[Marxism] Fwd: Evidence Consistent with the Possibility of a Poison Gas Release from an Attack on an Ammunition Depot in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Now Postol is saying that people died not because of a sarin gas attack 
but because Russian bombs unleashed a Bhopal type chemical reaction. I 
think this guy needs Aricept.


http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/04/67249.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Postol Arguing with Himself

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://crashfast.com/2017/04/26/postol-arguing-with-himself/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Linux Beach: Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://claysbeach.blogspot.com/2017/04/sincerely-yours-theodore-postol.html
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[Marxism] ILWU members train to resist immigration raids

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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http://www.ilwu.org/ilwu-members-train-to-resist-immigration-raids/

Actions everywhere 
With immigrants now working throughout the country, actions in some regions 
seemed to take residents by surprise. That may have been the case in Grand 
Rapids, Michigan, where so many students joined the strike that school district 
officials had to officially cancel the school day – in a city long considered a 
home of the Republican Party and conservatism. It is also the hometown of Amway 
heiress Betsy DeVos who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of Education.
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[Marxism] Fwd: AFP joins Assad regime, ISIS and threatens to sue Orient News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Pro-Syrian revolution website tells Agence France-Presse to shove it up 
their ass.


http://www.orient-news.net/en/news_show/135619/AFP-joins-Assad-regime-ISIS-and-threatens-to-sue-Orient-News
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Re: [Marxism] Jonathan Demme, Oscar-Winning Director, Is Dead at 73

[Ernest Leif via Marxism]

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My entry into the feature film world was an an apprentice on his remake of
the "Manchurian Candidate". I was of course very nervous, but he made me
feel at ease, sometimes even asking my opinion on what I thought about a
particular sequence. He'll be missed.
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[Marxism] Jonathan Demme, Oscar-Winning Director, Is Dead at 73

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Besides being a fan of his movies, I always appreciated that he was a 
donor to Tecnica, the technical aid for Nicaragua project I was involved 
with 30 years ago.


NY Times, April 26 2017
Jonathan Demme, Oscar-Winning Director, Is Dead at 73
By BRUCE WEBER

Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who observed emphatically 
American characters with a discerning eye, a social conscience and a 
rock ’n’ roll heart, achieving especially wide acclaim with “The Silence 
of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia,” died on Wednesday at his home in 
Manhattan. He was 73.


His publicist, Leslee Dart, confirmed the death. Mr. Demme disclosed 
that he had cancer in 2015.


Mob wives, CB radio buffs and AIDS victims; Hannibal Lecter, Howard 
Hughes and Jimmy Carter: Mr. Demme (pronounced DEM-ee) plucked his 
subjects and stories largely from the stew of contemporary American 
subcultures and iconography. He created a body of work — including 
fiction films and documentaries, dramas and comedies, original scripts, 
adaptations and remakes — that resists easy characterization.


A personable man with the curiosity gene and the what-comes-next 
instinct of someone who likes to both hear and tell stories, Mr. Demme 
had a good one of his own, a Mr. Deeds kind of tale in which he wandered 
into good fortune and took advantage of it. A former movie publicist, he 
had an apprenticeship in low-budget B-movies with the producer Roger 
Corman before turning director.


Mr. Demme became known early in his career for quirky social satires 
that led critics to compare him to Preston Sturges. They included 
“Handle With Care” (1977), originally titled “Citizens Band,” about an 
eccentric network of rural Americans linked by trucks and CB radios, and 
“Melvin and Howard” (1980), a tale inspired by true events, which 
starred Jason Robards as the billionaire recluse Howard Hughes and Paul 
Le Mat as an earnest, good-natured gas station owner who picks him up in 
the desert after Hughes has had a crash on his motorcycle. Hughes 
ostensibly leaves a colossal fortune to the man, who never gets the 
money, of course, losing his claim to it in court.


“Mr. Demme and Bo Goldman, his screenwriter, take Melvin’s tale at face 
value and present the movie as Melvin’s wildest dream,” Vincent Canby 
wrote in a review in The New York Times. “The comic catch is that this 
wild dream is essentially so prosaic. It’s also touched with pathos 
since Melvin — in spite of himself — knows that it will never be 
realized. This is the story of his life.”


