[Marxism] The myth of the kindly General Robert E Lee

2017-06-13 Thread Dennis Brasky via Marxism 
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
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[Marxism] Fwd: PBS Runs A Three-Hour Series Glorifying The DeVos Education Agenda | HuffPost

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pbs-school-inc-devos-documentary_us_593ff88ee4b02402687ce613
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[Marxism] [UCE] 50 years of Occupation - a forum

2017-06-13 Thread Dennis Brasky via Marxism 
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> http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060517
>>>
>>
>> http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060717
>>
>> http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060917
>
>>
>>
>>
>
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[Marxism] What is to constitute the new “yes” is the problem | John Bellamy Foster | MR Online

2017-06-13 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism 
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https://mronline.org/2017/06/13/what-is-to-constitute-the-new-yes-is-the-problem/





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[Marxism] Fwd: Stop calling for a Muslim Enlightenment | Christopher de Bellaigue | World news | The Guardian

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/19/stop-calling-for-a-muslim-enlightenment
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[Marxism] Fwd: Are We Nearing Civil War? - Pat Buchanan

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2017/06/13/are-we-nearing-civil-war-n2340246
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[Marxism] Fwd: After Turkey's decision to deploy troops in Qatar, Syrian Kurds express willingness to cooperate with Saudi Arabia - ARA News

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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What would Murray Bookchin have thought of this, I wonder.

http://www.aranews.net/2017/06/after-turkeys-decision-to-deploy-troops-in-qatar-syrian-kurds-express-willingness-to-cooperate-with-saudi-arabia/
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Re: [Marxism] How a Campus Fight Drove 2 Left-Leaning Professors to Fox News

2017-06-13 Thread Sheldon Ranz via Marxism 
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Oh, but I did have plenty to offer.  I posed the question that provoked
Amith into giving the other side of the story.

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 3:08 PM, Michael Yates via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> Amith gives a good account, I think, of the context for the professor's
> appearance on the odious Tucker Carlson's show. Sheldon Ranz has nothing
> whatever to offer us. I taught for more than forty years and faced many
> hostile students. And many, more dangerous people in bars, bowling alleys,
> and on the streets of Johnstown, PA. That's part of being a radical.
> Nothing, and I mean nothing, can justify going on that wretched pig's show,
> and especially to cry crocodile tears over how you have been treated by
> students who were fighting for social justice.
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[Marxism] How LaRouche ripped off Michael Hudson

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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(From Dennis King's book)

Pepper and several others, including LaRouche himself, cultivated a Wall 
Street economist, Dr. Michael Hudson, author of several works in 
economic history. They told him that their New Benjamin Franklin 
Publishing House would like to republish several important 
nineteenth-century economists that he had cited in his scholarship. They 
also asked him for money, offering 20 percent on a three- month loan 
secured by the publishing house and two top LaRouche aides. Hudson had 
his lawyer draw up the notes and with some trepidation turned over 
$75,000. But the only books that were published were by or about 
LaRouche. The latter met with Hudson two months later and asked him to 
convert his loan into stock in the publishing company, promising him an 
administrative post. When Hudson turned the offer down, his NCLC 
contacts dropped all pretenses of friendliness. They explained that 
LaRouche had told them he was politically unreliable. Franklin House 
defaulted on the notes, then sought to stretch out the payment period. 
Its checks bounced, and when Hudson demanded return of his principal, he 
was told that the money was needed to pay for LaRouche's bodyguards. If 
he persisted in asking for his money back, they would have to conclude 
he was part of the world plot to kill LaRouche. Hudson filed a federal 
racketeering suit and was promptly attacked by the LaRouchians in an 
article calling him a KGB agent. It took him four years in court to 
obtain a judgment against them, only to find there was no practical way 
to collect. Franklin House had been stripped to a bare shell.


When Hudson's legal efforts were discussed inside the NCLC, LaRouche 
Security aide Michelle Steinberg said (according to FBI testimony at her 
1986 bail hearing): "Piss on him. Fuck him. That's what he gets for 
lending us money." The victimizing of Hudson was the first 
well-documented case of fraud in what prosecutors allege was the 
defrauding of thousands of other lenders. And Hudson, for his part, 
cured of any illusions about the LaRouchians, became a prosecution 
witness in criminal proceedings against them.

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[Marxism] Fwd: [New post] When Assimilation Isn’t Enough

2017-06-13 Thread Richard Sprout via Marxism 
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Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "
> Date: June 13, 2017 at 2:45:12 PM EDT
> To: "Richard Sprout" , ""

> Subject: [New post] When Assimilation Isn’t Enough
> 
> 
> Respond to this post by replying above this line
> New post on
> 
> 
> When Assimilation Isn’t Enough
> by Anthracite Unite
> Tales of a "Good Immigrant" in Hazleton
> 
> Read more of this post
> 
> Anthracite Unite | June 13, 2017 at 2:44 pm | Tags: Filipino
Americans, racism | Categories: Hazleton, Immigration | URL:
http://wp.me/p8fBuB-bc
> Comment  See all comments
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> Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: 
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Re: [Marxism] How a Campus Fight Drove 2 Left-Leaning Professors to Fox News

2017-06-13 Thread Michael Yates via Marxism 
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Amith gives a good account, I think, of the context for the professor's 
appearance on the odious Tucker Carlson's show. Sheldon Ranz has nothing 
whatever to offer us. I taught for more than forty years and faced many hostile 
students. And many, more dangerous people in bars, bowling alleys, and on the 
streets of Johnstown, PA. That's part of being a radical. Nothing, and I mean 
nothing, can justify going on that wretched pig's show, and especially to cry 
crocodile tears over how you have been treated by students who were fighting 
for social justice.
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[Marxism] On the Arab Jew

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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(Ella Shohat is great)

On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements
Selected Writings of Ella Shohat

Spanning several decades, Ella Shohat’s work has introduced conceptual 
frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of 
Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East, focusing on the pivotal figure 
of the Arab-Jew. This book gathers together her most influential 
political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs. as well 
as previously unpublished material.


Defying the binarist and Eurocentric Arab-versus-Jew rendering of the 
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Shohat’s work has dared to engage with the 
deeper historical and cultural questions swirling around colonialism, 
Orientalism and nationalism. Shohat’s paradigm-shifting work unpacks 
such fraught issues as the anomalies of the national/colonial in Zionist 
discourse; the narrating of Jewish pasts in Muslim spaces; the links and 
distinctions between the dispossession of the Nakba and the dislocation 
of Arab-Jews; the traumatic memories triggered by partition and 
border-crossing; the echoes within Islamophobia of the anti-Semitic 
figure of ‘the Jew’; and the efforts to imagine a possible future 
inter-communal ‘convivencia’.


Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics 
in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres 
written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the 
author’s intellectual journey.


About The Author

Ella Shohat, an Arab Jew from a Baghdadi family now living in New York, 
is Professor of Cultural Studies and of Middle Eastern Studies, New York 
University. Among her many books are Israeli Cinema: East/West and the 
Politics of Representation (I.B. Tauris, 2010) and Taboo Memories, 
Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006).


http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745399492
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[Marxism] Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions and America’s Secret Slave System

2017-06-13 Thread Richard Sprout via Marxism 
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http://www.theroot.com/hillary-clinton-jeff-sessions-and-americas-secret-slav-1796031686?utm_source=theroot_newsletter_medium=email_campaign=2017-06-13


Sent from my iPhone

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Re: [Marxism] ‘No Such Thing as Justice’ in Fight Over Chemical Pollution in China

2017-06-13 Thread Fred Murphy via Marxism 
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This essay has probably appeared here before, but it's the best there is on
China and the environment. Richard is expanding it into a book to be
published by Verso later this year or next.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse


On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> (I read shit like this and wonder how anybody on the left can consider
> China's government as environmentally-minded. It takes more than
> alternative energy to qualify. It is particularly galling when you consider
> how Roland Boer, the winner of the Isaac Deutscher prize in 2014, pumps out
> ridiculous defenses of "Chinese socialism" nonstop.)
>
>
> NY Times, June 13 2017
> ‘No Such Thing as Justice’ in Fight Over Chemical Pollution in China
> By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ
>
> ​[snip]
>
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[Marxism] The Revolution That Always Was: How Communist-Led Kerala Is Leading India | teleSUR

2017-06-13 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism 
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http://www.telesurtv.net/english/amp/english/news/The-Revolution-That-Always-Was-How-Communist-Led-Kerala-Is-Leading-India-20170612-0012.html





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[Marxism] Fwd: From Syria to Palestine: Struggles Against Dictatorship, Imperialism, and Zionism | WeAreMany.org

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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Audio of Left Forum panel discussion.

http://wearemany.org/a/from-syria-to-palestine
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[Marxism] Fwd: Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory | US news | The Guardian

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/13/revealed-reality-of-a-life-working-in-an-ivanka-trump-clothing-factory
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[Marxism] Fwd: 100th Anniversary of Hubert Harrison’s Founding of the First Organization of the Militant “New Negro Movement”

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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By Jeffrey Perry. Finally had a chance to have a long talk with him 
during lunchtime at the Left Forum a couple of weeks ago. He never 
belonged to a sect but was part of an informal network of people who 
were close to Theodore Allen. I enjoyed sharing memories of Hoboken with 
him, another former resident. I lived there in 1966 before it became 
gentrified. An amazing place.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/13/100th-anniversary-of-hubert-harrisons-founding-of-the-first-organization-of-the-militant-new-negro-movement/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Amazon.com: Art Bastard: Robert Cenedella, Richard Armstrong, Marvin Kitman, Ed McCormack: Amazon Digital Services LLC

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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This is a great film about a radical artist now available VOD.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WD1Y7FJ/

My review:

https://louisproyect.org/2016/06/02/art-bastard/
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[Marxism] Going to FoxNews

2017-06-13 Thread Ron Jacobs via Marxism 
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I graduated from Evergreen when I was in my thirties.  I also worked there
for a couple years. My take on the recent protests is simple.  The students
of color and others who held the protests were fed up with (what I
characterize as) the self-centered and  arrogant opposition of Weinstein et
al to a request they and other white faculty and students take their
classes off campus for the traditional Day of Absence activities.  For
Weinstein to label the request to go off campus for a day as oppressive is
a very good example of how many progressives and liberals are  out of touch
with what oppression is.  This is even moreso in the land of academia.  The
request was just that--a request.  It was not made with the slaver's whip
or even a Jim Crow law.  It was a requestAs for the draconianism of the
attempt to create equity. from my understanding it seems that it was not
draconian at all, at least no more than a good affirmative action policy.
Race may not be a biological construct, but racism doesn't need biology to
exist.  History tells us that.  Weinstein's attempt to pretend otherwise is
not only ahistorical, it is ultimately its own brand of racism.

Then there is FoxNews.  FoxNews is a propaganda outlet for the rightwing
and fascist elements in the US.  Going on there serves the interests of the
elements. I have been invited to go on different FoxNews shows a couple
different times.  One was a morning news show after the invasion of Iraq in
2003.  I refused.  After all, I had seen how they edit the clips they use
to serve their purposes; purposes which are diametrically opposed to mine.
The other time was an invite to talk about Bill Ayers and the Weather
Underground (because of my book The Way the Wind Blew) during Obama's
campaign.  It was Sean Hannity who invited me.  We were discussing the
particulars--flying to the studio or doing an interview remotely,
etc.--when I told the producer that if I went on the show, I wanted Hannity
to know that I disagreed with almost everything he said and stood for and
that I would just leave if I was cut off or felt my input was a waste of my
time.  The producer said he would talk with Hannity before we finalized
anything.  He called back an hour later and told me that Hannity had
changed his mind and thought I was a communist.  I told the producer
thanks.  Hannity ended up finding someone of his political ilk to give him
the prop he wanted.  My point is FoxNews should be boycotted.  One's ego
should not decide ones media appearances.  Of course, from where I sit and
with the info I have read and received from friends at Evergreen is that
Weinstein's ego is a major reason why this situation came to the head that
it did.

Do I think the students and allies should have targeted him? No, but I
understand why they did.
ron jacobs
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Spy Who Funded Me: Revisiting the Congress for Cultural Freedom - Los Angeles Review of Books

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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One class of scholarship about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the 
role of the CIA has been investigative and denunciatory; the other, 
analytic and skeptical. Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper? 
(1999) and Joel Whitney’s more recent Finks (2015) belong to the former 
category: they argue that the CIA manipulated Cold War culture to the 
detriment of the global left. They understand the CIA as an instrument 
of the United States ruling class, and the CCF as its representative on 
the international intellectual field. But other scholars, without 
disputing the CCF’s hegemonic intentions, are less sure about its actual 
impact. In his book Cold War Modernists, published in 2015, Greg 
Barnhisel found relatively little editorial interference by the CCF in 
the operations of its flagship English-language journal Encounter. Hugh 
Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer (2008) argues that even when the CIA 
tried to call the tune, it did not always get what it wanted. In my own 
book on the subject, Neither Peace nor Freedom (Harvard University 
Press, 2015), I argued that the CCF produced unexpected and 
contradictory effects in Latin America in its pursuit of intellectual 
hegemony, as when it helped Fidel Castro come to power in Cuba.


full: 
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-spy-who-funded-me-revisiting-the-congress-for-cultural-freedom/

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[Marxism] ‘No Such Thing as Justice’ in Fight Over Chemical Pollution in China

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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(I read shit like this and wonder how anybody on the left can consider 
China's government as environmentally-minded. It takes more than 
alternative energy to qualify. It is particularly galling when you 
consider how Roland Boer, the winner of the Isaac Deutscher prize in 
2014, pumps out ridiculous defenses of "Chinese socialism" nonstop.)



NY Times, June 13 2017
‘No Such Thing as Justice’ in Fight Over Chemical Pollution in China
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

DAPU, China — The small boy could no longer recognize the sound of his 
mother’s voice. Bony and pale, vanishing beneath a winter coat, he spoke 
mostly in grunts and screams, the language of his malady. He stumbled as 
he walked, never certain of the ground beneath him.


Wang Yifei, 5, was destined for a better life, his family thought. To 
ensure years of good fortune, they relied on traditions that had always 
guided them: making certain his mother stepped over hot coals on her 
wedding day and lining his crib with white cloth to fend off wayward 
spirits.


But Yifei had fallen ill, and like more than 300 other children in Dapu, 
a town of 62,000 in Hunan Province, in central China, he suffered 
hearing loss, impaired speech and difficulty walking. Many other 
children also struggled with memory problems, stunted growth, anemia and 
seizures.


Doctors eventually determined that the children had lead poisoning and 
pointed to a nearby factory, Meilun Chemical Materials, which produced 
pigments for use in paints and makeup powder. Upset and demanding 
accountability, dozens of families prepared to sue.


Yet in Dapu, as in much of China’s rural heartland, the chemical 
industry is king — the backbone of years of above-average economic 
growth. Local Communist Party officials depended on Meilun and other 
plants for their livelihoods and political fortunes, and they had a 
history of ignoring environmental violations to keep the factories humming.


Yifei’s father, Wang Jiaoyi, did not anticipate the backlash to the 
lawsuit. First, he said, his co-workers at a local farm warned that he 
might lose his job packing vegetables. Then thugs showed up at his door, 
threatening to hurt his family. After months of pressure, Mr. Wang 
decided to drop the case.


“There’s no way to win,” he said. “There’s no such thing as justice.”

After a decade in which companies in wealthier nations exported to 
poorer ones much of the dirty business of making hazardous substances, 
China is now the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial chemicals, 
claiming a third of global production by some estimates.


But as the Chinese government has promoted the sector’s rapid growth, it 
has struggled with its impact on the environment. The chemical industry 
has quashed calls to strengthen oversight and force companies to 
publicly disclose what substances they produce. Local environmental 
bureaus are often politically feeble and understaffed. Even when 
companies acknowledge some responsibility for harming public health, as 
Meilun did, the remedies given to communities often fall far short of 
the victims’ needs.


“It’s a dwarf regulating a giant,” said Ma Jun, a prominent Chinese 
environmentalist.


Under President Xi Jinping, the government promised a chance for people 
to fight back, declaring a “war on pollution” and enacting a law in 2015 
to make it easier to sue companies and force them to cover the cost of 
cleaning up neighborhoods. The law was supposed to level the playing 
field by enabling nonprofit groups to file public interest lawsuits 
against polluters. Environmentalists heralded it as a breakthrough.


But progress has been limited. In the Chinese courts, the Communist 
Party controls the decisions of judges, and they routinely rule on cases 
in consultation with officials who have a political and financial 
interest in the outcome. The police, at the behest of the local 
authorities, often harass lawyers and activists, hoping to deter them 
from bringing cases, advocates say. And the government decides which 
nonprofit groups can file public interest lawsuits.


As a result, those who stand up to the chemical industry in China rarely 
prevail.


Wang Zhenyu, a lawyer based in Beijing who has taken on cases on behalf 
of pollution victims, said the new law had failed to deter what he 
called a “privileged class” from intervening in environmental cases. 
“The elite see pollution victims as their enemies,” he said, “and they 
will do everything possible to undermine them and keep their grip on power.”


Signs of Something Wrong

Staff members at Dapu Elementary School were startled. Children at the 
school were showing signs of

[Marxism] Cable news ignored people of color when covering Trump’s Paris exit | Grist

2017-06-13 Thread Richard Sprout via Marxism 
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http://grist.org/article/cable-news-ignored-people-of-color-when-covering-trumps-paris-exit/


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[Marxism] Veterans Affairs Official Downplays Agent Orange Risks, Questions Critics - ProPublica

2017-06-13 Thread Richard Sprout via Marxism 
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https://www.propublica.org/article/veterans-affairs-official-downplays-agent-orange-risks-questions-critics


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[Marxism] Fwd: Investment, profit and growth | Michael Roberts Blog

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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I’m always banging on about the close connection between the movement of 
investment (expenditure on the means of production) and economic growth. 
 In my view, the evidence is overwhelming (The profits-investment 
nexus) that it is investment that is the main swing factor in booms and 
slumps, not personal consumption as many Keynesians focus on.  And it is 
also a key factor in the long-term growth of labour productivity.


https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/investment-profit-and-growth/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trump's History of Lies, According to Biographer Timothy O'Brien - Bloomberg

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-12/trump-s-history-of-lies-according-to-biographer-timothy-o-brien
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[Marxism] Fwd: Theodor Bergmann, ¡Presente! | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2017-06-13 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism 

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https://louisproyect.org/2017/06/13/theodor-bergmann-presente/
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[Marxism] The Jewish Museum - The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin

2017-06-13 Thread Richard Sprout via Marxism 
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http://jewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-arcades-contemporary-art-and-walter-benjamin?utm_source=banner_medium=email_campaign=Hyperallergic-banner-6-7-17_term=Walter%20Benjamin%2C%20Jewish%20Museum%2C%20The%20Arcades%3A%20Contemporary%20Art%20and%20Walter%20Benjamin


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