[Marxism] Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Where Is the Outrage Over Anti-Semitism in Sports and Hollywood?

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kareem-abdul-jabbar-is-outrage-anti-semitism-sports-hollywood-1303210
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[Marxism] Oregon Public Broadcasting: Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Very scary

https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-law-enforcement-unmarked-vehicles-portland-protesters/
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Re: [Marxism] How a Lincoln-Douglass Debate Led to Historic Discovery

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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The Wall Street Journal paywall blocking this article, which was posted by
Dennis Brasky, has been defeated.
Texting exchange by two professors led to Frederick Douglass letter on
Emancipation Memorial
ByTed Mann
July 4, 2020 9:30 am ET

WASHINGTON—It was a text-message debate that led Scott Sandage and Jonathan
White to discover a vital American artifact last weekend: a long-forgotten
letter showing how Frederick Douglass really felt about a statue of Abraham
Lincoln and a slave.

Messrs. Sandage and White are history professors who have been on opposite
sides of a dispute over the Emancipation Memorial near the U.S. Capitol,
which depicts Lincoln in the act of freeing a kneeling Black man.

Mr. White, who teaches at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, wrote
in a newspaper that the statue should be preserved, even while conceding in
passing that Douglass disliked the design.

Mr. Sandage, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania,
considered the statue “visually unredeemable” because of its depiction of a
Black man kneeling in a subservient position to Lincoln.

Both men sit on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and had been
debating whether the statue should remain or come down.

And so on the last Friday evening in June, sitting on the couch with his
wife watching “Gilmore Girls,” Mr. White was texting back and forth with
Mr. Sandage, pondering the alleged distaste for the statue by Douglass, who
had dedicated it with a famous address in 1876.

The account of Douglass criticizing the statue at its unveiling came from a
1916 book that included the recollection of activist John W. Cromwell, who
was in attendance.

Mr. White pointed out the account was secondhand from three decades later,
and could be apocryphal. Mr. Sandage had thought Cromwell’s account had
been corroborated and cited it in his own work in the 1990s. He went
searching for a corroborating account.

Last Saturday morning, Mr. Sandage started searching Douglass’s name and
the word “knee” in digitized newspaper archives at Newspapers.com. He found
no corroborating accounts of the remark, but something better: published
blurbs headlined “Frederick Douglass says” that referred to an 1876 letter
from Douglass criticizing the monument.

After 20 minutes, and narrowing the search using Douglass’s flashiest
adjective (“couchant”), Mr. Sandage uncovered Douglass’s letter itself.

Five days after the unveiling, in a letter to the editor of the National
Republican newspaper in Washington, Douglass had critiqued the statue’s
design and suggested how more dignified depictions of free Black people
would improve the park.

“The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude,” Douglass
wrote. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the
negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on
his feet like a man.”

Mr. Sandage said he didn’t at first realize the importance of his
discovery, but alerted Mr. White and texted an image of the letter to David
Blight, a Douglass biographer and history professor at Yale University.

Mr. Blight was “practically giddy,” Mr. Sandage said.

Mr. Blight in turn emailed Richard Fox, a Lincoln scholar at the University
of Southern California, who hadn’t seen the letter either.

“This all happened on Saturday morning,” Mr. Fox said. “None of us knew
until three days ago that there was any evidence in Douglass’s entire life
that he had actually said these things, and then there it was.”

Mr. White and Mr. Sandage weren’t done. Their searches also uncovered an
obituary for Charlotte Scott, the former slave whose $5 donation had kicked
off the fundraising to pay for the monument on the day of Lincoln’s death.

The statue was paid for by donations from former slaves, including Black
veterans of the Union Army, but the design was selected by the Western
Sanitary Commission, a St. Louis charity run by white people, according to
the National Park Service.

The commission selected the design by Thomas Ball, an American sculptor
living in Trieste, Italy, after years of appeals failed to raise sufficient
funds for a larger and more complex monument, historians said.

Messrs. White and Sandage also found a reference in the Washington Bee, a
Black newspaper in the city, to “the Charlotte Scott Emancipation statue in
Lincoln Park.”

Just like that, a document apparently unknown to Douglass’s biographers and
not found in the orator’s papers at the Library of Congress had landed
squarely in the middle of the debate that has swept the nation and the
neighborhood around Lincoln Park where the statue stands.

Amid the Black Lives Matter Movement 

[Marxism] responding to query re photo of Brezhnev kissing

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Dayne Goodwin asked: who is that with Brezhnev

Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kiss on the 30th anniversary of the DDR.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/soviet-leader-leonid-brezhnev-and-east-german-president-news-photo/582649448
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[Marxism] Virtual event: interview of author of new bio of Klaus Fuchs

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Thursday, August 6
6PM

Nancy Thorndike Greenspan, author of Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus
Fuchs, interviewed by Kai Bird

Presented by Leon Levy Center for Biography

Free registration at
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/nancy-greenspan-on-klaus/register
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Re: [Marxism] If You Want to Let Freedom Ring, Hammer on Economic Injustice

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote: This must be a first. A NYT op-ed that cites James
Boggs, a black Marxist auto worker.

I don't know about New York Times op-eds citing James Boggs. But, on Sept.
23, 1972, the Times published "Beyond Rebellion", an op-ed _by_ James Boggs.

DETROIT—The black movement has gone through a number of stages in the last
15 years. First, there was the civil rights movement which reached a
critical stage with the Birmingham confrontations of 1963, and which fi
nally collapsed with the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
in 1968. Then, there has been the black power movement which began to rise
with Malcolm in 1963–4; and which mushroomed into a national movement
following the Watts uprising of 1965 and the Newark and Detroit rebellions
of 1967.

Today we are still in the stage of trying to clarify what black power
means. At the present time most “movement” people are still in the purely
nationalist stage of black power. That is to say, most of those who call
themselves black power advocates are trying to find a solution for blacks
separate from a solution for the contradictions of the entire United
States. Actually this is impossible. Therefore, many black nationalists are
going off into all kinds of fantasies and dreams about what black power
means — like heading for Africa, or isolating themselves in a few states,
or whites just vanishing into thin air and leaving this country to blacks.

We have yet to come face to face with our contradiction that just as it has
been on the backs of the black masses that this country has advanced
economically, so it is only under the revolutionary political leadership of
black people that this country will be able to get out of its
contradictions. We are hesitant to face up to this truth because it is too
challenging. We have the fear which always haunts the revolutionary social
forces, the fear of not knowing whether they can win, the lack of
confidence in themselves and in their ability to create a better society.

This is not a fear that is unique to blacks. All revolutionary social
forces have this fear as they come face to face with their real conditions
of life and the growing realization that they must assume the revolutionary
responsibility of changing the whole society, so that their lives as well,
as those of others in the society can be funda mentally changed. Because
the task is so great, it becomes much easier to evade the tremendous
challenge and responsibility for disciplined scientific thinking and
disciplined political organization which are necessary to lead
revolutionary struggle.

Confronted with this political choice, many of those who have been
frustrated by the failure of the civil rights movement and the succeeding
rebellions to solve all our problems have begun to put forward all kinds of
fantastic ideas as to what we should now do. Some say we should separate
and return to Africa. Some say we should separate but should remain here
and try to build a new black capitalist economy from scratch inside the
most advanced and powerful capitalist economy in the world! Some say we
should join the Pan‐African movement of the African peoples in Africa and
build a military base in Africa from which we will eventually be able to
attack the U.S.A.

Others say we should just struggle for survival from day to day, doing
whatever has to be done for survival. And finally, others have just given
up struggling for anything at all, and have turned to astrology or drugs or
religion in the old‐time belief that some metaphysical force out there in
the twilight zone will rescue us from our dilemma.

We have to examine all these theories realistically and scientifically
—whatever their origin and whosoever is proposing them—whether they are our
friends or our relatives; whether or not they are old comrades with whom we
have demonstrated and gone to jail in the past; whether or not we admire
them for their past deeds or for their charismatic personalities or because
they make us feel good when we hear them rapping against “the man.” All
these personal considerations are irrelevant measured against the real
miseries of our present conditions in this country and the real future
which we must create for ourselves and our posterity in this country. We
live in this country, our labors have laid the foundation for the growth of
this country. Our contradictions are rooted in this country's unique
development and can only be resolved by struggles under our leadership to
eliminate the roots of these contradictions in this country.

As we look at our communities, looking more and more each day like
wastelands and fortresses, as we look at 

[Marxism] Robin D. G. Kelley: What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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NY Times, June 18, 2020

The hackneyed emphasis on “Why loot?” obscures the question, which black
people have asked for centuries.

By Robin D. G. Kelley

Dr. Kelley is a professor of American history.

“Why are they looting?”

It’s asked every time protests against police violence erupt into civil
unrest.

We know the answers by now: Poverty, anger, age, rage and a sense of
helplessness. For some, it is a form of political violence; for others,
destructive opportunism. There appears to be no single motive. That white
youth figured prominently among looters during the recent wave of unrest
confounds easy explanations.

Often the catalyst is economic — grabbing necessities, stealing goods to
sell, snatching luxury items few can afford or retaliating against
merchants thought to be exploitative. Looting is theft; it violates the
law. But stealing commodities isn’t senseless. Given that we are in the
worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, looting should not
surprise anyone.

Let me offer a more productive question instead: What is the effect of
obsessing over looting?

It deflects from the core problem that brought people to the streets: The
police keep killing us with impunity. Instead, once the burning and looting
start, the media often shifts to the futility of “violence” as a legitimate
path to justice. Crime becomes the story. Riots, we are told, cause harm by
foreclosing constructive solutions. But such rebellions have not only
shined a spotlight on American racism; they have also spawned
investigations and limited reforms when traditional appeals have failed.

At the same time, looting has also been used as a pretext for expanding the
police, which is what happened in Baltimore after the 1968 riots. By
branding looters a criminal element in black communities, law enforcement
officials could demand bigger budgets. And they were given a boost by
President Lyndon Johnson, who increased federal funding for the police as
part of his War on Poverty.

“Looter” often means “black,” as we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina when a photograph of a white couple “finding” necessities from a
grocery store was compared with one of a black man whose search for similar
items was deemed “looting.” Rarely do we read about the white people who
looted during the Watts rebellion in 1965 and in Detroit in 1967. Indeed,
white people, among them far-right provocateurs, have engaged in looting
and destruction of property during the current protests; there is ample
video evidence from across the country. There are also videos of black
organizers asking them to stop because the police will “blame that on us.”

Our country was built on looting — the looting of Indigenous lands and
African labor. African-Americans, in fact, have much more experience being
looted than looting. The long history of “race riots” in America — in
Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Detroit; New York; Memphis; Wilmington, N.C.;
Atlanta; New Orleans; Springfield, Ill.; East St. Louis; Chicago; and
Tulsa, Okla. — more closely resembled anti-black pogroms than ghetto
rebellions. White mobs, often backed by the police, not only looted and
burned black homes and businesses but also maimed and killed black people.

Our bodies were loot. The forced extraction of our labor was loot. A system
of governance that suppressed our wages, relieved us of property and
excluded black people from equal schools and public accommodations is a
form of looting. We can speak of the looting of black property through
redlining, slum clearance and more recently predatory lending.

Police departments and municipal courts engage in their own form of looting
by handing out and collecting excessive fines and fees from vulnerable
communities. A 2017 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found
that “municipalities that rely heavily on revenue from fines and fees have
a higher than average percentage of African-American and Latino
populations.” And cities rely on tax revenues not only to fund the police
but also to pay the ballooning costs to settle police misconduct cases.
Chicago shelled out more than $100 million to settle police misconduct
suits in 2018 alone.

I found it ironic that the New York Stock Exchange went silent for 8
minutes 46 seconds during George Floyd’s funeral, even though Wall Street
has profited from police misconduct. Cities and counties sometimes have to
issue bonds to pay out these settlements; banks collect fees for their
services and investors earn interest. Some of the beneficiaries of this
arrangement include Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, as well
as smaller regional banks.

The hackneyed emphasis on “why 

[Marxism] NY Times: Delbert Africa, 74, Convicted in Radical Group’s Clash With Police, Dies

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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As a member of Move, he spent four decades in prison and was released in
January. His beating by Philadelphia police officers in 1978 was broadcast
nationwide.

By Neil Genzlinger June 17, 2020

Delbert Africa, a member of the radical group Move who spent more than 40
years in prison after being convicted in a 1978 confrontation with the
police in Philadelphia that left a police officer dead, died on Monday at
his home in Philadelphia, only months after his release. He was 74.

His daughter Yvonne Orr-El and members of the Move organization announced
his death at a news conference
,
at which they said Mr. Africa had received inadequate care for a kidney
condition while in prison.

“Had my father received the treatment he needed,” Ms. Orr-El said at the
news conference, “the healthy, strong, smiling, humorous, sarcastic man
that I call my father would still be here today.”

He was paroled in January.

Mr. Africa was one of nine Move members, all black, who were convicted of
third-degree murder in the 1978 clash.

In surrendering to the police, hands in the air, he was knocked down,
kicked and beaten — an arrest captured by cameras and broadcast nationwide.
The images became a symbol of police brutality to some, especially in
Philadelphia, where police relations with black residents and other
minority groups were strained.

Three officers were later charged with assault. At their trial, the police
commissioner, Joseph O’Neill, testified that the officers’ actions had been
justified.

“Delbert Africa wasn’t a man, he was a savage,” Commissioner O’Neill said.
“When you’re dealing with a savage, you don’t know what he may do. I have
seen a person handcuffed and on the ground kick an officer in the groin.”

In 1981, as jurors were preparing to hear closing arguments in the case, a
judge acquitted the officers in a directed verdict.

The Move organization, a largely black religious as well as political group
that was often described in the news media with words like “revolutionary”
and “anarchist,” coalesced in the 1970s around John Africa, whose original
name was Vincent Leaphart. He espoused a back-to-nature, anti-government
belief system.

The group’s presence at a compound in the Powelton Village section of
Philadelphia was a thorn in the side of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a former city
police commissioner who had been accused of harassing black residents and
condoning brutality against them. The authorities said that the compound
was a health hazard and that Move members were stockpiling weapons.

In August 1978, as the police tried to evict the group, gunfire broke out,
and a police officer, James Ramp, was killed. Mr. Africa and the others
charged maintained that a police bullet had killed Officer Ramp.

Move re-established itself at another location in the city, and in 1985 the
police dropped a bomb on its new compound, igniting a fire that destroyed
more than 60 homes. Eleven people died. One was John Africa. Another was
Delbert Africa’s daughter Delisha.

“I wanted to strike out,” Mr. Africa told The Guardian in a 2018 interview,
describing his reaction when he heard the news of the bombing in prison. “I
wanted to wreak as much havoc as I could until they put me down. That
anger, it brought such a feeling of helplessness.”

Delbert Orr was born on April 2, 1946; like other members of Move, he took
the surname of the group’s founder. Before encountering Move, Mr. Africa
served as an airman in Vietnam from 1966 to 1969, according to Richard Kent
Evans, a research associate at Haverford College in the Philadelphia
suburbs and author of the new book “MOVE: An American Religion.”

Mr. Africa then returned to his hometown, Chicago, and joined the Black
Panthers, Dr. Evans said. After he was seriously injured in a car accident,
he moved to Philadelphia in March 1970. It was during walks around the
block trying to rehabilitate his injured leg and back that he encountered
members of Move (who render the name in capital letters) on a street
corner, talking their version of revolution.

“He attributed his recovery from his car-crash injuries to the teachings of
John Africa,” Dr. Evans said by email, “converted to MOVE, adopted a new
name, Delbert Africa, and served as MOVE’s Minister of Confrontation and
Security.”

In that capacity he was the one the police often heard in their various
exchanges with the group before the 1978 clash, and that made Mr. Africa a
target for a beating when he was arrested, Dr. Evans said. In the interview
with The Guardian, Mr. Africa described his arrest:

“A cop hit me with his helmet. Smashed my eye. 

[Marxism] Kashmir -- "‘We Have Been in a Lockdown for Three Decades’

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Art, June 11, 2020

By Malik Sajad

Mr. Sajad is a graphic novelist from Kashmir.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/opinion/kashmir-lockdown-india.html
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[Marxism] NY Times: Edén Pastora, ‘Commander Zero’ in Nicaragua, Dies at 83

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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A hero of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, he later turned on his comrades
in arms, mounting an international campaign of political pressure and later
guerrilla attacks inside the country.

By Robert D. McFadden June 16, 2020

Edén Pastora, a hero of the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua who was
known by his nom de guerre, Commander Zero — and who later turned against
his victorious comrades in arms in a long counterrevolutionary war of words
and guerrilla attacks that failed to budge the socialist regime in Managua
— died early Tuesday in a military hospital in that city, the capital of
Nicaragua. He was 83.

A grandson, Álvaro Pastora Gutiérrez, said the cause was a heart attack. He
said Mr. Pastora had been gravely ill when he was admitted to the hospital,
though he did not identify the nature of the illness.

Mr. Pastora’s wife told a local newspaper that the cause was
bronchopneumonia. His family had denied rumors that Mr. Pastora had
contracted Covid-19. The government has been widely accused of listing
pneumonia as the cause of death in Covid cases as a way to dispel reports
that the pandemic was out of control in Nicaragua.

Nicaragua has resisted adopting the strict measures that have been put in
place around much of the world to curb the spread of the disease, refusing
to close schools and businesses and allowing, and even organizing, mass
events.

Mr. Pastora, in a life of danger and adventure that stretched from the
jungles of the Miskito Coast to the halls of Congress in Washington, was
instrumental in toppling the military dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza
Debayle, the last of the line in a repressive family dynasty that had ruled
their Central American country for nearly a half century.

But deprived of a major role in the revolutionary government he had helped
to install, and increasingly disillusioned by its Marxist-Leninist
tendencies, Mr. Pastora went into exile and for years challenged the
regime, led by Daniel Ortega, first with an international campaign of
political pressures and later with hit-and-run guerrilla attacks inside
Nicaragua.

Along the way he courted sympathizers and bankrollers in the United States,
Europe and Latin America; took money and air support secretly from the
Central Intelligence Agency; attacked cities in Nicaragua; was denounced by
Managua as a traitor and tried in absentia; was seriously wounded by an
assassin’s bomb that killed eight people; and once ran for the presidency
of Nicaragua. He lost — and two years later, in 2008, announced that he had
reconciled with the Ortega government.

Known for bold stratagems that captured world headlines and romanticized
his daredevil exploits, Mr. Pastora was an early leader of the Sandinista
National Liberation Front and a charismatic figure in the struggle against
a dictator who had looted the national treasury and ordered the deaths of
countless opponents, including Mr. Pastora’s father.

On Aug. 22, 1978, Mr. Pastora, a former medical student, led some 25
Sandinista guerrillas on a daring raid into the National Palace in Managua.
The invaders killed or disarmed the palace guards and seized more than
1,000 hostages, including the entire Nicaraguan Congress and most of the
senior officials of the Somoza dictatorship.

For three days, as a shocked world watched, the revolutionaries held out
until General Somoza capitulated to their demands for the release of scores
of political prisoners, a $500,000 ransom and safe passage to Panama. The
spectacular raid established the legend of “Comandante Cero.” Photographers
caught him as he mounted the steps of the escape plane: a triumphant
swashbuckler in a dark beret, clutching a rifle, his chest crossed with
bullet and grenade bandoleers.

The raid reignited a revolution that had been simmering for years. Within
days, six cities rose in revolt. Insurrections soon spread across the
country. By spring, a civil war was underway, pitting General Somoza’s
well-equipped National Guard against a ragtag coalition of rebel forces.
Mr. Pastora commanded the southern front in an offensive that slowly closed
in on Managua.

With battles raging on the city outskirts, General Somoza resigned on July
17, 1979, and flew to Miami. As triumphant rebels drove through the city
firing automatic weapons in the air, a Junta of National Reconstruction was
installed. The war had left 50,000 people dead and 600,000 homeless.

A year later, General Somoza was assassinated in Paraguay by Sandinista
commandos, who blew up his limousine with an anti-tank rocket.

Despite his efforts for the revolution, Mr. Pastora, who had voiced
presidential ambitions, was not named to the junta or to 

[Marxism] free online streaming of "Let the Fire Burn"

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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It's an outstanding and harrowing documentary.

