[Marxism] Fwd: What Became of Occupy Wall Street?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/06/what-became-of-occupy-wall-street/
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Re: [Marxism] Election in Canada

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I would turn to Wolfgang Streeck's theory of the consumer voter to
understand all this. There seems to be something available for a whole
variety of niche markets. As to the meaning of all this for the class
struggle, I would not be overly optimistic.

comradely

Gary

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 2:26 AM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
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>
> I received this from someone who is normally not enthused about any
> capitalist party.  In this case, the Liberal Party, the historic governing
> party in Canada (I haven't factored in recent decades, but this certainly
> was true.).  This is an indication of the impact of the new government.
> I expect we will have a discussion of the meaning of all this.
> ken h
>
> For once, Canadians are proud (and perhaps even a little bit smug). We ran
> the data:
>
> We have a Minister of Environment and CLIMATE CHANGE.
> We have a Minister of Immigration, Citizenship and REFUGEES.
>
> Our Prime Minister is a sci-fi geek.
> Our Minister of Health is an actual Doctor.
> Our Minister of Families, Children and Social Development is a poverty
> economist.
> Our Minister of Science is an actual Scientist (oh, and she has a Nobel
> Prize).
> Our Minister of Status of Women is an actual woman!
> Our Minister of Veterans Affairs is a quadriplegic because he was shot in
> a drive-by shooting.
> Our Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour is a
> Professional Geologist.
> Our Minister of Democratic Institutions is a Muslim refugee.
> Our Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities is a Paralympian
> Athlete.
> Our Minister of Defence is a badass war hero, Afghanistan combat vet, and
> police officer.
> OUR MINISTER OF TRANSPORT IS A GODDAMN ASTRONAUT.
>
> Half of our Ministers are women.
> Half of our Ministers are men!
> Two of our Ministers are people of First Nations (Kwakwaka'wakw, Inuit)
> Three of our Ministers were born outside of Canada (India, Afghanistan)
> Two of our Ministers are Sikh.
> At least one of our Ministers is Muslim.
> At least two of our Ministers are Atheist.
> One of our Ministers is battling breast cancer. frown emoticon
> One of our Ministers is in a wheelchair.
> One of our Ministers is blind.
> One of our Ministers is openly gay.
> One of our Ministers is openly ginger.
> Also, Hon. Navdeep Bains has a perfect twirly moustache
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[Marxism] My interview on ABC radio about Australia's Goods and Services Tax

[John Passant via Marxism]

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This is the link on my blog to my 15 minute interview with Genevieve 
Jacobs on ABC Canberra Radio 666 on the Goods and Services Tax on Friday 
morning.


http://enpassant.com.au/2015/11/06/my-interview-on-abc-radio-about-the-goods-and-services-tax/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Leaked Emails From Pro-Clinton Group Reveal Censorship of Staff on Israel, AIPAC Pandering, Warped Militarism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://theintercept.com/2015/11/05/leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-group-reveal-censorship-of-staff-on-israel-aipac-pandering-warped-militarism/
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[Marxism] TODAY: VIGIL FOR PALESTINE: 11/6, 1145-1215 at NYU

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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Please join the...


... Black Allied Law Students Association (*BALSA*), Coalition on Law and
Representation (*CoLR*), Law Students for Human Rights (*LSHR*), Law
Students for Justice in Palestine (*LSJP*), Middle Eastern Law Students
Association (*MELSA*), Muslim Law Students Association (*MLSA*), National
Lawyers Guild (*NLG*), South Asia Law Students Association (*SALSA*), NYU
Students for Justice in Palestine (*SJP*), and the NYU Law Women of Color
Collective (*WoCC*)...


...for a Silent Vigil for Palestinians...


TODAY, Friday, November 6

11:45am-12:15pm

Vanderbilt Courtyard, 40 Washington Square South


The purpose of the vigil is to stand in solidarity with oppressed
populations in Palestine which are currently living under occupation. In
addition to the hundreds of children and thousands of Palestinian civilians who
were killed last year
,
we are horrified by recent extra-judicial killings on Palestinian land
. We hope that
the vigil will shed light on human suffering in Palestine.


We will hold signs, remember those who have been killed by Israeli forces,
and oppose the culture of dehumanization of Palestinians and the silencing
of minority voices which have become pervasive on US campuses
 and in our own community.

Please join us! In solidarity!
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Battle Between Gravity and Quantum Physics, as Told by Craig Hogan and Lee Smolin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature 
works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for 
gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbiting planets, colliding 
galaxies, the dynamics of the expanding universe as a whole. That’s big. 
Then there is quantum mechanics, which handles the other three 
forces—electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. Quantum theory is 
extremely adept at describing what happens when a uranium atom decays, 
or when individual particles of light hit a solar cell. That’s small.


