarters an executive had promised.

“The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.

“Soon, the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and playing games on their phones.

The Verge 

The Eighth Wonder of the World

10 23 2020

Foxconn was attempting to gain state money to build by gaming the system to make it look like they had been hiring, as the subsidy was based on how many employees they had hired. The office for Foxconn was being packed full of bureaucrats, to make the required number of employees to be able to get the Treasury’s money to keep building.  

It was the employees who began to see there was something wrong, that Foxconn was not what it seemed.  Working for Foxconn was a rough job, with no real work to do in the office, in a broken down old building.  

“Even the handful of jobs the company claims to have created are less than real: many of them held by people with nothing to do, hired so the company could reach the number required for it to get tax subsidy payments from Wisconsin. Foxconn failed at that objective, too: last week, Wisconsin rejected the company’s subsidy application and found it had employed only 281 people eligible under the contract at the end of 2019. Many have since been laid off.

“Foxconn did not return repeated requests for comment.

“It’s not unusual for either the Trump administration or Foxconn to make announcements that prove hollow. But for Foxconn, the show went on — for two years, the company, aided by the vocal support of the Wisconsin GOP, worked to maintain an illusion of progress in front of a business venture that never made economic sense.

The Verge ibid.

The jobs never came, and Foxconn would not get their subsidy.  But the money for the roads and bridges would be spent, all to host what was supposed to employ 13,000 workers, at a 10 billion dollar investment.  

The illusion Foxconn had of a partially completed factory that would soon be producing LCD Screens continued for several years, until now, where it is now obvious there will be no 10 billion dollar LCD factory in Mount Pleasant.  But in the leadup to this realization, the Republican bourgeoisie tried to mislead the public about the progress made by Terry Gou and his Foxconn factory.   

“That illusion has had real costs. State and local governments spent at least $400 million, largely on land and infrastructure Foxconn will likely never need. Residents were pushed from their homes under threat of eminent domain and dozens of houses bulldozed to clear property Foxconn doesn’t know what to do with. And a recurring cycle of new recruits joined the project, eager to help it succeed, only to become trapped in a mirage. 

“Foxconn would spend the next two years jumping from idea to idea — fish farms, exporting ice cream, storing boats — in an increasingly surreal search for some way to generate money from a doomed project. Frequent leadership changes, a reluctance to spend money, and a domineering corporate culture would create an atmosphere employees described as toxic. Many of the employees The Verge spoke with have since left the company, and all of them requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. It has been a baffling ordeal for the people who thought they were building the Silicon Valley of the Midwest — “Wisconn Valley,” Walker called it — all the more so because so many others still believe the vision.

The Verge ibid.

The broken promise of an LCD factory led to attempts to figure out how Foxconn could possibly make a profit doing something other than producing LCD Screens.  By this time desperation was starting to set in, and it was clear the factory would never produce LCD’s, or any commodity for that matter.

“Foxconn’s Wisconsin saga began two days after Trump’s inauguration, when the company’s founder and CEO, Terry Gou, told reporters he was considering building a $7 billion factory in the US and employing as many as 50,000 people.

“A contract with WEDC (Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, a state-run organization that administers the Foxconn deal and approves the tax subsidies if the hiring quotas are met) signed in November made it official: nearly $3 billion in “refundable” tax credits, most likely to be made in the form of direct payments to Foxconn. Combined with infrastructure the state promised to build, approximately $800 million in additional incentives mostly from the small town of Mount Pleasant, where the “Fab” was to be located, and other contributions, the package totaled more than $4 billion. In a best-case scenario, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found the state wouldn’t break even until 2043. Depending on how many people Foxconn hired, each job would cost taxpayers somewhere between $200,000 and more than a million dollars. The average subsidy in the US is around $24,000 per job. 

“Such announcements are far from unusual for Gou, and often, nothing comes of them. In Vietnam in 2007, in Brazil in 2011, in Pennsylvania in 2013, and in Indonesia in 2014, Foxconn announced enormous factories that either fell far short of promises or never appeared. Just this year, the industries minister of Maharashtra, India, which aggressively pursued one of Gou’s multibillion-dollar projects in 2015, finally confirmed the factory isn’t coming, saying the state had learned a lesson about believing businesses promising big investments.

Ibid.

Yet the illusion of Foxconn building in Wisconsin continued, and the subsidy for building was not negated until 2020, when a new governor, a member of the liberal progressive bourgeoisie Tony Evers, removed the subsidy. 

“…the 1,040 people Foxconn intended to hire by the end of 2018, per its contract with the state, or even the 260 needed in order to receive subsidies, an audit found the company had managed to hire only 113. At the Mount Pleasant campus, it had erected a single structure, a 120,000-square-foot space that sat virtually empty. Its very name, “the multi-purpose building,” seemed noncommittal. As for the promised LCD factory, the “Fab,” Foxconn boasted in a letter that a contractor had moved 4 million cubic yards of dirt. As 2018 came to an end, the company froze budgets and canceled planned career fairs. The project entered a complete stall. 

“Foxconn’s vacillations spilled into public view in January 2019, when Woo told Reuters, “In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory,” having finally discovered it was unprofitable to make LCDs in the US. The comment caused an uproar. State Republicans swiftly blamed Evers for driving Foxconn out; the administration expressed surprise at the change; Trump spoke with Gou, and Foxconn immediately announced that LCD production was back on. “Great news on Foxconn in Wisconsin after my conversation with Terry Gou!” Trump tweeted, claiming credit for bringing Foxconn to Wisconsin a second time.

Ibid.

In Works volume 4 I detailed when this occurred, Terry Gou’s admitting the factory could not be built in Wisconsin, as there was no way the company could compete in America. It looked like the end of Foxconn, until Donald Trump intervened to keep the illusion going, saying he was keeping the project going. At this point many of us were starting to question whether or not the factory would go forward.

