Author: viewfromleftfieldblog

The Israeli slaughtering of an entire population is one of the most monumental crimes of this century. The level of moral outrage that needs to be expressed now is beyond what US society is capable of. Our diseased culture, our broken institutions and our utter lack of capacity for caring for each other is being translated into government support for genocide. The student encampments are one of the few inspiring symbols of resistance and hope. The solidarity and determination being shown by students to a cause greater than themselves is an inspiration to the best of our humanity.

I would love to have the clarity of insight to talk about “effective” strategies for stopping this genocide. I could prattle on about fundamental causes of US and Israeli militarism and their rapacious appetites for destruction. No doubt this is connected to the illogic of global capitalism, the geostrategic manifestations of a global system built on exploitation, oppression and pillage. The Israeli expansion of illegal settlements and the walling off of the Gaza Strip like an open air prison is now coupled with genocide and future plans to recreate Gaza as a capitalist playground for an expanded Israel. The fact that Israeli real estate speculators are openly advertising the opportunities for luxury living in Gaza once an entire population has been exterminated is illustrative of what this is all about.

Sometimes movements for change that are serious and long-term and facing seemingly insurmountable odds have to be morally centered. The expression of moral outrage is a crucial aspect of what fuels protest and why people are motivated by protest. That being said, this boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is also connected to a broader politics of anti-militarization that is focused on highlighting those who are complicit in this massive global crime. By demanding that universities divest from Israel, students are raising awareness of the genocide that is taking place. Students are also pressing universities to open their books to show us how deeply they are connected to a broader system of militarization, one whose tentacles extend so deep into US society that they tie us to a global system of violence that eviscerates more humane solutions for solving problems that are existential for human survival. The fact that BDS has grown in purpose, intentionality and linkages to domestic and global networks of anti-militaristic solidarity should inspire hope.

Critics of the student encampments are led by those who want to justify and perpetuate the genocide that is taking place. The fact that our ruling class is so united in providing daily support for a genocide is deeply revealing about the depths of depravity in our capitalist system. The use of McCarthyist tactics to accuse anyone who protests as being a Hamas supporter is the kind of lowest common denominator tactic that has long been used to prop up bipartisan political support for a never-ending warfare machine, also endorsed by both political parties. Joe Biden’s supply side liberalism, somehow labeled as “progressive” by clueless liberals, has mainly been a massive giveaway to corporations to beg them to invest in needed social infrastructure, including to some extent green energy technology. The political exchange for getting this legislation passed: guaranteeing an expansion of oil exploration as a quid pro quo for getting political support for massive corporate subsidies.

The attempt to leverage the interests of capital in spending taxpayer money to get them to do some of what is needed to address the climate crisis expresses the utter lunacy of the system. Of course, as part of the expanded bipartisan spending bills championed by Democrats and supported by some Republicans is another central justification: they tell us we have to spend as part of a broader militarization of U.S. society necessary to prepare for war against China. This is a return of military Keynesianism on a massive scale. Corporations because they are profit-making machines cannot solve humanity’s problems. Instead, we prop them up with corporate welfare that is then linked to scenarios of World War III.

The U.S. and other global capitalist states that have disproportionate power within an increasingly militarized and destructive political and economic system have no real answers for the crises that they have created and that they perpetuate. As corporations fail to invest in what societies need, because that is fundamentally at odds with their purpose, we shower them with money and use militarization and policing and “security” as our justifications. The hollowness of this system is being perceived by young people setting up encampments. On this day, I am grateful for at least some expressions of disgust, opposition and moral outrage at a bipartisan capitalist system that has long ceased to work for the vast majority of us, and is now openly embracing genocidal crimes.

These are the most inventive, boundary-crossing, provocative, entertaining, and eclectic albums that caught my attention this year. Not a “best of” by any stretch, but an overview of where my tastes lie (Jazz and roots music) and what I had time to sample. I lean toward artists whose work borrows heavily from a range of traditions, combinations of rock, folk, blues, soul and jazz heavy on the saxophone, piano and in one glorious example: the trombone (see Jennifer Wharton’s glorious Grit and Grace).

The first album on my list is by Adeem the Artist called White Trash Revelry. The album was released in December of 2022 but I first listened in the early part of 2023. The singing and songwriting combines evocative storytelling about growing up pansexual, with left politics, in the South. The heartfelt passion, intelligence and humanity of the lyrics comes through in every song.

Sunny War is an electrifying artist who borrows from folk, bluegrass, blues, punk and soul—old and new—in emotionally charged, effervescent songs about longing, forgiveness, pain, and reconciliation. The album grabs attention from the beginning.

Lakecia Benjamin delivers a fiery, inspirational, multi-faceted and celebratory romp through politically charged and soulful tunes that dance and float with abandon. Benjamin pays tribute to the voices and spirit of women artists, activists and organizers, led by the first tune that includes the voice of civil rights activist and author Angela Davis. Truly inspiring musical adventure.

