[Marxism] From a Rwandan Dump to the Halls of Harvard
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (Back in 1967 when I joined the Trotskyist movement I was struck by an observation some leader made in a speech, it could have been Fred Halstead who was running for president. One of the biggest problems with capitalism is that it not only punishes the poor by making them live a life of misery. It also robs the human race of the contributions that can be made by such people whose children might be a potential scientist who could find a cure for cancer or some other life-saving breakthrough. Under socialism every Justus Uwayesu would be given such an opportunity.) NY Times, Oct. 23 2014 From a Rwandan Dump to the Halls of Harvard By MICHAEL WINES BOSTON — Nine years old and orphaned by ethnic genocide, he was living in a burned-out car in a Rwandan garbage dump where he scavenged for food and clothes. Daytimes, he was a street beggar. He had not bathed in more than a year. When an American charity worker, Clare Effiong, visited the dump one Sunday, other children scattered. Filthy and hungry, Justus Uwayesu stayed put, and she asked him why. “I want to go to school,” he replied. Well, he got his wish. This autumn, Mr. Uwayesu enrolled as a freshman at Harvard University on a full-scholarship, studying math, economics and human rights, and aiming for an advanced science degree. Now about 22 — his birthday is unknown — he could be, in jeans, a sweater and sneakers, just another of the 1,667 first-year students here. But of course, he is not. He is an example of the potential buried even in humanity’s most hopeless haunts, and a sobering reminder of how seldom it is mined. Over the 13 years since his escape from the smoldering trash heap that was his home, Mr. Uwayesu did not simply rise through his nation’s top academic ranks. As a student in Rwanda, he learned English, French, Swahili and Lingala. He oversaw his high school’s student tutoring program. And he helped found a youth charity that spread to high schools nationwide, buying health insurance for poor students and giving medical and scholastic aid to others. He is nonetheless amazed and amused by the habits and quirks of a strange land. “I tried lobster, and I thought it was a big fight,” he said. “You have to work for it to get to the meat.” And the taste? “I’m not sure I like it,” he said. Fresh from a land dominated by two ethnic groups — the majority Hutu and the Tutsi, who died en masse with some moderate Hutu in the 1994 conflict — he says he is delighted by Harvard’s stew of nationalities and lifestyles. He was pleasantly taken aback by the blasé acceptance of openly gay students — “that’s not something we hear about in Rwanda”— and disturbed to find homeless beggars in a nation otherwise so wealthy that “you can’t tell who is rich and who isn’t.” He says his four suitemates, hailing from Connecticut, Hawaii and spots in between, have helped him adjust to Boston life. But he is still trying to figure out an American culture that is more frenetic and obstreperous than in his homeland. “People work hard for everything,” he said. “They do things fast, and they move fast. They tell you the truth; they tell you their experiences and their reservations. In Rwanda, we have a different way of talking to adults. We don’t shout. We don’t be rowdy. But here, you think independently.” Born in rural eastern Rwanda, Mr. Uwayesu was only 3 when his parents, both illiterate farmers, died in a politically driven slaughter that killed some 800,000 people in 100 days. Red Cross workers rescued him with a brother and two sisters — four other children survived elsewhere — and cared for them until 1998, when the growing tide of parentless children forced workers to return them to their village. They arrived as a drought, and then famine, began to grip their home province. “I was malnourished,” Mr. Uwayesu said. “My brother would tell me, ‘I’m going out to look for food,’ and then he would come back without it. There were times we did not cook the whole day.” In 2000, young Justus and his brother walked to Kigali, Rwanda’s capital and a city of about one million, in search of food and help. Instead, they wound up at Ruviri, a sprawling garbage dump on the city’s outskirts that was home to hundreds of orphans and herds of pigs. Justus found a home with two other children in an abandoned car, its smashed-out windows and floor covered with cardboard. For the next year and a half, he said, all but the search for food and shelter fell by the wayside. “There was no shower, no bathing at all,” he said. “The only thing was to keep something warm for the night, something
[Marxism] In These Times looks at the growing labor support for Hawkins in NY Governor's race
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[Marxism] RALLY THIS SATURDAY; As signatories to our Open Letter mount, we call on you to join us