“If the factory was meant to earn Trump’s goodwill, the January incident showed that the company couldn’t simply vanish as it had elsewhere. Foxconn was stuck in Wisconsin, and it needed to find a way to cut its losses. Employees at every level of the project were enlisted in a search for something — anything — Foxconn could do to generate revenue.

“In meetings at Racine’s City Hall, Foxconn representatives and city officials started developing a plan, elements of which Racine submitted to a competition called the Smart Cities Readiness Challenge in 2019: camera-festooned autonomous vehicles would patrol high-crime areas, the city said in its proposal, guided by 5G cells mounted on lamp posts. Self-driving vehicles — retrofitted golf carts at first, then shuttles as soon as 2020 — would ferry Racine’s workers to Foxconn’s campus. Foxconn, the city noted in the submission, was a “particularly important stakeholder” and would help provide financing and technology. 

“But when city officials started asking basic questions about the sort of infrastructure they needed to build in order to accommodate Foxconn’s technology, Foxconn employees found they were unable to get clear answers from the company. “They were losing confidence, and then we parade in more new shiny ponies, and more people who couldn’t answer what should have been easy questions,” an employee said.

“Foxconn only ever got as far as buying the golf carts. They arrived from China disassembled, in orange, pink, and other festive colors. One employee described them as “the biggest pieces of shit,” like something “bought off Wish.com.” Unable to make them autonomous, Foxconn put them in storage in the multipurpose building. At one point, the company discussed outfitting them with lights and turning them into security vehicles, but the subsidiary in charge of security refused to pay FEWI (Flying Eagle Wisconsin, the Foxconn subsidiary run by Alan Yeung initially tasked with laying the foundation for the Wisconsin project) for the carts, according to one employee. As the divisions bickered, bored employees would come down from the Milwaukee headquarters to race the carts around the empty building, until the batteries finally died.

Ibid.

It looks like Racine was easily fooled by promises of high tech industrial development from capitalists; in the form of a company from Taiwan, that would make a massive amount of profit doing manufacturing in Mount Pleasant. The fraud is a product of the more reactionary bourgeois desperation to appear to be making progress by partnering with large capitalist companies, that society would miraculously prosper if the workers just accepted their leadership, and supported them.

Racine should have known they were being taken, that Scott Walker was not telling them the whole truth about who was going to invest in their city.  But their trust of Republicans led them to believe the false promises delivered by a billionaire with the support of Donald Trump, Paul Ryan. and Scott Walker. 

“Earlier partnerships announced with local companies like Rockwell Automation had been followed by total silence. (Employees say they quickly fizzled; Rockwell did not return a request for comment.) Of the $100 million gift Gou promised the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the school confirmed that only $700,000 ever arrived.

“The original plan had been grandiose: the sphere was to be the dot in the “i” of a complex of data centers spelling out “Fii” (Foxconn Industrial Internet)  when viewed from the air. But according to three employees, Foxconn balked at the cost. An employee with knowledge of the project said that Foxconn finally moved forward with the sphere — and only the sphere — when the architect told the company it had to put a deposit down for the steel if construction was going to finish in time for a long-promised visit from Trump.

“But the building without the data centers was just a glass orb in a field — at best, “really, really, really expensive office space,” in the words of one employee. Adding to Fii’s troubles, FEWI (Flying Eagle Wisconsin, the Foxconn subsidiary run by Alan Yeung initially tasked with laying the foundation for the Wisconsin project.), also trying to cut its losses, had “tricked” Fii into buying more land than was needed for the sphere, according to a second employee. A Foxconn executive briefly entertained an elegant solution, according to two employees: starting a Foxconn tree farm, so the company could get free trees for the terrarium-like interior of the sphere that Gou wanted, and sell the excess trees for profit.

“It’s endless,” said an employee, noting with frantic exasperation that the sorts of tropical trees Foxconn wanted can’t even grow in Wisconsin’s climate. “When you’re desperate and you have no product to sell and the only asset you have is land, what can you do? You build on it or you grow crops on it.”

Ibid.

The sphere now sits empty in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, surrounded by farmland.  There are roads to it though, thanks to the state that picked up the costs of building them to the factory.  The buildings that were supposed to be factories are now considered useful for storage.  Their official purpose is now this, storage.

“In many ways, the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is the physical manifestation of the alternate reality that has defined the Trump administration. Trump promised to bring back manufacturing, found a billionaire eager to play along, and now for three years the people of Wisconsin have been told to expect an LCD factory that plainly is not there. Into the gap between appearance and reality fell people’s jobs, homes, and livelihoods.

“The buildings Foxconn has erected are largely empty. The sphere has no clear purpose. The innovation centers are still vacant. The heart of the project, the million-square-foot “Fab,” is just a shell. In what an employee says was a final cost-cutting measure, only the portion that was to host the Trump visit was ever finished. Recent documents show the “Fab,” once intended for use as manufacturing, has been reclassified as a massive storage facility.

“WEDC, as part of its audit of the company’s 2019 subsidy application, had Foxconn survey its employees about what they were working on. Not a single respondent mentioned LCDs because no one is working on LCDs, and they never were.

“The project has fallen orders of magnitude short of its hiring and investment targets. WEDC found Foxconn had only 281 eligible employees at the end of 2019, 13 percent of what it had originally aimed for. (Many of the employees Foxconn tried to claim were paid too little or hired too late in the year to get a paycheck in 2019.) After this year’s layoffs, it is nowhere near meeting its 2020 target of 5,200 employees. Foxconn itself acknowledged, in its subsidy submission, that it has so far invested 2.8 percent of the $10 billion it promised. It has built less than 2 percent of the 20 million square feet of manufacturing space it originally planned. 

“The company’s desperate quest to maintain appearances caused it to fail repeatedly and in ways more destructive than mere ordinary failure would have been: local businesses were strung along, civil servants spent years figuring out what the company is doing, residents were removed from land the company didn’t need, and again and again recruits were lured in by the vision of a grand manufacturing renaissance in Wisconsin.