Now for the problem: Relativity and quantum mechanics are fundamentally 
different theories that have different formulations. It is not just a 
matter of scientific terminology; it is a clash of genuinely 
incompatible descriptions of reality.


full: 
http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/will-quantum-mechanics-swallow-relativity

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[Marxism] Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LRB, November 5 2015
These people are intolerable
Richard J. Evans

Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War by 
Pierpaolo Barbieri

Harvard, 349 pp, £22.95, April, ISBN 978 0 674 72885 1

On 25 July 1936, Hitler spent the evening at Bayreuth, attending a 
performance of Wagner’s Siegfried. On his way back to his guest quarters 
at Villa Wahnfried, the Wagner family residence, he was introduced to a 
curious delegation that had arrived from Spanish Morocco. It was led by 
Johannes Bernhardt, a Nazi businessman who lived in the colony, and 
included another Nazi businessman and a Spanish air force officer. They 
had managed to get to Bayreuth with the assistance of the Nazi Party’s 
foreign policy organisation (the German foreign office had refused to 
receive them). The three men gave Hitler a short letter from General 
Franco, who had led a military coup in Morocco – timed to coincide with 
military uprisings across Spain – but was now stuck in North Africa and 
unable to get his army across to the mainland. Would Hitler provide 
transport planes, they asked, along with rifles and anti-aircraft guns?


After criticising Franco for his funding problem (‘That’s no way to 
start a war!’), the Nazi leader launched into one of his characteristic 
rants, a full two hours long. The influence of the communists on 
left-wing governments in France and Spain had to be countered, he 
proclaimed. ‘If Spain really goes communist, France in her present 
situation will also be Bolshevised in due course, and then Germany is 
finished. Wedged between the powerful Soviet bloc in the East and a 
strong communist Franco-Spanish bloc in the West, we could do hardly 
anything if Moscow chose to attack us.’ Hitler naturally thought in 
conspiratorial terms, and he told the Nuremberg party rally a few weeks 
later, on 9 September, that the right-wing rebels in Spain had to be 
helped to prevent the ‘revolutionising of the continent’ by ‘Bolshevik 
wire-pullers’ controlled by ‘an international Jewish revolutionary 
headquarters in Moscow’. He had stopped this happening in Germany in 
1933, he boasted; now it had to be stopped in Spain too. In another 
monologue, this one three hours long and addressed to his cabinet in 
December 1936, he declared that Europe was now divided into two hostile 
camps. Spain was the theatre in which communism had to be defeated. ‘If 
there had not been the danger of the Red Peril overwhelming Europe,’ he 
said in one of his private ‘table talk’ monologues in 1942, ‘I would not 
have intervened in the revolution in Spain.’ On another occasion he 
noted that German intervention would ‘distract the attention of the 
Western powers to Spain and so enable German rearmament to continue 
unobserved’.


Against the advice of his entourage, Hitler ordered twenty planes to be 
sent to Franco’s aid – twice as many as requested. Ten of the Junkers 
bombers flew directly to Morocco disguised as civilian transports and 
equipped with spare parts and technicians, while the other ten were sent 
by sea from Hamburg to Cádiz with more equipment. By 11 August they had 
all arrived apart from one that had been blown off course and landed in 
Republican territory. They were joined by six fighter pilots and 95 
volunteer airmen and technicians from the Luftwaffe, all wearing 
civilian clothes and unaware of their destination when they enlisted for 
the operation. A few planes had already flown to mainland Spain, but the 
pace of the airlift now increased dramatically, and by October 1936 
almost 14,000 men, 44 pieces of artillery and 500 tons of equipment had 
been carried across on 868 flights to the Nationalist rebels. Still 
under the influence of Bayreuth, Hitler called the airlift Operation 
Magic Fire. Another 8000 troops made the hazardous journey by sea, but 
the airlift was crucial.


Soon Hitler was sending bombs, rifles, grenades, tanks and yet more 
aircraft to the Nationalist side in the civil war that had broken out 
when the military coup stalled. Twenty shiploads from Germany had 
arrived in Spain by mid-November 1936. Between January 1937 and August 
1938 the Germans also supplied the Nationalists with 320,000 rifles and 
550,000 revolvers. German armed forces also ended up in Spain; they were 
eventually named the Condor Legion, and consisted of three squadrons of 
bombers and three of fighters, backed by anti-aircraft, signals and 
reconnaissance groups, and on the ground by two armoured units. Two 
German ‘pocket battleships’ and several U-boats patrolled the coast to 
intercept Republican supplies. The German forces saw the war as a 
proving ground for aircraft, 

[Marxism] Fwd: I was "part of a terror organization, " says Israeli pilot turned activist | The Electronic Intifada

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Ryan Rodrick Beiler: What was it like growing up in a military family?