My favorite Jazz artist of all time remains Charles Mingus. This year saw a release of his complete 1970s recordings with Atlantic Records, which includes some of his best work, such as four of his late period classics, and his last great album, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion.

Jaime Wyatt’s album Feel Good produces a rich soulful sound that blends blues, rock, country and folk with passionate vocals and lyrics. Wyatt’s opening number features a powerful chorus and lush arrangement accentuated by boisterous organ to heighten the bluesy vocals of Wyatt, singing urgently about the costs and consequences of global warming.

There are lots more here, including a new album from the great saxophonist Chris Potter, the full orchestral soundscape of The Black Gold Orchestra’s album Genesis, the passionate lyricism and wonderfully produced record Time Ain’t Accidental that accentuates the magical writing and shifting emotional tones of Jess Williamson, the tribute to Mahalia Jackson that becomes an innovative ode to passionate creativity and soulful rapture from James Brandon Lewis, and the powerfully effervescent and straight-ahead folk, bluesy country and bluegrass of acoustic guitarist Molly Tuttle on City of Gold. This year’s list is filled with high quality musical production and sheer fun—I hope you are inclined to sample what looks good to you….

Floridians are paying three times more for home insurance than they were five years ago–the average homeowners insurance payment is $6000 compared to just under $2000 in 2019. The costs will take another leap next year.

Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican legislature have been gifting insurance companies with more tax breaks, subsidies of $1 billion to help pay reinsurance costs–the amount the insurers borrow to pay for increased costs of covering homeowners policies, and making it harder for homeowners to sue insurance companies that fail to honor their contractual obligations.

This is political grift by Florida Republicans who have taken $9.9 million from insurance lobbyists since 2019, according to a report by Florida Watch. This money has flowed to Friends of DeSantis and to the Republican Party of Florida.

The political line of DeSantis and Florida Republicans is that much of the increased costs of insurance is driven by out-of-control lawsuits peddled by attorneys and third parties who have colluded to flood the industry with frivolous claims. Florida law has allowed a transfer of legal claims from homeowners to third parties who have then exercised their rights to sue insurance companies for alleged failures to honor the obligations of policies.

The Florida legislature passed a bill during the 2022 legislative session that prohibited some of these claim transfers, though loopholes remain, in addition to making it more difficult for homeowners to sue insurance companies. Homeowners now have to pay the full legal costs of lawsuits if they are unsuccessful, which is designed to tilt the playing field even further to the advantage of insurance companies.

Over the last two years, Florida insurance companies have altered the work of licensed adjusters to slash the claims of Floridian homeowners by as much as 97 percent, according to a detailed study in the Washington Post. In other words, the insurance lobby has felt emboldened by DeSantis and the Republican legislature to override claims and to lower their obligations to policy holders by whatever means necessary.

At the same time, it is not escalating lawsuits that are the primary factor driving up insurance costs in Florida. The lawsuits are concentrated among a wealthy group of litigants and directed toward a minority of firms within the insurance market of the state. If the lawsuits were the primary reason for escalating costs, their impact would be more dispersed across the Florida insurance market.

Climate change is the elephant in the room driving the rates of Florida insurance sky high. This is manifested by the increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes in recent years, which has been the biggest factor increasing costs for insurance companies, resulting in several large companies leaving the state and/or dramatically reducing their exposure. The companies that remain are smaller, have less capital to pay high claims and have to borrow money on the reinsurance market to afford day-to-day operations. Lenders in the reinsurance market have hiked their rates due to a combination of climate change modeling (anticipating more deadly and frequent storms), increased costs of borrowing, and increased dependence on creditors.

The upshot is that the insurance market is ill-equipped to deal with climate change. The way insurance works is to spread unrelated costs across all policyholders so that everyone pays for damages suffered by a smaller subset of holders. Climate change breaks this model by the increased severity, frequency and large-scale impact of environmental costs across a wider group of policyholders.

In response, Florida Republicans, encouraged by wealthy developers and real estate speculators, engage in climate change denial and offer only “market solutions” to a crisis rooted in systemic environmental devastation. The “market” means that rich developers can expand wherever and whenever they want, courtesy of deregulation, lower taxes and public subsidies. The rest of the “market,” working class and middle class homeowners, have to fend for themselves. The rich can afford to sue each other, while DeSantis and the Republican legislature wants to make it cost prohibitive for ordinary homeowners to fight back.

I was trained in the discipline of political science, which has never had a good history investigating or understanding the term “working class.” Mainstream political science has tended to avoid acknowledging that class categories even exist, preferring instead to ask why the U.S. has been “exceptional” in its lack of class conflict (despite the evidence to the contrary). When “class” has been discussed, it is typically conflated with income or with education in much of the political science scholarship. Another way of saying this is that Weber has long triumped over Marx in political science and in many of the other social sciences as well (despite the fulminations of conservatives that academia is dominated by Marxists!–I wish).

The Weberian tradition defines class by income and therefore collapses a wide range of categories of employment and ownership into overlapping income brackets. In other words, a Weberian definition of class would conflate small business owners with workers when both occupy the same income tier. Depending on how much income a worker gets in wages, that worker might be categorized in a Weberian definition as lower class, lower-middle class, middle class or even upper-middle class. A small business owner might occupy the upper-middle class or lower-upper class category, depending on income status. The same goes for professional-managerial jobs, which under the Weberian definition could end up in more than one category, depending on the income of the professional-manager.

A Marxist definition defines class and “working class” very differently, based on a person’s relationship to the means of production. Working class is defined as those who are forced to sell their labor-power for wages; capitalists are those that own the means of production. In this formulation, the relationship of the working and ownership classes to each other is the central definining feature of capitalism. For Marxists, the working class exists in relationship to the private ownership of capital; the sale of working class labor-power to capitalists is the driving feature of the capitalist system. The ownership of the means of production structures and informs power relationships throughout capitalist society, including catogories that fall in between capitalist and workers, such as small business owners and professional-managers, who occupy a middle tier which is also defined, in Marxist terms, by this tier’s relationship to the dominant class ownership structure in society–in other words, the large-scale capitalist owners of production have dominant economic, political and social power within capitalism.

Political science is generally not focused on the Weber-Marx debate, which is considered passe now, though there have been periods in the history of the discipline when socioeconomic questions of class and “elites” were more front and center, often dependent on the rise and fall of class conflict in US society. Mostly political scientists focus on how governing institutions operate, the political “rules of the game” that inform dominant instututions and establish the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. In mainstream political science, this means a scholarship focused around the legitimacy of the rulers, the institutions that provide stability for the system, the motivations and behavior of political elites in relationship to voters, and in electoral systems, the way that public opinion, voter preferences and voter mobilization informs the choices of political parties.

Mainstream political scientists are now having a debate about the two dominant political parties in the U.S. in relationship to working class voters. The debate is about whether or not there has been enough of a shift of working class voters to the Republican Party, and away from the Democratic Party, to constitute a realignment of the voting blocs that each Party depends on to get elected. The debate hinges on how to define “working class” and whether or not this “working class” is switching its party allegiances, as well as how to understand the power and influence of business within each party coalition. Proponents of the party realignment thesis, Eitan Hersh at Tufts and Sarang Shah at Berkeley, argue in their recent paper “The Partisan Realignment of American Business,” (discussed in Thomas E. Edsall’s latest NYT column of August 16) that the Democratic Party is becoming a party of socioeconomic elites rather than labor and the Republican Party is becoming less of a business party and more of a party of “working class social conservatives.”

The arguments of Hersh and Shah epitomize the long-term inability and unwillingness of mainstream political science to seriously interrogate the socioeconomic class structure of American politics. The assumptions of Hersh and Shah, as reflected in their recent paper, are wrongheaded in several areas: First, that the Republican Party is moving away from a base dominated by business and socioeconomic elites, and second, that the Democratic Party has ever been a labor party. Corporations and the wealthy continue to dominate fundraising, lobbying and financing of think-tanks and policy-planning organizations for the Republican Party, whose policies remain heavily tilted in favor of rich donors. At the same time, the Democratic Party has long been dominated by owners of capital, and this has been well-documented in terms of who disproportionately funds Democratic Party candidates, which lobbies dominate access to the Democratic Party lawmakers, and which organizations disproportionately finance Democratic think-tanks and policy-planning organizations. Business organizations have exercised power in each of these three areas throughout the history of the Democratic Party, including the realignment that led to the New Deal coalition in the 1930s. It is true that organized labor increased its influence and power within the Democratic Party during the height of the New Deal, which owe a great deal to conflicts and divisions among business elites as well as large-scale labor movements and strike waves, which at times shifted policies in a relatively pro-labor direction.

However, since the right-turn of the late 1970s, early 1980s, business power has grown stronger and less contested within the Democratic Party. The thesis advanced by Hersh and Shah is wrongheaded in their assumption that the Democratic Party is moving toward a base of socioeconomic elites. The dominant power blocs within the Democratic Party have not just been socioeconomic elites, but large-scale capitalist owners who exert their power through campaign contributions, lobbying money and donations to prominent Party think-tanks, foundations and policy planning organizations. Instead of examining who has long dominated the investment profile that the Democratic Party is beholden to, Hersh and Shah assume that the Democratic Party’s support base rests within its electoral coalition. Here they marshall evidence that this electoral coalition has shifted away from “working class” voters and toward “socioeconomic elites.”