“That vision got Gou regular access to the White House during a trade war and gave Trump a groundbreaking and almost a ribbon-cutting, too. But maintaining the mirage required a culture of secrecy. Employees were warned not to talk to the press (including, specifically, me). Many were afraid to speak — afraid of getting fired, or of retribution even after they’d left. Publicly, the company issued announcement after announcement — innovation centers, career fairs, smart cities, AI 8K+5G, the AI Institute — each one erasing the memory of the last missed deadline. (One employee quipped that one of the few things Foxconn succeeded in making in Wisconsin was press releases.) The illusion was defended by GOP officials at all levels of government, from Mount Pleasant to the State Assembly to the White House, who accused anyone pointing out that the project was off track of trying to scuttle it for partisan ends, as if the existence of the factory were open to debate and positive thinking might make it real. 

“…in actual reality, the project has succeeded in manufacturing mostly this: an endless supply of wonderful things for the President to promise his supporters. This past weekend, in an interview with a local Wisconsin TV station, Trump insisted Foxconn had built “one of the most incredible plants I’ve ever seen” in Mount Pleasant and would keep its promises and more if he was reelected. 

The Verge

10 22 20

https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wisconsin-jobs-loophole-trump

It was another Trump promise that was an illusion. The grandiose claims of 13,000 jobs, 10 billion dollars for a small town in Wisconsin, was designed to fool people to support him.

Clearly all that would have occurred if Scott Walker was still Governor, and Paul Ryan Congressman, was the fraud would have continued.

But in the end it had to fail, and reality to make itself felt.  It was after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by the state to build the roads, bridges, etc. to support the Foxconn factory, which will never make LCD Screens, or employ 13,00 people.  

The factory is a monument to an illusion, and illusion of a bourgeois with worldly connections bringing investment into small town Wisconsin.  Although the office referred to in the article was in Milwaukee, Racine and Mount Pleasant are more like suburbs, the latter mostly rural.  It was to convince Trump’s rural following he could deliver investment, and this would result in prosperity.

It seems to have failed.  It is a relief that the LCD Screens will never be produced here, as it would damage the ecology of Lake Michigan, which is why I was always against it.  Hopefully if anything is produced there, it will have to have a real Environmental Impact Statement, not the farce we were handed last time.  But in reality, it looks like nothing will ever be produced there.  It is a dream of something that was an illusion, like Trump’s vision of America, that society would progress if everyone just believed capitalism was working. 

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

10 23 2020

From the Archive Article about Thomas Malthus

~ nicholasjayboyes

A Paradigm Shift Away from Laissez Faire Economic Ideas 5 1 2021

There is an idea that had gained traction in the 80’s in particular, that was if capitalists made large profits, and used the money as revenue, the workers would benefit.  This idea was called”laissez faire “.  There were also fantasies about not having to use the state to prop up capitalist industry.

The presence of this large group of people who are mostly service workers, producing mostly luxuries, restaurant workers, for instance, is part of capitalist industry.  Every increase in productivity displaces workers in industry; the machinery becomes more advanced, the labour less skilled, or redundant with the advances in machinery.  

This creates a constant industrial reserve army of workers, what Marx called attention to, who are lucky to find employment, and it is often unskilled if they do, as the job the worker used to do has been eliminated.   It is replaced with a machine, and an unskilled worker.

These workers who have been shed by modern industry are often forced into luxury production, or used as some form of menial servant.  The service industry is basically this.  This is supposed to be  a consolation for a displaced worker, that the wealth will trickle down somehow when the bourgeois create capital through the exploitation of the worker, and the worker can become a low wage service worker now that he is no longer producing necessary commodities.

They spend their revenue on these luxury goods, which do not increase profits.  Luxury production is not goods for the workers to consume.  This form of production is for the bourgeoisie, and is for them an expenditure, rather  than an investment. 

The jobs this supports are not much different  from menial servants, which are what Malthus suggested the workers should be thankful for; a large number of workers displaced by industrial progress harnessed by capitalists who are reduced to menial servants. We see this in the number of service occupations that are not far removed from Mathus’s menial servants.

There is more profit to be made as industry progresses, and machinery that displaces workers increases surplus value when productivity increases. It creates the industrial reserve army of workers, a capitalist phenomenon.  The work is unskilled, and throttling the capitalist mechanism forward creates these workers. 

Perhaps they could content themselves as being porters, barmaids, massage workers, etc.  The surplus value has to go somewhere, its production can only be reinvested to a certain degree.  The population rising justifies the surplus; it is for more workers to be able to labour. 

But what happens to the surplus when the workers can only consume so much of it, as they are paid wages that are not able to consume all they are producing?  If they were paid the value of their labour by the capitalist, there would no longer be a capitalist.  The whole system is based on producing a surplus, and it has to be consumed somehow.  

This provided Malthus and the bourgeois a way out, namely increasing the number of servants and menial labourers.  This would seem to be a root of the laissez faire economic ideas which were popular in the  80’s.

Advancement of machinery lowers the value of the product.  It is not the fault of machinery the capitalist relationship of exploitation exists.  It is a social order, a historical condition. It is the way it is used, that more expensive machinery reduces the workers control of the means of production.  

The presence of large numbers of people who are in menial labour indicates a surplus is coming from somewhere, supporting the unproductive classes.  Trickle down ideas justified the increased number of these people.

But the question of if it really did is being rejected.  It may have created more capital, but it increased the proportion of the working class, and left about 1,000 families in control of most of the joint stock companies shares.  They control the surplus value, and laissez faire was a theory that supported them.  The idea of the state money being somehow separate from profit was just plain silly, every crisis bailouts of trillions of dollars occurs with the state money. 