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Despite strong rains and the cold, a number of students, community members, and others, braved the elements to register their dissent Wednesday night against anti-Muslim bigot Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the NYU Law FOLCS forum. https://www.facebook.com/events/607870392654917/?ref=22 Image https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/t31.0-8/10457715_460609654081537_1788423044020292442_o.jpg We hope you will join us in demonstration again this Saturday https://www.facebook.com/events/555481251251132/?ref=22 and sign our open letter. Details below. - Join student groups, faculty, and community groups to register your concerns about NYU's affiliation with the Forum on Law, Culture, and Society: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59187564/FOLCS%20Open%20Letter.pdf Sign here! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Fz8ITgCBt8UHE3neeUtVfmf5X6Zm1t7EHFSi-yA6pCs/ *JOIN US THIS SATURDAY IN PROTEST SPREAD THE WORD!* *NOT IN OUR NAME: Rally against “Stop Frisk” police commissioner, pro-torture Bush attorney general at NYU-affiliated film screening of CIA-vetted torture film * https://www.facebook.com/events/555481251251132 Where: Outside NYU Law’s Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Sq. South When: 6:30PM, Saturday, 25 October NYU Law’s newly acquired -- and grotesquely named -- Forum on Law, Culture, and Society, is inviting former NYPD police commissioner Ray Kelly and former attorney General Michael Mukasey to screen CIA-vetted http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-obtains-4-to-5-inch-stack-of-overlooked-cia-records-detailing-meetings-with-bin-laden-filmmakers/ film* Zero Dark Thirty*, widely interpreted as promoting torture http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/zero-conscience-in-zero-dark-thirty . Ray Kelly spent several years engaging in warrantless spying of Muslim students http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2012/NYPD-monitored-Muslim-students-all-over-Northeast and communities around the East Coast -- including Muslim students at NYU. Kelly is also responsible for the “Stop Frisk” http://www.nyclu.org/node/1598 program, rife with racial discrimination and widely condemned as means of harassing people of color in New York. Despite Kelly’s history of mistreating NYU community members, NYU Law is nonetheless placing its stamp of approval on his visit through its affiliation with the Forum. The Forum will also bring former US attorney general Michael Mukasey, who defended Bush administration officials from being held accountable for potential war crimes http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html, namely torture http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15413635. *Zero Dark Thirty*, produced in close consultation with the CIA http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-obtains-4-to-5-inch-stack-of-overlooked-cia-records-detailing-meetings-with-bin-laden-filmmakers/, presents the audience with a stream of demeaning caricatures of Muslims while alleging -- falsely http://bigstory.ap.org/article/senate-torture-report-examines-hunt-bin-laden -- that torture was necessary and justified to capture Osama Bin Laden. It is difficult to see how having individuals complicit in torture and warrantless spying that reached NYU itself deserve such a warm welcome as they screen thinly-veiled government propaganda. The Forum was enthusiastically embraced http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/center_studying_law_and_culture_moves_to_nyu by NYU Law Dean Trevor Morrison this summer. Its director and host of Wednesday’s event, Thane Rosenbaum, opined during Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza last summer that virtually all Palestinian civilians forfeited their “right[s] to be called civilians” due to how some voted in a 2006 election. As a slew of critics noted, Mr. Rosenbaum’s commentary mimicked terrorist propaganda http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/07/thane_rosenbaum_s_wall_street_journal_op_ed_this_new_york_university_professor.html designed to justify massacring innocent people -- including Americans and Israelis. The Forum is also separately hosting anti-Muslim bigot Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has called Islam a “nihilistic cult of death” and has called for the US constitution to be amended to exclude Muslims from legal rights. A coalition of student and community groups has called for this protest as part of a growing campaign to get NYU Law to reassess its relationship with the Forum. Meet outside NYU Law’s Vanderbilt Hall, 40 Washington Sq. South, at 6:30PM on Saturday, 25 October. You are encouraged to bring banners and materials. E-mail arg...@nyu.edu to add your endorsement.