There are considerable problems with the thesis of the working class shift as well, primarily the measurements used to define “working class.” As consistent with the Weberian tradition in political science, “working class” is defined by a combination of income and education, but here education takes front and center stage, which allows Hersh and Shah to define working class as those without a college degree. It’s true that this measures significant numbers of working class people, but it also captures as many as 10 million “voters,” who are not working class voters according to the Marxian definition, but instead are business owners, mostly quite rich, and mostly local and regional leaders of the pro-Trump insurgency in small towns and regions of the U.S. This is not just a “little” mistake, but one that compounds a history of poor theorizing when it comes to conceptualizing a meaningful definition of working class in U.S. capitalism.

A better way to capture what is happening: both parties are going through an institutional crises due to decades of plunder by a largely unaccountable ruling class that has exercised increased control over the economy and the state. That crisis has seen shifts in voting allegiances. Working class voters have shifted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, though the shift is less than implied by Hersh and Shah for two reasons. The first is that working class voters are split by occupation, with manufacturing workers increasing their votes for Republican candidates but service sector workers, the largest category of the working class by far, consisting of 70 milion members, continuing to vote Democratic Party. In fact, even if we stick with the Weberian category of income, working class voters with the lowest income (below $50,000) voted for Biden over Trump in the 2020 Presidential electionby a margin of 57-43%; Biden also won voters making between $50,000 and $99,999 by a margin of 56-44%. Trump won 54% of voters making $100,000 or more.

The reason the working class realignment theory is being advanced by some political scientists is due to poor measurements of class, overwhelmingly defined by education, specifically those with a college degree versus those without. That’s a poor measure that does not even track the Weberian income measure of class very well. Second, the tendency to conflate working class with manufacturing workers (and white workers) is also prevalent. This fits well within the electoral college of U.S. politics, which gives disproportionate voting power to low populated states and to low-populated areas, including rural areas which have long voted Republican and have in fact been hit hard by a massive socioeconomic redistribution from poor people to rich people. These areas in many cases increased their turnout and thereby aided Trump and the Trump voting coalition that the Republican Party is depending on. This has not realigned U.S. politics, however, as the policies of the Republican Party have continued to be much more favorable to business interests and the wealthy, while the Democrats have continued to juggle a wider range of interest groups, more diverse and varied, within a big tent that has long been directed by corporate interests and the privileged position of socioeconomic elites in American capitalism.

I had conflicted feelings in anticipation of the recently released Oppenheimer film. On the one hand, I admired the book, American Prometheus, that the film was based on. Written by historians Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, the 721-page biography was a magisterial achievement that covered Oppenheimer from birth to death, contextualized by the insights of expert scholars who were able to frame the circumstances that shaped Oppenheimer. On the other hand, I have long felt that movie director Chrisopher Nolan’s filmmaking was overrated. His directing has always exhibited a technical virtuosity that too often eclipsed attention to character development.

The Oppenheimer film is a collision of the best of the book, which the director at times manages to capture within a sprawling arc of filmic biography, with the worst of Nolan–the technocratic flourishes often do not allow the viewer to get fully immersed in the characters, flattening too many scenes because of the expansive coverage of the breath of Oppenheimer’s scientific life. At the same time, there is an energy in the presentation and the acting that makes it immersive in grappling with important political and existential questions: the threats posed to humanity by the creation and expansion of the atomic bomb and the witch-hunt mentality of the Cold War US establishment that seeks to punish any dissent from the orthodoxy of nuclear weapons expansion.

The best aspects of Oppenheimer are Nolan’s depiction of the inquisition of the scientist by a three-member security panel assembled by the Atomic Energy Agency to interrogate Oppenheimer. At the time of the 1954 “hearing,” Oppenheimer’s security clearance had already been revoked by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, brilliantly played by Robert Downey, Jr. Oppenheimer had asked for a hearing to establish a process whereby he would be able to defend himself from accusations that he was a Soviet spy, a baseless account largely manufactured by powerful and unaccountable political operatives led by William Liscum Borden, former executive director of Congress’s Joint Atomic Energy Committee, the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Strauss himself.

Nolan’s direction and script, heavily indebted to the book (Bird and Sherwin are listed as co-authors of the screenplay), is at its best in contrasting Oppenheimer’s life with the manufactured witch-hunt orchestrated by key architects of the U.S. security establishment. The Oppenheimer film succeeds, within certain limitations, in providing a sense of how corrupt and unaccountable the U.S. national security establishment often was, even to one-time “national heroes” such as Oppenheimer. The “hearing” was an unbridled inquisition, in that Oppenheimer’s lawyers, lacking security clearance, had no access to classified information used liberally to build a false case against the scientist, including the outlandish and unsupported charge that Oppenheimer was a “Soviet spy.” This “finding” by the three-member security panel was used to justify a 2-1 ruling stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

Despite powerful scenes of Cold War hysteria, Oppenheimer the movie limits audience awareness of the scope and scale of the Cold War witch-hunt. That’s largely due to the extreme focus on Oppenheimer the individual, whose character is often so limited to the expressions and reactions of Oppenheimer himself (well-played by actor Cillian Murphy) that the larger systemic causes and consequences of the nuclear arms buildup gets minimized. Nolan’s choices to center almost every scene around an Oppenheimer reaction to events reduces the film to liberal individualism, whether intentionally or not. The limits of this approach are readily apparent in two crucially important scenes: the testing of the Atomic Bomb in the Alamogordo Bombing Range (125 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico) and the use of the atomic bombs in Japan. In both cases, we see nuclear explosions through the eyes of Oppenheimer and his immediate scientific and military team, a choice which serves to remove from the frame the fact that atomic testing produced direct casualties from nuclear radiation on the surrounding New Mexico population. The costs and consequences of the New Mexico atomic tests were replicated in other locations, both in the U.S. and globally, and had severe consequences in many other locations to health and mortality. By 2022, the U.S. had conducted 1,054 atomic tests, costing more than $100 billion.

The film, though, actually limits a broader understanding of the costs and consequences, and as such does not give the viewer a proper scope of the extent to which U.S. society was dominated by the one-sided viewpoint of the military-industrial complex. Instead, the contradictions of nuclear armament appear in simplified terms: as an existential morality play in the conscience of Oppenheimer himself, rather than a deep-seated power-structure that ran roughshod over dissent, creating a McCarthyist witch-hunt mentality that rewarded subservience, punished critics and was weaponized the most against workers, artists, intellectuals and dissidents, whose voices would be silenced in favor of the profit-making objectives of the military-industrial complex. We see reflected in Oppenheimer’s eyes his vision of the horrific scope and scale of the weapon he has helped unleash against Japan, when he addresses a public audience who reveres him for helping to “win the war” against Japan. Oppenheimer plays to the audience in his speech, while the audience in the movie theatre only sees what Oppenheimer’s imagination allows us to see, not what the Japanese actually experienced.

Nor do we get from the film the opposition to the use of the atomic bombs in Japan from a wide range of military Generals, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hap Arnold, Curtis LeMay, and Admirals Bill Leahy and even the nororious racist Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. All opposed the decisions to use atomic weapons for the simple reason that conventional bombings had already “brought Japan to its knees,” according to Arnold and LeMay. We now know, through the scholarship of Gar Alperovitz and others, and the release of classified documents, that the bomb was dropped for two reasons: first and foremost, to keep the Soviets from expanding their troop presence in Asia by sending a signal of U.S. power, and second, because the bomb was so exorbitantly funded. According to the work of Martin Sherwin: we dropped the bomb to provide a visible result of the sheer costs and magnitude of the resources devoted to this development of U.S. power. The use of the bomb was a demonstration of U.S. global militarism that prefigured a large-scale military-industrial complex which followed profit motivations more closely than “national defense.”

The criticisms of this nuclear weapons expansion do surface in Oppenheimer, but are at best secondary and undeveloped next to Oppenheimer’s own existential crisis. The script does not do justice to most of the secondary characters, especially the women characters, who are treated as an afterthought, an appendage to Oppenheimer himself–most blatantly in a graphic depiction of Oppenheimer having sex with his former lover, Jean Tatlock, in his own imagination during the three-panel interrogation, in full view (in Oppenheimer’s guilty conscience) of his wife, Kitty Oppenheimer.

The scientists who oppose the further development and use of the atomic bomb are depicted briefly, but given short shrift and uneven, at best, character development. Albert Einstein as portrayed by Tom Conti emerges as a bit of a cartoon figure. The fact is Einstein did not request or get a security clearance; his politics of opposition to U.S. militarism and his socialism were made clear to the establishment as Einstein courageously spoke out against the consequences of succumbing to the national security establishment’s terms of subervience. To the movie’s credit, one of Einstein’s interactions with Oppenheimer produces a prophetic warning of the dangerous game that Oppenheimer has played: trying to change the system from within only to be sacrified by the system for the sake of preparing the way for humanity’s imminent destruction.

The fact that Nolan is willing to push the outer limits of a liberal critique of the system by including Einstein’s prophetic warning to Oppenheimer is a strength of the movie. The fact that the script only allows the viewers to see the nuclear buildup through the eyes and consciousness of Oppenheimer himself is too often a weakness of the film’s liberal individualism, which fails to capture the systemic power of a growth of a military-industrial complex whose casualties go way beyond Oppenheimer himself. It’s gratifying to see a major Hollywood film and a prominent director tackle the existential crises of the production, development, and expansion of nuclear weapons. But it’s disappointing to see this reduced to a “great man” version of history.

Ultimately, I would recommend seeing the movie, as it has plenty of strengths to offer, and introduces viewers, however unevenly, to important existential questions about the costs and consequences of nuclear arms expansion. However, the film is far from sufficient in educating viewers about the larger political, economic and social context that produced and dramatically expanded the deployment of nuclear weapons around the world. For that, viewers need a broader education that the movie Oppenheimer often cuts short.

The Miami Marlins record at the halfway mark of the 2023 season is 47-34, which is second in team history to the 1997  World Series champion Florida Marlins, who were 48-33 at the same point. How has this happened? What might we expect going forward?

First, it’s time to note the successful moves made by General Manager Kim Ng, who is rightly receiving congratulatory plaudits on Marlins social media for helping to steer the team in a better direction post-Jeter. The first big decision of the 2022 offseason, arguably the first full offseason where Ng has had the most authority to guide the team in a different direction, was the hiring of Skip Schumaker as the new Marlins manager. According to several Marlins players interviewed, from Garrett Cooper (“this coaching staff is better than what we’ve had”), to Jazz Chisholm to Sandy Alcantara, the clubhouse culture has never been better. Of course, clubhouse “culture” and “chemistry” are so readily used as catch-alls for team success that it is rather meaningless by itself. Did winning change the culture? Did the culture change lead to winning? These debates are by definition circular and therefore impossible to resolve.

What we do know is that the new manager and coaching staff have worked with the Marlins analytics department and front office to successfully address at least two problems identified from the failures of 2022:  hitters with high strikeouts/lack of contact and poor infield positioning that allowed hits to get through. These were areas that Kim Ng and her front office prioritized in the offseason. The hiring of a hitting coach, Brant Brown, who preached bat to ball skills and contact rate, coincided with a player acquisition strategy of acquiring high contact hitters. The trade for Luis Arraez is the high-water mark of this approach, successful beyond anyone’s expectations thus far, as Arraez has been around a .400 batting average all year with contact rates that make him a unicorn among contemporary players–he’s more Tony Gwynn and Rod Carew than anyone playing in today’s game. He also has a wRC+ of 158–second in the National League to Ronald Acuna Jr.–in runs created above league average, weighted by type of hit and for league context. Ng’s trade for Arraez has been pivotal to this team’s success, both in the stellar half-season provided by Arraez and by the example he has set for other players. Several Marlins players have noted his influence on their approach to hitting for more contact, especially with two strikes, and taking the ball the other way. Jesus Sanchez turned his season around, and is at his best, when he hits the ball to the opposite fielf. Even Jorge Soler has been a making better contact his year, which has also helped him optimize his power stroke. He and Arraez have been a killer one-two combo in the Marlins lineup. Garrett Cooper credits new hitting coach Brant Brown with helping him find more consistency in hitting the ball up the middle with authority. Bryan de la Cruz and Sanchez have worked extensively with Brant Brown in shortening their strokes to generate more hard contact the other way, especially with two strikes.

So when we talk about “culture,” it’s more meaningful to talk about whether or not players are “buying in” to what the new manager and coaching staff are selling. We have lots of evidence that they are. The Marlins were 26th of 30 teams in contact percentage in 2022. They are 9th in contact percentage in 2023. This year’s Marlins are 13th in on-base percentage; last year’s version was 27th. This adds up to a Marlins team that is average offensively (they still rank lower in power production), compared to a bottom five offense in 2022. Still not a great offensive team, but one that has advanced considerably in key areas of run production, which in tandem with outstanding pitching–among the league leaders in a range of the most important statistical categories despite a subpar Sandy Alcantara–has allowed the team to win close games and to hold other teams in check. The ongoing presence of major league pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, combined with a strong pitching development and acquisition system, continues to produce results. Most notably the latest young phenom, Eury Perez, whose numbers are mind-boggling across the board, accomplishing what no 20 year old pitcher has ever done: specifically becoming the youngest pitcher since 1901 with 3 straight scoreless outings of 6+ innings (courtesy of the great Sarah Langs). Braxton Garrett has been the season’s surpising rotation anchor with command of five pitches he can throw for strikes at any point in the count–slider, sinker, cutter, curveball, and changeup–to carve up hitters without the high-end stuff of his rotation counterparts. Jesus Luzardo has been solid and at times he can blow opposing teams away with his upper-tier velocity and spin. The rotation has produced beyond the sum of its parts, and despite injuries to Trevor Rogers and Edward Cabrera. This becomes evident when looking at how the Marlins rank on six of the sabermetric stats posted by Fangraphs: top five in WAR, FIP, xFIP, SIERA, K%, K-BB%.

The other area where the new manager and coaching staff have outperformed last year’s version is infield positioning. Despite the infield shift restrictions, there are still advantages to positioning your infielders optimally. No one does that better than the Marlins analytical and coaching staffs, who have worked together to give the team the most runs saved in MLB as of June 29:  18 runs saved on the season (see Sports Info Solutions, “Reeling Them In–Marlins Infield Positioning Working Well,” by Mark Simon, June 29, 2023).

Can the Marlins keep us this pace?  In terms of qualifying for the playoffs, the odds are decidedly in the team’s favor now, as Fangraphs and other sites estimate their playoff chances to be in the 60% range. Still, the club does not have much room for error or injury:  the hitting is league average; the pitching is doing very well despite injuries and subperformance from Alcantara, who has looked much better of late. The team needs a healthy and productive Jazz and a consistent return to form from last year’s Cy Young winner. They also need to add a couple of pieces of quality big league production–ideally on the left side of the infield, at catcher and a veteran arm they can add to the back end of the rotation and/or bullpen. The front office has proven they can deal–and more chips need to be traded prior to the deadline if the team continues its playoff pace. 

GO FISH!

++Daniel Defense, the manufacturer and marketer of the AR-15 used in the massacre of 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Texas, secured a $20 million contract from U.S. Special Forces in 2002 to provide the accessories for combat rifles. The company’s military contracts led to civilian sales of AR-15s produced by the company, promoted by military-style marketing campaigns that advertised how civilians could “use what they use” (NYT, May 28, 2022).

++The sales of military-style assault rifles to civilians accelerated after 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired. U.S. wars post-9/11 in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world through expanded counterinsurgency wars deepened this military-to-gun pipeline. Politicians, joined by prominent journalists and commentators, breathlessly celebrated dramatic expansions of the U.S. military budget, adding more fuel to an already expansive pipeline of foreign arms sales and domestic civilian sales, increasing the use of high-powered, military-style firepower from the ranks of the armed forces to police departments to gun manufacturers, with civilians being encouraged to “use what they use” (Goodman, Counterpunch, June 9, 2002).

++The U.S. gun culture is not a simple recent historical development. There was the political mobilization of the National Rifle Association in the 1970s as a purveyor of a single-minded expansion of unrestricted gun rights as the embodiment of “American freedom” guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. This NRA-turn was reinforced by a mix of profit motivations, white supremacist ideology baked into U.S. history, the culture of rampant individualism, and a pervasive fear of “crime and disorder” accelerated by a white counter-reaction to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that was strategized and encouraged by U.S. politicians–most notably President Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign.

++As Roxanne Doty documents in her excellent book, Loaded, the emergence of the U.S. gun culture has deep historical roots in the founding of the U.S. Property owners used “citizen militias” in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th centuries. Landowners deployed men with guns to expand land ownership by the forced expulsion of Native Americans. Settler colonialism provided one of the original justifications for gun ownership, as did genocidal forays against Native popuations that stood in the way. Slave patrols used to track down, retrieve and force escaped slaves back to their owners, or to kill them outright if deemed necessary, was another motivation of property-owning gun rights enthusiasts early in U.S. history. Guns have long been linked to the protection of property rights regardless of the costs or consequences.

++The Cold War militarization of U.S. culture directly contributed to the expansion of more deadly firearms that could be accessed by the civilian population. As with the post-9/11 increases in military-style weapons made available to civilians, the increases in the U.S. military budget during the late 1970s and early 1980s coincided with a flood of high-powered weapons sold to civilians. Gun manufacters, backed by the NRA, moved aggressively to expand the manufacturing, marketing and sales of advanced weaponry, part of a strategy to reverse declining weapons sales. The ready availability of military-style rifles and high-capacity, high-caliber semiautomatic pistol designs since the 1980s provided opportunities for U.S. gun manufacturers to sell more deadly weapons at home and abroad (“The Miliarization of the U.S. Civilian Firearms Market,” Violence Policy Center, June 2011).

++The combination of U.S. militarization, white supremacy, rampant individualism, conspiracy theories that invent threats to property ownership in the form of government plans to “take away your guns,” and profit motivations of gun manufacturers has created a dystopian nightmare of routinized mass violence.

++The Republican Party has long embraced the availability of military-style assault weapons as equivalent to foundational “American freedom.” The Party’s open embrace of weapons-wielding citizens confronting Black Lives Matter protesters is the modern equivalent of historical trends of white supremacy and armed vigilanteeism that have fueled the weaponization of U.S. society. The embrace of militarization by both political parties further takes us down this untenable path, as police department budgets continue to explode and militarization of law enforcement continues to be used as puntive means to safeguard the interests of property owners while maintaining the conditions of rampant inequality that further fuels gun violence.

++What are the solutions? The left needs to target all sources of the violence, recognizing the ways that gun massacres are woven into a history of systemic institutionalized violence encouraged and abetted by militarization, policing, racism, profiteering gun companies, a war against oppressed and marginalized people, and conspiracy theories that provide fuel for rabid individualism that turns deadly. Two resources that can help: “It’s Time to Dismantle America’s Residential Caste System,” Politico, 9/12/21, and “Uvalde Police Didn’t Move to Save Lives Because That’s Not What Police Do,” The Intercept, May 27, 2022.

I’m taking a detour from my politics and culture posts to provide some thoughts about my favorite baseball team, the Miami Marlins.

Once again, the Marlins are playing way below their run differential, and many of their starting position players are playing well below their career norms, including their free agent acquisition outfielders, Jorge Soler and especially Avisail Garcia, who is now hurt along with several other players temporarily out or landing on the IL with minor injuries.

As in 2021, the starting pitching has been the only area of the team consistently above average. The bullpen has been okay except in the highest leverage ninth inning situations, where the Marlins continue to blow games. The hitting, once again, has failed the most, with only Jazz Chisholm and Brian Anderson consistently perfoming well among starters who have been mostly healthy. Jon Berti, Joey Wendle and Bryan De La Cruz  have been very good as utility guys, with Wendle playing a lot until his injury (he’s back now).

Since the new ownership took office and the new front office was consolidated under CEO Derek Jeter (who left before the 2022 season started) and now under Kim Ng and a nucleus that has been in place well before Ng, the organization has been mired in mediocrity. On the plus side, the overhaul of the Loria-era roster has produced a farm system loaded with pitching depth at every level. On the negative side, the organization has been among the worst of any MLB team in developing hitters and in plugging their roster with free agents that add value to the big league club.

The result for the MLB team for 2021 and again in 2022 has been a frustrating mess: in both years, to start the season, the team had outscored its opponents through the first 42 games. Yet, due to low run production and an inconsistent bullpen, the team has produced a woeful 18-24 start (now 18-25 in 2022), well below the pace of what just about all of the best statistical outlets predicted. Fangraphs predicted an 81-81 season. Baseball Prospectus 80-82, individual prognosticators for MLB.com predicted in the mid 70s. I picked 79 wins and a fourth place finish (they are in fourth place now amidst a very slow starting division outside the Mets) and former Baseball Prospectus writer Joe Sheehan predicted 85 wins.  

The problems loom large at the major league level for this franchise. The new sabermetrics is all about the ability of major league coaches and the front office to utilize statistical analysis and technology to develop hitters and pitchers at the major league level. As is true throughout their organization, the Marlins have done this very well with pitchers. However, the organization gets a failing grade, from the front office to the manager, in developing hitters. A residue of this has been that the team has a recent habit of going for long stretches with some of the worst players in Marlins history before having finally given up on many of them in 2021. The 2022 team is supposed to have more veteran depth, but the new player acquisitions have mostly hit below their career norms.

I have zero confidence that this team as currently constructed will turn things around. However, the pitching is too good, and the circumstances too recent, to justify anything approaching another rebuild. With all due respect to Don Mattingly–he should not take the exclusive blame for the losses, as he is one of many in the organization who has failed to achieve his stated goals–the beginning of his 7th year is more than enough for one manager to be here without notable success. The team needs a new voice. The front office also could use new voices, especially in hitting development and analysis. I would keep Kim Ng for now, as she has only been here a little over a year and the overall results have been a byproduct of the organization that she inherited.

The time to pivot is now, gradually, but with the realization that the current mix of players is not working. The first obvious step would be to bring up some minor league players to replace veteran 1B/DH Garrett Cooper and Jesus Aguilar, such as Lewin Diaz at 1B and Jerar Encarnacion at DH/OF. Send Jesus Sanchez, a young hitter I still like a lot, to the minors to let him readjust and get out of his own head/slump. Get Bryan De La Cruz more playing time. Put Elieser Hernandez in the bullpen. 

Eventually, the time may come to trade Jorge Soler, if he shows more plate consistency and therefore his value increases. Given his four year contract, his current injury and his terrible start, Avisail Garcia is untradable and the team will have to hope he gets better. We may have to get a future OF or potential impact bat through trade of a starting pitcher (Pablo Lopez perhaps when his value is as high as it is now). The organizational depth in starting pitching is still a strength.

Not a pretty picture, but this start is the second worst in team history only behind 2013. The organization needs to show some level of awareness and urgency. My top choices at the beginning of the offseason were for the Marlins to have already signed Starling Marte to an extension and to have acquired Mark Canha. The Mets added them both, which gave them a mix of contact hitters and power hitters that would have worked to elevate the Marlins as well. Instead we add players like Soler and Garcia to an already one-dimensional offense that includes Cooper (who can hit but can do nothing else well) and Aguilar (ditto).  The inability to get more significant high leverage bullpen help was also a problem that many of us criticized at the time.

We have at best a C-type organization (which might be generous) when we need an A-type organization. They need to get better and to show more urgency and creativity in the process.