This is because taxes come from profit, and it is claimed by those who pay into the pot, so to speak, of state money.  It is used in times of crisis to keep the business making a profit.

Clearly all capitalists do this.  Yet they suggest the state should have less role in capitalist industry, which is a contradiction.

But the question of where the surplus goes that cannot be reinvested seems to be answered by expenditure of revenue by our capitalist.  The unproductive expenditure would seem to be at odds with abstinence, which is often preached as justification for a bourgeois to have gotten control of business and made a profit, allowing for them to exploit the working class. 

On one hand you have the capitalist wanting more consumption of his commodity, on the other hand his workers are paid minimum wage, and expected to be spendthrifty.

The consumption of luxury items and menial servants, the basis of the restaurant industry, is from the surplus value created in production for capitalist enjoyment.  It doesn’t matter to them the dishwasher or busboy is an unskilled worker getting minimum wage, working 12 hours a day.  This is supposed to be right, the wealth is trickling down.  But from the perspective of the worker the condition is considerably different.  On one hand you have massive wealth, accumulating capital, on the other an industrial reserve army of workers, who have to labour in luxury production or as service workers for the minimum of wages.  Trickle down economics not only justifies their position,  it perpetuates the exploitation of a class who is destined to labour. 

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

5 1 2021

Ecological Material Conditions and Theories of Value

~ nicholasjayboyes

Ecological Material Conditions and Theories of Value

The climate is changing, it is getting hotter everywhere, due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.  Heavy reliance on fossil fuels has actually increased the global temperatures.

  • “Since 1901, the average surface temperature across the contiguous 48 states has risen at an average rate of 0.16°F per decade. Average temperatures have risen more quickly since the late 1970s (0.31 to 0.54°F per decade since 1979). Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record for the contiguous 48 states have occurred since 1998, and 2012 and 2016 were the two warmest years on record.
  • “Worldwide, 2016 was the warmest year on record, 2020 was the second-warmest, and 2011–2020 was the warmest decade on record since thermometer-based observations began. Global average surface temperature has risen at an average rate of 0.17°F per decade since 1901 , similar to the rate of warming within the contiguous 48 states. Since the late 1970s, however, the United States has warmed faster than the global rate.

United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Climate Change Indicators

The temperature in Lytton British Columbia on June 29th 2021 was 49.6 degrees Celciuis.  

“Lytton, a village in the Fraser Canyon located about 260 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, also saw record-breaking highs of 47.9 C on Monday and 46. 6 C on Sunday.  Before this week, the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada was 45 C in Saskatchewan in 1937.

“On Tuesday alone, seven locations in B.C. met or exceeded the 45 C mark, including Lytton, Cache Creek (47.4 C), Grand Forks (45 C), Kamloops (47.3 C), Kelowna (45.2 C), Lillooet (46.7 C) and Osoyoos (45 C).’

“The BC Coroners Service said there has been a significant increase in deaths since Friday, with extreme heat suspected to have played a role.

“From Friday to Monday, there were 233 reported deaths in the province, up from an average 130 deaths over a four-day period.

“In Vancouver, police said Tuesday they have responded to more than 65 sudden deaths since the heat wave began on Friday. The city normally sees about three or four sudden deaths every day.

CBC 6 29 2021

Climate change is racking our world.  Deforestation in British Columbia, due to the logging and timber industries, who have been at it for years, are a contributing factor.  Cutting the forest, especially the old growth, raises temperatures.  Photosynthesis in plants creates oxygen, it breaks the Carbon Dioxide, fixing the carbon in the plant, and and storing it in the process.  The Oxygen is given off from the photosynthesis, which all animals breathe.

Deforestation removes the forests ability to fix CO2 from the atmosphere; the cut trees are no longer producing oxygen, and transpiring water, cooling the climate.  British Columbia, like Alaska, has been cutting the old growth pristine forests to make a profit.  In twisted logic they feel the forests are just sitting there doing nothing, they see no value in the forests, so they cut them down mercilessly.

This has been the dominant economic idea since Adam Smith wrote Wealth Of Nations, when a forest was seen as being a free resource, sometimes with rent paid to the landowner to log it, but basically a resource to capitalists, when we consider the landowner as being one of them.  To make a long story short, the value of a commodity is how much labour is required to produce it. The current idea of a forest is it is worth the amount of trees or minerals beneath it.  It is open game for capitalists to remove the trees and mine the metals or petroleum underneath it.

Recognition of forests as important for stopping climate change is only just beginning.  The idea of an old growth forest as a resource with a price tag is the paradigm.  It is not seen as a priceless work of art for future generations of humans or sovereign ecological territory, rather the value of it is as a commodity that can be bought or sold.

By only seeing activity that creates a material commodity as being productive, capitalism is rapidly destroying the ecology.  In BC and Alaska this perverse logic still exists, in a condition not much different from Adam Smith’s time.  The consciousness of the human being has been expanding with technological development, we now have satellites in space orbiting Earth, and we can map out climate change scientifically.   Our data shows consistent warming in the last century, which is damaging ecology.  In the past we could only record temperatures on the ground, often without even computers to help us. 

Now we are mapping climate change with powerful computers, and the Republican bourgeoisie are left to question the science. 

This group of dinosaurs is caught in capitalist logic, which considers ecology to have no value besides as exchange value, money, which can be had by logging.

This paradigm has to change.  The logging of old growth in BC and Alaska is resulting in climate change.  The economic ideas have to change, ecology must have value beyond simply a resource for human exploitation.  The land has to be viewed as more than a commodity which only has exchange value as a resource to exploit, sold to create capital. 

A revolutionary shift in consciousness is taking hold, with climate change starting to figure into the capitalist mind.  Even large capitalists are seeing the science, the liberal progressive bourgeoisie is shifting towards acknowledging climate change as real, and recognizing that society is going to have to change their economic ideas to stop the ecological consequences of uncontrolled exploitation of the ecology for exchange value.  The Republican bourgeois are way behind, Donald Trump disbelieved climate change was real, he thought it was a hoax designed to keep the ruling class weak, and hinder the ability of capitalists to make a profit.  The ruling class seems to still be largely subordinate to Trump; he is still the leader of their party.  