[Marxism] From my Swedish correspondent on the Russian submarine scare
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Hi Louis, The false-flag operation/exercise seems to be over now. A thoroughly planned and well executed propaganda operation in order to feed the ever hungrier Swedish military-media-industrial-complex. As well as a fine way to introduce the brand new stealthy cool of HMS Visby. For some reason all photos of (obviously Russian) submarines are blurry. http://onechancenews.com/a-mysterious-submarine-is-lurking-in-sweden-and-fingers-point-to-russia/ [Sorry, quick duck-go-search, but the headline sums up the mission objective pretty good: A Mysterious Submarine Is Lurking in Sweden, and Fingers Point to Russia] My feeling is that this has been planned for a long time. This is the answer of the Swedish military–industrial–media complex to the threats of a Social Democratically lead government. Not that they fear that the Social Democrats in any way would oppose the awesome job-creating sector know as MIMAK (former prime minister Göran Persson(S) is the chief lobbyist of big Gun), but the possible inclusion of the Left Party in the government was troubling. Everybody in Sweden, including the leader of the Left Party Jonas Sjöstedt [a fellow comrade of mine, but even back then destined to take up the mantle of the old-school social democracy] was sure that the Left Party [formerly The Left Party the Communists/Communist Youth] would be part of the new government. Jonas Sjöstedt and the Left Party took many steps to the right in order to prove their allegiance to the system and thereby ensuring a spot in the new government. To the shock of almost everybody [me included] it was announced the day after the election by (S) that the Left Party would NOT be included in the new government. Jonas Sjöstedt must have felt mighty betrayed. Anyway, the Swedish MIMAK feared that the notorious crypto-communists in the Left Party would be both in the government, as well as, for the first time ever, in the [not sure how to translate this] foreign affairs committee; i.e. the communists would be able to influence matters of national security. Above all, they might want to limit the large weapons industry that is nowadays, much like the US, the backbone of the Swedish economy. The timing was perfect. When to strike? When you'll encounter the least opposition and can push your agenda to the max. When the government is new, weak and unlikely to intervene. And even though Göran Persson (former prime minister (S)) is the leading lobbyist for the MIMAK, even the most modest inclination towards peace by liberals(US) or social democrats(EU) is a challenge. The Military felt compelled to assert its power and put pressure on the new government to increase military spending in the new budget. [Didn't operation Cast Lead happen just after Obama was elected?] Neither the right wing alliance nor the left wing (including the Left Party) received a majority of the votes in the election since the neofascist Sverigedemokraterna got 13%. It's still unclear if the newly formed SD-MP(Miljöpartiet-the (center) Green Party) can get their new budget through. It might it be blocked by Sverigedemokraterna, and if so, there could be a new election. I tweeted a while ago about the Russian scare in Swedish media. The weird thing is that all media, including the social democratic Aftonbladet present it this way: https://twitter.com/pjedlund/status/480313429316894720 In all frankness: I'm fucking terrified. No one here seems to gives a damn. So what if they couldn't catch the sub, we still need to strengthen our defense. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] From my Swedish correspondent on the Russian submarine scare
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Maybe HMS Visby will locate the Loch Ness Monster, which is clearly visible in the photographs. Jesse Lemisch _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: [Critical-Syria] Winning Kobane, Losing Syria
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/564286-winning-kobane-losing-syria MICHAEL WEISS https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/Author/Michael.Weiss Published: 23/10/2014 01:35 PM Winning Kobane, Losing SyriaObama has shown that he can make a difference — when he wants to. [image: Kobane explosion. (AFP/Bulent Kilic)] An explosion rips through Kobane. (AFP/Bulent Kilic) Within the space of a week, Kobane, the Syrian-Kurdish city on the lip of the Turkey that has been besieged for weeks by the Islamic State, has gone from being “not strategically vital” to “symbolically important,” to give the *Wall Street Journal**’**s* paraphrase