"We would like to share the extraordinary 2013 film *Let the Fire Burn*, a
document of another tragic clash between government and citizens that
occurred 35 years ago in Philadelphia. On May 13, 1985, a longtime feud
between the city and the black liberation group MOVE came to a deadly
climax when, by order of local authorities, police dropped military-grade
explosives onto a MOVE-occupied rowhouse resulting in the tragic deaths of
eleven people (including five children) and the destruction of 61 homes. It
is a story that is worth revisiting in these current days of injustice,
anger and grief.

*"Let the Fire Burn* will be available to watch for free here throughout
the month of June.  Please read the accompanying statement by Mike Africa
Jr., member of the MOVE Organization about the film."

https://kinonow.com/let-the-fire-burn
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[Marxism] Unarmed black man handcuffed by Alameda police for 'dancing in the street'

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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https://abc7news.com/society/exclusive-unarmed-black-man-handcuffed-by-alameda-police-for-dancing-in-the-street/6234241/
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[Marxism] Bird’s Eye View of Protests Across the U.S. and Around the World

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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NY Times photos and video of yesterday's marches and demos

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/07/us/george-floyd-protest-aerial-photos.html
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[Marxism] The Atlantic: James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution

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“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” he writes, “I swore an
oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops
taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate
the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a
bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military
leadership standing alongside.”

full at
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/
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[Marxism] Neil Davidson Archive now at Marxists Intenet Archive

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https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/davidson/index.htm
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[Marxism] Little Steel Strike: Remembering the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre (People's World)

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https://peoplesworld.org/article/little-steel-strike-remembering-the-1937-memorial-day-massacre/
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[Marxism] Frances Goldin, legendary housing activist, literary agent, dies at 96

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https://thevillagesun.com/frances-goldin-legendary-housing-activist-literary-agent-dies-at-96

A transcript of an oral history interview is at
https://www.gvshp.org/_gvshp/pdf/Goldin_FrancesTranscriptFinalWebsite.pdf
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[Marxism] Biden criticizes Trump on Cuba

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from Joe Biden on twitter, May 15

Trump's international failures have cleared a path for Cuba to join the UN
Human Rights Council. This would betray Cuba's political prisoners and
further undermine U.S. diplomacy. As President, I will lead by empowering
the Cuban people and defending human rights.

https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1261403984100818944
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[Marxism] Nakba Day

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Today marks the commemoration of the dispossession of the Palestinian
people by Zionist forces.

Visualizing Palestine developed an interactive map project, "Palestine,
Today: Explore How The Nakba Transformed Palestine".

https://today.visualizingpalestine.org/
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[Marxism] NY TImes Op-Ed: Cities Are Safe Places to Live, Even in a Pandemic

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(by the former Health Commissioner of New York City)

It’s a mistake to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus.

By Mary T. Bassett

Dr. Bassett directs the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard.

May 15, 2020

The image of cities as caldrons of contagion is a very old one. In the 19th
century, rapid urbanization was accompanied by literal squalor and waves of
often lethal communicable disease. Life expectancy declined during the
Industrial Revolution as cities’ populations surged.

But in recent years, U.S. cities could boast that the so-called urban
penalty had been reversed. “If you want to live longer and healthier than
the average American, then come to New York City,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg
declared. This advantage continued with his successor, Bill de Blasio.

New York had an average life expectancy roughly 2.5 years longer than the
nation’s in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. This
is good news, since most of humanity lives in cities, and in the United
States, over half of the population lives in cities of one million
residents or more.

And then the coronavirus arrived, and New York became a hot spot for
Covid-19 cases and deaths. As stay-at-home advisories rolled out, many
wealthy city residents fled to country houses, beaches and boats.

Connecting the dots between population density and viral transmission seems
simple logic. New York, with a population of 8.6 million, is the only
American megacity. It is also the U.S. center of the pandemic.

But everything we know so far about the coronavirus tells us that blaming
density for disease is misguided.

New York City Health Department data indicate that Manhattan, the borough
with the highest population density, was not the hardest hit. Deaths are
concentrated in the less dense, more diverse outer boroughs. Citywide,
black and Latino residents are experiencing mortality rates that are twice
those of white city dwellers.

Then there is the rest of the world. While the coronavirus first exploded
in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, many “hyperdense” cities in Asia have been
able to contain their outbreaks. The virus appeared in Singapore (5.6
million residents), Seoul (9.8 million), Hong Kong (7.5 million) and Tokyo
(9.3 million), cities close in size to New York, but with much lower
recorded deaths.

California and Hawaii have the highest population density of the states —
but not the highest Covid-19 mortality rates. Albany, Ga., with a
population under 80,000, has among the highest case rates in the United
States (many related to attending a funeral).

Cities, large and dense by definition, do not inevitably support explosive
viral transmission. But factors that do seem to explain clusters of
Covid-19 deaths in the United States are household crowding, poverty,
racialized economic segregation and participation in the work force. The
patterns of Covid-19 by neighborhood in New York City track historical
redlining that some 80 years ago established a legacy of racial residential
segregation.

Population density is not the same as household overcrowding. The U.S.
census defines crowding as more than one person per room, excluding the
kitchen and bathroom. That means a one-bedroom apartment occupied by four
people is crowded. In 2013, the Bronx had New York City’s highest
percentage of crowded households (12.4 percent), followed by Brooklyn (10.3
percent) and Queens (9.3 percent). Manhattan and Staten Island had 5.4
percent and 3.4 percent crowding. (Nationally, 2 percent of people live in
crowded households.)

Why are there so many crowded households in New York, including in its less
densely populated neighborhoods? The answer is simple: the high cost of
housing. High rents are also a principal driver of homelessness, which
during this epidemic has proved deadly. Covid-19 has shown how risky
crowded settings like homeless shelters, jails, detention centers and
nursing homes can be.

It is no surprise that public health and urban planning have common roots
and missions, because the quality and availability of housing, public
transportation and green spaces are so tied to health. But as we think
about the blueprint and design of cities, it is also critically important
to consider the lived experience of individuals and how they navigate their
urban space.

Imagine a low-wage worker, who holds two jobs to support her family and pay
the rent, who has to work during this pandemic because her job is
“essential,” who works when sick because she has no sick leave. She travels
on a crowded bus, puts off medical care because she lacks insurance, and
then returns to an apartment crammed with young 

[Marxism] NY Times: We Must Not Forget The Jackson State Massacre

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Fifty years ago, the police fired into a crowd at the historically black
college, killing two.

By Robert Luckett

Dr. Luckett is a professor of history at Jackson State University.

May 14, 2020

JACKSON, Miss. — In the 1960s, white motorists driving along John R. Lynch
Street, which cut through the middle of the historically black campus of
what was then called Jackson State College, would often taunt students
along the way with racist epithets, throw objects at them and threaten to
hit pedestrians.

On Feb. 3, 1964, a white driver slammed into a Jackson State student named
Mamie Ballard, sending her to the hospital. This incident began a yearslong
push to close Lynch Street to traffic, which in turn helped propel the
already potent local civil rights movement.

Jackson State may have been majority black, but it was in the capital of a
state dominated by white supremacists, who governed the college. Informed
by the civil rights and Black Power movements, students naturally saw the
fight to close Lynch Street as a cornerstone of their broader push for
justice and equality in Mississippi. With an increasingly aggressive tenor,
the ensuing student demonstrations, which peaked each spring, demanded
justice for Ms. Ballard, who survived, and that Lynch Street be closed.

On May 14, 1970, someone set fire to a dump truck parked in the middle of
Lynch Street a few blocks from campus. While there was no evidence that
student protesters had been involved, white authorities cited the vandalism
to justify the use of force.

Late that evening officers from the Jackson Police Department and the
Mississippi Highway Patrol marched onto campus, accompanied by the
so-called Thompson Tank, an armored personnel carrier that Mayor Allen
Thompson, the city’s segregationist mayor, had purchased in 1964, ahead of
what he termed the civil rights “invasion” of Freedom Summer. That same
year the Mississippi Legislature gave the Highway Patrol broad authority to
intervene in protests, even if local authorities hadn’t requested them. The
patrol still held that power in 1970.

The phalanx of officers proceeded to Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory,
arriving close to midnight. But instead of facing a mass of angry
protesters, they found scores of students enjoying a Thursday evening
relaxing outside as graduation neared. Later asserting that a sniper had
shot at them from a window in Alexander Hall — an absurd claim with no
evidence — the police fired more than 400 rounds of ammunition over 28
seconds in every direction.

In the chaos that spilled into the early morning hours of May 15, two men,
Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, were left dead; a dozen other
young people were wounded in the gunfire. Hundreds of others bear physical
and psychological scars to this day. Gibbs was a junior political science
major at Jackson State. He had married his high school sweetheart, and they
had one son. Unbeknown to Gibbs and his wife, Dale, she was pregnant with
their second son.

Green was a senior at nearby Jim Hill High School. He had been walking home
from his after-school job on the opposite side of the street from Alexander
Hall, which meant the police had turned to fire in the opposite direction
from the supposed sniper.

Graduation was canceled, and the Class of 1970 received their diplomas in
the mail. A number of injured students and the families of Gibbs and Green
sued the city and state, represented by the renowned civil rights attorney
Constance Slaughter. The plaintiffs lost; no one was ever charged in the
killings. The section of Lynch Street through campus was finally closed,
and the Gibbs-Green Memorial Plaza now stands in front of Alexander Hall.
But those concessions did nothing to lessen the trauma for those who
survived.

The 50th anniversary of the police attack at Jackson State comes at a
moment when America is struggling with a pandemic, the impacts of which
have weighed heavily, and unjustly, on black bodies. Thanks to the
insufficient and belated response of national and state leaders that has
inflamed the pandemic, people of color are disproportionately represented
among Covid-19 cases, and they bear the brunt of the government’s
aggressive enforcement of quarantine rules.

Then came the video showing the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed
black man out for a jog in Georgia. Although he was killed in February,
only last week were the men shown on a video confronting Mr. Arbery
arrested. As the survivors of the May 1970 attack at Jackson State and
modern proponents of Black Lives Matter understand, justice remains elusive.

Through it all, we must be reminded that state-sanctioned 

[Marxism] Clarion Ledger: Mississippi poultry worker who died of COVID-19 pushed for better pay, conditions

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A tribute to labor activist Celso Mendoza

https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2020/05/11/forest-mississippi-poultry-worker-celso-mendoza-dies-coronavirus/3104375001/?fbclid=IwAR0Ha0nOTKiSFtyCi1W44JlNcnzy3cJ50D-uRoePrko5bGgD_ee5WlihI7w
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[Marxism] CNN: Sioux tribe rejects South Dakota governor request to remove Covid-19 checkpoints

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May 9, 2020

The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has rejected an ultimatum by South Dakota's
governor to remove checkpoints on state highways within tribal reservations
or risk legal action.
Gov. Kristi Noem sent letters Friday to the leaders of both the Oglala
Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe demanding that checkpoints
designed to prevent the spread of coronavirus on tribal land be removed,
the governor's office said in a statement.

full at
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/09/us/south-dakota-sioux-tribes/index.html
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[Marxism] NY Times: Denis Goldberg, South African Freedom Fighter, Is Dead at 87

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He was the only white defendant to be convicted alongside Nelson Mandela
and others in 1964 for resisting apartheid. He spent 22 years in prison.

By Alan Cowell May 8, 2020

Denis Goldberg, one of two surviving political activists convicted in the
so-called Rivonia Trial, which put Nelson Mandela and seven others in
prison for many years and proved a turning-point in South Africa’s long
struggle against apartheid, died on April 29 in Cape Town. He was 87.

His family, in confirming the death, said he had been treated for lung
cancer.

Mr. Goldberg’s career, first in the armed resistance movement and later in
the post-apartheid era, encapsulated much of his country’s modern history,
from the racial nuances of the struggle against white minority rule to the
reluctant acknowledgment of — and disillusion with — the corruption that
became a byword in early 21st-century South Africa.

At the trial, which lasted from 1963 to 1964, many of those accused of
sabotage were expecting the death sentence. Indeed, in a celebrated address
from the dock, Mr. Mandela said his ideal of a democratic and free South
Africa was, “if needs be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

When Judge Quartus de Wet pronounced life sentences on eight defendants,
Mr. Goldberg’s mother, Annie Goldberg, who was in the public gallery, did
not hear what he said.

“Denis, what is it?” she called out. “What did the judge say?”

Mr. Goldberg replied: “Life! Life is wonderful!”

In all, 11 people faced charges as the trial approached. Of those, the
state withdrew its accusations against one potential defendant, Robert
Hepple, and he was released. Two others — Lionel Bernstein, who was known
as Rusty, and James Kantor — were acquitted. All three fled to London.

Those convicted along with Mr. Mandela and Mr. Goldberg were Walter Sisulu,
Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni and Ahmed
Kathrada. With Mr. Goldberg’s death, the sole survivor of those convicted
is Mr. Mlangeni, now 94.

At 31 Mr. Goldberg was the youngest of those convicted and the only white
person among them.

The hearings came at a crucial juncture in South African history. The
authorities there had increasingly resorted to force in suppressing
opposition to apartheid, the white rulers’ draconian system of racial
separation, and their adversaries had turned to armed struggle in response.
The trial was intended to crush and silence Mr. Mandela and his followers.

But the prisoners turned the occasion into a global indictment of
apartheid, particularly with Mr. Mandela’s speech from the dock.

“It was the most important trial in South Africa’s history,” Nick Stadlen,
a former High Court judge in Britain who made a documentary film about the
trial in 2017 that featured Mr. Goldberg and others, wrote in The Guardian
after Mr. Goldberg’s death.

The origins of the trial date to July 1963, when the South African security
forces raided Liliesleaf Farm, a hideout in the Rivonia district in the
northern suburbs of Johannesburg. Members of mKhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the
Nation), the clandestine military wing of the African National Congress —
both of them outlawed organizations — were meeting there when the police
stormed in. At the time, Mr. Goldberg, a member of the banned South African
Communist Party, had been a technical officer in the military unit,
cloaking his sabotage activities behind a day job in the construction of a
power station in Cape Town.

Many of the documents produced at the trial had been written by him.
Indeed, he offered to assume responsibility for all the charges so that his
co-defendants could be acquitted. But they rejected his offer.

Before the trial, Mr. Goldberg was interrogated and threatened in a police
effort to secure confessions or persuade their captives to testify against
their fellow detainees. Under harsh laws permitting detention without trial
for 90 days, Mr. Goldberg’s wife, Esmé Goldberg, was also held for many
days.

Even Mr. Goldberg’s sentencing did not escape the strictures of apartheid.
While Mr. Mandela and six defendants were sent to serve their sentences on
Robben Island, off Cape Town, Mr. Goldberg was ordered to the Central
Prison in Pretoria, the administrative capital.

In more recent times the facility has been known as the prison where the
Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius served part of a sentence
for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. It is also the setting for a
2020 movie “Escape from Pretoria,” starring Daniel Ratcliffe, which
chronicles a real-life breakout by three prisoners in 1979. Mr. Goldberg,
who helped facilitate the escape but did not participate in it, was 

Re: [Marxism] George Shriver has died

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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from Verso Books

In Memoriam of George Shriver, translator of Rosa Luxemburg

It is with great sadness that we have heard of the death of George
Shriver. *Peter
Hudis*, general editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg remembers a
friend and a comrade.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4689-in-memoriam-of-george-shriver-translator-of-rosa-luxemburg
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[Marxism] What The New York Times thinks is "one of the most trying aspects of the pandemic"

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‘It Was Just Too Much’: How Remote Learning Is Breaking Parents

For the adults in the house, trying to do their own jobs while helping
children with class work has become one of the most trying aspects of the
pandemic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/nyregion/coronavirus-homeschooling-parents.html

I submitted this following reader's comment:

Working at home, while children are present, is "one of the most trying
aspects of the pandemic"?? What about working in a slaughterhouse, or a
nursing home, or a supermarket, while trying to figure out childcare for
kids? Or what about people who've lost their jobs? People who view this
problem as ""one of the most trying aspects of the pandemic" have a very
fortunate vantage point.
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[Marxism] NY Times: Closed Hospitals Leave Rural Patients ‘Stranded’ as Coronavirus Spreads

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[I think NYTimes articles re COVID-19 are not behind a paywall.]

A for-profit company bought three struggling hospitals in West Virginia and
Ohio. Doctors were fired, supplies ran low and many in need of care had to
journey elsewhere. Then the doors shut for good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/us/hospital-closures-west-virginia-ohio.html
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[Marxism] NY Times: Richard Sobol, Civil Rights Lawyer in the South, Dies at 82

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Unlike other Northern lawyers who joined the struggle in the South, he
stayed, and won a landmark case.

By Katharine Q. Seelye
April 23, 2020

In 1966, on a swampy strip of land south of New Orleans, a young black man
named Gary Duncan was defusing a potential fight between white and black
teenagers outside a newly integrated school when he touched an arm of one
of the white boys, who recoiled. The police later arrested Mr. Duncan on a
charge of battery. His request for a jury trial was denied, and he was
sentenced to 60 days in prison and fined $150.

Mr. Duncan and his mother asked a young, white civil rights lawyer, Richard
Sobol, to represent him, which he did. Mr. Sobol fought the case all the
way to the United States Supreme Court. In a landmark 1968 decision, the
court ruled for Mr. Duncan and established the right to a jury trial in
state criminal cases.

The ruling was a major victory for the civil rights movement and for Mr.
Sobol, who was 29 at the time and just beginning his legal career.

Over the next half-century, he would file scores of challenges involving
racial and sexual discrimination in employment, education, voting and
housing. He became one of the nation’s busiest and most successful — if
unsung — champions of civil rights.

Mr. Sobol died on March 24 at his home in Sebastopol, Calif. He was 82. His
wife, Anne Sobol, also a lawyer who sometimes practiced with him, said the
cause was aspiration pneumonia.

Mr. Sobol took on a wide range of civil rights cases, often at great
personal risk and under threat of violence. In the Duncan case, he was
thrown in jail on bogus charges. His release was an important victory for
civil rights lawyers across the South.

In his litigation, he made particularly effective use of the new Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and its Title VII, which prohibited racial
discrimination in employment.

In a major lawsuit against a paper mill in Bogalusa, La. — one of the first
class-action suits involving Title VII — he successfully argued that the
use of tests in hiring and the use of seniority in promotions violated the
Civil Rights Act.

“He was a natural,” Ms. Sobol said in an interview. “He practiced law on a
whole different level from most of us.”

Mr. Sobol often said that his greatest defeat was his failure to convince
the Supreme Court in 1972 that juries should be required to reach unanimous
decisions. The court revisited the issue recently and, in a triumph that he
did not live to see, ruled on Monday that jury decisions involving serious
crimes had to be unanimous.

Mr. Sobol practiced primarily in Louisiana and Washington, D.C. But he
preferred working in the trenches in Louisiana than on antitrust cases for
the white shoe firm in Washington that employed him. In a description of
his early career — which he wrote as a chapter for “Voices of Civil Rights
Lawyers” (2017), edited by Kent Spriggs — he said that most of his work in
Washington “never came to anything, certainly not to anything one could be
proud of.”

By contrast, he wrote, within 10 days of arriving in Louisiana in 1965, he
won a school desegregation case that allowed black children to attend white
schools. “I saw the impact one lawyer, familiar with federal litigation
practice, could have,” he wrote.

He stayed in Louisiana longer than he had initially planned. And across the
decades he made a difference in scores of cases, big and small.

“He devoted his life to seeing that justice was done,” George Cooper, a
retired professor from Columbia Law School, who met Mr. Sobol in the early
1960s and worked on cases with him, said in a phone interview.

“He was one of the legions of young lawyers who went South in the 1960s to
help with the civil rights movement,” Mr. Cooper said. “But unlike so many
others, he stayed on the ground and saw it through. In the process, he won
notable cases but also gave a whole segment of the population a chance for
justice that they might not have had otherwise.”

While prominent in legal circles, Mr. Sobol was less known to the general
public. That may change with a forthcoming documentary film, “A Crime on
the Bayou,” by Nancy Buirski, and a new book, “Deep Delta Justice,” by
Matthew Van Meter, both scheduled for release soon.

Richard Barry Sobol was born on May 29, 1937, in Manhattan to Alfred and
Anne (Alberg) Sobol. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a high
school math teacher and a homemaker.

Richard attended the Bronx High School of Science before enrolling at Union
College in Schenectady, N.Y., from which he graduated in 1958. He graduated
from Columbia Law School in 1961.

His early marriage to Barbara Simonovitz ended in divorce. 

[Marxism] 150 Years Ago

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April 22, 2020 is the sesquicentennial of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov.
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[Marxism] NY Times: A doctor says he was removed from his federal post after pressing for rigorous vetting of treatments embraced by Trump.

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I just finished reading this, and I'm feeling that if the Democrats
nominate Homer Simpson for President, socialists should support him. (I
acknowledge that such an outcome would be a significant improvement over
the likely nominee.)

The doctor who led the federal agency involved in developing a coronavirus
vaccine said on Wednesday that he was removed from his post after he
pressed for a rigorous vetting of a coronavirus treatment embraced by
President Trump. The doctor said that science, not “politics and cronyism”
must lead the way.

Dr. Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed this week as the director of the
Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Authority, or BARDA, and as the deputy assistant secretary for
preparedness and response.

Instead, he was given a narrower job at the National Institutes of Health.
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the
government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address
the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and
not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,”
he said in a statement to The Times’s Maggie Haberman.

“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not
politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” he said.

The White House declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Alex Azar, the
health and human services secretary, did not immediately respond to an
email seeking comment. The medical publication Stat reported on Tuesday
that Dr. Bright had clashed with Bob Kadlec, the assistant health secretary
for preparedness and response.

Dr. Bright, who noted that his entire career had been spent in vaccine
development both in and outside of government, has led BARDA since 2016.

In the statement, he said: “My professional background has prepared me for
a moment like this — to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens
Americans and people around the globe. To this point, I have led the
government’s efforts to invest in the best science available to combat the
Covid-19 pandemic.

“Unfortunately, this resulted in clashes with H.H.S. political leadership,
including criticism for my proactive efforts to invest early into vaccines
and supplies critical to saving American lives. I also resisted efforts to
fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political
connections,” he said.

Dr. Bright, who is a career official and not a political appointee, pointed
specifically to the initial efforts to make chloroquine and
hydroxychloroquine widely available before it was scientifically tested for
efficacy with the coronavirus.

“Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad
use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration
as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit,” he said.

“While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’
for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven
drug on demand to the American public,” Dr. Bright said, describing what
ultimately happened: “I insisted that these drugs be provided only to
hospitalized patients with confirmed Covid-19 while under the supervision
of a physician.

“These drugs have potentially serious risks associated with them, including
increased mortality observed in some recent studies in patients with
Covid-19.

“Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and
cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to
safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis,” Dr.
Bright said.

“I will request that the inspector general of the Department of Health and
Human Services investigate the manner in which this administration has
politicized the work of BARDA and has pressured me and other conscientious
scientists to fund companies with political connections and efforts that
lack scientific merit,” he said. “Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs
can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service
to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump
politics.”

Dr. Bright has hired the lawyers Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, who have a
whistle-blower practice and are known in part for representing Christine
Blasey Ford, who, during the nomination process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh
to the Supreme Court, accused him of engaging in sexual misconduct decades
earlier, a claim he denied.

In a statement, the lawyers called Dr. Bright’s change in position
“retaliation plain and simple,” and said that they planned to ask the
Office of Special Counsel to seek 

Re: [Marxism] An "All Hands on Deck" Moment: Sixty-Six Old New Leftists Urge Support for Joe Biden - New Politics

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Louis Proyect mistakenly wrote that this article was written by Paul Buhle.
It was actually written by Paul LeBlanc.

https://newpol.org/an-all-hands-on-deck-moment-sixty-six-old-new-leftists-urge-support-for-joe-biden/
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[Marxism] Perhaps he can keep Lady Thatcher company

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BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52060791
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[Marxism] The New Yorker: Chesa Boudin on His Incarcerated Father and the Threat of the Coronavirus in Prisons

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Chesa Boudin, the District Attorney of San Francisco, last spoke to his
father on the phone a few days ago, and, like everyone these days, they
talked about *COVID*-19. His father, David Gilbert, is seventy-five, but
the risks he faces if infected by the virus are far more serious than those
confronting many other septuagenarians. Gilbert is confined at Shawangunk
Correctional Facility, some seventy miles north of New York City. Should he
get sick, he will have to rely on the prison’s staff to help him. “Using
the phones or even going to the mess hall is a real risk for him at this
point,” Boudin said. “They use very old-school phones that are shared by a
large number of inmates, and they don’t work very well. And, so, to have a
conversation, you have to get your mouth right up into the mouthpiece that
is being used by many, many hundreds of other people.”

Gilbert is among the oldest people in the New York State prison system. In
1981, he and Chesa’s mother, Kathy Boudin, who were both members of the
Weather Underground, were involved in the robbery of a Brink’s armored
truck, in Rockland County, that resulted in the deaths of one of the
company’s guards and two police officers. Kathy, who was sentenced to
twenty years to life, was released on parole in 2003; Gilbert is serving a
sentence of seventy-five years to life. About his most recent call with his
father, Boudin said, “We said goodbye at the end, as we do at the end of
every phone call, but this one felt different. It felt heavier and more
ominous because I know—and he knows—that there’s a very high likelihood
that his prison will go on lockdown, or that he’ll be unable to get back to
the phones. And because we know that the reason for that is a disease that
very seriously threatens his life.”

full at
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/chesa-boudin-on-his-incarcerated-father-and-the-threat-of-the-coronavirus-in-prisons

from Chesa Boudin's twitter account
https://twitter.com/chesaboudin/status/1243271954871676928

related opinion piece by David Leonhardt of The New York Times
What Cuomo Hasn't Done: Protect elderly prisoners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-prisons-cuomo.html
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] [UCE] Insurgent Notes: Our Symposium on the Life and Work of Noel Ignatiev

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March 16, 2020

http://secure-web.cisco.com/1yx-HgfZZafGV1o0Eot0VhH7QiSjYoEpLzTnGf_nZIARSGx0ZJnnfW08WhFQT_sAnGaOs2b-4u2KaZ82iN7FZFJJC30kxkwiL-ZZ72XNOa7eiKPrmGZUCVNuHFOoHyAGHeJi8Aj4RsrkMCpBGh5HidlQVyWXGdS8id39Qw037KM1FZdoq3tab2SEpYJMZk6d_nlPmFIZug30-U6Xtj3P31vC78aJ1yuczrrpQy6urfxZi96Qp5fRMV6D9nXG7mqpWO0vAWi8TKrzOnNSkZzQhqsykTCq5TRy39z4TKO-qetB-R0h-vuQ7C26RdtRDZxd5JauY-V7M8Jd4K1B9Z2NQ30uE4o9XUarGfHNGPRQR_s47kR_AN_1nRPpk552agCpA/http%3A%2F%2Finsurgentnotes.com%2F2020%2F03%2Fintroduction-3%2F
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[Marxism] Executive Office for Immigration Review and COVID-19

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the deportation machinery grinds on

(from an immigration lawyer in Denver)
https://twitter.com/immlawACHall/status/1238279857055780864
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[Marxism] [Corrected] Greetings on International Women's Day!

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rising_of_us_all_-WomensMarch_-WomensMarch2018_-SenecaFalls_-NY_(25935267908).jpg

Bread And Roses
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,A million darkened
kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,Are touched with all the radiance that
a sudden sun discloses,For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses!
Bread and Roses! As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,For
they are women’s children, and we mother them again.Our lives shall not be
sweated from birth until life closes;Hearts starve as well as bodies; give
us bread, but give us roses. As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women
deadGo crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.Small art
and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.Yes, it is bread we fight
for, but we fight for roses too. As we go marching, marching, we bring the
greater days,The rising of the women means the rising of the race.No more
the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,But a sharing of
life’s glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.Our lives shall not be
sweated from birth until life closes;Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread
and roses, bread and roses.
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[Marxism] Greetings on International Women's Day!

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rising_of_us_all_-WomensMarch_-WomensMarch2018_-SenecaFalls_-NY_(25935267908).jpg
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[Marxism] Nexhmije Hoxha obituary

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Guardian, March 2, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/nexhmije-hoxha-obituary#maincontent
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[Marxism] NY Times: Rafael Cancel Miranda, Gunman in ’54 Attack on Congress, Dies at 89

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[The Times obit quotes from, and links to, a 1998 interview published in
The Militant
https://www.themilitant.com/1998/6233/6233_20.html

He and three others opened fire on a crowded House chamber in the cause of
Puerto Rican independence. Some saw him as a terrorist, others as a hero.
By Neil Genzlinger March 3, 2020

Rafael Cancel Miranda, the last survivor among the four revolutionaries who
shot up the United States Capitol on March 1, 1954, in the name of
independence for Puerto Rico, died on Monday at his home in San Juan, the
island’s capital. He was 89.

His family announced his death in a statement, which said he had been
hospitalized for several weeks with multiple health problems.

Mr. Cancel Miranda, a hero to many who favor independence for Puerto Rico
but a terrorist to many others, was 23 when he and three companions
attacked the Capitol, spraying gunfire from the gallery into the House
chamber and injuring five congressmen as 243 House members were debating a
bill involving migrant workers from Mexico.

The four — the others were Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andres
Figueroa Cordero — were not satisfied with the agreement that had made
Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth in 1952, believing that it was a
sham and that the island essentially remained an occupied colony.

Ms. Lebrón waved a Puerto Rican flag briefly and shouted about independence
as the attack unfolded and House members sought cover. The four were
overpowered and arrested.

Although the scene was chaotic, Mr. Cancel Miranda, at least, was convinced
that most of those injured “got hurt by my gun,” as he put it when he was
freed in 1979.

“No congressman in particular was the target,” he said then. “It was just
an effort to shoot up the place. If we aimed to kill, believe me, that
would have happened.”

All four served lengthy prison sentences. During his incarceration, Mr.
Cancel Miranda spent time in Alcatraz in San Francisco, Marion Penitentiary
in Illinois and Leavenworth in Kansas — “the Harvard, Yale and Princeton of
American prisons,” as he put it in a 1998 interview with The Houston
Chronicle.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Mr. Figueroa
Cordero, who had cancer and died in 1979. President Carter freed the other
three in 1979, though they had never sought clemency, considering
themselves political prisoners.

Mr. Cancel Miranda and the others returned to Puerto Rico to a cheering
crowd. He continued to speak out about independence in subsequent decades
and did not regret the passion he had brought to the cause as a youth.

“That youth is alive, with gray hair and six grandchildren,” he told The
New York Times in 1990 in an interview in Puerto Rico. “If this is still a
colony, why should I change?”

Rafael Cancel Miranda was born on July 18, 1930, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico,
to Rafael Cancel Rodríguez, a businessman, and Rosa Miranda Pérez. Both
parents were active in the nationalist movement. A formative moment for
Rafael came in 1937, when his parents participated in a nationalist
demonstration in the city of Ponce; police officers opened fire on the
marchers, and about 20 were killed.

“My mother went there dressed in white and returned dressed in red,” he
told the socialist weekly The Militant in 1998, “covered in the blood of
the dead, whose bodies she had to crawl over as the bullets flew overhead.”

He often said that his first act of protest had come days later, when he
refused to pledge allegiance to the American flag. He was sent home from
school.

In 1949, Mr. Cancel Miranda drew a two-year prison sentence for refusing to
be drafted into the United States military.

“To me, it didn’t make sense to be in the same army that invades your
country and massacres your people,” he said. “If you’re going to fight, you
should fight them.”

After his release, he spent time in Cuba, then settled in Brooklyn, where
he worked at a shoe factory. There he met the other three people who would
join in the Capitol attack.

Mr. Cancel Miranda’s job was supposed to be to act as just a scout, his son
Rafael Cancel Vázquez said in a phone interview. Mr. Cancel Miranda had
traveled to Washington and made maps that were to be used in the attack.
But, his son said, his role was changed at the last minute, and he joined
the other three on the mission.

The three men were sentenced to 75 years each; Ms. Lebrón to 50 years. At a
later trial, six more years were added to those sentences when the four
were convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the United States government,
something Mr. Cancel Miranda found ridiculous.

“Can you imagine us thinking we could overthrow the U.S. government 

[Marxism] NY Times: Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan Priest, Poet and Revolutionary, Dies at 95

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By Elias E. Lopez
March 1, 2020

The Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s most admired poets and
priests, who defied the Roman Catholic Church in the 1980s by serving in
the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua, died on Sunday in
Managua, Nicaragua. He was 95.

His personal assistant, Luz Marina Acosta, confirmed his death to The
Associated Press.

Born to a wealthy Nicaraguan family, Father Cardenal became a prominent
intellectual voice of the Nicaraguan revolution and an ardent proponent of
liberation theology, a Christian movement rooted in Marxist principles and
committed to social justice and uplifting the poor. He was appointed
Nicaragua’s first minister of culture after the Sandinistas overthrew the
dictator Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979.

As the Vatican’s opposition to liberation theology intensified in the 1980s
under Pope John Paul II, Father Cardenal became a focal point. Before a
scheduled visit to Nicaragua in 1983, the pope publicly demanded that
Father Cardenal and four other priests who had actively supported the
revolution resign their government positions. The Sandinista government
refused the demand to replace them, but said its invitation to the pope
still stood.

After months of public arguing, the pope accepted the invitation and landed
in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. As he walked along a receiving line on the
tarmac shaking hands, the pope seemed taken aback to see Father Cardenal
among the dignitaries.

While other priests were in clerical garb, Father Cardenal had shown up
wearing a collarless white shirt, slacks and his signature black beret over
his thick white hair. When he knelt to kiss the pope’s ring, the pope
withheld his hand and wagged his finger at him as he spoke to him,
apparently sternly. According to a Vatican official, the pope told Father
Cardenal, “You must straighten out your position with the church,” The
Associated Press reported.

Videotape of the scolding, though not audible, was broadcast around the
world.

“Christ led me to Marx,” Father Cardenal said in an interview in 1984. “I
don’t think the pope understands Marxism. For me, the four gospels are all
equally communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and
is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.”

His priestly authority was revoked by Nicaragua’s bishops that same year.
(Three other priests were also disciplined.) Father Cardenal’s suspension
was lifted in February 2019, when Pope Francis granted him absolution from
“all canonical censorships,” the Vatican News reported.

Father Cardenal began writing poetry as a young man, tracing the tormented
history of Nicaragua and Latin America as epics in blank verse.

Much of his poetry, though, was intimate: love poems that recalled the
longings of his youth, finely wrought images of city lights at dusk or his
famous “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe,” in which he describes how Monroe was
found on her deathbed in 1962, “like someone wounded by
gangsters/stretching out his hand to a disconnected telephone.”

Fascinated by evolution and its lessons for politics, Father Cardenal began
to incorporate science into his poetry in the 1980s. He developed the theme
until the end of his life, marveling at the origins of the universe and the
mysteries of DNA — sources of awe that in his vision brought people closer
to God.

“In this monumental vision, everything merges and condenses,” the
Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez wrote in the introduction to Father
Cardenal’s anthology “Ninety at Ninety,” which was published in Spanish in
2014. “Not only do the poet’s intimate personal experience and the
scientific exploration of the heavens enter into the mystical, so do the
memories of his own past.”

The most recent complete collection of Father Cardenal’s poetry published
in English was “Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems,” (2009, edited and
translated in part by Jonathan Cohen).

Closing the volume was the poem “Stardust,” Father Cardenal’s meditation on
death. It concludes:

And the galaxy was taking the shape of a flower

the way it looks now on a starry night.

Our flesh and our bones come from other stars

and perhaps even from other galaxies,

we are universal,

and after death we will help to form other stars

and other galaxies.

We come from the stars, and to them we shall return.

Ernesto Cardenal Martínez was born on Jan. 20, 1925, to an upper-class
family in Granada, a city on Lake Nicaragua. He studied literature in
Managua and at Columbia University in New York City, where he read Walt
Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound.

He returned to Nicaragua in the 1950s, but after a failed coup against the

[Marxism] NY Times Opinion: Germany's Post-Nazi Taboo Against the Far Right Has Been Shattered

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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[this is related to John Reimann's post "surprise election results in
eastern Germany"]

Events this week in German politics were horrifying. But they shouldn’t
have been a surprise.

By Lukas Hermsmeier

Mr. Hermsmeier is a journalist.

Feb. 7, 2020, 11:30 a.m. ET

BERLIN — Sometimes, it takes an earthquake to reveal what’s below the
surface.

In the eastern German state of Thuringia this week a regional election
displayed the disastrous state of Germany’s political center — and how far
the country now stands from the anti-fascist consensus it proclaims to
maintain.

On Wednesday, the state Parliament of Thuringia elected Thomas Kemmerich of
the Free Democratic Party as the new governor. The only reason Mr.
Kemmerich was able to win, though, was because he received the backing of
the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by its German initials
AfD. The Free Democrats in Thuringia, along with members of Chancellor
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, agreed to the deal to ensure
Mr. Kemmerich took office.

In doing so, the center-right parties broke a taboo that has been in place
in German politics since the end of the Nazi era. Mr. Kemmerich became the
first high-ranking German politician since World War II to be elected by
relying on votes from a far-right party.

The centrists’ decision to side with the far right is especially worrying
in Thuringia, where the AfD is not only the second strongest party in the
regional parliament, but also more extreme than in any other state. The
AfD’s boss there, Björn Höcke, is the leader of a hard-line movement inside
the party known as “Der Flügel” — The Wing. In a 2018 book, he warned of
the “coming death of the nation through population replacement.” Last year,
a court ruled that he could legally be termed a fascist

The events in Thuringia have shaken German politics. Ms. Merkel called the
outcome “unforgivable.” Lars Klingbeil, the secretary general of the Social
Democrats, spoke of a “low point in Germany’s postwar history.” Even the
conservative tabloid Bild called the result a “disgrace.” After a wave of
public fury — including protests across the country — Mr. Kemmerich
announced on Thursday that he would resign in order to allow new elections.
(It’s far from clear that a new election wouldn’t produce even stronger
results for the AfD, however.)

But what led to these shameful machinations goes far deeper: the increasing
normalization of the radical right in German politics. Even if Germany’s
conservatives and liberals have not previously entered into formal
agreements with the far right at the federal level, and are unlikely to let
the AfD into a future government, they have nonetheless helped it gain
power and far too often set the agenda. That dynamic won’t disappear soon.

This was not the first time that centrists have collaborated with the AfD.
There have been at least 18 cases in which Ms. Merkel’s party has
cooperated with the AfD on a local level, it was reported last fall. In the
state parliaments of Berlin and Brandenburg, for example, the two parties
have voted together on legislation. Leading Christian Democrats from
several states have declared their willingness to work with the far-right
party. In Saxony-Anhalt, the two parties teamed up in 2017 on an “inquiry
on left extremism.” And in the same state, two Christian Democratic members
of Parliament wrote a position paper last year in which they considered a
coalition with the AfD. “We must reconcile the social with the national,”
they stated, echoing neo-Nazi rhetoric.

The AfD has grown consistently since its founding in 2013 and is now
present in the parliaments of every one of Germany’s 16 states. The parties
of the center, meanwhile, have all shifted rightward. Both the Free
Democrats, under their leader Christian Lindner, and the Christian
Democrats have moved their policy platforms in an anti-immigrant direction.
Neither Ms. Merkel nor the party’s new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer,
have created clear boundaries between their party and the far right. But
many voters, especially in the east of Germany, would rather buy the
original product than its copies.

How did it come to this? One major factor is the obsession of many German
centrists with the so-called horseshoe theory of politics, where the far
left and the far right are equivalent.

Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats have been guided by this theory. In an
official resolution, the party stated that it will never enter coalition
with either the Left Party or the AfD. In Thuringia, it was this unmovable
opposition to the left — demonized in its entirety by conservatives and
liberals, citing the Left 

[Marxism] Forum: "The Black Panther Party in Seattle"

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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sponsored by Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action (PSARA)

Saturday, February 22, 2PM
Washington State Labor Council 321 16th Avenue S, Seattle

The forum features six former Black Panther members who are now members of
PSARA: Mark Cook, Larry Gossett, Vanetta Molson, Garry Owens, Na'eem
Shareef, and Mike Tagawa.

For more than 30 years PSARA (Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action)
has been a forceful advocate for older Americans, their children, and their
families. Today we're working to unite the generations to build a secure,
healthy, and dignified retirement for all.

http://psara.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/BPP-Forum.pdf
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[Marxism] Democracy Now: Saturday Marks 60th Anniversary of Historic Greensboro Four Sit-In

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Saturday marks the 60th anniversary of the Greensboro Four sit-in protest
at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen students at North Carolina’s A State
University — Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David
Richmond — refused to leave the whites-only lunch counter after being
denied service. Their action inspired a nationwide wave of sit-ins aimed at
desegregating businesses and public spaces. Within weeks of their action,
sit-in protests spread to over 250 cities and towns across the country,
sparking a nationwide movement that saw more than 400 protests by the end
of the year.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/31/headlines/saturday_marks_60th_anniversary_of_historic_greensboro_four_sit_in
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[Marxism] Granma: Asela de los Santos Tamayo - 1929-2020

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Asela de los Santos Tamayo, a prominent Cuban revolutionary, considered a
founder of Cuba’s emancipatory education, died in the dawn hours yesterday,
January 23, at the age of 90.

She was born September 10, 1929 in the city of Santiago de Cuba. At a very
young age, she joined student struggles at the University of Oriente, where
she graduated with a PhD in Pedagogy, and met Vilma Espín, a life-long
friend and comrade.

She collaborated in supporting survivors of the attack on the Moncada, and
under the leadership of Frank País, became part of the original core of the
26th of July Movement.

During the insurrectional, she carried out many missions, moving
reinforcements and weapons to the Sierra Maestra.

In August 1958, she joined the Rebel Army’s Second Eastern led by
then-Comandante Raúl Castro Ruz, who named her of head Education in the
liberated territory, where she participated in the creation of more than
400 schools for children and study groups for combatants.

After the triumph of the Revolution, her work with Vilma in the Federation
of Cuban Women was key, serving first on the National Committee and later
becoming Secretary General.

In 1966, she joined the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces to
direct the Camilo Cienfuegos Teaching and Military Schools, and in 1970
took on a leading role at the Ministry of Education, later coming Minister.

Asela was a founder of the Cuban Communist Party and a member of its
Central Committee for three terms. She was also a member of the national
leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

Ideals and love united her until the last moments of her life to the Hero
of the Republic of Cuba, José Ramón Fernández. Asela will be remembered for
her modesty, firmness, commitment to social justice and loyalty to Fidel,
Raul, Vilma and the Cuban Revolution.

In accordance with her expressed will, her body was cremated and the urn
bearing her ashes will be displayed tomorrow, January 25, at the Veterans
Pantheon in Havana’s Colon Cemetery, where the public may pay their
respects, to be subsequently transferred to the Second Eastern Front
Mausoleum, in the province of Santiago de Cuba.

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-01-24/asela-de-los-santos-tamayo-1929-2020
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[Marxism] Mildred Solem obituary

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Letter to the editor
The Militant
Feb. 3, 2020

Mildred Solem, a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s and
’50s, died this month in Minneapolis. She was 105 years old.

As a young woman Millie moved from Hallock, Minnesota, a small town near
Canada, to Flint, Michigan, where autoworkers were fighting for a union,
and then to Minneapolis where she got a job as an office worker downtown.
Her first contact with the communist movement came when a protest by
unemployed workers passed by her workplace and she came out to join them.

She soon met her husband, Chester Johnson, an electrician who was a
founding member of the SWP and had helped lead a sympathy strike in the
building trades for Teamsters during the historic 1934 strikes that made
Minneapolis a union town.

Millie maintained her membership in the SWP until a stroke incapacitated
Chester and left her to care for him and their three small children. Over
the years Millie contributed money to the SWP and opened her house to party
members who needed a place to stay.

In 2015 a plaque was placed in the old warehouse district of Minneapolis
commemorating the 1934 Teamster strikes. A photo captures Millie, then 100
years old, at the event with her fist raised in the air.

Bill Scheer
Minneapolis, Minnesota

https://themilitant.com/2020/01/25/letters-23/

[scroll down to Letter from lifelong partisan of the ‘Militant’ for her
recollections, published in 2003
https://www.themilitant.com/2003/6743/674346.html]
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[Marxism] Right-left alliances: Richard Spencer on Iran, Trump, Zionism

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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A.R. Gupta wrote: "Richard Spencer has never once criticized Trump as a
pawn of Zionism..."

Richard Spencer tweeted:

"Donald Trump is wicked and disgusting.

"He’s threatening to destroy Aryan heritage sites and the Iranian people
for a Zionist war"

https://twitter.com/richardbspencer/status/1213612411720101888?lang=en
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[Marxism] NY Times: Antiwar Protestors Across U.S. Condemn Killing of Suleimani

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Demonstrations in more than 80 communities were organized to call attention
to rising tensions in the Middle East.

By Mariel Padilla
Jan 4, 2020

Thousands of antiwar protesters gathered in communities across the country
on Saturday to condemn the American drone strike in Baghdad that killed
Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.

In cities and towns across the United States, more than 80 demonstrations
were planned to oppose the killing of the commander, Qassim Suleimani, and
the Trump administration’s decision to send thousands more troops to the
Middle East.

The protests were spearheaded by Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, an
antiwar coalition, and Code Pink, a women-led antiwar organization.

“Unless the people of the United States rise up and stop it, this war will
engulf the whole region and could quickly turn into a global conflict of
unpredictable scope and potentially the gravest consequences,” the
coalition said in a statement.

More than 1,000 demonstrators in Washington gathered outside the White
House, carrying “No War” signs, Brian Becker, national director of the
coalition, said. Others marched in New York City in Times Square,
repeatedly chanting “U.S. out of the Middle East.” Crowds also assembled in
Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Memphis, Miami and St. Louis.

In Philadelphia, demonstrators outside City Hall carried signs demanding
that the United States stay out of Iraq and avoid war with Iran. In San
Francisco, an antiwar rally included chanting, singing and speakers. In
downtown Chicago, hundreds of demonstrators stood outside Trump Tower, some
with signs that read “Stop bombing Iraq.”

In Seattle, a rally was held at a park next to Pike Place Market. Hundreds
of people gathered, including 19-year-old Ethan Cantrell, who held a sign
that read “please no more war.”

Mr. Cantrell said that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that spanned almost
his entire life had been “20 years of pointlessness.”

Aliza Cosgrove, an 18-year-old protester in Seattle, said she would like to
see more young people who grew up in the digital age — particularly those
who come from privileged backgrounds — demonstrating in public.

“When you go on the internet, you see so many people talking about the
world and talking about what’s going on, and they just make jokes or repost
something and that’s all they do,” she said. “There’s good in spreading the
message on social media, but there’s also direct action in going out and
raising your voice.”

Act Now to Stop War and End Racism and Code Pink began calling for
nationwide protests on Tuesday, ahead of the drone strike that killed
General Suleimani but as tensions were escalating between the United States
and Iraq, Mr. Becker said.

Protests were initially planned in 10 to 15 cities and the number grew to
30 by Thursday. When the general was killed near the Baghdad airport early
on Friday, the number of participating cities more than doubled, Mr. Becker
said.

As of Saturday afternoon, more than 80 protests were organized, Medea
Benjamin, a director of Code Pink, said.

She said she had not seen numbers like this since 2003.

“One thing that’s very different this time is that more young people and
people of color came out to protest,” Ms. Benjamin added.

Ms. Benjamin said the surge of protesters reflected a momentum and energy
that she hoped would be seen and heard by lawmakers.

“It felt like this in September 2002 when we were putting out calls to
organize,” Mr. Becker said. “There was the same sense of alarm. This is
extremely reminiscent of the months before the Iraq invasion.”

The drone attack drastically ratcheted up tensions between Washington and
Tehran, causing online interest in military conscription and “World War
III” to surge on Friday.

On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security updated its National
Terrorism Advisory System to warn that Iran “is capable, at a minimum, of
carrying out attacks with temporary disruptive effects against critical
infrastructure in the United States.”

The system’s bulletins, which are shared among law enforcement across the
country, also reiterated that there was no current, specific, credible
threat against the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/iran-anti-war-protests.html

[The coalition statement mentioned in the fourth paragraph can be found at
https://www.answercoalition.org/national_action_us_troops_out_of_iraq
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[Marxism] "Hero of the Republic of Cuba, Harry Villegas, Passes Away"

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Alongside Ernesto Che Guevera, the Cuban General ‘Pombo’ fought in Cuba,
Congo, and Bolivia

full at
en.escambray.cu/2019/hero-of-the-republic-of-cuba-harry-villegas-passes-away/
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[Marxism] John Devere Severn (1935-2019)

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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John joined the Young Socialist Alliance in Seattle and was part of the
Kirk-Kaye tendency which left the Socialist Workers Party in 1966, and
formed the Freedom Socialist Party (for more on the Kirk-Kaye tendency, see
"Why We Left the Socialist Workers Party" at
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/prs3-fraser/15Whyleftswp.html
)

As Trotskyist splinters tend to do, the Freedom Socialist Party split into
two parties, each named the Freedom Socialist Party. For a time, John
remained with the FSP that was led by Clara Fraser and still exists. The
other FSP, led by Frank Krasnowsky, was pro-China and Trotskyist-Maoist. It
never reached the critical mass necessary to become a micro-vanguard.

John was a wonderful guy; I feel blessed to have know him and to consider
him a friend.

Here's the obit:

John Devere Severn, born March 19, 1935 in Hunters WA, died December 4,
2019 at his home in Shoreline WA due to complications from COPD. John was
the only child of Justin and Sylvia Severn, who at that time ran a farm
near Corvada WA.

In 1943, they moved to the big city of Spokane and from there to Richland,
where his parents went to work for Hanford, which John always referred to
as the death machine. He graduated from Richland High and went on to the
University of Washington, where he earned a Master’s in History
specializing in the French Revolution.

Not surprisingly, John's basic decency and caring nature—and his
appreciation of logical, fact-based argumentation—led him to the political
left. When called before his draft board in the early fifties, he insisted
that he'd be pleased to serve as long as he could participate in completing
the work of the Civil War by helping integrate the Jim Crow South.

He was won to the idea that, in order to make the world a better place, it
would be necessary to engage the working class; and he joined the Young
Socialist Alliance, youth group of the Socialist Workers Party (at the time
the largest Trotskyist organization in the US).  As the Seattle
correspondent for the YSA's monthly newspaper, John saw himself as a
proletarian intellectual and spent much of his life working on the shop
floors of a series of industrial concerns in the Seattle area.

John was extremely well-read, broadly knowledgeable and happy to share what
he knew. One always left a conversation with John being better informed
about early country music or paleontology or electric power generation or
double-entry bookkeeping—not to mention Marxism, social and political
history, and a raft of other subjects.

For a period following his involvement with the Seattle radical left, John
regarded himself as an anarchist. Subsequently Episcopalianism and, later,
Orthodox Christianity took the place of revolutionary politics in John’s
life. During this time, religious study became the vehicle for John’s
humanity and intellectual curiosity, but John remained a man of the left
with wide-ranging interests.

In 1974, he married Kathy Ingalls of Seattle and they remained together for
45 years, bearing two children between them. John continued to cultivate a
comprehesive knowledge of cooking and gardening. Over the past decade, he
traveled to Barcelona on numerous occasions to visit old friends, make new
ones, and to study the Spanish language and culture. He always relished
good food and coversation with family and friends.

He is survived by his wife, Kathy Ingalls-Severn, his daughters, Thea and
Anna Severn, and by his sons, Joshua Baker and Jacob Severn, as well as
four grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held in 2020, date and location to be determined.

 https://funerals.coop/obituaries/john-devere-severn.html
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] query re Clinton signing welfare bill

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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In response to Gary MacLennan's query about the photo in Salon:
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1dJeRsc--OcR8zh-NSiI6vAUUrK1RW8dv_CAwep5Z5JAS0RCCmfalqGJYhTlfbUHIdXIZzDurO3KYjjHisXKxq5nxAetPHX04w797ijsM_ulYWTdiGuBR2eyXce-2K9sI3LfyHwuHVU_mloWQO-Ipon279mvzuE6IY0uyPc1sp8NJV3cx4k5zJtXhbp1v1o_3zmgun1zxujqdywM3nNx9OZial6Kaekljt4DjDaUJ_V89FqmPNQijjgfWhVfAhnogXDsnxswEeMR7XZDM4iByziZ3zKQoXBIfB_2XHw6d4lSnb_rwVpCHDANtIlk3sMGUgWaxA8WgCXZ_X_0MScgCR4r55ytqcygETSMhahcK5kcA5AXjZ55PFiGzlwtAyYcLa9HcD-HCgYID-qMpmFd1qA/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2F2016%2F08%2F28%2Fa-failed-policy-based-on-failed-research-the-destructive-legacy-of-bill-clintons-1996-welfare-reform-act%2F

The woman standing to to Clinton's right is Lillie Harden, a "success
story" for  "welfare reform".
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1eRxWwoWcmVOu9FAJdQ75ETyske_6m7HT1flQINLehky5ZgXEWDZiU9yFFTjR0Q0PQCJGNlJ61m3tJEygQoRIz6upPt701XprJMO8nDssYZ9FSL38CeG4iZ4ymQktIXzZotZocxjihu1Ha0c4ZNh7nxxmnVkCSZVdQqpBaQHDs5_L84v8h3A7CtQ4sOXPhviGaDBz27ev7Xm8zvTjk0_N8Mzeer3sRi9p-CckCH5hAeIMvjPpxrR1Hl-JqVufqPcSDrw0t7oGJ3Xn7r1eIMf2ZwiUlTwakuO8uic8fCL1ACcg7gt2ANbm8_IIqEK_6v15e0JWMrw3tnbBnYRastIWYYzVSpHNRkTWQZIygNy5kXt2IJd9oKoqQGqgP1C2oQdz_X0fWVAU3zHd2AdaFrnb4g/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.c-span.org%2Fvideo%2F%3Fc4562242%2Fuser-clip-lillie-harden-speaks-life

The woman standing to Clinton's left and the woman standing to the left of
Lillie Harden were also former welfare recipients.
According to The New York Times:

Mr. Clinton took care to have three former welfare mothers at his side in
the sunshine as he signed the measure, praising it for restoring
''America's basic bargain of providing opportunity and demanding in return
responsibility.''

https://secure-web.cisco.com/1cmEunaCsIc-J45HYigs4ZWhMG37F12tIyDAALG6GW3lE38D4LEBPxIw-Jn3rHpE4u9S0zgE283s_XRRw-sP3yAdYmSZIqPIvkrtzqqQwfCO0LclF3eH8OI_YrCWU-uQhL7UPb3an381fcyfZNKmTPhoCngUFUGCf8UMpphCnc8QN2Tq9Jno9BHmFKnj95QNa-4YxeAV8jPQXZXAnEBgN9MtB19BC-CudoG6y8J9h46pQeZJ0zHfv-uQgrb_ukrHUgxS4QT3Lzh7dCGvxWBsQPUJGIW-zZ46ut3JIJoZ2r2ppbiSI2ZlUG7ctNIm9wFdlC-cRupN8jzhhOFWUP2W-RW18h5S1IBjrHKfTS-TQXD3q1DsNXRJujfvFwKTip421/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1996%2F08%2F23%2Fus%2Fclinton-signs-bill-cutting-welfare-states-in-new-role.html

For the outcome of the Lillie Harden success story, see

https://secure-web.cisco.com/1DiYIx0QDHDu8i1aQhBHS3G7D2EvUWMVl8mDsyUF_UwcdslyOzQyf6-r_n7wSdchk2PggAeK38tD-lzrYK6NrUild7fCal57fu6xEwrlr5dtpEdJAHFEAhB0YOH7xPHChC0uUsm351L478kFtvh7tgjJTXS871_0vYqOdGkc7EGKmmRoKzys4J80wKhh_Y3hkguCYdn7T9WH2bOFafD4JZmiRSydiwekeNevrDOaD6SIJsDXAVm0jfEwuMGrY4SCuLDBH98cP_a3ggPZgmpaltcOKlToRIbg7AScuynFl9IPkQiNHkZshA6QrY9_x4PlWYl8XNlKZPzOK8WCoDNHWfyMb5vlp1GB3enoVcqOg63CUkjWl54OjnE8W0o2ZLYM3oro3fJUvo3oNvE38wctPmQ/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alternet.org%2F2015%2F05%2Ftragic-end-woman-bill-clinton-exploited-poster-child-gutting-welfare%2F
and
https://secure-web.cisco.com/1oRMH4Vb2AJ8dKVRSYAEVUWkPGlsuDO7KyKqbJtW3q9Oh1seE-t6cdNWmLmOrc-RusYjNNw_Pa8-QcVzt5yPPG7kB1kwqMdXYN5V-0YkdHi537jLSjQ3tkieZc2LPd0qaoJnuJOu4lYPdQAyMcsUbMLWyGHHVxA4_3WG3-rgW1Pgi2EIpljN5Sm50Yy7U90gp9FAtobbRUr1UBrn4eL-lPI42LVK4Gy7MzldCCSGnecw7GLI2qfRaipx4em2Bhu7KpRYp4Dz44SBE7mz-CNvjAnppdIBMUDZgK3-n9qv_4pBnCX09Wgz3nGe16kXPeP_P5oeTeZHp1urrUbbDZ-1w8I-zM-3ZnQXypz6kOhOKkysD5gTyLQvKQ-3FxC81OC-t/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2016%2F8%2F22%2F12583376%2Fwelfare-reform-history-clinton-lillie-harden

A sad story indeed.

[Apologies to Gary -- I just don't have the time to try to identify the
other person you asked about.]
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[Marxism] Maureeen Dowd column in NY Times: Trump's Bad. Sadly, He's Not Alone

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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I've omitted the first few paragraphs and am starting with an excellent
discussion of Democrats, liberals, foreign policy and military elites:

We see a constant parade of Washington pooh-bahs like James Comey, Andrew
McCabe and John Brennan on cable, sounding the alarm and presenting
themselves as the white hats to Trump’s black hat. Retired generals grimace
at the president’s impetuous, ego-driven foreign policy.

The left keens that the president is destroying our sacred institutions and
jeopardizing our national security. But for many Americans, the events of
the last week prove that Trump is right to be cynical about a rigged system
and deep-state elites.

The inspector general’s report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation
offered a hideous Dorian Gray portrait of the once-vaunted law enforcement
agency. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times, the report uncovered “a
staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process.” The F.B.I. run by
Comey and McCabe was sloppy, deceitful and cherry-picking — relying on
nonsense spread by Christopher Steele.

With the stunning and sad “Afghanistan Papers,” The Washington Post
revealed what we knew in our hearts: We have spent 18 years and a trillion
dollars in Afghanistan, with generals lying and hiding evidence that the
war was unwinnable, just as the generals did in Vietnam. As one general
conceded, they did not understand Afghanistan and didn’t have “the foggiest
notion” of what they were doing.

Even as President Barack Obama escalated the war, poured in more billions
and promised to crack down on corruption, The Post said, the United States
looked away and let its allies — the Afghan president, warlords, drug
traffickers and defense contractors — wallow in fraud, corruption and dark
money.

Then there’s “The Report,” streaming on Amazon, the heroic saga of Daniel
Jones, played by Adam Driver. Jones is working for Dianne Feinstein on the
Senate Intelligence Committee and spends years compiling a report
documenting the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in
secret prisons, a barbaric, un-American and ineffective system designed by
two creepy psychologists who were paid about $81 million by the C.I.A.

The movie is not kind to Barack Obama and Denis McDonough, suggesting that
they protected the C.I.A. and tried to bury grisly details from the report
to fend off criticism that Obama was weak on terrorism. It is also a harsh
portrayal of Brennan, MSNBC’s Voice-of-Morality, who, as C.I.A. director,
fought the Senate inquiry so hard that his operatives even clandestinely
hacked into the computer network of committee staff members to figure out
how they were getting their information.

If this weren’t enough institutional perfidy for one week, we had the
Boeing hearing in Congress: An F.A.A. analysis done after the first deadly
crash off the coast of Indonesia showed that the agency knew that if it did
not act, the Boeing 737 Max was likely to crash 115 times in the 45 years
it was expected to fly, theoretically killing more than 2,900 people. But
that wasn’t enough to immediately ground it. The government is supposed to
protect us from the greedy capitalists, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, this climate of confusion and cynicism allows Trump to
prosper. He did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he
came to bathe in it.

full at
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-afghanistan-report-boeing.html
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[Marxism] Salon -- Russia went looking for puppets in America — and they found Trump and the Republicans

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Vicious redbaiting piece, being picked up by AlterNet and other
progressives/resisters.

Claims that not only the CPUSA, but Progressive Labor, Socialist Workers
Party, Workers World, SDS, Weatherman and even the Socialist Labor Party
(!) were pawns of the Kremlin.

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/14/russia-and-the-republicans-how-vladimir-putin-got-an-american-subsidiary/
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[Marxism] The Brooklyn Rail: two items re Noel Ignatiev

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Dec. 19 - Jan 20 issue

1. "Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality" by
Noel Ignatiev
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/12/field-notes/Frederick-Douglass-John-Brown-and-the-Virtues-of-Impracticality

2. "A Life Defined by Political Engagement -- Noel Ignatiev, 1940–2019" by
John Garvey
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/12/field-notes/Noel-Ignatiev-1940-2019
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[Marxism] Questions re: ALL OUT FOR SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14: CELEBRATE CUBA 5 FREEDOM!!

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The forwarded message, posted by the moderator, urges:
THIS SPECIAL EVENT WILL CELEBRATE THE 5th ANNIVERSARY OF THIS HISTORIC
VICTORY AND ITS LESSONS FOR OUR STRUGGLES TODAY AS WE FACE WASHINGTON’S
DEEPENING ANTI-CUBAN MEASURES.

Where is this event taking place?
What is the event?
Who is sponsoring the event?
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[Marxism] Howard Zinn Book Fair, San Francisco, Sunday December 8

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Sunday, Dec. 8, 10AM - 6PM
City College of San Francisco, Mission Campus
1125 Valencia Street
Suggested donation: $5 (no one turned away for lack of funds)
The campus is a short walk from 24th Street BART Station and Muni lines 14,
33, 48, 49 and J

The theme of this year’s book fair is “Strike! Discovering Our Power.” We
selected this theme to celebrate the ways in which everyday people discover
their ability to work together. Inspired by the wave of strikes across the
United States in the past year, the massive General Strikes in India, and
the recent uprisings in Algeria and Sudan, we expand the idea of the strike
to include all of the ways people can take collective action to preserve
their homes, protect life on earth, respect indigeneity, shut down the
machinery that produces racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and
inequality, and build movements that are strong enough to last. The Strike!
is not only
about withdrawing our labor, but about redirecting it to create a better
world.

Featuring over sixty publishers, booksellers, and grassroots organizations,
dozens of author readings, panels, and workshops with Silvia Federici, Jane
McAlevey, Emory Douglas,  Alice Bag, Bhaskar Sunkara, Nicholas Baham III,
Eric Drooker, Shawna Potter, Charlie Jane Anders, and voices from The
Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, The Yellow Vest Movement in France, the
Oakland Teachers Strike and more

https://howardzinnbookfair.com/

[and a plug for a book I've been involved with]

One of the exhibitors is 1741 Press, publisher of the collective memoir
"You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a
Worker-Student Alliance".

"a must-read book": Louis Proyect, in CounterPunch

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/

The book has a facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/pg/yousayyouwantarevolution/posts/
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[Marxism] Marxists Internet Archive November Newsletter

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I just received the e-mail Newsletter. It contains this message:

A ONE TIME DONATION TO THE MIA FOR $25 WOULD GO A LONG WAY IN KEEPING THE
MIA ONLINE!

Send your donation via paypal to: paym...@marxists.org

The MIA is such a wonderful and valuable resource.I hope comrades give
consideration to supporting the Marxist Internet Archive.
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[Marxism] NY Times: Noel Ignatiev, 78, Persistent Voice Against White Privilege, Dies

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In the journal Race Traitor and in a provocative book, Dr. Ignatiev argued
that the white race should, in a sense, be abolished.

By Neil Genzlinger

Nov. 14, 2019

Noel Ignatiev, a provocative scholar who argued that the idea of a white
race is a false construct that society would be better off without, died on
Saturday in Tucson, Ariz., where he was visiting a family member. He was 78.

His son, John, said the cause was complications of a chronic illness.

Dr. Ignatiev — who came to the academic world after two decades as a
factory worker — made a splash in 1995 with his book “How the Irish Became
White,” which looked at the assimilation of the Irish Catholics who
emigrated to the United States in the 1800s. Ill treated in their home
country, they started out at the bottom of the economic ladder in the
United States as well, competing with free black laborers for the worst
jobs in the North and, in the South, being relegated to work deemed too
dangerous to risk the life of a valuable slave.

“This book looks at how one group of people became white,” Dr. Ignatiev
wrote in the introduction. “Put another way, it asks how the Catholic
Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in
America.”

Beneath the case study was an idea that Dr. Ignatiev had long been
exploring, including in Race Traitor, a journal that he and John Garvey
founded in 1992. The publication’s aim, Dr. Ignatiev once put it, was “to
explore how people who had been brought up as white might become unwhite” —
that is, renounce the privileges that came with the label “white,” like
favored access to good jobs and neighborhoods.

“How the Irish Became White” is among a group of books that have been
foundational
to what became known as whiteness studies, a field that examines the
structures that produce white privilege.

“Many academics today study whiteness,” Adam Sabra, a history professor at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a longtime friend, said by
email. “Noel Ignatiev wanted to abolish it.”

But, as Dr. Ignatiev always felt compelled to point out, he was not
advocating some sort of mass extermination, just a change in presumptions.

“There is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no
such thing as white culture,” Dr. Ignatiev said at a 1997 conference at the
University of California, Berkeley. “Without the privileges attached to it,
the white race would not exist, and white skin would have no more social
significance than big feet.”

When interviewers would ask why he, a white man, was seeming to argue for
canceling his own race, he would rebel at the very label.

“That’s not a term I like to have applied to myself,” he told CNN in 2002.
“I want to get rid of it, because I think that the price that it extracts
from us is greater than the benefit it brings.”

Noel Saul Ignatin was born on Dec. 27, 1940, in Philadelphia. (John
Ignatiev said the family had changed its last name before his father was
born; his father, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, changed
it back to something closer to the original name when he reached
adulthood.) His father, Irv, delivered newspapers, and his mother, Carrie,
was a homemaker; later they ran a housewares store together.

His parents, intellectuals despite their humble circumstances and
Communists, were committed to bridging the racial divide, something Noel
saw in practice when helping his father with his newspaper deliveries
before he went off to school.

“The route was in a mostly black neighborhood,” he said last month on the
podcast “It’s Going Down,” “My father used to say there was not another
white man in the city who could have handled it. Many of the customers
would stop and tell me what a fine man my father was.”

Dr. Ignatiev graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia and
attended the University of Pennsylvania, but after his third year there he
dropped out because, as he told The Boston Globe in 2000, the student life
felt sterile. He worked in steel mills and other factories, mostly in
Chicago, “while trying to promote a proletarian revolution,” his son said.
He rejected any opportunity to become a supervisor.

“I wanted to be a worker because I thought they had something to teach me,”
he told The Globe. “I gained an appreciation for their knowledge, sense of
realism and capabilities.”

He was involved in various leftist and revolutionary groups in this period,
including Students for a Democratic Society and the Sojourner Truth
Organization, which was focused on workplace issues and their relation to
race. In 1967 he and Ted Allen wrote an influential, much-reproduced paper,
“The White 

[Marxism] Los Angeles Times: Noel Ignatiev, scholar who called for abolishing whiteness, dies at 78

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https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2019-11-11/noel-ignatiev-dies-race-whiteness
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[Marxism] "The POC: A Personal Memoir" by Noel Ignatin [Ignatieff]

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This piece was published in 1979. It's an account of Noel Ignatieff's
experience as a member of an "anti-revisionist" tendency in the CPUSA and
the Provisional Organizing Committee split-off from the CP.

(Thanks to the Marxist Internet Archive/Encyclopedia of anti-Revisionism
On-line)

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1956-1960/ignatin01.htm
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[Marxism] Against The Current review of SDS/Progressive Labor collective memoir

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Review of "You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in
Building
a Worker-Student Alliance"

November-December 2019 issue

Voices from the "Other '60s"
https://solidarity-us.org/atc/203/other-60s/

Louis Proyect's CounterPunch review is at
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/

available via amazon at
https://www.amazon.com/You-Say-Want-Revolution-Worker-Student/dp/0578406543
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[Marxism] NY Times: Democrats' Secret Plan to Kill Third Parties in New York

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(This article focuses on third parties that frequently endorse major party
candidates, but the Democrats' plan would also affect genuinely independent
third parties, and make it for difficult for the Green Party to maintain
its position on the New York ballot. The primary target of the proposal is
the Working Families Party, which generally supports Democrats, but is to
the left of Governor Cuomo.)

By Vivian Wang
Oct. 29, 2019

The chairman of the New York State Democratic Party is pushing a proposal
that would essentially neuter almost all third parties, crippling one of
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s biggest political nemeses but also potentially
helping conservatives.

The proposal from the chairman, Jay Jacobs, would quintuple the number of
votes that a political party needs to guarantee a spot on the ballot in the
next election. A party currently needs 50,000 votes for its candidate for
governor to secure a spot for the next four years.

Mr. Jacobs, in a private email to a group of state commissioners reviewing
parts of New York election law, proposed raising the number to roughly
250,000.

At first glance, it might seem a strange position for any Democrat, let
alone the head of the state’s Democratic Party, to take.

Nearly every minor party has fallen short of collecting 250,000 votes,
including, and perhaps especially, the Working Families Party, a
progressive group that shares many Democratic Party ideals yet has been one
of the most reliable antagonists of Mr. Jacobs and his close ally Mr. Cuomo.

Only the Conservative Party has been able to surpass the 250,000 vote mark
in recent years. If just that party survived, a candidate could then run on
both the Conservative and Republican lines — New York election law allows
candidates to run on multiple lines — while a liberal candidate would have
no such advantage.

“Conservatives have an awful lot of support,” Mr. Jacobs said when asked
about the idea. “There’s no question that they will have an easier time
meeting these thresholds.”

“I can see that that could be problematic,” he added.

Mr. Jacobs, whom Mr. Cuomo appointed to the state commission, insisted that
his proposal was aimed at reducing voter confusion and rooting out
corruption among “sham” parties that he said trade their ballot lines for
political favors. He did not specify which parties he was referring to.

“A lot of people have been getting away with an awful lot for a long time,”
Mr. Jacobs said. “In my mind, it will be better overall if elections are
run with only really credible parties.”

For the W.F.P. and its supporters, the proposal is the latest attempt by
Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Cuomo to silence one of their most prominent political
rivals. For the past few months, Mr. Jacobs has all but declared war on
third parties, advancing multiple proposals to ban them. Mr. Cuomo, though
he has not explicitly sought to ban the W.F.P., has said that he knew Mr.
Jacobs’s stance when he chose him for the commission.

The dispute is also the most recent front in the feud between Mr. Cuomo and
an increasingly emboldened mass of left-wing activists and politicians who
have cast Mr. Cuomo and his allies as centrists bent on obstruction.

Mr. Jacobs made the proposal in an email on Oct. 16, soon after a meeting
of the commission. It was created by the Legislature in April to design a
small-donor matching system for state elections, but in the months since,
much to the angst of the W.F.P., the commission also turned to the question
of third parties.

In the email, Mr. Jacobs asked a lawyer for the group, as well as the other
eight commissioners, whether it had the power to raise the threshold for a
guaranteed ballot line.

Traditionally, the W.F.P. and other minor parties had been able to meet the
50,000-vote threshold relatively easily, in part because candidates are
allowed to run on multiple lines, known as fusion voting. Progressives can,
for example, choose to vote for the Democratic candidate on the W.F.P. line
to send a message about their political priorities without worrying about
wasting a vote.

Mr. Jacobs asked the lawyer if the commission could require parties to
achieve “an amount equal to 2 percent of all registered voters in the
state” in races for president and governor.

Two percent of New York’s 12,695,762 registered voters is 253,915 votes. In
the last election for governor, the Conservative Party collected 253,624
votes. The W.F.P., the next highest vote-getter, collected about 114,000.

Mr. Jacobs said the details of the proposal were not final. He said he had
not yet discussed it with his fellow commissioners, who must vote to
approve it.

But he reaffirmed his 

[Marxism] industrialization/rank and file strategy/UPS

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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I believe Louis Proyect is mistaken when he wrote:"The one group that did
have such an orientation is very much worth studying: Solidarity. They were
heavily involved with struggles in the UPS."

Groups that had such an orientation included the International Socialists
and the International Socialist Organization.

For the UPS struggles, here's an article by Cal Winslow, who was in both of
those organizations.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/18/the-fight-for-control-at-ups/
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[Marxism] Jim Robertson is Officially Dead!

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took the Spartacist League six months to publish this obit

https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1162/jim.html
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[Marxism] NY Times: Ascensión Mendieta, 93, Dies; Symbol of Justice for Franco Victims

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She fought for decades to recover the remains of her father, who had been
executed by a firing squad in 1939. Finally, when she was 92, she found him.

By Katharine Q. Seelye
Published Sept. 22, 2019
Updated Sept. 23, 2019

Ascensión Mendieta was just 13 in 1939 when her father was lined up against
a wall in Spain and shot by a firing squad of soldiers loyal to Gen.
Francisco Franco. His body was then dumped into a mass grave.

Ascensión would devote her entire life to finding her father and giving him
a proper burial. Only recently, at age 92, did she fulfill that ambition.

After decades of agony and searching, she located him in 2017, in the
cemetery at Guadalajara. She had his remains exhumed and buried him in
Madrid at a ceremony attended by  hundreds of mourners.

“Now I can rest in peace,” she said at the time.

On Sept. 16, Ms. Mendieta died in Madrid at 93, her family reported on
social media. Her last wish was carried out when her own coffin was placed
in the same tomb as her father and she was buried with him.

She had come to personify the struggle for justice shared by the families
of perhaps as many as 200,000 victims of Franco-era executions, whose
bodies were tossed in unmarked graves or along the side of roadways
throughout Spain.

Her simple demand for justice made Ms. Mendieta, a modest small-town woman
who did not seek the spotlight, a hero to many.

As the BBC reported: “This most personal of struggles had inadvertently
made humble Ascensión into a public figure in her final years. She bore her
celebrity status with smiling bewilderment, but she always had a
crystal-clear view on the injustice her family and thousands more had to
stomach during the Franco regime and the failure of the modern Spanish
state to come to terms with the country’s bloody legacy.”

Ascensión Mendieta Ibarra was born on Nov. 29, 1925, and grew up in
Sacédon, east of Madrid, with six siblings. As a teenager she worked as a
seamstress. She eventually had four children. Complete information on
survivors was not immediately available.

Her mother, Maria Ibarra, raised the children while her father, Timoteo
Mendieta Alcala, was the village butcher in Sacédon, in the province of
Guadalajara. More important, he was an officer of the General Workers
Union, a socialist union, which made him a target for Franco.

Ascensión was 13 when a group of men came to the door looking for her
father. She thought they were “well spoken” and let them in.

He was taken and shot against the wall of a Guadalajara cemetery on Nov.
16, 1939. His body was dumped in a mass grave there, along with those of
more than 20 others; more than 800 others who had been executed would
eventually fill the pits in the cemetery.

After Franco’s death in 1975, Ms. Mendieta and other relatives petitioned
the Spanish government for help in locating his remains. The authorities
refused to help.

Family members were  not allowed to visit the mass grave where they
believed he had been tossed. They were left to throw flowers over the
cemetery wall.

In 2010, a group of victims’ families, together with prominent humanitarian
organizations, filed a lawsuit in Argentina seeking an investigation into
Franco’s crimes against humanity. A judge there, María Romilda Servini de
Cubría, had begun an investigation and was compiling a growing file of
people seeking help in finding relatives who had been executed.

In 2013, at age 88, Ms. Mendieta flew to Argentina to add her case to the
file. The judge proceeded under a legal principle called universal
jurisdiction, in which a court in one country can sometimes prosecute
someone elsewhere for crimes believed to have harmed the world. She
eventually gained the cooperation of a Spanish judge, who complied with her
request to dig up some of the graves. (The lawsuit was the subject of a
2018 documentary, “The Silence of Others.”)

A team of archaeologists and volunteers from the Association for the
Recovery of Historical Memory, a human rights group that in 2000 uncovered
the first mass grave of Franco victims, undertook the exhumation, with no
financial support from the Spanish government. After two unsuccessful
attempts, they found Timoteo Mendieta Alcala’s remains in 2017 in what was
 called Pit No. 1 of the cemetery.

The unearthing of those remains marked the first time a Franco-era victim’s
body had been recovered through the courts, according to the BBC. The next
year, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory delivered to
families the identified remains of nearly two dozen others who had been
executed in 1939 and dumped in that same cemetery.

Ms. Mendieta buried her father in a nonreligious 

[Marxism] NYC:, Mon. Sept 23: An Intergenerational Conversation with Dr. Angela Y. Davis

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Monday, September 23, 2019 7:00pm
Riverside Church
490 Riverside Drive
(120th Street & Riverside Drive)
New York, NY

hosted by the National Conference of Black Lawyers

Derecka Purnell, attorney, writer, and organizer, and Vincent Warren,
executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, will be joining
Dr. Davis in a discussion about the future direction of the Movement for
Black Liberation and the challenges for Black lawyers. The conversation
will be moderated by Amanda Alexander, executive director of the Detroit
Justice Center.

https://ccrjustice.org/home/get-involved/events/intergenerational-conversation-dr-angela-y-davis
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[Marxism] NY Times: Annette Kolodny, Feminist Critic and Scholar, Dies at 78

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She was a pioneer in the field of ecofeminism, in which she drew parallels
between the ravaging of the environment and the ravaging of women.

By Katharine Q. Seelye 
Published Sept. 20, 2019Updated Sept. 21, 2019

Annette Kolodny, a literary and cultural critic who was a pioneer in the
field of ecofeminism, drawing parallels between the subjugation of the
environment and the subjugation of women, died on Sept. 11 at her home in
Tucson. She was 78.

Her husband, Daniel Peters, said she learned she had rheumatoid arthritis
when she was 19 and had been using a wheelchair for the last decade. She
died of infections resulting from sores from prolonged sitting, he said.

Dr. Kolodny was a prodigious author and scholar with many areas of
interest, among them early American literature, Native American culture,
women’s studies and feminist literary criticism. Although she wrote books,
she specialized in essays, and much of her most influential work —
including perhaps her most famous piece, “Dancing Through the Minefield:
Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist
Literary Criticism” (1980) — was published in academic and literary
journals.

She was also one of the first Americans to delve into ecofeminism, a
subgenre of feminist literary criticism that grew out of the environmental
movement of the 1960s.

Through this lens, Dr. Kolodny connected the ravaging of the land,
particularly in the opening of the American West, and the ravaging of
women. She explored that concept in the book “The Lay of the Land: Metaphor
as Experience and History in American Life and Letters” (1975).

She was teaching at the University of New Hampshire when she wrote that
book, and while it broke new ground and received positive reviews, she was
denied tenure, even as men with similar credentials were promoted. That led
her to sue the university for discrimination; the university settled with
her out of court in 1980, but the experience was traumatic for her and
would have lasting effects.

“We lost almost all of the friends we thought we made,” Mr. Peters, her
husband, who is a novelist, said. “At a certain point, a number of the
women suddenly started getting tenure, and they drummed her out of their
group. She felt they had abandoned her.”

Still, Dr. Kolodny continued her scholarly and critical work. In 1984 she
published another important book on ecofeminism, “The Land Before Her:
Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630—1860.”

n 2012, she completed one of her most monumental and well-regarded books,
“In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the
Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery.” In it, she
re-examined two medieval Icelandic tales, known as the Vinland sagas, and
argued that they were the first known European narratives about contact
with Native Americans.

“Her interest in Native Americans arose with her interest in ecofeminism,
because they both dealt with issues of cultural and economic
appropriation,” Adele Barker, a friend and former professor who worked with
Dr. Kolodny in cultural studies at the University of Arizona, said in a
phone interview.

She added, “The issues that lay at the heart of feminism, issues of power
and oppression, lay at the heart of all her work.”

Annette Kolodny was born on Aug. 21, 1941, on Governors Island in New York
Harbor, where her father, David Kolodny, a dentist, was stationed while in
the Army. Her mother, Esther (Rifkin) Kolodny, was a public-school teacher.

Annette grew up in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College, graduating Phi
Beta Kappa in 1962. She went to work as a low-level employee for Newsweek
magazine’s international editions, but, like many women there, she was
frustrated.

“Women were not being promoted,” Mr. Peters said, “and she didn’t see a way
to go higher.”

She left after a year and studied English and American literature at the
University of California, Berkeley. She received her doctorate in 1969.

Her first job after that was teaching at Yale, where she met Mr. Peters, a
senior in her class on the contemporary American novel; they were married
in 1970. In addition to him, she is survived by her sisters, Nancy Weiner
and Edie Kolodny-Nagy.

With the Vietnam War raging, Mr. Peters was worried about being drafted.
The couple left Yale for Canada, where Dr. Kolodny taught literature at the
University of British Columbia and Mr. Peters attended graduate school.

They returned to the United States in 1974, and she landed a teaching job
at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. When she was denied tenure,
Dr. Kolodny, who 

[Marxism] NY Times: The Socialist Plan to Radicalize Big Labor

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Allegations of spying, subterfuge and “red-baiting” as the left battles
over institutions at the heart of the Democratic Party.

By Vivian Wang

Sept. 19, 2019

A group of far-left activists huddled in the basement of a labor union in
Manhattan, aiming to upend a Democratic institution that they felt had
grown stale.

The potential target was not an entrenched politician, or the local county
party. It was a much closer ally: labor unions, including the one that was
hosting the activists’ meeting earlier this year.

The plan did not go over well. The union, a branch of the Communication
Workers of America, kicked the activists out. Labor leaders accused the
activists of plotting infiltration. The activists, in turn, recently warned
of union spies.

The dispute makes clear the growing ambition of New York’s activist left,
which over the past year has notched a string of high-profile successes,
from propelling Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to
scuttling Amazon’s plans to build headquarters in New York City.

On the national stage, progressive forces are trying to push the Democratic
agenda to the left, and challenge how party leaders respond to President
Trump.

Emboldened by their successes, they are now preparing to take additional
steps toward political and economic transformation — including by
challenging groups that have long been in the populist vanguard of the
Democratic Party.

The unions, in turn, have been forced to reckon with the shifting political
landscape, and to decide what position they want to occupy within it.

While unions in New York and nationwide have often championed progressive
policies, some have also opposed marquee issues for the left, including the
Green New Deal and Medicare for All. No union endorsed Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in
her insurgent congressional campaign last year.

Even as grass-roots labor activism has swelled in new sectors — including
among video game makers and Uber drivers — established unions have often
kept their distance because of funding shortages or reluctance to engage
with workers outside of their formal membership.

At its heart, the debate is one between pragmatism and idealism, working
within the system versus burning it down.

It is the same debate dogging the Democratic Party at large, but amplified
by an only-in-New-York mix of vibrant activism, impenetrably blue politics
and — unlike in the rest of the country — still-mighty unions eager to
quell perceived threats to their clout.

“Given the political moment we find ourselves in, the idea that a leftist
political organization would launch disruptive attacks on their ostensible
allies in the labor movement is the definition of cutting off your nose to
spite your face,” said Peter Ward, the president of the Hotel Trades
Council, a union of hotel workers.

Activists countered that the labor movement had fallen out of step. Jeremy
Saunders, the co-executive director of VOCAL-NY, a progressive activism
group, said many union leaders seemed dismissive of the energy on the left.

“This growing left sees labor as its natural allies,” he said, “but is
frustrated by some unions who too often side with those same politics and
politicians who refuse to fight for justice.”

The current dispute involves the New York City branch of the Democratic
Socialists of America and the plan it crafted at that basement meeting. The
socialists, deeming the city’s unions overly reliant on insider
relationships, prepared a “rank-and-file strategy” for their members to
join unions and remake them from within.

The group also later published a blog post encouraging other chapters
nationwide to follow suit.

Some backlash was immediate. But it exploded recently, after the group’s
37-page memo about its plan was reported by Politico, leading union leaders
to accuse D.S.A. of sowing division.

In response, D.S.A. members — including State Senator Julia Salazar, the
first member of the group to serve in the Legislature — said the union
leaders were “red-baiting.”

[tweets omitted]

ensions escalated when D.S.A. issued a statement accusing the Hotel Trades
Council of sending members to spy on D.S.A. meetings in order to “thwart
H.T.C. members’ self-organization and full exercise of their democratic
union rights.” (The union denied spying; D.S.A. meetings are public.)

In interviews, activists — both involved with D.S.A. and not — said the
unions’ reactions affirmed their critique.

Bianca Cunningham, a leader of the New York City D.S.A., said unions’
entanglement in political relationships “prohibits them from being able to
take real chances.”

“We’re not surprised that conservative unions come out and 

[Marxism] NY Times Opinion -- Eric Foner: The Lost Promise of Reconstruction

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Can we reanimate the dream of freedom that Congress tried to enact in the
wake of the Civil War?

By Eric Foner
Mr. Foner is the author of “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and
Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”
Sept. 7, 2019

Among the unanticipated consequences of the election of Donald Trump has
been a surge of interest in post-Civil War Reconstruction, when this
country first attempted to construct an interracial democracy, and in the
restoration of white supremacy that followed. Many Americans feel that we
are living at a time like the end of the 19th century, when, in the words
of Frederick Douglass, “principles which we all thought to have been firmly
and permanently settled” were “boldly assaulted and overthrown.”

Douglass was referring to the rights enshrined in three constitutional
amendments ratified between 1865 and 1870. The 13th Amendment irrevocably
abolished slavery. The 14th constitutionalized the principles of birthright
citizenship and equality before the law. The 15th sought to guarantee the
right to vote for black men throughout the reunited nation. All three
empowered Congress to enforce their provisions, radically shifting the
balance of power from the states to the nation.

The amendments had flaws. The 13th allowed involuntary servitude to
continue for people convicted of crime, inadvertently opening the door to
the creation of a giant system of convict labor. The 14th mandated that a
state would lose part of its representation in the House of Representatives
if it barred groups of men from voting but imposed no penalty if it
disenfranchised women. The 15th allowed states to limit citizens’ right to
vote for reasons other than race.

Nonetheless, the amendments should be seen not simply as changes to an
existing structure but as a second American founding, which created a
fundamentally new Constitution. Taken together, as George William Curtis,
the editor of Harper’s Weekly, wrote at the time, they transformed a
government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” Yet they do not occupy
the prominent place in public consciousness of other key texts in our
history, nor are their authors, Representatives James Ashley, John Bingham
and others, widely known.

The amendments were written in broad, sometimes ambiguous language. A
series of interconnected questions about their precise meaning cried out
for resolution. Did the 13th prohibit only chattel bondage or extend to
other elements of slavery, including racial inequality? Did the 14th shield
Americans against violations of their rights only by state laws and
officials (the so-called state action doctrine), or also against the acts
of private individuals? Did the 15th prohibit laws that, even if
race-neutral on their face, were clearly intended to limit black men’s
right to vote?

The task of definition fell to the Supreme Court. And in a series of
decisions familiar today only to specialists (with the exception of Plessy)
— the Slaughter-House Cases, Cruikshank, Hall v. DeCuir, the Civil Rights
Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, Giles v. Harris — the court drastically
restricted the scope of the second founding. As time went on, outright
racism became increasingly evident in the court’s decisions. The process
was gradual and never total, but the fate of the three amendments offers an
object lesson in what can happen to constitutional rights at the hands of
an unsympathetic, conservative Supreme Court.

The 13th Amendment quickly fell into disuse. The court assumed that its
purpose was fulfilled when chattel slavery vanished and rejected claims
that various forms of racial inequality that persisted amounted to “badges
of slavery” against which Congress could legislate. The justices reduced
the “privileges or immunities” guaranteed to American citizens in the 14th
to virtual insignificance, insisting that most rights still derived from
state, not national, citizenship. The court elevated state action into a
shibboleth, severely restricting federal protection of rights against the
assaults of violent individuals and mobs. It refused to intervene as the
South’s black men lost the right to vote. The justices mainly used the 14th
Amendment as a vehicle to protect the “liberty” of corporations, not that
of the former slaves, striking down state laws regulating economic activity
on the grounds that they violated the rights of “corporate personhood.”
Only John Marshall Harlan, black Americans’ most steadfast friend in the
federal judiciary during this period, consistently dissented from what he
called the court’s “entirely too narrow and artificial” reading of the
three amendments.

In the face of these decisions, those 

[Marxism] NY Times Opnion: We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is

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A crucial part of his coalition is made up of better-off white people who
did not graduate from college.

By Thomas B. Edsall
Aug. 28, 2019

Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary
Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class
— defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the
Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in
the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college
degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican
Party.

According to the census, the top two income quintiles in 2017 were made up
of those with household incomes above $77,552. More than half of the voters
Kitschelt and Rehm describe as high income are middle to upper middle
class, from households making from $77,522 to $130,000 — not, by
contemporary standards, wealthy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/opinion/trump-white-voters.html
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[Marxism] NY Times: Sidney Rittenberg, Idealistic American Aide to Mao Who Evolved to Counsel Capitalists, Dies at 98

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[Great obit, including this wonderful vignette: "For most of his time in
China, from 1945 to 1980, he was an intimate of the Communist Party’s top
leaders, whom he sought out in their mountain sanctuary, a guerrilla camp
in Yan’an, by trekking 45 days on foot. He played gin rummy and argued
dogma with Mao, talked for days about the United States and philosophy with
Zhou, danced with Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and got to know Mao’s inner
circle, including Liu Shaoqi, the third-ranking leader. They all watched
Laurel and Hardy movies together."

By Robert D. McFadden
August  24, 2019

Sidney Rittenberg, an American soldier-linguist who stayed in China for 35
years after World War II as an adviser and political prisoner of the
Communist Revolution, and later made millions as a counselor of Western
capitalists exploiting booming Chinese markets, died on Saturday in
Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 98.

The family confirmed the death in a statement.

In a saga of Kafkaesque twists, Mr. Rittenberg was a dedicated aide to
Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai as a party propagandist known
across China by his Mandarin name, Li Dunbai — the mysterious foreigner in
Mao’s government. But he ran afoul of Mao’s suspicions, offended Mao’s wife
and spent 16 years in prison, falsely accused of espionage and
counterrevolutionary plotting.

n the United States after his release, he used his extensive knowledge and
contacts in China to build his own capitalist empire, advising corporate
leaders, including Bill Gates of Microsoft and the computer magnate Michael
S. Dell, on how to cash in on China’s vast growing economy. Still welcome
in China, he took entrepreneurs on guided tours, introducing them to the
country’s movers and shakers.

“His compelling tale can perhaps best be understood as a story, writ small,
of modern-day China itself,” the author Gary Rivlin wrote in The New York
Times in 2004. “His metamorphosis from isolated expatriate to high-priced
global go-between mirrors the country’s own shift — from a closed-door
Communist state to a freewheeling moneymaking society, with a new class of
entrepreneurs who dream the same dreams that dance in the heads of people
in places like Silicon Valley.”

The rebel scion of a prominent Charleston, S.C., family, Mr. Rittenberg,
who joined and quit the American Communist Party, arrived in China as an
Army private just as World War II ended.

He was fluent in Chinese, was committed to Marxist-Leninist ideals, was
aware of the rampant corruption in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government
and was determined to take part in momentous historical changes.

For most of his time in China, from 1945 to 1980, he was an intimate of the
Communist Party’s top leaders, whom he sought out in their mountain
sanctuary, a guerrilla camp in Yan’an, by trekking 45 days on foot. He
played gin rummy and argued dogma with Mao, talked for days about the
United States and philosophy with Zhou, danced with Mao’s wife Jiang Qing,
and got to know Mao’s inner circle, including Liu Shaoqi, the third-ranking
leader. They all watched Laurel and Hardy movies together.

Mr. Rittenberg joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1946. He became an
English-language translator of news dispatches for the party’s propaganda
arm and an interpreter of Chinese for communiqués and contacts with
international leaders. He traveled with Mao and the Red Army and witnessed
events of the civil war that led to the Communist victory in 1949, and to
the formation of Mao’s Beijing government, the People’s Republic of China.

Despite his growing status, Mr. Rittenberg was incarcerated twice on
trumped-up charges. After the Communists took power in China, the Soviet
leader Josef Stalin charged in a communiqué to Mao that Mr. Rittenberg was
a secret American agent sent to undermine the revolution. Without trial, he
was held for six years in solitary confinement.

Cleared of the bogus spy charges and released in 1955, he resumed his
status in privileged upper echelons of the party. He was named to a high
post in China’s Broadcast Administration, and later became a director of
Radio Beijing, which regularly denounced the United States. He also wrote
for the controlled New China News Agency, and was a liaison to foreign
journalists and dignitaries. He sometimes broadcast propaganda himself,
anonymously in English with a soft South Carolina drawl.

He was well paid and lived with his third wife, Wang Yulin, and their three
daughters and son in a Beijing suite luxurious even by Western standards,
filled with priceless Ming dynasty antiques. (He had previously been
married to an American who divorced him when he left for China, and to 

[Marxism] Medium.com: "What I Did in the War" by Michael Balter

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"During the 1960s I was a member of a far-left group. We were so far left,
in fact, that we thought Mao Zedong was a revisionist capitalist roader. We
also believed that revolutionaries should join the military to subvert and
destroy it from within.

"I was an undergraduate student at UCLA when my turn came to carry out this
mission. I mailed my student draft deferment card back to my draft board
along with a letter condemning the war, and was promptly obliged with an
induction notice."
full at
https://medium.com/@michael.balter/what-i-did-in-the-war-e159eaa098ad

This piece was written by a former member of the Progressive Labor Party.
He has a longer memoir in the collection "You Say You Want a Revolution:
SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance". Louis
Proyect reviewed the book (mentioning Balter's contribution) in
CounterPunch.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/

The book is available at
https://www.amazon.com/You-Say-Want-Revolution-Worker-Student/dp/0578406543
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[Marxism] People's World: Participants in the radical student upsurge speak out in this volume

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Participant reflections of the tumultuous 1960s student upsurge and the
anti-Vietnam War movement are always a welcomed contribution to those
interested in mid-20th century U.S. radical history. The collection of
essays that constitute You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and
Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance enlarge the historical
lens – perhaps, intentionally, perhaps unintentionally – by focusing
laser-like on just one of the myriad of groups that emerged during this
time.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was for a short period in radical
history the largest, most vibrant student organization of the mid-to-late
1960s. PL, or the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), was a Maoist group that
initiated the 1964 May 2nd Movement (M2M) protests against escalating U.S.
involvement in Vietnam; the Worker-Student Alliance was PLP’s youth front
that for a time worked to take over SDS.

You Say You Want a Revolution is full of interesting personal accounts,
anecdotes that throughout the course of the book emerge into a larger
narrative of youthful optimism, activism, excitement and often times
disillusionment with PLP and its undemocratic decision-making structure,
ultra-leftism, and eventual sectarian isolation.

full at
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/participants-in-the-radical-student-upsurge-speak-out-in-this-volume/
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[Marxism] from New Republic job announcement: INEQUALITY DEPUTY EDITOR, PART-TIME

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Long a champion of equality in all its guises, The New Republic is looking
for a part-time editor to oversee a forthcoming inequality vertical. The
editor will be expected to recruit and oversee columnists and design
potential partnership opportunities. You should be full of ideas, know how
to make our coverage unique, how to inspire and mentor writers, and have
ideas on how to use a small budget to grow this beat into something
spectacular.

Now get this:

This is a non-Guild job and is open to internal and external candidates.
This is a part-time role, requiring 29.5 hours per week, and does not
include benefits.

full announcement at https://tnr.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=75
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[Marxism] Boston Public Library book event re SDS/Progressive Labor memoirs

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You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building A
Worker-Student Alliance (John Levin and Earl Silbar, editors)

Thursday, June 20, 2019 (6:00 PM – 7:45 PM)
Jamaica Plain Branch Library
30 South Street
Jamaica Plain MA 02130

Join us to hear several local authors who contributed to the recently
published book-"You Say You Want a Revolution". Listen to people who
participated in the student movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The book
includes pieces set in and around Boston, such as the Harvard Student
Strike in 1969.

https://bpl.bibliocommons.com/events/search/fq=branch_location_id:(28)/event/5ce4106f6070164500f09312

SPEAKERS will include:

Ellen S. Israel, a key organizer, and participant, in student travel to
Cuba in 1963 and 1964, in defiance of the U.S. government's travel ban (and
defeating the ban in the Supreme Court). Her memoir includes photos of
Fidel playing ping pong with the students ("he won each time!")

Frank Kashner, union activist at General Electric

John Pennington, Harvard activist and National Secretary of SDS, following
the split with Weatherman and RYM II factions

Mary Summers, Harvard activist, currently teaching academically based
community service courses on the Politics of Food and Healthy Schools at
the University of Pennsylvania

Lou Proyect's review of You Say You Want a Revolution is at
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/
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[Marxism] NY Times Op-Ed calls for Communism (seriously)

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We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the
needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination.

By Aaron Bastani
Mr. Bastani is the author of the forthcoming “Fully Automated Luxury
Communism: A Manifesto.”
June 11, 2019

It starts with a burger.

In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept
for what he called “cultured meat.” Five years later, in a London TV
studio, Mr. Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown from animal
cells in a laboratory. Secretly funded by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of
Google, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost $325,000 — making
theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were
promising: Hanni Rützler, a nutrition scientist, concluded that the patty
was “close to meat but not as juicy.” The next question was whether this
breakthrough could be made cheaper. Much cheaper.

The first “cultured beef” burgers are likely to enter the market next year,
at approximately $50 each. But that won’t last long. Within a decade they
will probably be more affordable than even the cheapest barbecue staples of
today — all for a product that uses fewer resources, produces negligible
greenhouse gases and, remarkably, requires no animals to die.

It’s not just barbecues and burgers. Last year Just, a leader in cellular
agriculture, cut a deal to start producing one of the world’s tastiest
steaks, Wagyu. A company called Endless West, which also makes grapeless
wine, has started to produce Glyph, the world’s first “molecular whiskey.”
Luxury could be coming to all.

The case of cultured food and drink, far from a curiosity, is a template
for a better, freer and more affluent world, a world where we provide for
the needs of everyone — in style.

But how do we get there?

To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. It differs from
the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, or hell in the paintings
of Hieronymus Bosch. It is unlike Europe during the Black Death or Central
Asia as it faced the galloping Golden Horde. And yet it is true: Ours is an
age of crisis. We inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity and low
wages, of climate breakdown and the collapse of democratic politics. A
world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty. A world
defined by inequality.

But the most pressing crisis of all, arguably, is an absence of collective
imagination. It is as if humanity has been afflicted by a psychological
complex, in which we believe the present world is stronger than our
capacity to remake it — as if it were not our ancestors who created what
stands before us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such
a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds.

If we can move beyond such a failure, we will be able to see something
wonderful. The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology
are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for
all.

Automation, robotics and machine learning will, as many august bodies, from
the Bank of England to the White House, have predicted, substantially
shrink the work force, creating widespread technological unemployment. But
that’s only a problem if you think work — as a cashier, driver or
construction worker — is something to be cherished. For many, work is
drudgery. And automation could set us free from it.

Gene editing and sequencing could revolutionize medical practice, moving it
from reactive to predictive. Hereditary diseases could be eliminated,
including Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, and
cancer cured before it reaches Stage 1. Those technologies could allow us
to keep pace with the health challenges presented by societal aging — by
2020 there will be more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 5 —
and even to surpass them.

What’s more, renewable energy, which has been experiencing steep annual
falls in cost for half a century, could meet global energy needs and make
possible the vital shift away from fossil fuels. More speculatively,
asteroid mining — whose technical barriers are presently being surmounted —
could provide us with not only more energy than we can ever imagine but
also more iron, gold, platinum and nickel. Resource scarcity would be a
thing of the past.

The consequences are far-reaching and potentially transformative. For the
crises that confront our world today — technological unemployment, global
poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity — we can already
glimpse the remedy.

But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created 

Re: [Marxism] Platypus “Nobody wanted to hear, ‘You’re reactionary in what you’re doing’”: An Interview with Earl Silbar - Platypus

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In addition to the interview with Earl Silbar, Platypus Issue #117 contains
interviews with SDS activists David Gilbert and Carl Davidson.

https://platypus1917.org/category/pr/issue-117/
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[Marxism] Kent State -- Former CIA intelligence executive, 50th Commemoration chair steps down following complaints

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KentWired.com
May 24, 2019

Stephanie Smith, an associate professor in Kent State's School of
Journalism and Mass Communication and former CIA executive, announced in a
Facebook post Wednesday she was stepping down as university chair of Kent
State's 50th Commemoration Advisory Committee.

“Out of respect for the profound concerns held by some members of Kent
State's May 4 community about my former work in national security, I am
stepping down as university chair of the 50th commemoration,” Smith said in
the post.
[snip]

Laurel Krause, the sister of Allison Krause, one of four students killed by
National Guardsmen at Kent State on May 4, 1970, led an email campaign from
her Facebook page to “PROTEST & STOP Stephanie D. Smith, the 25-yr #CIA
veteran, from running the #KentState 50th.”

full at
http://www.kentwired.com/latest_updates/article_7649a79c-7e3d-11e9-b3be-ebce7b093450.html
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[Marxism] Through the eyes of the Charleston hospital workers movement: 50 years later

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The Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina)
June 8, 2019

In March 1969, African American hospital workers had enough.

Underpaid and overworked, hundreds, mostly women, took their grievances to
the streets of Charleston. They demanded better treatment, the rehiring of
12 co-workers fired by the Medical College Hospital, now the Medical
University of South Carolina, and the recognition of the Local 1199B union.

Below are the words of strikers, community leaders and others remembering
the more than 100 days of activism in Charleston that followed. The
comments have been edited for length.

full at
https://www.postandcourier.com/news/through-the-eyes-of-the-charleston-hospital-workers-movement-years/article_b79cb1bc-7339-11e9-996a-03e876ccb7c9.html
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Re: [Marxism] Breaking ground for gay rights in the Communist press – People's World

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Andrew Stewart posted these important pieces by Eric Gordon
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/breaking-ground-for-gay-rights-in-the-communist-press/
)

I just want to let people know that Eric is one of the SDS activists who
contributed a memoir to
You Say You Want A Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building A
Worker-Student Alliance.
https://www.amazon.com/You-Say-Want-Revolution-Worker-Student/dp/0578406543

Lou Proyect's review of the book is at
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/
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[Marxism] The Guardian: ‘Academic vandalism’ – unique archive of the Troubles under threat

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It is one of the most important sources of information about the Troubles
in Northern Ireland, a historical memory bank of data, stories and images
used by scholars around the world.

The Conflict Archive on the Internet (Cain) website, based in Derry, has
taken two decades to build up an unrivalled encyclopaedic digital record of
the conflict. It includes oral histories, election results, political
memorabilia, public records, bibliographies and the names and details of
more than 3,600 Troubles-related killings in Northern Ireland, Ireland, the
UK and continental Europe. The information is free to access and responsive
to requests and queries ranging from school students, professors and former
paramilitaries.

But perhaps not for much longer. Ulster University, which hosts the
archive’s three-strong team at its Magee campus, is threatening to pull the
plug. The university says the cost, estimated at £170,000 a year, is
unsustainable.

Academics are appalled. Some say that to cripple the archive would be an
act of intellectual vandalism when there is urgent need to understand
Northern Ireland’s conflicts, past and present.

full at
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/30/academic-vandalism-unique-archive-troubles-northern-ireland-under-threat
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[Marxism] Richard Seymour in NY Times: Nigel Farage Is the Most Dangerous Man in Britain

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He’s the most effective demagogue in a generation. Now he sets the agenda.
By Richard Seymour
Mr. Seymour writes about British politics.
May 28, 2019

LONDON — Nigel Farage is the British crisis in human form. His party, the
unambiguously named Brexit Party, which is hardly a party and didn’t exist
six months ago, won nearly a third of the British vote in the recent
European Parliament elections, putting it in first place and driving the
shattered Conservative Party into fifth. Long underestimated, Mr. Farage
has done more than any politician in a generation to yank British politics
to the hard, nationalist right. He is one of the most effective and
dangerous demagogues Britain has ever seen.

With his last political vehicle, the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, Mr.
Farage took an assortment of Tory retirees and a smattering of ex-fascists
and other right-wing cranks, and welded them into a devastating political
weapon: a significant national party. That weapon tore such chunks out of
the Conservatives’ share of the vote that the party leadership felt
compelled to call a referendum on Europe — which it then lost. Mr. Farage
declared victory and went into semiretirement as a pundit.

Now, almost three years after the Brexit vote, he’s back. His timing could
hardly be better. After a “lost decade” of declining living standards and
flat wage growth, trust in Parliament and the news media is at rock bottom.
The Conservatives are disintegrating; Prime Minister Theresa May is on her
way out of office, having failed to secure a parliamentary majority for her
Brexit deal. She failed because, rather than seeking cross-party consensus,
she tried to placate her own hard right and prevent voters from abandoning
the party — again. Unable to do so, she has simply hardened public opinion.

A poll in April found that given a choice between remaining in the European
Union, and leaving with no deal, 44 percent of Britons support “no deal.”
The vast majority of these voters previously supported the Conservatives.
But since they are the party of business, they can’t seriously contemplate
leaving without a deal. Nor can Parliament.

The resulting stalemate, combined with an election in which the main
parties barely campaign, presented Mr. Farage with an easy target. And
thanks to his success, there is enormous pressure on the Conservatives to
deliver Brexit in October, deal or no deal. Boris Johnson, likely to
replace Mrs. May as prime minister, is now pledging to do just that.

The Brexit Party’s campaign was a one-man show. While it has a
sophisticated digital strategy, the party has no members and no manifesto,
and none of its candidates were democratically selected. It offered only
one policy: a “No Deal” Brexit. Its rallies focus on star performances by
Mr. Farage, introduced with thundering motivational music. He is a gifted
communicator, verbally dexterous, with a sense of humor.

Like many English reactionaries — including Mr. Johnson — he speaks in a
nostalgic, “old world” register. He doesn’t talk about taxes or
privatization. He talks about unfairness and loss, about the sovereignty
supposedly ceded to Europe, immigration and elite cosmopolitans. And he
names a placebo solution within reach: Brexit. The great escape. It’s a
powerful antidepressant.

It is ironic that Mr. Farage appeals to people who are besieged by
precisely the kind of volatile financial capitalism that he champions. He
is, like President Trump, that paradoxical figure: the capitalist populist.
He made his money as a City trader during the boom years of the 1980s,
reveling in its adrenaline-fueled, heavy-drinking culture. He is the Gordon
Gekko of British politics. It’s striking, to those who care to look, just
how much his agenda is about class interest: He opposes extended maternity
leave, raising the minimum wage and reducing the retirement age — anything
that inconveniences his nouveau riche confederates. If he had his way, many
of his supporters would be working harder, longer, for less money, with
less protection. That, indeed, is his Brexit dream: Singapore on the Thames.

Even his racism is class-bound. Mr. Farage’s problem is not just with
immigrants, it seems, but with poor immigrants especially: those from
Eastern Europe, or Muslim countries, or those with H.I.V. He has said he
would be uncomfortable with Romanians as neighbors, but he married a woman
from Germany. He hates the European Union because its moderate social
legislation and free movement defy what he thinks is a Darwinian cultural
ecology through which some rise and others fall.

It is a mistake to overstate his “white working-class” base — UKIP included

[Marxism] Raymond Bonner in NY Times: In El Salvador, Left Joins Right in Asking for War-Crimes Amnesty

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The proposed law would protect perpetrators of crimes against humanity and
extrajudicial killings from both camps.
Mr. Bonner reported from El Salvador for The Times in the early 1980s.

May 28, 2019

During El Salvador’s brutal, bloody civil war, the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front, or F.M.L.N., a coalition of leftist guerrilla groups, and
Arena, a far-right political party that had its own death squads, were
deadly enemies, killers and killed.

From the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, which was organized
by Arena’s founder, to a peace agreement in 1992, thousands of peasants
were massacred. Union leaders and students had their thumbs tied behind
their backs with wire, then were shot in the head, their bodies left behind
shopping malls as a warning to others. All together some 75,000 civilians
were killed during the war.

The military acted with impunity, and had immunity.

Now the F.M.L.N., which has 23 seats in the 84-member Legislative Assembly,
is supporting legislation by Arena, which has 37 seats, that is tantamount
to a de facto amnesty for crimes committed during the war. Politics may
make strange bedfellows, but this?

A vote is expected on Wednesday as the parties rush to pass the legislation
before a new president, Nayib Bukele, is sworn in on Saturday. He has
expressed opposition to the measure. The current president, Sánchez Cerén,
was an F.M.L.N. commander during the war and has been linked to at least
one crime that could be prosecuted if there is no amnesty — the kidnapping
of a wealthy businessman.

The proposed amnesty would also protect the perpetrators of a crime that
lives in infamy as “the massacre at El Mozote.” In December 1981, a
Salvadoran Army battalion, whose officers had just returned from
counterinsurgency training in the United States, slaughtered nearly 1,000
children, women and men in El Mozote and surrounding villages. After
separating the village men, whom they took away and executed, the soldiers
ordered the women and children into the convent behind the Roman Catholic
church. They opened fire with their automatic weapons, then set fire to the
building, falling beams crushing the skulls of victims, dead or alive. Many
of the children were toddlers; the average age was 6.

After years of legal setbacks, survivors and relatives of family members
began to see the light of justice in 2016 when a judge reopened an
investigation into the El Mozote massacre. He has summoned 20 former senior
military officers, including the former minister of defense, Jose Guillermo
García, into his simple courtroom in San Francisco Gotera, a gritty
agricultural town in eastern El Salvador, and read the charges, among them
rape, kidnapping and murder as well as war crimes and crimes against
humanity.

Peasants from local villages have come before the judge to relive the
horror. Amadeo Sánchez told the judge that he had escaped into the nearby
hills with his father. From his hiding place in the sisal bushes, he saw
two young girls pulled out of their mud-and-wattle hut by soldiers and
taken to the river. He heard them screaming “Mamá, they’re raping me.” He
then heard gunshots, and silence.

When he returned to his village, Mr. Sánchez found the bodies of his mother
and two siblings. He also saw a young mother lying in her bed, shot in the
head. Next to her lay her 1-day-old daughter. Her throat had been cut.

On the wall, he told me, as he had the judge, the soldiers had scrawled in
blood, “Un niño muerto, un guerrillero menos” — “One dead child is one less
guerrilla.”

“This is mocking the victims,” Mr. Sánchez said last week of the amnesty
proposal, which he had come to protest in front of the Assembly building.

If the measure is passed, the El Mozote trial will be terminated, said
David Morales, who has been representing victims and survivors for nearly
20 years, since his days as a recent law school graduate working for the
archbishop’s legal aid office. “It will be impossible to continue,” he said.

For good measure, and ensuring the end of the trial, the legislation says
all trials must be held in the capital, San Salvador.

What’s more, under the new legislation only direct perpetrators of such
crimes as murder, rape, kidnapping and torture could be prosecuted, not the
captain, colonel or general who ordered it. In the event there was a trial
of any lower-level soldier, he would not be at risk of a jail sentence
under the proposal, not even for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The F.M.L.N. defends its support for the measure. “It’s not true that it’s
an amnesty law,” Nidia Díaz, an F.M.L.N. leader, said in a statement last
week. She 

Re: [Marxism] Central Park Five

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Ken Hiebert wrote: Since it is AP I wonder how widely it will be read.

A quick and crude google search shows that the AP story has been picked up
by quite a few news outlets.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%98When+They+See+Us%E2%80%99+actors+revisit+the+Central+Park+Five+case=%E2%80%98When+They+See+Us%E2%80%99+actors+revisit+the+Central+Park+Five+case=chrome..69i57.1171j0j4=chrome=UTF-8
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[Marxism] NY Times book reviewer skewers new Jared Diamond tome

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fuckin' brilliant

NONFICTION
What to Do When You’re a Country in Crisis

by Anand Giridharadas
May 17, 2019

UPHEAVAL
Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
By Jared Diamond

If you’ve ever been at a wedding or conference or on board a United
connection from O’Hare, and been cornered by a man with Theories About It
All, and you came away thinking, “That was a great experience,” have I got
the book for you.

Jared Diamond’s “Upheaval” belongs to the genre of 30,000-foot books, which
sell an explanation of everything. I travel often and see them a lot: at
airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom
blurbed “Upheaval”) and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and
in the air, where I’ve noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of
readers who read in the quiet of 30,000 feet have a preference for writers
who write from the viewpoint of 30,000 feet.

So I dug into Diamond’s latest, intrigued by his thesis that the way
individual humans cope with crisis might teach something to countries.
Then, before long, the first mistake caught my eye; soon, the 10th. Then
graver ones. Errors, along with generalizations, blind spots and
oversights, that called into question the choice to publish. I began to
wonder why we give some people, and only some, the platform, and burden, to
theorize about everything.

The theory proposed by Diamond — a professor of geography at the University
of California at Los Angeles and the author of several books, including the
Pulitzer Prize-winning “Guns, Germs and Steel” — is interesting. Human
beings go through personal crises all the time. We know a lot about how
people change in order to cope — or fail to. What if we applied those
lessons to countries in quagmires?

Drawing on the work of therapists, Diamond reports that the key for
individuals coping with a crisis is “selective change.” People who
successfully overcome a problem tend to identify and isolate it, figuring
out “which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t
need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.”
Diamond asks, Could the same be true for countries? He believes so, and he
seeks to test his theory by adapting a dozen factors known to affect the
resolution of personal crises to national crises. Some factors translate
easily — just as people must first accept being in crisis, nations must
first come to a consensus about their woes. Other analogies feel more
strained — help from your close friends translates into material and
financial aid from allies. Armed with this framework, Diamond sets out to
see how well it fits countries’ actual histories.

Diamond’s method is the case study. Looking at Finland, Japan, Chile,
Indonesia, Germany, Australia and the United States at pivotal moments in
their histories, he evaluates their courses of action with reference to his
12 bullet points. Meiji-era Japan, needing to open up to the world while
preserving its cultural core, found a way “to adopt many Western features,
but to modify them to suit Japanese circumstances.” After World War II,
Germany worked its way to taking full responsibility for its actions and
thereby successfully transformed itself. America, in part because it shrugs
off the lessons of other places, struggles to resolve its issues.

At the end of each chapter, each mini-history, Diamond pauses to ask some
variant of: “How does Indonesia’s crisis fit into our framework?” And this
is a tell. The Framework is driving the inquiry here, and everything stands
at its service. The people we encounter are seldom richly portrayed,
because only The Framework matters. The stories we learn about each country
are often partial and slanted, because only The Framework matters.
Countries where racism and tolerance, sexism and equality have long been in
tension are portrayed as being entirely one thing before magically becoming
the opposite thing, because The Framework can only process monoliths.

With a focus on The Framework, facts recede in importance. The book is
riddled with errors. Diamond gets wrong the year of the Brexit vote. He
claims that, under President Ronald Reagan, “government shutdowns were
nonexistent.” But they occurred a number of times. He describes
Australian-rules football as a sport “invented in Australia and played
nowhere else.” But it is played elsewhere — in Nauru, where it is the
national sport, as well as in China, Canada, France, Japan, Ireland and the
United States, according to the Australian Football League.

Diamond says a 1976 terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., targeting a
former Chilean official, was “the only known case of a 

[Marxism] Richard Greeman in CounterPunch -- The Yellow Vests of France: Six Months of Struggle

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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note: the article ends with this postscript:
P.S. Latest news: the CGT just held its convention and voted unanimously
for “convergence” with the Yellow Vests, something our group in Montpellier
has been working towards for months. Tomorrow, for the first time, we are
meeting with the other Yellow Vest groups in our region. “On ne lâche
rien!” (Nothing escapes us, we don’t give in).

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/20/the-yellow-vests-of-france-six-months-of-struggle/
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[Marxism] Haaretz: Facebook Busts Israeli Campaign to Disrupt Elections in African, Asian and Latin American Nations

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Dozens of accounts, pages and groups operated by private firm peddling fake
news were deleted, tech giant says

The Associated Press
May 16, 2019

Facebook said Thursday it banned an Israeli company that ran an influence
campaign aimed at disrupting elections in various countries and has
canceled dozens of accounts engaged in spreading disinformation.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters
that the tech giant had purged 65 Israeli accounts, 161 pages, dozens of
groups and four Instagram accounts. Many were linked to the Archimedes
Group, a Tel Aviv-based political consulting and lobbying firm that boasts
of its social media skills and ability to "change reality."

Gleicher said Facebook could not speculate about Archimedes' motives, which
"may be commercial or political."
But he said Facebook discovered "coordinated inauthentic behavior," with
accounts posing as certain political candidates, smearing opponents and
presenting as local news organizations peddling supposedly leaked
information.

The activity appeared focused on Sub-Saharan African countries but was also
scattered in parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America. The pages have
racked up 2.8 million followers and hundreds of thousands of views.

Gleicher said Archimedes had spent some $800,000 on fake ads and that its
deceptive activity dated back to 2012. He said Facebook has banned
Archimedes.

Facebook has come under pressure to more aggressively and transparently
tackle misinformation aimed at sowing division and confusion around
elections, since the revelation that Russia used Facebook to sway the 2016
U.S. presidential election.

On its website, Archimedes presents itself as a consulting firm involved in
campaigns for presidential elections.

Little information is available beyond its slogan, which is "winning
campaigns worldwide," and a vague blurb about the group's "mass social
media management" software, which it said enabled the operation of an
"unlimited" number of online accounts.

The site, featuring a montage of stock photos from Africa, Latin America
and the Caribbean, boasts of its "own unique field within the social media
realm" and its efforts to "take every advantage available in order to
change reality according to our client's wishes."

A message seeking comment from the company was not immediately returned.

Archimedes' chief executive is Elinadav Heymann, according to Swiss
negotiations consultancy Negotiations.CH, where he is listed as one of the
group's consultants.

A biography posted to the company's website describes him as the former
director of the Brussels-based European Friends of Israel lobbying group, a
former political adviser in Israel's parliament and an ex-intelligence
agent for the Israeli Air Force.

Messages left with Heymann through Negotions.CH were not immediately
returned.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/facebook-busts-israel-based-campaign-to-disrupt-elections-in-african-asian-nations-1.7249342?fbclid=IwAR3kFNhkPq-PYp6h2GD9e6N9cyVyntPXYKZMQ83WnI5Z5uN3Yfl3MfGWp0U
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[Marxism] New York Times: Colombia’s Peace Deal Promised a New Era. This Is What It Looks Like.

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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By Nicholas Casey
May 17, 2019

When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do
they? This is the first in a series in which The Times is going back to the
scene of major news events to see if those promises were kept.

[short answer -- FARC lived up to its commitments ("except for a small
dissident group"); the government didn't. A field day for the
paramilitaries; the rural population got fucked.]

After Colombia’s government signed a peace deal with the country’s main
rebel group, ending decades of war and upheaval, both sides said it
heralded a new era. But two and a half years after the militants agreed to
lay down their arms, many of the promises made are not being honored, and
the prospect of a true, lasting peace now seems far from certain.

This is what we found:

As many as 3,000 militants have resumed fighting, threatening the very
foundation of the accord.

Many of the millions of Colombians who once lived in rebel-held territory
still await the promised arrival of roads, schools and electricity. The
government’s pledge to help rural areas was a big reason the rebels stood
down.

Since the peace deal was signed, at least 500 activists and community
leaders have been killed, and more than 210,000 people displaced from their
homes amid the continuing violence. That undercuts a core selling point of
the deal: that it would bring safety and stability.

Colombia’s new president, Iván Duque, a conservative who took office in
August, has expressed skepticism of the accords and wants to change a
commitment that was fundamental to the rebels agreeing to lay down their
weapons.

The Path to Peace

Colombia’s five-decade civil war took at least 220,000 lives and devastated
large swaths of the countryside. In rebel-held areas, government services
disappeared and the infrastructure crumbled. Many turned to the drug
economy to survive.

All sides were accused of atrocities — kidnappings, rapes and summary
executions — that bred deep-seated animosities across the country and even
within families. In a war so deeply personal, finding a way out posed an
enormous challenge.

So when the government and the largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, reached a peace agreement in
September 2016 after years of negotiation, much of the world applauded.
Juan Manuel Santos, then Colombia’s president, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But peace deals of this scope are never easy to implement, and Colombians
knew a long, daunting path was ahead of them.

The deal the two sides reached was ambitious and complex — with 578
separate stipulations — but it can be boiled down to a few core promises.

A primary goal of the FARC insurgency was improving the lives of rural
Colombians. The deal calls for “universal” education in rural areas for
preschool through secondary school; guaranteed access to drinking water;
and heavy subsidies for development programs in former rebel territories.

The rebels, in turn, would cease all hostilities, turn in their weapons to
the United Nations and return to civilian life. The FARC would be allowed
to compete in elections and was guaranteed 10 seats in Congress.

WHAT WE FOUND
Raised Hopes, and Dashed Ones

Much of the war was fought in the countryside.

The peace agreement raised hopes that the rural deprivation that fueled the
conflict might finally ease. But two years after the accord was signed, a
visit to the town of Juan José made clear that little has changed.

The community of 8,000 has not received even the most basic services it was
promised. With no running water, residents are still forced to rely on
untreated wells. No schools have been built in the surrounding villages,
despite government pledges, and many children have never seen the inside of
a classroom.

While the police are now in Juan José, neither they nor the military have
made it to the nearby villages, and new armed groups have moved in to fill
the vacuum left by the FARC.

Emilio Archila, an adviser to the government, said many of the biggest
development promises in the agreement — such as delivering water and
electricity — would take more than a decade to accomplish, given the damage
the countryside suffered from the conflict. “Anyone who thinks we could
solve these issues in two years doesn’t understand the magnitude of the
problem,” he said.

But Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a
human rights group, said the government had failed to act. “The government
had a window of opportunity to establish the state in lands the rebels gave
up, but it didn’t take that chance,” he said. “Now there are many groups

[Marxism] NY Times: Cuba Rations Staple Foods and Soap in Face of Economic Crisis

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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By The Associated Press
May 11, 2019

HAVANA — The Cuban government has begun widespread rationing of chicken,
eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products in the face of a grave
economic crisis.

Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez told the state-run Cuban News Agency
on Friday that the rationing would begin in order to deal with shortages of
staple foods. She blamed the hardening of the American trade embargo by the
Trump administration.

Economists have given equal or greater blame to a plunge in aid from
Venezuela, where the collapse of the state-run oil company has led to a
nearly two-thirds cut in shipments of subsidized fuel that Cuba used for
power and to earn hard currency on the open market.

“We’re calling for calm,” Ms. Díaz said, adding that Cubans should feel
reassured that at least cooking oil would be in ample supply. “It’s not a
product that will be absent from the market in any way,” she added.

Cuba imports roughly two-thirds of its food at an annual cost of more than
$2 billion, and brief shortages of individual products have been common for
years. In recent months, a growing number of products have started to
disappear for days or weeks at a time, and long lines have sprung up within
minutes of the appearance of scarce products like chicken or flour.

Many shoppers find themselves still standing in line when the products run
out, a problem the government has been blaming on “hoarders.”

“The country’s going through a tough moment,” said Lazara García, a
56-year-old tobacco factory worker, in response to the rationing. “This is
the right response. Without this, there’ll be hoarders. I just got out of
work and I was able to buy hot dogs.”

At the Havana shopping center where Ms. García bought the hot dogs,
cashiers received orders on Friday to limit powdered milk to four packets
per person, sausages to four packs per person and peas to five packets per
person.

Manuel Ordoñez, 43, who identified himself as a small-business owner, said
the measures would do nothing to resolve Cuban’s fundamental problems.

“What the country needs to do is produce,” he said. “Sufficient merchandise
is what will lead to shorter lines.”

Limited rationing has already begun in many parts of the country, with
stores restricting the number of items like bottles of cooking oil that a
shopper can purchase. The policy announced by Ms. Díaz appears to go
further and apply the same standards across the country of 11 million
people.

The Cuban economy crashed with the fall of the Soviet Union, plunging the
island into a more than decade-long period of misery and hunger that ended
with the arrival of subsidized Venezuelan oil in the early 2000s.

The latest shortages and rationing appear to mark the end of a phase of
relative prosperity, but conditions are nowhere close to the deprivation of
what is known as Cuba’s “special period.” Cuba’s leaders say that while
tough times lie ahead, there will be no return to the worst days of the
post-Soviet depression because the island has diversified its economy and
built trade ties with countries around the world.

Food stores in Cuba are government-run, with products highly subsidized and
others wildly overpriced by global standards. Every Cuban receives a ration
book that allows him or her to buy small quantities of basic goods like
rice, beans, eggs and sugar each month for payment equivalent to a few
United States cents.

Cubans with enough money can buy more basic goods at “liberated” prices
that are still generally below the world average. At the highest of Cuba’s
three tiers, brand-name goods, including high-quality rice and fancy jams,
can be purchased often for two to three times the price in their country of
origin.

Ms. Díaz said chicken would now be sold in limited quantities in every type
of store — with cheaper chicken limited to 11 pounds per purchase and the
more expensive variety capped at two packages per purchase. Low-priced
soap, rice, bean, peas and eggs would now be sold only in limited
quantities per person and controlled through the national system of ration
books, she said.

Sales of those products at higher prices do not appear to be affected for
the moment. The measures can be expected to have a serious impact on
private business owners who often buy cheaper goods at state stores in the
absence of access to a wholesale market. Cuba maintains a total monopoly on
wholesale commerce, imports and exports, with virtually no access for the
country’s small but growing private sector.

Ms. Díaz provided a grim series of statistics on food production by the
state-run sector, which has found itself struggling to find the cash it
needs to 

[Marxism] “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with” -- When Ronald Reagan sent troops into Berkeley

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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East Bay Yesterday
May 8, 2019

50 years ago, a group of students, activists and community members
transformed a muddy, junk-filled parking lot into a park. When the
University of California, under heavy pressure from Gov. Ronald Reagan,
tore up the grass and surrounded the land with a heavily-guarded fence,
this response triggered a surreal and tragic set of events. The maelstrom
of violence that engulfed Berkeley in May 1969 would be almost impossible
to believe if the cameras hadn’t been rolling.

Dozens were shot, hundreds were arrested, and thousands were teargassed –
protesters and innocent bystanders alike. During the military occupation of
Berkeley by National Guardsmen, a helicopter launched a chemical attack on
the University campus, children were surrounded by bayonet-wielding
soldiers, and journalists were detained under the supervision of brutally
sadistic guards. Following the upheaval, Gov. Reagan cracked, “If it takes
a bloodbath, let’s get it over with, no more appeasement.”

more text, photos, and audio at
https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/if-it-takes-a-bloodbath-lets-get-it-over-with/
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[Marxism] NY Times: Art Kunkin, Counterculture Newspaper Publisher, Dies at 91

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(founder of L.A. Free Press)

“What made the difference between the alternative press in the 1960s and
the mass media,” he said, “was that the mass media looked on all events as
isolated — errors that the system could correct. The sense of the 1960s
alternative press was that these issues were all connected, that they
indicated a certain sickness of the society. And this sickness has not
decreased.”

Arthur Glick Kunkin was born on March 28, 1928, in the Bronx to Irving and
Bea Kunkin. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1945.

He was an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party and acquired some
journalism experience working on The Militant, the party’s newspaper, as
well as other leftist publications.

full at
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/obituaries/art-kunkin-dead.html?action=click=Well=Homepage=Obituaries
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[Marxism] Ex-CIA honcho named Kent State University's chair of the 50th May 4 Commemoration Advisory Committee

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1. Stephanie Smith, an associate professor in Kent State's School of
Journalism and Mass Communication, was recently chosen as the chair of the
50th May 4 Commemoration Advisory Committee.

In this role, Smith will be a leader in creating, planning and executing
all commemoration events, as well as overseeing plans and work with the May
4th Task Force, May 4 families and survivors and Kent State students, staff
and faculty.
http://www.kentwired.com/latest_updates/article_2e393a60-6dc3-11e9-aece-b340769a2792.html

2. from Stephanie Smith's bio
Smith retired in 2011 from the United State Federal Government, after 27
years of service, 25 of them with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
She also had significant executive experience in defense (U.S. Navy) and
public diplomacy (Department of State).

As a Senior Intelligence Service executive in the CIA, Smith led thousands
of employees; designed and managed programs worth several billion dollars;
interacted regularly with Congress; and traveled extensively, including
throughout two war zones (Afghanistan and Iraq). She was selected as a
member of CIA's Senior Intelligence Service in 2000 and achieved its
highest rank. Smith led the largest of CIA's four directorates, the
Directorate of Support, and reported directly to the Director of CIA for
hiring, security, global logistics, facility support, finance, acquisitions
and medical services worldwide. In this role, Smith was also accountable to
Congress, the media, and the American public.

https://www.kent.edu/jmc/profile/stephanie-d-smith
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[Marxism] Katha Pollitt: A Radical Reunion: Harvard’s Student Strikers, 50 Years Later

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We are older, grayer and for the most part, more rotund—but our commitments
to left politics haven't changed.

https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-strike-sds-vietnam/

Pollitt's piece in The Nation differs from many accounts of Students for a
Democratic Society in that it discusses both the positive and negative
aspects of the role of the Progressive Labor Party in SDS. (Most accounts
either ignore PL or denounce it.)

The recent collective memoir, "You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL and
Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance" includes accounts by
participants in the Harvard strike.
https://www.amazon.com/You-Say-Want-Revolution-Worker-Student/dp/0578406543

Lou Proyect's review of that book is at
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/rebuilding-a-revolutionary-left-in-the-usa/
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[Marxism] NYC event -- Taking the Lead: Labor and Global Warming – Our History, Activism, and Challenges

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Saturday, May 11
10AM - 1PM
The Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Bobst Library -- 10th Floor
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY

Sponsors: The New York Labor History Association & the Tamiment Library and
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University

Program:

Our History
Donn Mitchell, on the UAW and the First Earth Day, author of Tread the
City’s Streets Again: Frances Perkins Shares Her Theology
Irene Shen, International Program for Labor, Climate and Environment, CUNY,
on the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy
Jon Forster, DC 37 Climate Justice Committee, on the Labor Network for
Sustainability

Our Activism
Zakia Elliott, Program Coordinator, Philadelphia Climate Works
Christopher Erikson, Business Manager, Local 3, International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers
Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, President, New York State Nurses Association

Our Future / Our Challenges
Eileen Moran, Environmental Justice Committee, Professional Staff Congress
Maritza Silva-Farrell, Executive Director, Alliance for a Greater New York
(ALIGN)
Bruce Hamilton, Vice President, Amalgamated Transit Union

Registration (required) at:
http://events.nyu.edu/#!view/event/date/20190511/event_id/234459
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[Marxism] May Day Greetings to all

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[from Billy Bragg's version of The Internationale]

And so begins the final drama,
In the streets and in the fields.
We stand unbowed before their armour,
We defy their guns and shields!
When we fight, provoked by their aggression,
Let us be inspired by life and love.
For though they offer us concessions,
Change will not come from above!

So come brothers and sisters,
For the struggle carries on.
The Internationale
Unites the world in song.
So comrades, come rally,
For this is the time and place!
The international ideal
Unites the human race.
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[Marxism] Huffington Post: New York Times Apologizes For Anti-Semitic Cartoon In International Edition

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-times-antisemitic-cartoon_n_5cc47e9be4b04eb7ff968179
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[Marxism] Vice Sports: Mexican Boxer Destroys American Fighter Wearing Trump Wall Shorts

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https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/mbxkjv/mexican-boxer-destroys-american-fighter-wearing-trump-wall-shorts
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[Marxism] CORRECTED LINKS: James Robertson obituaries

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The Spartacist League has not yet issued an obit for its founder. Here are
two recent Robertson obituaries.

1. from the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, "Obituary:
James Robertson, Spartacist League founder (1928-2019)"
https://socialistfight.com/2019/04/17/obituary-james-robertson-spartacist-league-founder-1928-2019/

2. from revolutionary programme, a piece by a supporter of the Bolshevik
Tendency (a splinter from the Spartacist splinter International Bolshevik
Tendency): "james m. robertson: a balance sheet"
https://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/james-m-robertson-a-balance-sheet/
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[Marxism] James Robertson obituaries

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The Spartacist League has not yet issued an obit for its founder. Here are
two recent Robertson obituaries.

1. from the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, "Obituary:
James Robertson, Spartacist League founder (1928-2019)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Sons#cite_note-MEY-3

2. from revolutionary programme, a piece by a supporter of the Bolshevik
Tendency (a splinter from the Spartacist splinter International Bolshevik
Tendency): "james m. robertson: a balance sheet"
https://revolutionaryprogramme.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/james-m-robertson-a-balance-sheet/
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[Marxism] NY TImes: Maurice Isserman on Gene Debs

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(w/ photos at
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/americas-original-socialist.html?action=click=Opinion=Homepage
)

America’s Original Socialist
A century ago, Eugene V. Debs went to prison for his beliefs.

One hundred years ago this month, the American Socialist leader Eugene V.
Debs, reported to a penitentiary in Moundsville, W.V., to begin a 10-year
prison term. Debs had been convicted the previous fall of violating the
Espionage Act, which had been enacted shortly after the United States
entered World War I with the ostensible aim of punishing citizens who
provided aid to the enemy. By the time Debs went to prison, scores of his
fellow Socialists had already been imprisoned under the act’s provisions.

Approaching his 64th birthday in ill health, depressed and dreading
separation from family and friends, Debs did not crave martyrdom. But he
knew he had a role to play, one he had freely chosen, and thus remained
outwardly defiant. “Tell my comrades,” Debs declared on beginning his
sentence in April 1919, “that I entered prison doors a flaming
revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed and my soul unconquered.”

Debs’s crime, in fact, had nothing to do with “espionage,” or any other
devious act of subterfuge and disloyalty. His was a crime committed proudly
in the open: delivering a speech before a cheering crowd of a thousand
supporters in a public park in Canton, Ohio, some 10 months earlier. Debs
deeply opposed the war, and said so, and was punished for it. When he
entered prison, Helen Keller, herself a veteran Socialist, called him an
“apostle of brotherhood and freedom.”

Debs dedicated his career to showing that another, more equitable America
was possible; a century later, as the country once again wrestles with the
same question, it’s worth remembering what Debs tried to tell us.

Born in Terre Haute, Ind., in 1855 and raised by freethinking French
immigrant parents, Debs belonged to no church, and espoused no formal
religious convictions. But he was intimately familiar with Scripture, and
comfortable speaking in the idiom of Midwestern American Protestantism.
“The man of Galilee,” he told the crowd in Canton, as frowning federal
agents on the scene scribbled down his words, “the carpenter, the working
man who became the revolutionary agitator of his day, soon found himself to
be an undesirable citizen in the eyes of the ruling knaves and they had him
crucified.”

Debs devoted just one paragraph of his lengthy Canton address to expressing
the Socialist Party’s traditional opposition to war: “The master class has
always declared the wars,” he noted, while “the subject class has always
fought the battles.” But that was enough under the Espionage Act to bring
his swift indictment and conviction. (The Espionage Act remains on the
books a century later.)

Few of Debs’s acquaintances from his early days in Terre Haute could have
predicted that he would someday face the grim prospect of spending his last
years as a political prisoner. Before he turned 15, eager to contribute to
his family’s uncertain finances, Debs dropped out of school and went to
work in the local railroad yards. But he did not remain a manual laborer
long. By the time he was 25, he was editor of the national magazine of the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, then an important union of skilled
railroad workers. By 30 he had won election as a Democrat to the Indiana
Legislature. Given his intelligence and eloquence, his future seemed
unbounded.

Debs’s views in those early Indiana days were those of a fairly
conservative craft unionist, anchored in a vision of promoting social
harmony between labor and capital. But by the early 1890s he had come to
feel that craft unionism, which focused exclusively on the organization of
skilled workers like the locomotive firemen (almost entirely white,
native-born and male) was a dead end for the labor movement.

Instead he turned to industrial unionism, the strategy of organizing all
workers in a given industry, regardless of skill, into a single
organization. In 1893 he helped form and became president of the American
Railway Union, which enjoyed a brief but phenomenal success, climaxing in
the great Pullman strike of 1894. The strike was broken by federal troops,
and Debs was subsequently thrown in prison for interfering with the mails.
The union’s demise, and the six months he spent in jail, sent Debs on a
political trajectory that in a few years’ time saw him emerge as the
presidential standard-bearer for a small but growing Socialist movement.

“Even physically Debs seemed to change,” his biographer Nick Salvatore
wrote. He took on national stature after the turn 

[Marxism] NY Times: Judith Clark, Getaway Driver in Deadly Brink’s Heist in 1981, Is Granted Parole

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Ms. Clark, 69, had evolved during her long incarceration from a left-wing
extremist to a model prisoner known for good works.

April 17, 2019

Judith Clark, who as a young woman took part in a deadly attempted robbery
of a Brink’s armored car that represented one of the last gasps of the
violent left-wing extremism of the 1960s and 1970s, was paroled on
Wednesday after being imprisoned in New York for 37 years, her lawyers said.

Ms. Clark, 69, was the getaway driver in the bungled 1981 heist in a suburb
of New York City in which two police officers and a guard were killed.

During her trial, Ms. Clark clung to her revolutionary beliefs and
maintained the violence was justified. But she underwent a transformation
over her decades in prison, apologizing for the pain she had caused, doing
good works and becoming a model of rehabilitation.

“I had to grapple with what happened to my humanity,” Ms. Clark said in a
2017 interview.

Many liberal elected officials viewed Ms. Clark as a symbol of the need for
clemency and forgiveness, maintaining that she had to be released from
prison if the state correctional system was to live up to its ideals, even
in politically charged cases involving the deaths of police officers.

“We are grateful that the parole board affirmed what everyone who has
interacted with Judy already knows — that she is a rehabilitated,
remorseful woman who poses no threat to society,” Michael Cardozo, one of
Ms. Clark’s lawyers, said in a statement.

But for law enforcement groups and many Republican elected officials, she
was the face of terrorism and deserved no mercy.

Ed Day, the county executive of Rockland County, where the killings took
place, called the parole board’s ruling a slap in the face to the families
of the victims.

“This perversion of justice is a sad continuation of the deadly assault on
police officers happening across our nation,” Mr. Day, who was formerly a
New York police officer, said in a statement.

The decision to release Ms. Clark came after a lobbying campaign involving
11 state senators, the former Manhattan district attorney, a former chief
judge, four former parole board commissioners and a former superintendent
of the prison where she was housed.

Her supporters, including 70 elected officials, sent a letter to the parole
board arguing that the state’s correctional system should not exist solely
for retribution, but also for rehabilitation, and that Ms. Clark had served
a long sentence, accepted responsibility for her crime and shown genuine
remorse.

Ms. Clark, then 31, drove a getaway car during the attempted robbery in
Rockland County in 1981. The heist was part of a scheme by the Black
Liberation Army and the May 19th Communist Organization — an radical
offshoot of the left-wing Weather Underground —  to steal $1.6 million for
financing a guerrilla uprising.

Two Nyack police officers, Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown,
and a Brink’s security guard, Peter Paige, were shot and killed during the
robbery, and though Ms. Clark was not at the scene of the shooting, she was
charged with second-degree murder and robbery.

Ms. Clark represented herself at her trial. Still fueled by the beliefs
that made her a willing participant in the robbery, she was deeply
uncooperative and defiant in court.

Ms. Clark expressed no remorse for her actions, telling the jury that
revolutionary violence was a “liberating force.” She described herself as
an “anti-imperialist freedom fighter” during jury selection and decried the
court proceedings as “fascist” and “racist.”
She was found guilty of both charges, and the sentencing judge said she was
beyond rehabilitation.

But her views evolved over the years while imprisoned at Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County. Ms. Clark has said
that in the process of building a relationship with her daughter, Harriet,
who was an infant when Ms. Clark was incarcerated, she jettisoned her
political views and began to reflect on the pain her actions had caused.

After a prolonged public silence, she eventually issued several public
apologies for her role in the robbery. In 1994, she wrote that she felt
“enormous regret, sorrow and remorse” about her actions. Eight years later,
she apologized publicly to the victims of the Brink’s robbery and their
families.

“For the rest of my life, I will be faced with the knowledge that my
inability to tolerate ambiguity and face responsibility led to my
participation in the death and destruction of Oct. 20, 1981,” she wrote in
a letter that was published in the Journal News in Westchester County.

Faced with the prospect of spending her life in prison,