Perhaps it is an issue of quality, where the right not to make a mess is part of the value of a commodity.  Clearly simply the amount of labour required to log a forest cannot continue to be the value of a commodity.  Something is going to have to give, political economy is not a completed science.  The ideas of value and surplus value are still evolving, our science demands we formulate new ideas of value including the life of other species, ecology, in what we consider the value of a commodity to be.  This shift in material reality, a world where climate change is recognized, and forests are not simply judged as x amount of dollars worth of trees, has to be the reality.

Specifically we have to change the practice of the value of a commodity to include ecology as an integral part of it.  The right not to make a mess, the idea behind recycling, is there to guide us. The days are gone when a forest can simply be exploited with no real view of climate change and ecological destruction.  Political economy is coming with, its laws changing with new ideas, it is the essence of the science.

Society is ready for further progress. It is up to us to figure how the value of a commodity is not simply what the base cost of exploitation of ecology is, rather social and ecological factors figure into the value of a commodity.  A paradigm shift brought forward by the natural sciences, meshing with economic ideas.  A revolutionary change of the consciousness level of the human being.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

From the Archive: Historical Points on the Ecological Era. Afghanistan War Remembered 3 Years Later

~ nicholasjayboyes

Events in Afghanistan as the Army Leaves There 8 14 2021

As Joseph Biden prepares to completely leave Afghanistan on the 31st of August, 2021, the Taliban has made enormous gains in placing areas under their control. The major cities are falling daily, the Taliban now close to conquering Kabul, the largest city and the Capital.

Biden has said ““One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me,” Biden added.” in the Washington Post.

It is a bold move to end the 20 year long war, started by Republican George Bush II. It’s been a Republican war, with Donald Trump pumping up the air war, like George Bush II did. Barack Obama did keep the war effort going; but it was something he inherited from George II. Under his rule they got Bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks on the New York skyscrapers. They found him in Pakistan, living comfortably in a modest house with a garden. He was killed by the Americans, mostly as revenge. But the war was started by George II, and perpetuated by Trump.

Since the start of the war, there was always the question of what the goals were. It was for capitalism, obviously, but it was never really enunciated clearly, as it was in Iraq. There it was nationalized oil, which was an accomplishment of the Baath Socialist Party. Thus overthrow the government, and get the wells back under Exxon Mobil and Chevron making a profit again. The invasion of Kuwait started with the wells there being nationalized by Saddam Hussein. The goals were clear, not to allow for the petroleum to be the property of the Iraqi people through nationalized ownership, as they were under the Baath Party.

But Afghanistan always sort of looked like revenge. Why was it necessary for George II to go to war? To get even with the Taliban for attacking New York, but it could have been handled differently with more level headed thinking. Iran is currently under American sanctions, and it drives them nuts. It can seriously hinder the regular functioning of the ruling class. Afghanistan could have simply been put under sanctions, until they gave up Bin Laden. It may have not been as severe a punishment viewed by all the world’s people, a message not to fight the Americans. But it may have averted what is now obviously becoming a military failure the minute the Afghans have to fight for themselves.

George II, like Donald Trump, did not command a majority in universal suffrage. Yet George II was fighting “dictatorship vs. democracy”. Trump too, often called his bourgeoisie “pro democracy”. This was connected to the 9/11 incident; the rest of the world did not see the legitimacy of George II as a leader of democracy, and someone attacked the country under his leadership. It was like Trump, everybody knew he did not command a majority, yet we were all expected to go along with it.

It was George II’s war, he was a “war president”. The Republican bourgeoisie he represented should be remembered as having started the war, Biden’s liberal progressive bourgeois the end of it.

The Taliban came to power fighting the Soviet Union, and they were trained and armed by the Americans in the war against the Soviets. They found them in Pakistan’s religious schools, where the Taliban would claim their name from, Taliban means “student” in Pashtun. They were recruited to fight by the Americans, and they defeated the Russians.

The point is, the bourgeois taught these people how to fight, and they turned against them. Now it looks like the Americans and their NATO European Union support have also lost the war there. Kabul may fall shortly, as have Kandahar, Herat, etc. Short of something strange happening, Afghanistan is lost. The war is ending, without a victory for NATO or the Americans. No profit is going to be made there, the investment of a trillion dollars in the war effort there for 20 years is lost.

There are Republicans who still want to fight war there, but given the failure of the Afghan Army, it certainly looks like the only thing that was stopping the Taliban from taking power was the presence of the American Army there. The minute NATO and Americans pulled people out of there, the country started falling. They had 20 years to train the Afghans, would another 20 years be enough for them to take care of themselves?

Biden may be in favor of the Embargo against Cuba, and upset with China. But under his leadership the country is making a hard choice that Trump was unable to make; to extricate themselves from a conflict that they were not winning. Although not everybody agrees with it, he did attain the sanction of universal suffrage to govern, and it was his decision based on the will of the majority. Perhaps that above all else will be remembered in the end.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 14 2021

Here’s another one from the archive:

Afghanistan Falls to the Taliban 8 19 2021

On the 15th of August, 2021, America lost the war against Afghanistan. The largest city, the capital Kabul, fell to the Taliban. The rest of the country by this point was mostly under Taliban control, and the capital falling ended America’s 20 year war, which was a failure.

A nonessential evacuation order (NEO) followed, with a scene resembling the fall of Saigon, an airlift operation from the airport in Kabul. The rush of thousands of Afghans and others attempting to board aircraft to escape resulted in several deaths, with some clinging to military aircraft during takeoff.