Yonatan Shapira: The education I got was very much about peace, 
equality, freedom and a lot of socialist values — caring about the 
other, caring about the poor — but at the same time with a big wall of 
negligence of Palestine. The same time I was in class learning these 
beautiful values, the Israeli army was engaged in occupation, land 
grabs, settlements, massacres, deportation of Palestinian activists.


But I didn’t know these things. I truly believed that I should defend my 
country. I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to be a pilot in the 
air force and it was my dream come true when I was accepted. I became a 
helicopter pilot and flew rescue missions and commando transport.


full: 
https://electronicintifada.net/content/i-was-part-terror-organization-says-israeli-pilot-turned-activist/14253

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[Marxism] Election in Canada

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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I received this from someone who is normally not enthused about any capitalist 
party.  In this case, the Liberal Party, the historic governing party in Canada 
(I haven't factored in recent decades, but this certainly was true.).  This is 
an indication of the impact of the new government.  
I expect we will have a discussion of the meaning of all this.
ken h

For once, Canadians are proud (and perhaps even a little bit smug). We ran the 
data:

We have a Minister of Environment and CLIMATE CHANGE.
We have a Minister of Immigration, Citizenship and REFUGEES.

Our Prime Minister is a sci-fi geek.
Our Minister of Health is an actual Doctor.
Our Minister of Families, Children and Social Development is a poverty 
economist.
Our Minister of Science is an actual Scientist (oh, and she has a Nobel Prize).
Our Minister of Status of Women is an actual woman!
Our Minister of Veterans Affairs is a quadriplegic because he was shot in a 
drive-by shooting.
Our Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour is a Professional 
Geologist.
Our Minister of Democratic Institutions is a Muslim refugee.
Our Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities is a Paralympian Athlete.
Our Minister of Defence is a badass war hero, Afghanistan combat vet, and 
police officer. 
OUR MINISTER OF TRANSPORT IS A GODDAMN ASTRONAUT.

Half of our Ministers are women.
Half of our Ministers are men!
Two of our Ministers are people of First Nations (Kwakwaka'wakw, Inuit)
Three of our Ministers were born outside of Canada (India, Afghanistan)
Two of our Ministers are Sikh.
At least one of our Ministers is Muslim.
At least two of our Ministers are Atheist.
One of our Ministers is battling breast cancer. frown emoticon
One of our Ministers is in a wheelchair.
One of our Ministers is blind.
One of our Ministers is openly gay.
One of our Ministers is openly ginger.
Also, Hon. Navdeep Bains has a perfect twirly moustache
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[Marxism] Doctors Without Borders Says Clues Point to ‘Illegal’ U.S. Strike on Afghan Hospital

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Nov. 6 2015
Doctors Without Borders Says Clues Point to ‘Illegal’ U.S. Strike on 
Afghan Hospital

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Doctors Without Borders hospital was among the 
most brightly lit buildings in Kunduz on the night a circling American 
gunship destroyed it.


The rest of the northern Afghan city was mostly dark after days of 
fighting between the security forces and Taliban militants. But the 
hospital was keeping its lights on as doctors there were working, 
according to the group’s general director, Christopher Stokes.


Spread across the hospital roof was a large white and red flag reading 
“Médecins Sans Frontières,” the group’s French name. On the afternoon 
before the strike, the fighting in the neighborhood had quieted enough 
for staff members to safely climb to the roof and lay out the markers 
identifying the building to any military aircraft flying over.


The group had also sent the longitude and latitude coordinates of the 
hospital, for years the most important trauma center in that part of 
northern Afghanistan, to the United States military to remind it where 
not to attack during the fighting.


Despite all that, and the protection afforded to war-zone hospitals by 
the Geneva Conventions, the hospital was gutted by an American military 
bombardment in the early hours of Oct. 3. The strikes occurred over an 
hour and 15 minutes and killed 30 people, including patients on 
operating tables and the wounded in their beds and wheelchairs.


At a news conference in Kabul on Thursday, the international medical 
organization said that more than a month after the attack the United 
States military had yet to offer an explanation for why a clearly marked 
hospital was struck, other than to say it had been hit by mistake.


“A mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage,” Mr. 
Stokes said at the news conference. The organization shared more details 
of the attack and renewed its call for an independent investigation, 
which both the United States and Afghanistan have resisted so far. “From 
what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war. You 
cannot do this. You cannot bomb a hospital.”


As details continue to emerge that suggest that the military struck the 
target it intended to hit that day, a troubling question hangs over the 
various investigations into the attack: Did someone intentionally decide 
to fire on the hospital, whether because of the presence of wounded 
Taliban fighters there or for some other reason?


As Mr. Stokes put it, “Did our hospital lose its protected status in the 
eyes of the military forces engaged in this attack, and if so, why?”


The main hospital building, the most clearly marked in the medical 
complex, received the brunt of the bombardment on Oct. 3. The perimeter 
of the hospital was mostly spared, suggesting that the main hospital 
building was the specific target of the various aerial passes by the 
American Special Operations AC-130, a gunship used by the military 
because of its ability to deliver precise strikes on one spot over an 
extended period of time.


So far, the United States military has offered few details to explain 
how the strikes happened.


After the airstrike, the military initially claimed the hospital had 
been collateral damage in a bombardment intended to protect American forces.


Later, offering little detail, the top American commander in 
Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell changed that account. He said the 
bombardment came in response to a request from Afghan forces for an 
airstrike, claiming that they had come under attack by Taliban fighters 
in the area. Doctors Without Borders has repeatedly denied those claims.


Since the attack on the hospital, Afghan officials have suggested that 
it was justified, claiming that the complex had become a Taliban 
stronghold in Kunduz after the militants seized the city in September.


But hospital officials have said that is untrue. As a neutral hospital, 
the organization said that it treats wounded patients without regard to 
which side they fight on. It enforces a strict no-weapons policy within 
the hospital.


At the news conference, Mr. Stokes described how the organization 
received an email from an American military official in Washington two 
days before the bombing inquiring about a large number of Taliban “holed 
up” in the hospital and about the safety of the hospital’s staff.


Mr. Stokes and colleagues warned reporters against reading too much into 
the emailed question, however, saying that the organization simply 
responded that the hospital was full of patients, including 

[Marxism] Fwd: Socialist politician credits Bernie Sanders after re-election in Seattle | US news | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/06/socialist-kshama-sawant-seattle-bernie-sanders
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[Marxism] Fwd: Why “Trumbo” is One of the Most Important Films Ever Made

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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When I ran into a fellow member of New York Film Critics Online last 
night following the press screening of Trumbo that opens everywhere on 
November 6th (unlike most films that I review, this one gets full-page 
ads in the NY Times), he asked me what I thought. My response: “If you 
can see only one film this year, it should be Trumbo. Furthermore, if 
you can see only film for the rest of your life, it might also be 
Trumbo, a desert island selection next to Citizen Kane or Modern Times.”


This is a film that obviously matters a lot more to me than the average 
Hollywood film that has become not only distressingly escapist but 
poorly made as well, the quality of which tends to be in inverse 
proportion to the amount of money it costs to make. Making a biopic in 
2015 about the famous blacklisted screenwriter with a cast of notables 
including Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad in the lead role should get the 
attention of any CounterPunch reader but when such a film is so head and 
shoulders over every American film made this year in terms of direction, 
screenplay, acting, incidental music, and costume design, it becomes one 
for the ages.


full: 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/06/why-trumbo-is-one-of-the-most-important-films-ever-made/

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[Marxism] Fwd: How much does Russia care about Hezbollah?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Russia gives Israel the green light to bomb Hezbollah.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentary/566164-how-much-does-russia-care-about-hezbollah
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[Marxism] The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Nov. 6 2015
Review: ‘Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll,’ by Peter 
Guralnick

by Dwight Garner

Sam Phillips
The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll
By Peter Guralnick
Illustrated. 763 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $32.

Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records in Memphis, is frequently 
remembered for a single sound bite: “If I could find a white man who had 
the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars!” He 
seems cynical at best, racist at worst.


He found his white man, of course. One day a 19-year-old Elvis Presley 
wandered into his tiny studio. The music they recorded in 1954 and 1955 
was a sensation, and it brought other poor, desperate, unknown and wild 
Southern boys into Phillips’s doorway: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, 
Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison.


The sound these men made in the 1950s, in unfettered songs that Phillips 
(1923-2003) coaxed onto tape, changed the feel of American life. 
Phillips just might be, as one music writer has suggested, America’s 
real Uncle Sam.


In his beautiful and meticulous new biography, “Sam Phillips: The Man 
Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll,” Peter Guralnick goes out of his way to set 
that “Negro feel” comment into deep context. The essence of that context 
is that Phillips was anything but a cynic or — for his era, at any rate 
— a racist.


Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service, as it was first called, 
so that black artists would have a place to record. He had loved the 
sound of black gospel music and sharecropper work songs since he was a 
child. Among the first people he ushered into his studio were unknowns 
named Howlin’ Wolf and Ike Turner.


Losing Howlin’ Wolf to Chess Records in Chicago a few years later, 
Phillips would say, was the cruelest blow of his career. He called him 
the only artist who could “entertain anybody from the president of the 
United States to the poorest person, black or white, that I might run 
across.”


Phillips was ahead of his time. So-called race records were selling in 
the early 1950s, but not widely. The singles he recorded in Memphis 
weren’t moving. He was in danger of going out of business. When the 
mystery train that was Presley came around the bend, he was not too 
stupid to climb aboard.


It’s worth pausing, for a moment, to consider how lucky it was that 
Presley walked into Phillips’s studio and not someone else’s. Another 
producer (that term had not yet come into use in the record industry) 
might have put him to work singing country-pop ditties with string 
sections. He might have been another Eddy Arnold.


Phillips already had an aesthetic ethos. In some ways, he had prepared 
his whole life for Elvis’s arrival. Part of Phillips’s ethos, Mr. 
Guralnick writes, was his “sense that there were all these people of 
little education and even less social standing, both black and white, 
who had so much to say but were prohibited from saying it.”


Phillips wanted to pull music out of the drawing room. He sought maximum 
spontaneity, minimum polish. “To Sam,” the author writes, “if you 
weren’t doing something different, you simply weren’t doing anything at 
all.”


In practice, Mr. Guralnick says, this meant things like the following: 
“If Ike Turner’s guitarist’s amp fell off the car on the way up to 
Memphis to cut ‘Rocket 88,’ well, stuff some paper where the speaker 
cone was ruptured, and then you had an original sound! If a telephone 
went off in the middle of a session, well, you kept that telephone in — 
just make sure it’s the best-sounding damn telephone in the world.”


One more example: When Perkins was recording “Blue Suede Shoes,” he 
accidentally sang “Go, cat, go” instead of “Go, man, go” and begged for 
a do-over. No chance, Phillips said. He understood the difference 
between lightning and lightning bug.


Mr. Guralnick is the perfect man to tell this story. He’s the author of 
a very good two-volume biography of Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” 
(1994) and “Careless Love” (1999). He’s also the author of “Dream 
Boogie” (2005), a biography of Sam Cooke. He’s written several books of 
essays about American vernacular music, my favorite of which is “Feel 
Like Going Home” (1971). Read the chapter on Charlie Rich.


Mr. Guralnick first met Phillips in 1979, and interviewed him 
extensively for this book. Phillips grew up in and around Florence, Ala. 
His father farmed and later was a flagman on the railroad. After 
completing high school, Phillips went to work for a small radio station. 
One of his tasks was setting up the microphones for live big-band 
broadcasts, and he learned the importance of good mike placement. He 
liked 

[Marxism] Fwd: Three documentaries | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Reviews of:

1. Inside Jackson Heights -- Frederick Wiseman takes up the cause of 
Queens Latinos, LGBT, and undocumented workers. The best film both 
artistically and politically he has made in decades.


2.  Song of Lahore -- Pakistani musicians go eclectic, taking up jazz to 
appeal to world markets when it has dried up in their own country 
largely because of political Islam's repressive practices.


3. "Where to Invade Next" -- Michael Moore's latest, a utopian plea that 
the USA be more like France et al when France et al are much more likely 
to become more like the USA.


http://louisproyect.org/2015/11/06/three-documentaries-3/
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[Marxism] Universal Basic Income - More welfare or more weekend?

[Leigh Phillips via Marxism]

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More welfare or more weekend? - On a Universal Basic Income, full
employment and avoiding libertarian traps

http://intergalacticproletarian.blogspot.ca/2015/11/more-welfare-or-more-weekend.html


Leigh Phillips
European Affairs Journalist & Science Writer
leigh.phill...@gmail.com
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(CA) +1 250 885 1003
(UK) +44 (0)75 282 17 335
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Skype ID: leighphillips
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[Marxism] [Pen-l] Fwd: Why “Trumbo” is One of the Most Important Films Ever Made,

[Michael Yates via Marxism]

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Good review, Louis. I hope I get to see the film. Dalton Trumbo wrote a 
fantastic antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. A great book to give to anyone 
thinking of joining the military. The Hollywood Ten set an example for all of 
us. Principle, courage, defiance of those in power. They suffered a good deal 
for it. Paul Buhle has written some good stuff about left-wing Hollywood, 
including about those blacklisted.  
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