http://online.wsj.com/articles/us-airdrops-weapons-and-supplies-to-besieged-syrian-kurds-in-kobani-1413761080?tesla=y of official U.S. government thinking on the subject. The number of airstrikes there has now far outstripped that of any other target in either Syria or Iraq. This includes Mount Sinjar, the site of ISIS’ first aspirational genocide of an ethnic minority population from which ISIS was temporarily expelled last August. Unfortunately, however, the jihadists are back there http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.622061 again, having completely encircled the barren mountain where tens of thousands of Yazidis were left stranded without food and water in August. Yazidi villages have been retaken, although this time US aerial interference seems far less exigent, in light of Kobane’s plight. The about-face is extraordinary. Earlier in the month, both the Pentagon and Ankara announced that Kobane’s fall was imminent. US Secretary of State John Kerry was all torn up but coldly realistic: “As horrific as it is to watch in real time what’s happening in Kobani,” he said http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/oct/09/john-kerry-kobani-syria-philip-hammond-isis-video on October 8, “you have to step back and understand the strategic objective.” Now Kerry says http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-drops-weapons-aid-to-kurds-fighting-islamic-state-in-syria/2014/10/20/2f1ed41c-5801-11e4-b812-38518ae74c67_story.html this: “We cannot take our eyes off the prize here. It would be irresponsible of us, as well as morally very difficult, to turn your back on a community fighting [ISIS], as hard as it is, at this particular moment.” Except that, as other US officials continue to insist, the “prize” isn’t Syria at all; it’s Iraq. ISIS is just so stupid that it has decided to throw the bulk of its manpower and its US-purloined heavy equipment at Kobane, which has thus become flypaper for terrorists. Some 400 ISIS fighters http://www.theguardian.com/world/20have been killed thus far, with serious losses in armaments and vehicles. US Central Command has dropped about 24 tons of medicine and weaponry onto the Kurdish citadel-city’s defenders, principally the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia run exclusively by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the Syrian branch of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). It was these fighters who fought “valiantly,” according to Kerry, not just in Kobane but around Mount Sinjar last August, rescuing the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga who couldn’t hold out against the IS onslaught. Here things got a little tricky for Washington because the PKK is a US-designated terrorist organization. Not to worry: White House and State Department lawyers cast a quick juridical eye over the problem and decided that the PYD is a legally distinct entity and therefore not subject to the same proscriptions on gun-running and military cooperation as the PKK, a fact which must have made PYD officials wiping their damp brows and laughing simultaneously given that they don’t deny being the Syrian branch of the PKK, and they openly consider Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned PKK commander, their ideological godfather and hero — an assessment shared by Ankara for some 30 years. Kobane’s transformation from an unworthy sideshow to the Dunkirk of Operation Inherent Resolve was remarkably swift, easy and rather creative for a normally languorous and analytically cautious commander-in-chief. True, US officials, beginning with former State Department Syria policy coordinator Robert Ford, had been holding indirect or quiet talks with the PYD since 2013, but in reality, Obama didn’t hesitate to arm the affiliate of a US-blacklisted organization to stop another, far more brutal one. “[O]fficials were desperate for partners on the ground on the Syrian side of the border,” the *Journal*noted. “In recent days, the Kurdish fighters had made gains.” First, CentCom Commander General Lloyd Austin showed the president a proposal for saving the city, which couldn’t be
[Marxism] De-industrialisation and the prospects for socialism
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Another excellent piece by Michael Roberts. I've stuck it up on Redline, here: http://rdln.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/de-industrialisation-and-the-prospects-for-socialism/#more-9698 But do go and look at Mike's excellent site, thenextrecession. It's absolutely required reading for anyone wanting to be well-informed about trends in the global capitalist economy. There's also quite a lot there about the British economy and the US economy. Phil _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