About a day later, the military part of the airport was up and running again, with a few thousand Army men guarding the retreating Americans. The press was able to exit, and a few thousand Americans, some diplomats.

Ashraf Ghani, the hand picked diplomat who was running the government, fled to the United Arab Emirates, where he is currently. He fled the country as the government fell, NATO and the American’s leader who was responsible for Afghanistan.

Joseph Biden joins the ranks of Harry Truman, who lost in Korea, John F. Kennedy, who failed to stop the Cuban revolution, and Gerald Ford, who saw the loss of Vietnam. The repeated failure of the Army to win victories against people in the developing world, in this case against a group with no aircraft, in the face of a massive aerial bombing campaign, showed again the weakness of the bourgeoisie, unable to stop peasants after 20 years and more than a trillion dollars spent, on the Afghan Army.

For years we were used to hearing the desperation of the Taliban, when the Americans were losing it was due to suicide bombers, etc. The way it looks now is the minute they started pulling out the men, which Donald Trump had originally agreed to, but could not as he was not elected, Biden was instead, and Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. If anything Biden delayed the inevitable; Trump said May 20th the war would end, BIden was 2 months later.

Yet the Republicans, and some Democrats, are suggesting this was Biden’s fault, that he misled the people by ending war there. We all know Trump’s agreements were often lies, that he often said he would do something, then failed to carry out his decisions; that things would have looked different if Joseph Biden had not commanded a majority of 7 million votes to Trump.

The only difference would have been we all know Trump was lying when he agreed to remove the American Army on May 20th.

Joe Biden stuck to his word, and honored the agreement, and the rest is history. Biden’s decision was a courageous one, standing up the Pentagon in a war started by Republicans under George Bush II, continued by Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The bourgeois finally had to admit the war was costing them men, and was not returning treasure or profits. Even if there was victory, Afghanistan would never have brought the Americans the trillion dollars they spent there in the war. The people they had in their proxy army were mostly illiterate, some even had trouble taking basic commands, like adding up numbers.

Like Vietnam, the airlift is bringing back the bourgeoisie and their supporters from the Kabul airport, many lucky to have saved the skin on their backs. It is not clear how long the Nonessential Evacuation Order will take to be completed, perhaps until the Taliban have had enough. There are still thousands of people trying to fly out of Kabul, and only the military side of the airport is still flying.

It remains to be seen if this is a once in a generation spectacle. Syria was also lost, although it was not as clear looking. Trump had bombed Syria many times, and the Americans are not in control of Syria, Bashar Assad is still in power. They always said removal of Assad was the goal of the Army being deployed there. Another failure, although a slower less sensational one.

The war this time lasted 20 years, the longest yet, only to result in a loss. It must be quite demoralizing, to have lost thousands of men and a trillion dollars, in a small country without even an air force. George II got them into it, and was unable to win; Obama inherited what looks now like a hopeless battle from George II. It was remarkable it lasted this long, the pandemic made fighting in a conflict overseas without vaccinations, Trump’s predicament, impossible to maintain. Even with vaccines, the virus is still spreading, and more than 600,000 people in America have died from Covid 19. The military is just now starting to receive orders to vaccinate all their people. Not good conditions to be tooling around the other side of the world trying to stop peasant rebellion.

The blame lies with the first efforts to support the Taliban against the Soviet Union, which they won. But look what was left behind, the Taliban in power. The same group they armed and trained overthrew their American supported government. The rest of the blame lies with the Republican bourgeoisie, who chose war over sanctions when the skyscrapers were attacked in 2001.

They did get Bin Laden, but revenge was the main motive keeping the conflict going. With only capitalism the motive for fighting, things finally came to a head in August of 2021, when the Army they created was conquered, mostly without even a fight. The flight of Ashraf Ghani to the UAE symbolically ended the foreign invasion of Afghanistan.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 19 2021

Wait there’s more:

The American Occupation of Afghanistan Ends 8 30 2021

The last flight left Afghanistan loaded with the soldiers, ending almost exactly 20 years of war. The pictures of the helicopters evacuating the diplomats from the rooftop a powerful symbol of the end of American intervention in Afghanistan.

It was the second superpower to lose a war there in less than 50 years. First it was the Soviet Union that was removed from Afghanistan in 96’ by the Taliban, with American assistance. They supported the rebels who fought the war against the Communist Party there, and successfully removed the government the Soviet Union had established there.

The same Taliban would refuse to surrender Bin Laden, mastermind of the attacks in 2001 that struck the skyscrapers in New York. Bin Laden, who came from a royal family in Saudi Arabia, would eventually be caught in Pakistan, although at some point he was living in Afghanistan, according to the Americans.

America’s longest war would last 20 years, cost trillions of dollars, yet end in a retreat from the last remaining enclave of control, the Kabul airport. They airlifted a little over 100,000 people in a period of a few weeks; the spectacle of thousands of Afghans who got on the tarmac was another memorable event, much like the airlift from Saigon in 1975.

They got most of the Americans out, anyone left is now on their own in an Afghanistan no longer under the Americans and NATO. The last of the diplomats left, their embassy shuttered, its contents destroyed in order to keep it secret from the Taliban.

The agreement Donald Trump made with the Taliban to leave and end the war was accomplished by Joseph Biden, something that escaped the former, who tried to suggest if he won the election the soldiers would stop fighting by May. We all know Trump was notorious for lying, we came to expect it in the 4 years he was in power. The epitome of Trump lying was his suggestion that the landslide victory of Biden by 7 million votes in suffrage was a fraud. There are still some believers who think someone like me would vote twice.

Voting twice is fraud, Punishment for fraud includes the following: Jail or Prison sentence: A misdemeanor conviction could carry a sentence of up to a year in a local jail, while a felony conviction carries a maximum sentence of 20 to 30 years in federal prison. How would you like to have that on your criminal record? You would never get a job again. The idea that there were thousands of Milwaukeeans who voted twice is being entertained by the State Legislature here of late. Although Joe Biden was preferable to Trump, finding even a dozen ballots cast twice simply has not happened.