Later, as a known commodity, Mr. Demme directed prestige Hollywood 
projects like “Beloved” (1998), an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel 
about the lingering, post-Civil War psychological horror of slavery, 
with Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover in starring roles, and “The 
Manchurian Candidate” (2004), a remake of the 1962 Cold War drama of the 
same title about a brainwashed American prisoner of war. Mr. Demme’s 
updated version, starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep and Liev 
Schreiber, takes place during the Persian Gulf war.


Mr. Demme may be best remembered for two films from the 1990s that were, 
at the time, his career’s biggest anomalies. The first, “The Silence of 
the Lambs” (1991), was a vivid thriller based on the novel by Thomas 
Harris that earned five Oscars, including best picture and best 
director. Unlike his previous films, with their mischievous pleasure and 
tender melancholy, this was straightforward and serious storytelling 
with only a few moments of shivery humor.


The story is told largely from the perspective of an F.B.I. trainee who 
becomes a key figure in the pursuit of a serial killer known as Buffalo 
Bill when she is assigned to conduct a prison interview with Hannibal 
Lecter, a mad and murderous psychiatrist, hoping to extract from him 
clues to Bill’s identity.


Lurid and titillating, the film is full of the perverse details of 
heinous crimes and marked by a seductively ambiguous bond that forms 
between the young agent-to-be, Clarice Starling, and the brilliant 
monster Lecter. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins both won Oscars for 
their memorably distinct character portrayals. The movie is also marked 
by Mr. Demme’s characteristically restless camera and the prominent use 
of music. The score, with its eerie leitmotif, is by Howard Shore.


Mr. Demme’s next narrative venture, “Philadelphia” (1993), brought to 
the fore the strain of advocacy in his work that was otherwise evident 
in his documentaries about Haiti; former President Jimmy Carter; New 
Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and his cousin Robert W. 
Castle, a white activist 

Re: [Marxism] Jeffery Webber and the "pink tide"

[Fred Murphy via Marxism]

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Haven't read it yet but I heard Jeff speak on the same themes at NYU a
couple months back, and the Jacobin article is a good summary.  I concur
with Andrew's point - sorting out the gains and losses from the so-called
Pink Tide experience is a valuable contribution. Will await Lou's in-depth
article before I comment further.

On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 1:46 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> On 4/26/17 1:32 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:
>
>> I've read about a third of the book and it's hardly the shrill told-you-so
>> caricature of Leninism which Louis makes it out to be.
>>
>
> As if the battle over control of Venezuela's state oil company in 2007 was
> between two neoliberal factions. Anyhow, I will be going into more depth
> tomorrow.
>
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Devil and David Grann: How the "Lost City of Z" Author Found His Way to a Follow-Up | Village Voice

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The devil was William Hale, a cattleman from Texas who'd come to the 
Osage Reservation in the latter years of the nineteenth century and 
accumulated a fortune in land and assets, earning himself the nickname 
"the King of the Osage Hills." No amount of money and power seemed to be 
enough for Hale, however, and in 1921 he set in motion a meticulous and 
horrifying plot to kill off an entire family of Osage in order to obtain 
the rights to their land, which sat atop an ocean of oil.


full: 
http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/the-devil-and-david-grann-how-the-lost-city-of-z-author-found-his-way-to-a-follow-up-9918104

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[Marxism] Fwd: A piano for Ketermaya | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Last month I had the very good fortune to see “Ketermaya”, a documentary 
shown at the 2017 Socially Relevant Film Festival about a Syrian refugee 
camp in Lebanon, and the even greater fortune to meet the director Lucas 
Jedrzejak. In two long conversations with Lucas, I found myself admiring 
not only his skill as a filmmaker but his very deep feelings of 
solidarity for the people of the Ketermaya refugee camp, especially the 
children. As we said goodbye, I told him to keep me in the loop on 
anything that I could do to help him in his efforts on behalf of the 
Syrian refugees who were the stars of his film.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2017/04/26/a-piano-for-ketermaya/
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Re: [Marxism] Jeffery Webber and the "pink tide"

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 4/26/17 1:32 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote:

I've read about a third of the book and it's hardly the shrill told-you-so
caricature of Leninism which Louis makes it out to be.


As if the battle over control of Venezuela's state oil company in 2007 
was between two neoliberal factions. Anyhow, I will be going into more 
depth tomorrow.

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Re: [Marxism] Jeffery Webber and the "pink tide"

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Comrades should read this article by Jeffery "adapted from the book," as
Jacobin puts it.
I've read about a third of the book and it's hardly the shrill told-you-so
caricature of Leninism which Louis makes it out to be.
Rather, it's a mature, detailed demolition of the myths around the Pink
Tide, as well as an accurate assessment of the state of the various
movement and political forces, all of which IMO is a precursor to united
action.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/lula-correa-rousseff-left-pink-tide/
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[Marxism] Jeffery Webber and the "pink tide"

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Just finished Jeffery Webber's 300 page book on how the "pink tide" in 
Latin America was a neoliberal con job aided and abetted by Martha 
Harnecker. Will be writing something tomorrow for Counterpunch but will 
state at this point how sterile this exercise is. It reminds me of all 
those articles in the ISO press for the past 15 years based on 
interviews with Venezuelan "revolutionaries" who testified against the 
perfidy of the Chavistas. The problem is that pointing out the 
deficiencies of Morales, Chavez or Correa is relatively easy. The hard 
part is developing strategies that can lead to a socialist revolution 
and becoming part of an organized movement that can gain the allegiance 
of the masses. Whatever else you want to say about Morales, Chavez and 
Correa, they knew how to win people to their ideas. Unless the Marxist 
left can develop the same sort of abilities, it is next to useless. You 
should never forget that Lenin's polemics against the Mensheviks was 
only part of his legacy. For every article excoriating Martov, there 
were a dozen others with proposals on LEFT UNITY and STRATEGY. If you 
think that Leninism is the same thing as denouncing Morales for 
encouraging soybean farms in Bolivia, you really need to study Lenin 
more thoroughly.

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[Marxism] Fwd: What’s wrong with Tim Anderson? | Red Flag

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Nobody symbolises this coalition of neo-fascists and former leftists 
more than Sydney University academic Tim Anderson.


Once associated with the anti-war movement, Anderson has now made 
supporting the Assad dynasty his life’s work. This has involved churning 
out articles filled with recycled government propaganda, organising 
conferences and rallies in support of the regime, and even 
state-sanctioned tours of Syria.


His unique dedication to the cause of tyranny has been rewarded with an 
exclusive private audience with Bashar himself, the man responsible for 
the deaths of at least 400,000 Syrians. In a demonstration of the toxic 
endpoint of this political stance, Anderson also shared a speaking 
platform with a well-known fascist, Jim Saleam, and stood alongside 
fascists at a memorial for slain Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei 
Karlov.



full: https://redflag.org.au/node/5770
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-South]: Illingworth on Rothman, 'Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: H-Net Staff 
> Date: April 26, 2017 at 10:31:24 AM EDT
> To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-South]:  Illingworth on Rothman, 'Beyond Freedom's 
> Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery'
> Reply-To: H-Net Staff 
> 
> Adam Rothman.  Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight
> of Slavery.  Cambridge  Harvard University Press, 2015.  288 pp.
> $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-36812-5.
> 
> Reviewed by James Illingworth (Department of History, University of
> Maryland, College Park)
> Published on H-South (April, 2017)
> Commissioned by Caitlin Verboon
> 
> An extraordinary drama played out in the courtrooms of New Orleans in
> early 1865. Rose Herera, a Louisiana freedwoman, brought suit against
> her former mistress, Mary De Hart, for kidnapping. Two years earlier,
> De Hart had taken Herera's three oldest children on a steamer from
> Union-occupied New Orleans to Havana, Cuba. There, they rejoined
> their master, one of many Confederate sympathizers who had fled the
> Crescent City for a port more hospitable to slavery. By the time Mary
> De Hart returned to New Orleans in January of 1865, however, a new
> state constitution had abolished slavery in Louisiana, and Rose
> Herera was a free woman with powerful new allies. First, Herera
> pursued her claims in the civilian courts, and, when that failed, in
> the provost courts of the occupying army. Finally, after three years
> apart, and thanks to the intervention of figures at the highest level
> of the federal government, Rose Herera was reunited with her
> children.
> 
> Rose Herera's struggle to rescue her children is the subject of Adam
> Rothman's _Beyond __Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of
> Slavery_. This compact, lively book manages to be both an intimate
> microhistory of one black family and a sweeping transnational account
> of war, emancipation, and Reconstruction in the Deep South's largest
> city and beyond. In it, Rothman uses Rose Herera's life and times to
> illuminate crucial changes in the southern legal system during
> Reconstruction, and, more importantly, to illustrate the challenges
> and triumphs of African American family life in the age of
> emancipation.
> 
> Born a slave in rural Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana, in 1835, Rose
> Herera grew up in the distinctive plantation regime of the lower
> Mississippi Valley. By the 1830s, planters in Pointe Coupée had made
> the transition from tobacco and indigo to cotton and sugar, and the
> booming parish had a significant black majority. In the early 1850s,
> Herera's owner sold his plantation and brought her and several other
> slaves to New Orleans, a bustling metropolis of well over a hundred
> thousand people. In the Crescent City, Herera was bought and sold
> several times, eventually ending up in the possession of one James De
> Hart, a dentist. In New Orleans she met and married George Herera, a
> free man of color, and the couple had four children before the
> outbreak of the Civil War.
> 
> When the Civil War came and Union forces occupied New Orleans, James
> De Hart fled to Cuba. The dentist's family tried to take Rose to join
> him there, but she resisted, and ended up confined to the city jail.
> Sick and imprisoned with her youngest child, an infant, Rose was
> powerless to prevent the De Harts from sailing to Havana with her
> three oldest children. She did not remain helpless for long, however.
> The abolition of slavery, the presence of Union troops, and the
> beginning of the political reconstruction of Louisiana created a
> terrain on which Herera was able to press her claims as a free woman
> and a mother. Although she was ultimately unsuccessful in both
> civilian and provost courts, Herera's persistence caught the
> attention of the military authorities who, in turn, alerted the
> federal government. Through the intervention of Secretary of State
> William Seward, the De Harts were eventually forced to send the
> children home.
> 
> In _Beyond Freedom's Reach_, Rothman faces the challenge of using
> Rose Herera's life to illuminate major historical processes without
> letting the drama of war and emancipation drown out the human
> elements of her story. This challenge is particularly acute given
> that Herera left very few written records for long stretches of her
> life. It would have been all too easy for her story to become
> submerged in the social history of Civil War-era Louisiana. In
> general, however, Rothman succeeds admirably in striking the right
> balance between 

[Marxism] Fwd: [Critical-Syria] Does the U.S. want regime change in Syria? | SocialistWorker.org

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Back in 2012, Anand Gopal had an article in Harper's describing the
revolutionary class politics visible in some towns in Syria, still the best
I've seen on that front:

http://harpers.org/archive/2012/08/welcome-to-free-syria/

Now we have an interview with Anand which picks up this theme again,
contrasting the need and opportunity for working-class based politics to
the practice of the mainstream bourgeois opposition.

Some key quotes:

"There are also internal reasons for the weakness of the FSA and the
mainstream democratic opposition.

"The revolutionary councils that popped up around the country in 2012-13
sought to include all segments of Syrian society. While this may have
seemed laudable at the outset, it was, in fact, effectively a popular front
strategy--the councils often included, or were dominated by, the big
landowning families and the prominent traders of the community.

"But if the councils were to be the seed of a new alternative state, they
should have taken the question of revenue seriously. This would have meant
directly confronting the class divisions in Syria, which in many ways were
at the root of the uprising to begin with. This might have included
confiscating the property of the wealthy and redistributing it to meet the
revenue needs of the councils.

"Instead, the councils and their armed protection--the FSA--sought outside
funding from NGOs and foreign intelligence agencies, which inevitably
introduced corruption and fragmentation, creating the space for Islamic
fundamentalists to challenge their authority.

"It's no coincidence that the three strongest state-building movements in
Syria--ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and the left wing YPG--relied very little on
foreign funding. ISIS's main source of revenue, for example, was
confiscation, followed by taxation and oil.

"Of course, it's easy to make this critique in the abstract, but we should
also recognize the extremely difficult conditions that the rebel movement
was operating under.

"To begin with, the sort of organized left that might have made class
demands was very weak in Syria, in large part because of the legacy of
Baathist rule, which co-opted or crushed any type of progressive
alternative..."

Full article at link below.
-- Forwarded message --
From: 'Ashley Smith' via Critical Syria 
Date: Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 9:41 AM
Subject: [Critical-Syria] Does the U.S. want regime change in Syria? |


https://socialistworker.org/2017/04/26/does-the-us-want-
regime-change-in-syria
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[Marxism] Can China Replace the West?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Review, May 11 2017 issue
by Jessica T. Mathews

Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump 
and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman
Other Press, 307 pp., $25.95

Gideon Rachman’s Easternization, his new survey of a transformed Asia, 
admirably does what so little writing on foreign affairs attempts. It 
treats with equal facility economics, geopolitics, security, enough 
history for needed background, official thinking, and public attitudes. 
Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, has an 
eye for the telling statistic and for the memorable detail that makes it 
stick. He packs an enormous amount of information into a short book and 
opens windows of understanding for nonexperts onto this immensely 
important three fifths of humanity. And while not directly concerned 
with the new American administration, the story he tells shows well why 
Donald Trump’s foreign policies could end so badly for the United States 
and for the world.


But Rachman does not, in the end, make a convincing case for the book’s 
thesis—embodied in its one-word title. The central issue, he writes, is 
“how the rise in Asian economic power is changing world politics.” His 
momentous answer is that “the West’s centuries-long domination of world 
affairs,” stretching back to 1500, “is now coming to a close.” Without 
doubt, Asia’s economic ascent has been extraordinary, but 
Westernization—the spread of the West’s influence and values—has rested 
on much more than its wealth and the military power derived from it. 
Those other elements—including open governments, readiness to build 
institutions, and contributions to others’ security and growth—are weak 
or absent in Asia today. Easternization is neither here nor coming soon.


Asia is the world’s largest continent and home to 4.4 billion people. 
But its story is disproportionately about China’s economic growth. 
Beijing’s official statistics are notoriously unreliable, but by most 
reckonings, China became the world’s largest economy (measured by 
purchasing power parity, PPP) in 2014. What isn’t so well known is how 
astonishingly fast the end came for the 140-year reign of the American 
economy as the world’s largest. According to numbers Rachman cites, 
China was just 12 percent of the size of the US economy in 2000 and only 
half as big as late as 2011. Such meteoric growth has been enough to 
lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, finance the US deficit, and 
still allow China to increase its military spending at double-digit 
rates every year for two decades.


In matters of national security the momentum of Chinese growth has 
meant, for example, that while Japan’s military spending was triple 
China’s in 2000, it was only half as large by 2015. A rapidly expanding 
military has underwritten Beijing’s surging confidence in its own 
strength vis-à-vis both its neighbors and the US, and increasingly 
aggressive behavior in the South and East China Seas, where it has 
claimed islands, rocks, and waters also claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and 
the Philippines. It has built artificial islands and constructed runways 
and other dual-use facilities on them. It has deployed planes and ships 
to assert its rights and challenged others’ rights to fishing areas, oil 
resources, and even freedom of navigation in areas of open ocean. It has 
vehemently rejected a strong ruling against its claims by a tribunal 
under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.


Though Chinese leaders have not specified exactly what waters they claim 
and insist that China wants a peaceful, negotiated solution to these 
disputes, it is easy to see their actions in a very different light. 
Beijing has notably failed to clarify its goal: whether to assert its 
newfound strength, to test others’ resolve, to extend its regional sway, 
or to claim sovereignty over everything within the so-called nine-dash 
line (a demarcation of China’s claims to the South China Sea that dates 
back to 1947) and attempt to push the US out of the western Pacific—an 
outcome Washington will not accept. In the atmosphere of profound 
strategic mistrust that defines US–China relations, the potential for 
tragic miscalculation by both sides is obvious.


This is not the only or even the most immediate security risk in the 
region. Taiwan’s official status as part of mainland China—known as the 
One China policy—is nonnegotiable for Beijing. Trump’s biggest blunder 
to date was to suggest that he might no longer accept that policy, which 
has kept the peace among the US, Taiwan, and China for four decades 
while allowing Taiwan to flourish. Beijing instantly—and 

[Marxism] Fwd: Chemical Attack in Syria - National Evaluation presented by Jean-Marc Ayrault following the Defense Council Meeting (26.04.17) - France-Diplomatie - Ministère des Affaires étrangères et

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[Marxism] Fwd: HMNY – the profit-investment nexus: Keynes or Marx? | Michael Roberts Blog

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