The point is we were used to the Republican bourgeoisie and their bold faced lies, and the argument seems to be that Trump would have changed his mind and the Taliban would not have taken power.

So here we are again, like lifting the mask mandates, something the Republicans said they wanted, a May 20th return of the Army home from Afghanistan they are now rejecting. The Covid 19 pandemic continues, the reactionaries afraid that getting vaccinated is really a shot that is going to affect your mind, and you will start liking Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

So here we go again, their own decisions resulting in reality. The pandemic is raging in the South, more than a thousand dead a day; Florida, Texas, Alabama etc. the epicenters of the Delta variant of Covid, due to the politicization of masks and vaccination by the Republicans,

All Biden did is do what Trump told us he wanted to do, like stopping mask mandates, ending the war, etc. It’s been their own decisions that have gotten them to where they are today, there is noone to blame but themselves.

And it was the Republican bourgeoisie who were in power when the war started, under similar conditions. Like Donald Trump, George Bush II did not command a majority in universal suffrage, yet it was “democracy vs dictatorship” in Iraq and Afghanistan. George II could have simply applied trade sanctions on Afghanistan, until they gave up Bin Laden.

Instead 20 years, trillions of dollars, and no treasure returning, American companies making a profit by employing Afghan workers, etc.

They taught the Taliiban how to overthrow the government when they fought the Soviet Union. They won, but in time the knowledge they gave them came back to haunt the Americans. The Taliban, armed with no airplanes; only guns, rocket launchers, and landmines have overthrown what was once a superpower. The nuclear weapons did not help them, or the night vision goggles, stealth aircraft, etc.

The Taliban are not a western movement. The ideas they have did not agree with the Soviet Union either. Are we really to believe that Nato and the Americans value the rights of women more than the Soviets did?

Yet the more liberal ideas of the west are trumpeted as what was lost to the Taliban. They could have just left Russia in control of Afghanistan and the rights of women if anything would be better than what the occupation brought. Equality was a value of the communists the Taliban removed in 96”.

We will soon see what the effects of this loss of territory means to places still occupied, like Iraq. If the oil gets nationalized again we will know for sure they lost. When ExxonMobil and Shell no longer pump the oil there will be no treasure returning home to American capitalists. Departures from bourgeois society such as industry capable of making profit that is not owned by capitalists always proves to be controversial.

It is not clear what Afghanistan is moving towards with the removal of Russia first than the Americans. But it was the fault of the bourgeoisie they are where they are today.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

8 30 2021

Fictitious Capital and Speculation

~ nicholasjayboyes

Fictitious Capital and Speculation  

The amount of money the national debt comprises is more than 30 trillion dollars according to the National Debt Clock website.  This money carries interest, and it is this process which is what is referred to below. 

“… fictitious capital,  the object of gambling on the stock exchange, which is actually nothing but the selling and buying of entitlement of a certain part of the annual tax revenue.”

Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value volume 3 p. 111

“ By fictitious capital Marx here means the capital of the National Debt which is brought into being by loans (of the bourgeois or bourgeois landowner state) and never intended to be invested as capital and on which the creditors are paid interest on the taxes, imposed on the people. “

Footnote in Prometheus books edition #40

“U.S. Budget Deficit & The National Debt. The National Debt is the total amount of money owed to all external parties by the US government. Most of that debt is in the form of outstanding government securities such as treasury bills, notes, and bonds that the government has issued.

Mar 22, 2022

Google search “is the national debt paid for with bonds or stocks?” 8 10 2022

The state’s money comes from profit, taxes are a subdivision of this profit. You have to first have a profit before the capitalist state can pay taxes, and the state’s money is not investment, at least it makes no profit. Rather it is revenue, and revenue refers to money spent that does not create surplus value, the object of capitalist production.  

All production is carried out to create surplus value, if there is state production it is something needed by capitalists they cannot produce and make a profit doing so, but is essential, like city buses, the passenger train, the highway system, etc. so the worker can, for instance, get to work in the factory on time.

The bond market is speculation on the state’s taxation in the future.  It is an investment on something that has not yet been created; there is no commodity 10 years from now when the bond matures that will be sold.  It is pure speculation on the income of taxes, gambling in the stock exchange on the states debts. 

Marx calls this “fictitious capital”, as it creates no real surplus value, rather is speculation on the annual tax money.  If it was capital it would make a profit. The company is not run firstly to pay taxes, then to make profit, rather the opposite, to make a profit then to subdivide this into taxes.  Industrial capital and agricultural capital create the surplus value, it is the unpaid section of the workday.  The state does not create surplus value, it is an expenditure of capitalists, and claimed by them as revenue. 

We are somehow supposed to feel that we have some say over taxes, as if the amount of taxes displayed on the paycheck would be the property of the worker if it did not have to be paid by the bourgeois.

Being privy to his tax expenditures is sort of interesting, perhaps we should have the whole profit printed on the paycheck?  If you want to hear the capitalists cry bloody murder, try bringing a vote on that. If the taxes did not have to be paid, there is no reason to assume the capitalist would not simply pay the worker the same, and keep the money.  It’s not like the worker is buying into something, an investment of sorts.  This money is directly from the profit, the worker does not choose how much he wants to give, and when liberal progressive bourgeoisie soften a little, and use the taxes for ecology or more worker friendly things, there is usually a corresponding retrogression.

This type of speculation indicates fictitious capital is still alive and real, just as it was in 1863 when Marx wrote Theories of Surplus Value.  The bond market is still large, and if it carries interest, the amounts of which are a sizable sum of money.  Have we ever seen taxes go down, under either party? In the real world, not the Ivory towers, life is a different experience.  

Taxes do come from the  worker, it is part of the unpaid section of the workday, the surplus value. When it is paid directly by the worker it is calculated for beforehand by the employer as a part of his wages..  

We thus see a society that is still functioning the same 167 years after being described by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value Volume 3. 

Nicholas Jay Boyes   

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

Purpose of State Industry Under Capitalism. Expenditures at Maximum Limit.

~ nicholasjayboyes

It is interesting to see the capitalists suggesting the state is too expensive, and attempting to pay less money towards it.  This would be the idea of Elon Musk, the white South African billionaire, also the world’s richest man; that the state is wasting money, and its expenditures need to be cut drastically.

I guess we have to look at what is owned by the state.  We have a passenger railroad industry, Amtrak, the Post Office,  and waste pickup among others.

The railroad is owned by the state, and usually loses money.  But every other industrialized nation has passenger railways, with Western Europe having high speed railroads, and advanced locomotives that have their own tracks, that go in the mountains and such.

They serve the practical purpose of connecting people between large cities, from downtown regions to other downtown regions.  It’s like going between downtown Chicago and Milwaukee, you don’t always want to drive your car as you encounter traffic , and even if it did not slow you down (which is ridiculous),  driving to downtown Chicago can be a real adventure.

Even if you fly 150 km south, which uses large amounts of energy compared to Amtrak, you still have to ride the L or rent a car to get from O’hare to downtown.  It is about a 45 minute ride between the train station to O’Hare on the L, making flying down there kind of rough.

So the bourgeoisie rises to the occasion, and even though Amtrak does not make a profit, passenger rail is seen as needed, and paid for by a subdivision of taxes from the profit.  

Perhaps to remind us that the capitalist state does good things too, Musk will try to cut railroad money.   He owns a luxury car company; I guess he must be in favor of auto travel.  

But selling it to anyone who has had to commute downtown, and drive it, is a hard sell.

Perhaps gutting the Post Office would be a source of savings.  They committed the sin of moving the mail in ballots we all use to vote, when we were losing the drop boxes the Republican bourgeoisie have come to detest. 

But the bills from the electricity and gas monopoly come in the mail.  They get the money from the bank automatically, but send a receipt showing your energy usage.  Paper receipts are essential in a failure, such as crashed computers.

So no real help there.  Taxes are also sent by mail; every year it comes time to pay the taxman, and it goes in checks by mail.  

This system seems to be working.  There is also mail that has to leave the country. Ever tried to use United Parcel Service, UPS, to send something outside the country? Try Canada, it’s like 10 times more expensive to send a letter UPS than the mail.    Need to send a package? Milwaukee to near Toronto Canada, about 900 miles, our package would have cost 217 dollars for Worldwide Express plus (same day),  $166 for the end of the day.  It costs $153 for worldwide expedited, and for standard (5 days or less), about $44.  The package was less than a pound.

Perhaps the fact recycling is now being done with Waste Management instead of the city sorter would be some savings.  Considering the city sorter burned down, it is now Waste Management that is sorting recyclables. 

But it certainly looks like using the city to get started recycling was effective.  We always said it would save money to recycle, now it is profitable.  Recycling proved to be a real success.  I guess the only question is if you really want to tamper with a working system of city garbage pickup.  It is one of the few remaining parts of our recycling program still not privatized. It may fall, but the fact remains recycling was accomplished without surplus value as a goal of the movement.  And the city pickup created no surplus value, it was not the reason for recycling, we were concerned about what disposable society was doing to the ecology. It is an example of the state giving in ot the desires of workers to do something that the profit motive was neglecting,, helping ecology. So they can give in sometimes, but once it could be done with a profit Waste Management commenced doing the recycling.

They look an awful lot like a monopoly, or a trust. They seem to be handling most of Milwaukee’s recycling, doing the sorting. Whether they own the recyclables is a more difficult question. Capitalists often prefer monopoly to state ownership, like NASA and Elon Musk. He now has a monopoly on what NASA used to do, launch men to the space station. He gets government contracts to do this. All this has done is move capital from the state to Musk’s pocketbook, from industry that was functioning just fine before capitalists decided they wanted a private company to do the launches.

So here we have 3 or 4 of the things the state owns, and it doesn’t look possible to remove the money being used to keep this industry productive and working.  

Maybe instate college tuition?  That is huge.  But it is a subsidy to the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class, who vote and support the Republicans.  It would be very surprising to see this gravy train come to a halt.  Our bourgeois political economists Ivory Towers are connected to this; good luck getting that through Congress. 

So we are really left to ponder, where will these massive savings Musk wants will come from?  Cutting off welfare, Social Security payments, could keep them from having to spend their sacred profits on senior citizens pensions.  But that is not popular with their following either, many of whom are retired or going to retire soon.  

Given any industry that can make a profit is made to do so, through privatization of nationalized assets, what could be unnationalized?  School systems?  There are capitalists who may be supportive of religion in schools,  but their beloved Constitution divides Church and State very  directly.  They have been promoting using state money for religious schools, they call them charter schools.  But they have shown no real promise of providing a better education than the state schools they are meant to replace.  And the right to an education is a thing all of us value, it is not socially acceptable to have children labouring instead of in school.

Basically the state really cannot be removed more than it already is without causing a social crisis for capitalists.  The industry the state controls is only this way as it is needed but cannot create a profit.  Are we to believe Musk can make the Post Office create a surplus this year?  Welcome back to planet Earth Elon.  It hasn’t created a surplus in decades, and unless something big really changes, expect  it to remain a government institution paid for by the state.  

It is sort of amusing to see the same institution, the state, which is used to hold down the proletariat, shrinking.  In this respect it is hard to take Musk and Donald Trump seriously.  We all remember the movement to pay less money to the riot police, defunding the police became a rallying call for the bourgeois.  No savings there either.  

The more you look at it, the more foolish it looks. It would seem to be an empty threat, from a rich man and his puppet.  It remains to be seen if doctrinaire experiments will follow. 

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic