from:"Ralph Johansen via Marxism"

Re: [Marxism] Oregon Public Broadcasting: Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets

2020-07-17 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Alan Ginsberg wrote

Very scary

https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-law-enforcement-unmarked-vehicles-portland-protesters/



I just sent this to a long-time friend in Manhattan, who had told me 
that his Black grandson, who has been at U of Oregon in Eugene and is 
now at home in Portland, was hit by a rubber bullet at a protest this 
week. That's all that my friend knows. He has told me that his two 
grandchildren of a "mixed marriage" have said they are now afraid to 
drive across country to visit him. I had just sent him the article by 
Hedges.


This may seem a little off topic, maybe not. I also just finished, this 
morning, Hazan's book A Peoples History of the French Revolution. There 
too there was confusion, hysteria around protection of property and 
seigniorial privilege against popular protest amidst starvation and 
hoarding and speculation, "public safety" commissions, guillotining 
unrestrained, extremism run rampant, at any cost. And worldwide 
reaction. Coincidentally, federal officers were first reported seen on 
the Portland streets on July 14.


Think I'm paranoid? So be it. Beats heedless. Unless we see effective, 
massive protest around this too, going over to permanent revolution. The 
fire this time.




Case in point. This is really frightening.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/federal-law-enforcement-unmarked-vehicles-portland-protesters/

I have to say that there's every reason to be afraid for your grandson 
if he's involved in this. Homeland Security, or its equivalents in the 
government, has been operating kind of in the shadows for at least the 
past 20 years and must have a sizeable dossier. It's chilling but it's 
what we can expect, and get out the way. Trump may even be planning a 
coup or its equivalent (even possibly with Democrats' collusion) if, 
despite current confusion and division, he and his cohorts think they 
can get enough middle class Americans to conclude in this fluid period 
that law and order are essential to prevent chaos.


The men in this video 
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/17/after-trump-deploys-secret-police-portland-imagine-what-happens-if-he-gets-four-more?cd-origin=rss_term=AO_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter_content=email_source=Daily%20Newsletter_medium=Email 
are wearing combat garb, drab-type masks concealing identity, the only 
identifying information is "police" on chests, no identifying names or 
badge numbers visible or readable, nothing showing that they are even 
federal marshals, could be private goons employed by Eric Prince (Trump 
would like that), in hired, unmarked private vans. We don't know. A shot 
across the bow?


I no longer think that this is hyperbole, although part of me would 
surely like to believe so. I think it's part and parcel of the 
developing breakdown of capitalist legitimacy worldwide.


I remember how cointelpro has operated to provoke incidents and 
demoralize protesters, from the Black Panthers, blackmailing Martin 
Luther King, forged documents, their liaison with local police 
department surveillance, you name it, I'm sure it's ongoing, and there's 
no limit to what they can do. Today we learn that Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 
liver cancer has recurred, prospect of a 6-3 rightwing Court; and we no 
longer have a Bill of Rights. The justification in Portland, of course, 
is protection of federal property and the inability of local authorities 
to contend with it. Federal property is everywhere; so is cointelpro.


Why should Americans think that we are somehow insulated from the most 
draconian measures to ensure capitalist "domestic tranquility," just 
because historically we have had a vibrant consensus on the part of a 
relatively prosperous middle class around "democratic values?" Why 
should we think that rabid US transnational corporate reaction only 
applies beyond our borders? Think "special forces," think Guantanamo, 
satellite surveillance, drones and destruction and the erosion of 
so-called national sovereignty among nation-states, when they can 
assassinate or permanently detain without charge or even acknowledgment 
anyone they please at will, anywhere.


The Corona virus pandemic, its follow-ons and unknown fortuitous 
happenings may give further impetus to the upending of our economy, as 
we can well imagine, and accelerate both protest and repression.

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[Marxism] Chris Hedges: America faces a historic choice — "ugly corporate tyranny" or revolution | Salon.com July 16, 2020

2020-07-16 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Chris Hedges: America faces a historic choice — "ugly corporate tyranny" 
or revolution | Salon.com

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/16/chris-hedges-america-faces-a-historic-choice--ugly-corporate-tyranny-or-revolution/

If I were writing it, I wouldn't change much in this compelling analysis 
by Chris Hedges, except that I would place greater emphasis on class as 
a determinant, and even more emphasis on ruling class power as a barrier 
well-designed to inhibit forward movement.


To recapitulate what I and many others on these lists see:

We are in a country that still very much dominates the globe, ever since 
WW2, with the primacy of the dollar as the world medium at which prices 
are set, the world's most powerful market, reputation among the poor and 
the darker-skinned around the globe as most desirable place to be - 
simultaneously driven by need, deprivation, hate and fear; the most 
powerful military, economic, political and cultural regime in history, a 
buffering middle class that benefits from that power with the most 
secure and relatively comfortable living conditions (matched and 
buttressed in more "developed" allied countries) in the history of the 
species, which protects the powerful from the full force of revolt among 
those most adversely affected.


The power, ever increasing, of the primary driver of capital 
accumulation, the competitive, piratical, no-holds-barred compulsion to 
extract profit at least cost from new investment increments of surplus 
to maximize market share, and the need to shape and condition the world 
socioeconomic system to comport with that imperative.


As is now becoming generally recognized on the left, It seems that 
whatever change for the better there will be will only come in this 
world when it is an active prospect here in the United States, the 
"belly," since without America on board, the dominant factor in 
production, exchange and distribution, change faces overwhelming odds.


Also we have, so far, no history on this continent of invasion, or 
generally acknowledged threat of physical destruction from other parts 
of the world. No chastening background. Nor have we yet any meaningful, 
generalized history of overt class consciousness in this regime of 
"equal opportunity," as much as that may appear to be coming undone or 
at least questioned.


It's this privileged position and rulers' power that gives me qualms 
about Hedge's assertion that "hope for change lies in the streets" of 
the United States. Expected feints yes, given the extent of continuing 
protest, toward change in the reactions of the powerful, like the 
current toleration of "Black Lives Matter" painting of dominant streets, 
the removal or renaming of offensive racist icons, corporate assent in 
many quarters to police reform, and the political donning of 
kente-cloth; but only to divert protest long enough to better facilitate 
means of repression.


Hedges does acknowledge the overwhelming police and ultimately 
military-carceral power to repress that movement, but that will gain 
force only once the domestic media are silenced by common boardroom 
assent, just as they have been since Vietnam in showcasing American 
savaging of others on the planet.


I'd say change of whatever extent will soon have to go underground and 
largely off the streets, over a long, painful period, not depend on 
exchange through the surveillance-capable and confined electronic media 
controlled by capital in that process, and be closely organized around a 
developing, viable vision of change, in order to overcome or mitigate 
the increasingly unequal, intractable socioeconomic and irreversible 
environmental catastrophe we see happening before our eyes.




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[Marxism] Popular protagonism in Venezuela’s transition to socialism: A conversation with Michael Lebowitz

2020-07-14 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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http://links.org.au/popular-protagonism-venezuela-transition-socialism-michael-lebowitz 


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[Marxism] 06-30-20 Ruling Class Counteroffensive in the Works by William Robinson - LA Progressive

2020-06-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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 LA Progressive


 Ruling Class Counteroffensive in the Works


 *Ruling Class It’s Capitalism, Stupid*

*https://www.laprogressive.com/capitalism-2-2/?fbclid=IwAR3_J8qdVqdcaVDExAWM0gI8KngQxN1zMvi4GXCjVNzVNIYPJrvmQhEqevE
*

*A*s anti-racist protests continue unabated across the United States, 
the ruling groups have been forced momentarily onto the defense by the 
sheer scale of the uprising, the first full-scale pushback against 
global police state 
 in the 
richest and most powerful country in the world.  Yet absent a more 
frontal attack on the root causes of racism, the uprising may be hard 
pressed to resist a counteroffensive from above involving a combination 
of repression, mild reform, and cooptation.


The powers that be are already embracing the language of struggle 
against “systemic racism.”  Racial justice is now being espoused by 
political and economic elites.  CEOs of major global banks and 
corporations whose policies have perpetuated racial inequality have 
taken the knee, declared their “solidarity” 
 
with aggrieved communities, as have Democratic and Republican Party 
stalwarts, as they attempt to commodify and convert “black lives matter” 
into a corporate logo. Lest the anti-racist struggle end up emptied of 
its transformative potential it must identify and target capitalism as 
the system that gave rise to and continuously reproduces racism.  
Ethnic, racial, gender and sexual oppression are not tangential but 
constitutive of capitalism.  There can be no general emancipation 
without liberation from these forms of oppression.   Yet the opposite is 
equally true: there can be no liberation from these forms of oppression 
without liberating ourselves from capitalism.


“We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said 
that the by-product, what comes off capitalism, that happens to be 
racism,” noted half a century ago Fred Hampton 
, 
the charismatic Chicago leader of the Black Panther Party shortly before 
his extra-judicial execution by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969.  
Hampton went on: “That capitalism comes first and next is racism.  That 
when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money.  So first the 
idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to 
make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to 
come from capitalism.  It had to be capitalism first and racism was a 
byproduct of that.”



 *To the extent that the struggle against police brutality is
 limited to targeting disproportionate police violence against
 racially oppressed communities the less we will be able to
 confront the underlying structural causes of this violence.*

Yet Hampton’s anti-capitalist perspective appears, at least at this 
time, to be largely absent.  To the extent that the struggle against 
police brutality is limited to targeting disproportionate police 
violence against racially oppressed communities the less we will be able 
to confront the underlying structural causes of this violence.  Racist 
police are but an extension of the capitalist state.  They exist to 
defend property from the propertyless, to enforce the power of capital 
and the rich over the poor and dispossessed majority who in the United 
States come disproportionately from racially oppressed communities.  In 
the big picture, the solution is not to reform law enforcement since law 
enforcement means enforcing a legal system that under capitalism is 
intended to protect the rich and the powerful from the poor and the 
dispossessed through criminalization of the latter or simply through 
enforcement of property rights.


As is now well known, the top one percent of humanity owns over half of 
the world’s wealth 
 
and the top 20 percent own 94.5 percent of that wealth, while the 
remaining 80 percent have to make do with just 5.5 percent.  Such savage 
social inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the 
system is unable to reverse them it turns to ever more violent forms of 
containment to manage immiserated populations.  The police are a 
coercive instrument of the capitalist state to control surplus labor, 
the poor, and the working class.  In the United States, workers from 
racially oppressed groups disproportionately swell the ranks of surplus 
labor, as do

Re: [Marxism] "Capitalism after Coronavirus"

2020-06-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Mr. Gore, a former vice president of the United States, is chairman and 
Mr. Blood is senior partner of Generation Investment Management."


That's a kick: Gore and Blood.

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Re: [Marxism] Trump in ?fragile? mood and may drop out of 2020 race if poll numbers don?t improve, GOP insiders tell Fox News | The Independent

2020-06-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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John Reimann wrote

As for Howie Hawkins and the Green Party: I had had hopes that it might 
develop into something - might start to develop a wider working class 
base - after Sanders lost in 2016. I think it's pretty clear since then 
that they won't. A real working class party will develop out of the 
struggle in the streets, on the jobs, and inside the unions. I have yet 
to see the Green Party play any significant role in any of that. To my 
knowledge, for example, they aren't even in the discussion within the 
protests against the George Floyd murder and the related murders.


Those like me who live in a shoo-in state for the Democrats at least 
don''t have to wrestle internally about voting for the greater dis-evil. 
We can write in Howie Hawkins, who appears to have a very good track 
record as a socialist candidate in NY state, as a way of recording our 
protest.

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[Marxism] 'All of us began with Marta Harnecker'

2020-06-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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''All of us began with Marta Harnecker'

'It is no exaggeration to affirm that Marta Harnecker was arguably the 
most important disseminator of Marx and Lenin’s ideas among successive 
waves of activists in Latin America...'


Not only among Spanish-speaking students of Marx. I first read Marta's 
work around 1980, and I'm sure many others everywhere benefited as well. 
And from the writings of her partner Michael Lebowitz, his many books 
including Beyond Capitalism, Build It Now, The Socialist Imperative.


By the way, I notice that this article was translated by Federico 
Fuentes, who had differences with Harnecker and Lebowitz over the 
Bolivarian Project, but who all emphasize the extent to which socialist 
change, as the author of this appreciation writes, 'involves a complex 
equation in whichnew organisational forms are not built - and will never 
be built - a priori, but rather are the result of the struggles of the 
times. They are products of and produce a platform of real and concrete 
demands, capable of transforming reality and shifting the balance of 
forces, while raising consciousness and drawing in other people and 
sectors to the project. But not to demand the possible. The neoliberal 
project affirms that almost nothing is possible. Marta, on the contrary, 
regularly recalled and emphasised that politics is the art of making 
possible the impossible.'


From what I know I am sure that, have to hope that, given the 
experience over all that workers in Venezuela have had in the Bolivarian 
Project and the attempted implementation of the forward-looking 
provisions of the Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela, they can never 
go back to and accept willingly a capitalist regime.


The Bolivarian Constitution, as Lebowitz has written, 'calls for 
democratic planning and participatory budgeting at all levels of society 
and upon “self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms.”' 
This is reinforced by 'the communal path to socialism that Chavez 
refined in his last years.'  This seems so even in the midst of renewed 
impoverishment and the over-dependence on their primary export product, 
brought on by what could be seen in many of its aspects as the arguably 
Bonapartist nature of the regime from the time of its origins, 
attempting to straddle rather than outright eliminate its capitalist 
underpinnings.


This worker-peasant adherence appears to be in the main why the project 
persists despite many errors, including not adequately promoting 
agricultural self-sufficiency and failure to root out the corruption in 
the bourgeois bureaucracy from which it necessarily sprang.


Not even the top Venezuelan military brass seem able or willing to 
engineer a coup at this point, particularly since the bourgeois 
opposition is so weak and has so many divisions, the hand of the the US 
government is so patently visible in this oil-rich country, and a 
preponderant number of peasants and workers still appear to stand behind 
the Maduro government; and this despite evident stagnation of the 
project, reversion to privation and chronic shortages of essential goods.


And I feel that despite disillusion, the influence of people like 
Harnecker and Lebowitz and Istvan Meszaros, through Chavez, has left its 
permanent mark on people's perception of how the seemingly 'impossible 
can become the possible.' And the determination that change has to start 
somewhere, even if its proponents face mountainous obstacles in trying 
to go it alone in a powerful, hostile capitalist world.




http://links.org.au/all-of-us-began-with-marta-harnecker


   All of us began with Marta Harnecker

/In memory of Marta Harnecker, who passed away on June 14, 2019/

By *Miguel Enrique Stédile *

June 25, 2020 — /Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ 
 — 
During an interview, then-Bolivia Vice President Álvaro García Linera 
and Spanish state parliamentarian Pablo Iglesias were exchanging ideas 
on classic texts and their own initiation into politics when the Spanish 
activist proclaimed: “All of us began with Marta Harnecker”. This 
statement is not only true for today’s young leftists but for thousands 
of people who have defended Marxism and socialism in the past four decades.


It is no exaggeration to affirm that Marta Harnecker was arguably the 
most important disseminator of Marx and Lenin’s ideas among successive 
waves of activists in Latin America, starting with the publication of 
her “Booklets for Popular Education” in the 1970s and

[Marxism] Nearly half of American adults are now unemployed

2020-06-29 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/nearly-half-of-american-adults-are-now-unemployed/ar-BB167gf0?li=BBnbfcN 


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[Marxism] The Main Street Manifesto, Nouriel Roubini

2020-06-28 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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'Dr. Doom' 
sends shocks of recognition/shivers up Wall Street spine


The Main Street Manifesto
Jun 24, 2020
Nouriel Roubini 



The historic protests sweeping America were long overdue, not just as a 
response to racism and police violence, but also as a revolt against 
entrenched plutocracy. With a growing number of Americans falling into 
unemployment and economic insecurity, while major corporations take 
bailouts and slash labor costs, something had to give.





Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at New York University's Stern 
School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Macro Associates 
, was Senior Economist for International 
Affairs in the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 
Clinton Administration. He has worked for the International Monetary 
Fund, the US Federal Reserve, and the World Bank. His website is 
NourielRoubini.com .


https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/main-street-manifesto-for-covid19-crisis-by-nouriel-roubini-2020-06

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[Marxism] Michael Roberts Blog: Trade wars are class wars – part two: global imbalances? June 24, 2020 at 7:09 am

2020-06-24 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/06/24/trade-wars-are-class-wars-part-two-global-imbalances/ 


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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Secret Service tells White House press corps to leave White House grounds in highly unusual move

2020-06-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Trump's escalating war on media, 4-1/2 months before the election, has
untold sinister implications, as the out-of-control president and a
progressively winnowed coterie of advisers even more dangerous than
Bolton, wades on with deliberation into what they have generated as an
out-of-control repressive situation, with media absent. And even the top
military honchos look on with seeming dismay.

"The move to force members of the White House press corps off White
House grounds ... "in response to the increasingly violent
demonstrations in Lafayette Park" ... is a highly unusual move that did
not immediately come with an explanation. Typically in security
situations at the White House, the press corps is locked down inside the
complex ... Trump declared himself “your President of law and order” as
peaceful protesters just outside the White House gates were dispersed
with gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets ..."

https://secure-web.cisco.com/1RCI_hgCpu2IHeil2pKtJjJ3Egri4JtV4UyMO-N5HXAgaRA7DxtvltwWktFduujIi2nNO_zmMaKuFhY4HeBxSk9832xmEKGZasBiIL0SDUn6ECCBr9ZkRk_4Eph2h2EVb4ghtbX_RMi_wVSQ56L8g_CL5hgZxIJjIJTousgSfoxjRgzOPr2Ay2weqc6S1lAz0PtgAM1pt3IJoxpP250ppSCzZBX1Ob7Jj3xhO6iRKPqogJRLQIhJP85fkXMLMeJJyLxKqUB8GWRPFUYYv9dE6elf-U5i-Kou_sVb6_Gz_qY6gROuFMvPIMXKjIhXBILczpZDZ3d5m8NpKhnxl92h2KRoijGZ_6KAxN-mP4_qxyambs0ZGzFmlb_GwNgOYzteL/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.channel3000.com%2Fi%2Fsecret-service-tells-press-to-leave-white-house-grounds-in-highly-unusual-move%2F

In a highly unusual decision, the US Secret Service told members of the
White House press corps to immediately leave the White House grounds.
The decision came during an ongoing demonstration across the street in
Lafayette Square, where protestors were trying to bring down a statue of
former President Andrew Jackson that stands in the middle of the park.

The US Secret Service on Monday evening told members of the White House
press corps to immediately leave the White House grounds, a highly
unusual decision that did not immediately come with an explanation.

The decision came during an ongoing demonstration in Lafayette Square,
across the street from the White House where protestors were trying to
bring down a statue of former President Andrew Jackson that stands in
the middle of the park. Those protesters were eventually pushed back out
of the park by police.

Protesters spray painted “BHAZ” on the pillars of St. John’s Episcopal
Church, which sits across the street from Lafayette Square. The acronym
stands for “Black House Autonomous Zone,” an apparent reference to the
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle where protesters have
taken over a six-square-block area of the city and kept out police in
order to set up their own self-governing space.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone had been a relatively peaceful protest
until this past weekend. Two men were shot in the zone early Saturday
morning and one of them later died. Police said a “violent crowd”
prevented them from getting to the wounded individuals.

In the nation’s capital, tensions between groups of protesters and law
enforcement outside the White House have been a focal point for the
nation in recent weeks as protests continue to play out over the killing
of George Floyd, a Black man who died while in police custody in
Minneapolis last month.

Last month, Trump was briefly taken to the underground bunker for a
period of time as protesters gathered outside the White House, according
to a White House official and a law enforcement source. The President
was there for a little under an hour before being brought upstairs.

A law enforcement source and another source familiar with the matter
told CNN that first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were also
taken to the bunker.

Following that episode, the White House cautioned staffers who must go
to work to hide their passes until they reach a Secret Service entry
point and to hide them as they leave, according to an email which was
viewed by CNN.

A few days after, Trump declared himself “your President of law and
order” as peaceful protesters just outside the White House gates were
dispersed with gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets, after which he
walked to a nearby church for a photo opportunity.

He remained at the boarded-up building, brandishing a Bible for the
cameras, for only a matter of minutes before returning to the White House.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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Re: [Marxism] Chicago Police Illegally Denied Protesters Right To Attorney, Phone Call, Top Public Defender Says | Pascal Sabino | Block Club Chicago

2020-06-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo wrote

https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/06/23/public-defender-joins-activists-to-sue-city-demand-end-to-incommunicado-detention/


Does this deliberate upping the repressive ante have earmarks of a 
global civil war? What the Chicago authorities are doing is being 
repeated everywhere, and not just because of Trump and his ilk. Trump 
appears to be little more than a harbinger and troubadour for worse to 
come.


Access to legal representation and the media are being attacked in the 
streets as well, shutting off informed access to internal wars just as 
they have done with our external wars, out of sight, out of the middle 
class mind. Will we see less and less up-close filmed revelation of what 
they want to conceal, as it even becomes possible, with the steady 
gutting of civil liberties, that people's i-phones at the scene are on 
flimsy grounds silently confiscated? While information is increasingly 
confined to authorities, with surveillance rampant?


Social control is out of control from top to bottom. I see the alarm 
expressed by a few major media outlets lately as the shocked gasp of 
bourgeois liberalism as to what is to come - before they join their 
confreres in the world of business as it must be.


To spell out some more of it that we may see but don't often enough 
explicitly enumerate, and don't we know that these probabilities are top 
of the destructive, containing forces' agenda in boardrooms, at Davos 
and Bilderberg:


What, after the election, when they no longer will get federal funds to 
those millions strapped, evicted and hungry, as happened in the thirties 
here and is happening elsewhere all over the world; but this time with 
no growth in increased wealth through expansion of profitable 
value-creating production, and instead more and more generation of and 
sequestering of profits of fictitious capital, property speculation, and 
debt manipulation? When state and municipal governments are failing; 
when the first wave surges, then subsides and a second wave of Covid-19 
strikes; when there is no end to savage racism against all with skins 
darker than pink-skinned Caucasians and with little effective power; 
when global poverty hits big with a new depression that leaves 1929 as 
relatively minor occurrence?


What happens when the environmental meltdown begins to come home to 
Americans and Europeans as forced migration deepens from impoverished, 
starved-out areas of the southern hemisphere generally?


And when massive repression is increasingly resorted to through 
capital's immense power in protecting the privileged from surges of 
protest from every direction?


Is this, or an almost irrepressible part of it, not in our future?

If so, what do we plan to do about it? As to the environment, it has 
gone to the point where mitigation is the only viable objective, and as 
it slips further down the sluice ways still nothing's happening to 
confront it, while the profit-generating panaceas of capital are still 
in charge as solutions.


As to preservation of human lives, we seem to have options but for the 
present we flounder, seemingly irretrievably.


Though objective conditions may point to solutions, if we read those 
developments right, when do we see that happening? When do we start to 
piece together the larger picture, rampant, globe-straddling 
transnational corporate power aided by authoritarian, captive 
governments and their ministrations, and begin to understand what 
effective opposition will look like? Will it be too late, because we, 
unlike capital, have not done our deep-shit homework? Looking back 
fondly on glorious past revolutions and Trotskyist solutions, or 
fulminating on Assad and his like, or remarking interminably on 
manifestations of chaos, certainly won't get it.


Slants on the future are supposed to end on a hopeful note, but my god 
that's become more and more difficult.

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Re: [Marxism] AFL-CIO "Leader" Richard Trumka Defends Police Unions by Comparing Them to Employers

2020-06-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22616/afl-cio-richard-trumka-black-lives-matter-police-unions

So what else is new?
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Re: [Marxism] free online streaming of "Let the Fire Burn"

2020-06-14 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Alan Ginsberg wrote

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


Thank you, Alan, for sending this out. I finally got around to watching 
it. It adds important context to what we're seeing now.


The events shown here are harrowing, savage, masterfully assembled as 
documentary, searing beyond any rational conception of being human - 35 
years ago and counting. None of the perpetrators charged, none 
convicted, only those who spoke an irrefutable if garbled and seemingly 
primitive truth paid the price once again, the victims with their 
inoperable and legal display weaponry, killed or imprisoned, and these 
events subsequently submerged and ignored.


Nine repeat nine Move members convicted of the killing of one police 
officer back in 1978 and all but one still in prison - with inoperable 
weapons, imputations of friendly fire, and subsequent police vows of 
revenge.


To quote from many sources, "death by burning flesh, military-grade 
explosives and more than 500 cops firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition in 
less than 90 minutes. The nearly 500 police officers gathered at the 
scene were ludicrously well-armed — flak jackets, tear gas, SWAT gear, 
.50- and .60-caliber machine guns, and an anti-tank machine gun for good 
measure. Deluge guns were pointed from firetrucks. The state police had 
sent a helicopter to the scene. The city had shut off the water and 
electricity for the entire block. And as the public would soon learn, 
the police had explosives on hand. The police dropped an improvised bomb 
made of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex, an explosive gel used in 
underwater mining. This caused the house to catch fire, and ignited a 
massive blaze which eventually consumed almost 4 city blocks, 61 homes, 
left 240 homeless, and killed eleven Move members in all, including five 
children."


The duly appointed commission of inquiry found only "gross negligence" 
on the part of city officials, none of whom as said was ever charged. 
Gross negligence in law: "conscious and voluntary disregard of the need 
to use reasonable care, which is likely to cause foreseeable grave 
injury or harm to persons, property, or both." A mild rebuke if there 
ever was one under these circumstances, which also as a charge precludes 
in its implementation, if any, punitive damages.


After years upon years of this, with steady drumbeat of inflammatory 
rhetoric and steady build-up of police capacity to attack with impunity 
and with less and less restraint, in my view now, talk of defunding, 
reforming, retraining police can almost come from Trump's lips, as it 
strikes me, it so drips with hubris, hypocrisy and avoidance.


How can we not see the connection between inequality, exploitation, and 
what the police mandate is and which, without major systemic change, 
will continue to be?


If we are not coming somehow closer and closer to kicking over this 
system root and branch by now, then how long oh lord we have to ask 
every time.


Buried deep in the national subconscious and still denial everywhere, 
with graphic evidence such as this seen by pitifully few. And the easy 
tendency to rationalize all this away- particularly among us, the broad, 
buffering American middle class, since it's not us in those accounts - 
after all, the propriety, the composure and the property of respectable, 
middle class neighbors just like us were destroyed, though fueled by 
their own ill-considered complaints and misunderstanding - the easy 
tendency to just shake our heads, fold our hands and go on without any 
concerted, effective, active response whatsoever.


Nothing really different. The woods were burning then but the blaze is 
more fierce now by far. How many of us have even known about this 2013

Re: [Marxism] Police are the Enemy Within - CounterPunch.org

2020-06-12 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

[Marxism] Police are the Enemy Within - CounterPunch.org
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:18:33 -0400 (EDT)

By Michael Yates.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/12/police-are-the-enemy-within/


“Camden County Police epitomizes what a police department should look 
like on paper while simultaneously trampling on an individual’s civil 
rights.”


https://truthout.org/articles/camden-is-not-a-blueprint-for-disbanding-the-police/?eType=EmailBlastContent=b27d5e7d-210c-477b-9ece-2e80d8836567 


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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-10 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

To further call attention to what I wrote here on Monday, I read that
the IDF is training many American police and sheriffs departments.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/pro-palestinian-group-says-idf-trains-us-police-in-racist-tactics-629937

The IDF, whose training is designed and mandated by the Israeli
government and who are trained specifically to immobilize, and destroy
Palestinians and Arabs generally. If you were a Palestinian personally
who had suffered and who had seen your neighbors and family members
killed, maimed and houses destroyed at the hands of the IDF, would you
be so naive as to call for reform?

John Reimann wrote
Here's an article of mine on the vote of the Minneapolis City Council to
disband the police:
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/06/08/minneapolis-city-council-votes-to-disband-police-will-they/

First of all, the move to defund or abolish the police department eludes
and obscures the real problem: as John says, the class relations are
going to remain the same.

And to add to what John notes here, the police have greatly increased in
numbers from my childhood in the late twenties, when there was one cop
in my neighborhood, walking a beat, and acquainted with and generally
friendly received by most. That changed quickly as the Depression
deepened, and with the coming of the patrol car and night sticks
replaced by lethal weapons. And the police have been given increased
latitude by the power-wielders over the years because the system has
insurmountable problems in maintaining social control.

Just like the army, police are recruited from the working class or the
otherwise 'expendables,' who are faced with poverty and have no other
jobs available, and who are young, often rural and usually unaware of
the workings of the world. Just like the army, in which I spent three
miserable years, the police are taught to hate, then they're taught to
kill those they've been taught to hate, and just like the army, then
they're assured, as was Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, that the army
looks the other way, in fact expects you to do exactly what you did, and
you're home free, with a lifetime of PTSD. This in a system of rigid
discipline, where the only answer is yes SIR, and where you're also
taught that you're there to protect your buddies in a crowd control
situation, whatever the effect on anyone else. So almost anything goes,
and you know you have department and powerful police union backup. Above
all, your mandate is to protect property, which absolutely doesn't mean
house and property in a ghetto neighborhood, You're there to instill
fear in an uncontrollable social situation. So who's going to call the
out-of-control cops to 'protect and serve,' when they are most likely
going to make things worse, if they show up at all?

The only possible benefit of this reshuffle that I see is to mollify the
liberal elements in the middle class, and the less checked-out among the
afflicted, and to force the police union to back off and make a few
compromises. But how long does that last? And to what end? How long, for
instance, have liberal and neighborhood groups tried to implement
community control, with no success and no change?

Property, wealth and its unequal distribution, is the basic problem,
obviously, as John notes. It's endemic and unavoidable in this system,
where the poor exist in good part as a reserve army of labor, and as the
inevitable result of any system of devil take the hindmost. And that's
where the discussion should be going and where the pressure should be
applied. Anything less is dragging out the problem, really just hiding
problem and solution and making it worse. The impulsion toward
increasing militarization of the police, as the jobs disappear, worker
organizing becomes ever more difficult, and inequality escalates, is not
going to go away under the system of capitalist exploitation and
inequality.

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Re: [Marxism] Minneapolis city council votes to disband police. Will they?

2020-06-08 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

John Reimann wrote

Here's an article of mine on the vote of the Minneapolis City Council to
disband the police:
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/06/08/minneapolis-city-council-votes-to-disband-police-will-they/

First of all, the move to defund or abolish the police department eludes
and obscures the real problem: as John says, the class relations are
going to remain the same.

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Re: [Marxism] Bird’s Eye View of Protests Across the U.S. and Around the World

2020-06-07 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Alan Ginsberg wrote

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



Just to add to this report, it's unique and amazing, happening all over 
the world and in the most unlikely places. We can only speculate on what 
this all means, its range and continuity and what it may portend.


As in this remote Northwest coastal California county of Del Norte. 
Seeing a protest here, with appropriate signage, certainly was encouraging.


63% of  voters in our rural county selected Trump in 2016, with the last 
census reporting about 5,800 population which includes the 2700 inmates 
and the staff of perhaps the world's most notorious prison, Pelican Bay, 
with all that a carceral culture, prison staff and their families, 
brings to a small community. So I heard not surprisingly that someone 
waved a rifle out his truck window at the demonstrators.


In Curry County, OR, 23 miles from here, another county where about 59% 
supported Trump, my partner saw protesters yesterday, the twelfth day 
following the killing, and we're told they continue today.

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Re: [Marxism] New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards

2020-06-05 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

(The Gray Lady airs its dirty laundry.)

NY Times, June 5, 2020 New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet 
Standards By Marc Tracy, Rachel Abrams and Edmund Lee


Executives at The New York Times scrambled on Thursday to address the 
concerns of employees and readers who were angered by the newspaper’s 
publication of an opinion essay by a United States senator calling for 
the federal government to send the military to suppress protests against 
police violence in American cities.



How hokie can you get. All this scrambling around about the "policy" at 
a  180-year old newspaper, as if they just discovered, my god, that IS a 
problem. We'll have to confer about that. New policies, Yeah.


Maybe they're mollifying their middle-upper class readers with this. But 
when is the last time they published even someone so relatively reticent 
to call for the system's complete overturn as Noam Chomsky?

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Re: [Marxism] George Floyd had 'violent criminal history': Minneapolis union chief

2020-06-03 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

(A familiar refrain as if being an ex-con excuses someone's knee on his 
neck for over 8 minutes.)


“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. 
The media will not air this,” police union president Bob Kroll told his 
members in a letter posted Monday on Twitter.


Floyd had landed five years behind bars in 2009 for an assault and 
robbery two years earlier, and before that, had been convicted of 
charges ranging from theft with a firearm to drugs, the Daily Mail 
reported.


https://nypost.com/2020/06/02/george-floyd-had-violent-criminal-history-minneapolis-union-chief/



["The head of the Minneapolis police union says George Floyd’s “violent 
criminal history” needs to be remembered and that the protests over his 
death are the work of a “terrorist movement.”


Floyd had landed five years behind bars in 2009 for an assault and 
robbery two years earlier, and before that, had been convicted of 
charges ranging from theft with a firearm to drugs, the Daily Mail 
reported 
."]


Sounds like there goes what middle class support there might have been 
for the protests. The largest middle class buffer between the working 
class and corporate power on the planet. More divide and rule.


And what charges will a middle class jury convict Chauvin for, let alone 
the others charged, with this information before them? Especially now 
that a Black Muslim State Attorney General, Keith Ellison, will now lead 
the prosecution?


And what does that mean for any meaningful "reform" of police conduct? 
We know the answer to that from the last 200+ years of racism -- squat.


So will the next murder of a Black person by the cops see increasingly 
militarized police clamping down from the get-go, with surveillance, 
drones, lethal automated weapons? And where do we go from there?


We're not rich enough to go into outer space and colonize with Jeff 
Bezos and Elon Musk.


I visualize a response similar to the million-person gathering at the 
Washington Monument against the US war on the Vietnamese people, only 
next time, 3 million or 5 million pushing down the barriers around the 
White House. Will the military follow their Comdr in Chief's orders to 
fire on that many of their fellow beings? And then what?


Well, that's my vision.
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Re: [Marxism] Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Malcolm X Today - Los Angeles Review of Books

2020-06-01 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-why-we-should-all-read-malcolm-x-today/



“I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of 
what confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create 
their own program, and when the people create a program, you get action.”


And presciently for our time: 'That's not a chip on my shoulder; that's 
your foot on my neck.'


/— /Malcolm X, whose birthday, unlike MLK's, passed unremarked upon six 
days ago.


That time may have arrived. All the elements converge, and informed 
experience is still the best teacher. The information is increasingly 
available, in increasingly accessible form, while the people most 
impacted by violence and inequality have recently been in a period where 
quiet reflection on experience was possible, and a massive amount of it 
has accrued to reflect about.


--- or else.

Not to hit too hard on MLK, but as Kehinde Andrews recalls, Martin 
Luther King, unlike Malcolm, thought that the capitalist system could be 
redeemed. An interviewer noted that difference between them, and asked 
Malcolm if he thought MLK was an 'Uncle Tom.' He replied that using that 
expression could subject one to a libel action, but that he could say 
that 'Uncle Martin is my friend.' My recollection of my reading, though, 
is that Martin was supposed to have been coming around by the time he 
was snuffed.



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[Marxism] Excerpted comment - John Smith on the crisis 2020

2020-05-25 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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This is from an interesting talk by John Smith (author of Imperialism in 
the 21st Century, MR Press 2016), given to a New Zealand Marxist group 
and the zoom of which was recently distributed by Phil Ferguson. The 
talk is in two parts, one on the bailout and the other on the effects of 
the pandemic and its economic consequences on the poorer countries in 
the global south. I have excerpted a few salient remarks.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzK5sFrhIEg
*
...*why the US government could not adopt the simple route of just 
printing that money and spending it, rather than going through this 
farrago of issuing Treasury bills**and then buying two-thirds of it 
themselves...[because] printing money and spending it to purchase bonds 
and other forms of corporate debt, "monetizing the debt," it**is 
feared...would lead to a complete collapse of confidence in the US 
currency...If investors saw the US government just printing money 
without this exercise of taking vast amounts of debt onto its balance 
sheet, they would lose confidence in the money, and with good reason, 
because all that this money is, basically, is just abstract labor.

*
*capitalists cannot find anywhere to put their money apart from US 
Treasury bonds. So the US government borrows this money from them and 
then uses it to do what those investors refuse to do, namely to purchase 
private corporate bonds, or even to spend on wages to replace the demand 
which, if the corporate investor were to spend it anywhere, would 
actually increase demand. Whatever it was they'd spend their money on.


...they don't print money. They borrow it, by issuing US Treasury bonds. 
So as they issue US Treasury bonds, they soak up what spare cash there 
is in the economy...*


*We've heard of QE1 and QE2...one of the correspondents in the Financial 
Times says that we now have not 1, not 2, but QE infinity...the US 
government is prepared to print as much money as it feels it needs to, 
to purchase however many bonds it needs to issue, in order to replace 
demand and to replace the corporate bonds which private investors refuse 
to purchase.


...they will therefore be buying their own debt.

...why can't they just cancel that debt?

...you can't just cancel a debt; you have to imagine that debt as a 
quantity of negative energy. You can't just cancel that negative energy 
unless you cancel an equivalent amount of positive energy. You would 
need to spend some of your cash, to use some of your assets in order to 
cancel that liability. In other words, debtors cancelling the debt is 
not just the same as tearing up a piece of paper. To cancel that 
negative force, you need to cancel an equivalent positive force...


this is reaching the end of the road. It cannot continue. Capital cannot 
continue to rule in the same way...it has been traveling since the 
crisis of the 1970s, and it cannot continue in the direction in which it 
has been traveling since the 2007-2009 crisis. All they've done, all of 
this accumulation of debt, has been to kick the can down the road and to 
postpone the day of reckoning, and to make sure that when that day of 
reckoning comes, it will be even more cataclysmic.



Impact on Africa, Asia and Latin America:

Financial Times:

   With Europe and the United States, the virus arrived first, forcing
   a public health response, and then - as the enormity of the crisis
   struck home - a massive fiscal and monetary injection. In much of
   the developing world, the sequence has happened in reverse, with the
   economic devastation of the corona virus arriving before the
   epidemic itself.

   Emerging market assets have been dumped on a scale never seen
   before. According to the Institute of International Finance, foreign
   investors have withdrawn $95 bn from stocks and bonds since they
   woke up to the crisis on January 21. That is four times the outflows
   in the same period after the start of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Asia, Africa and Latin America were already largely in stagnation...it 
is a crisis that truly is global. It's not just affecting the 
imperialist countries; it's affecting the whole world...causing 
collapsing currencies, collapse in remittances from their workers who 
had gone to rich countries, hundreds of millions in the global south who 
are completely dependent on remittances from their family members, and 
those remittances have plummeted in the recent time, while tourism is 
very important for many, many countries in the global south, which has 
come to a complete halt.


foreign investors have withdrawn $95 bn from stocks and bonds since 
January 21


Financial Times: _
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Re: [Marxism] China’s Virus Vaccine Will Be Global Public Good, Xi Says - Bloomberg

2020-05-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

Still a tinge of Maoist red in China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/china-s-virus-vaccine-will-be-global-public-good-xi-says?utm_content=asia

Maybe we're seeing the response of a society and economy that has until 
now been on its way up and isn't floundering around trying to figure out 
where all the brownie points went.


Last time we were in trouble globally, the Chinese government basically 
rescued global capitalism with its gigantic post-2007-2009 stimulus 
package, and as John Smith says "helped to fuel the rise in raw 
materials costs that itself gave rise to speculative capital, and that 
money was to be made by further boosting the price of raw materials" and 
temporarily saving the economies of the raw materials-exporting poorer 
countries.


Smith doesn't see how China will be able to exercise that option this 
time around, and the countries of the global south will share in the 
general debacle big-time, especially with the late and even more tragic 
arrival in their countries of the full brunt of the corona virus, and as 
northern investors continue to flee their markets.
Again quoting Smith, G20 "creditors are resisting calls altogether for a 
voluntary standstill to loan repayments on commercial sovereign debt [in 
the global south]. In other words, they are resisting even a 
postponement of their debt payments...[according to Smith that includes 
China among the G20 countries resisting relief to the poorer nations, by 
the way. So that "tinge of Maoism," if Maoism really had that effect by 
design on poorer nations and not extraction and exploitation of others 
in Africa especially from the get-go, appears to be pretty thin. I was 
in east Africa during the time of Mao when the Chinese were building 
rail lines from the copper mines of Zambia to the seaports, constructing 
roads and a bridge across the Nile through southern Sudan and its 
petroleum deposits to the Red Sea, ass over teakettle, with cheap 
African labor overseen by Chinese foremen and engineers]. All of the 
full force of the economic crisis of the world and in their own 
countries is going to be placed on the shoulders of the workers and the 
farmers of these countries without any relief whatsoever. None whatsoever."

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Re: [Marxism] China’s Virus Vaccine Will Be Global Public Good, Xi Says - Bloomberg

2020-05-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

Trying again. I think first post attempt had wrong address.

Louis Proyect wrote

Still a tinge of Maoist red in China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/china-s-virus-vaccine-will-be-global-public-good-xi-says?utm_content=asia

Maybe we're seeing the response of a society and economy that has until
now been on its way up and isn't floundering around trying to figure out
where all the brownie points went.

Last time we were in trouble globally, the Chinese government basically
rescued global capitalism with its gigantic post-2007-2009 stimulus
package, and as John Smith says "helped to fuel the rise in raw
materials costs that itself gave rise to speculative capital, and that
money was to be made by further boosting the price of raw materials" and
temporarily saving the economies of the raw materials-exporting poorer
countries.

Smith doesn't see how China will be able to exercise that option this
time around, and the countries of the global south will share in the
general debacle big-time, especially with the late and even more tragic
arrival in their countries of the full brunt of the corona virus, and as
northern investors continue to flee their markets.

Again quoting Smith, G20 "creditors are resisting calls altogether for a
voluntary standstill to loan repayments on commercial sovereign debt [in
the global south]. In other words, they are resisting even a
postponement of their debt payments...[according to Smith that includes
China among the G20 countries resisting relief to the poorer nations, by
the way. So that "tinge of Maoism," if Maoism really had that effect by
design on poorer nations and not extraction and exploitation of others
in Africa especially from the get-go, appears to be pretty thin. I was
in east Africa during the time of Mao when the Chinese were building
rail lines from the copper mines of Zambia to the seaports, constructing
roads and a bridge across the Nile through southern Sudan and its
petroleum deposits to the Red Sea, ass over teakettle, with cheap
African labor overseen by Chinese foremen and engineers]. All of the
full force of the economic crisis of the world and in their own
countries is going to be placed on the shoulders of the workers and the
farmers of these countries without any relief whatsoever. None whatsoever."

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[Marxism] Jeffrey Sachs has it somewhat right on why we're already in a Great Depression, wrong again on reformist capitalist solutions

2020-05-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Opinion: We're already in a Great Depression
by Jeffrey D. Sachs - CNN - Monday, May 18, 2020

Instead of an imagined "tradeoff" between reviving the economy and 
safeguarding health, President Donald Trump's policies are delivering 
both a great depression and tens of thousands of deaths at the same 
time. That's because a tradeoff between economy and health doesn't 
exist, except in Trump's fantasy. Unless people are confident about 
their safety in the midst of the pandemic, they will not resume normal 
life. By allowing a premature reopening, which ensures that the epidemic 
will rage, Trump most likely has condemned America to economic collapse.


The fantasist promotes magical thinking, and perhaps even believes it 
himself. Trump said that the virus wasn't a threat. He said that it 
would go away by April. He said that it was fully under control. He said 
in March that we have all of the testing we need.


The epidemic is controllable when government is serious. Australia, 
China, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Taiwan, among others, all 
have kept deaths below 10 per million population, compared with 271 per 
million in the United States. Those other countries implemented public 
health policies at national scale; the US did not.


With US reported Covid-19 deaths nearing 90,000 -- and almost certainly 
higher based on a comparison of deaths this year and last year -- Trump 
now tries to discredit the death count. In Trump's fantasy world, there 
are no deaths if they are not reported.


Trump's maneuverings also won't save the economy, which is in a free 
fall. States can open now and thereby spread more disease and death. But 
again, economic fantasy won't replace reality. Consumers will not 
suddenly start buying. Builders will not suddenly build buildings when 
so many stand to be empty or underutilized.


Some of Trump's followers may head to crowded places -- and if so, many 
will contract the virus -- but most Americans will not.


Of the record 20.5 million jobs lost in April, most will not come back 
any time soon, whether or not states declare their economies open. The 
continued spread of the virus itself will block any meaningful rapid 
recovery. So too will deep structural changes that will cause a 
significant, albeit unknowable, proportion of today's job losses to be 
permanent.


Here are some of the jobs that are not returning: E-commerce will 
displace many brick-and-mortar retail jobs. Big name retail chains are 
now going bankrupt week after week. The result is that many retail jobs, 
down 2.1 million comparing March and April 2020, will likely not return. 
Jobs created as a result of online shopping won't equal those lost in 
brick and mortar stores.


Many business firms will reorganize their workflows to allow for far 
more work from home, and this will leave office complexes sparsely 
populated. Many companies will downsize their space, meaning new 
commercial construction will remain depressed for years to come.


New oil and gas drilling has collapsed and will not recover to past 
levels given the long-term glut in world oil markets and the collapse in 
oil and gas prices. Travel and tourism will remain depressed as long as 
the epidemic is uncontrolled, keeping down employment numbers in 
accommodations, leisure, entertainment and restaurants.


Trump's remaining idea is to force companies to return home from China 
and rebuild their supply chains at home. This is yet another fantasy. By 
intensifying the attacks on China -- including new measures to cut off 
Chinese companies from American semiconductor technology -- Trump will 
crush the growth prospects of much of America's high-tech industry, 
whose business includes international markets, including China's vast 
population. Trump's moves will invite Chinese retaliation and hasten the 
day when China competes with the US in various dimensions of 
semiconductor manufacturing and design, such as specialized chips for 
artificial intelligence and 5G.


One obvious area of retaliation will be for China to buy planes from 
Airbus instead of Boeing. Even before the pandemic, Boeing was in a very 
deep crisis because of its flagrant mismanagement of the 737 Max. 
Trump's failure to contain the epidemic and his intensified attacks on 
China will deepen Boeing's woes. Boeing stock fell 2 percent on May 15, 
the day after Trump's new anti-China measures, and Boeing stock is down 
by more than 70 percent from the peak on March 1, 2019.


Trump will try to save moribund companies, no doubt including his own 
family business. He will try to save the oil and gas sector, though no 
banks will touch it. He will

[Marxism] The American unemployment system is broken by design

2020-05-17 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-american-unemployment-system-is-broken-by-design/ar-BB141Rkr 


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[Marxism] Movement for a People’s Party formation announced

2020-05-13 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

The Black Agenda Report has an article on the effort to organize a new
movement for a people's party https:
//www.blackagendareport.com/leftists-jump-corporate-democratic-ship-leaving-sanders-behind.

Nearly three-quarters of the 10,000-strong Los Angeles chapter of
Our Revolution, the mass
organization birthed during Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid,
voted to leave the Democratic Party and join the Movement for a
People’s Party, also founded
by operatives from Sanders’ 2016 campaign. In effect, Sanders’ most
committed supporters have refused to once again be sheep-dogged by
their mentor into the cemetery where U.S. social movements go to die.

Press release:
https://peoplesparty.org/our-revolution-los-angeles-joins-the-movement-for-a-peoples-party/

Note that, from what I've read of their platform, the organizers are not
explicitly advocating that people not vote for the Democratic candidate;
they could have but it's probably unnecessarily divisive. They inveigh
instead, trenchantly and in some detail, against the current party
duopoly and the present electoral process.

They invite all movements and individuals with beliefs similar to those
in their declared platform to join them.

They could move beyond (or with a section of) the DSA, seemingly
embroiled as it is in its impasse over electoral support.

This is a follow-on that has been looked for since 2016, as Sanders has
again endorsed the Democratic Party choice, just as he has always said
he would. He has a different agenda from his constituents from here on
out, which has always been implicitly tied to his role in the Congress
and his reelection by his diverse constituents in a money-driven
Senatorial campaign. So bye bye Bernie.

The move to organize outside the two parties begins now not after the
election, with a committed base with nowhere else to go but move ahead
of the irredeemably corporate, effectively dead two-party system.

This is well and good, of course, and maybe a necessary way-station, but
moving beyond the rigged electoral system to participatory democracy,
and the new system that entails, remains the priority.

*Our Revolution Los Angeles and the Movement for a People’s Party*
*
**https://peoplesparty.org/*

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[Marxism] Unsurvivable heat extremes have emerged earlier than expected: study - The Washington Post

2020-05-09 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Every time I see a new report, surprise is registered at how much 
reality exceeds expectations. And mass migration emerges more urgently 
with each successive pile-on.


["...researchers were surprised to find such sharp increases in moist 
heat waves in part because computer model projections don’t show these 
occurrences becoming common for a few more decades"...it is disturbing 
to see it happening in real time. It will only get worse and more 
widespread from here." "The computed heat index [in Bandar Mahshahr, a 
city in southwest Iran] for this brutal combination was 165 degrees (74 
Celsius), among the highest recorded. However, the National Weather 
Service cautions such conditions are so extreme that they are beyond the 
limit the heat index was designed to calculate..."“Of all of the climate 
risks coming this century, the thing I am most concerned about is 
excessive heat in the tropics,” said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist 
emeritus at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, 
in an email. “Rich countries have brought much of their economy indoors 
where air conditioning is a possibility, but many developing economies 
rely on labor-intensive outdoor agriculture,” he wrote. “The combination 
of poverty and extreme temperatures can be lethal...would make 
agriculture that relies on outdoor picking impossible. ”]



Unsurvivable heat extremes have emerged earlier than expected: study
Andrew Freedman, Jason Samenow - The Washington Post - Friday, May 8, 2020

Welcome to “Steambath Earth,” featuring sauna-like temperatures and 
humidity too high for humans to tolerate.
Extremely humid heat that is more intense than most Americans have 
experienced — approaching a crucial, immovable human survivability limit 
— has more than doubled in frequency in some coastal subtropical regions 
of the world since 1979, according to a new study published Friday.
The study is the first to find that wet bulb temperatures of 95 degrees 
(35 Celsius), which renders ineffective the human heat response of 
sweating to shed heat through evaporation, leading to hyperthermia, are 
already occurring for short periods of time at a few weather stations.
These tend to be located in parts of the Persian Gulf shoreline and 
coastal southwest North America, where sizzling lands border sultry 
seas, as well as in northern South Asia, where extreme heat and humidity 
combinations overlap just before the annual monsoon begins.
With computer model projections showing the world will continue to warm 
rapidly in response to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the 
atmosphere, the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, 
warns that highly populated regions of the world will be rendered 
uninhabitable sooner than previously thought for parts of each year.
This will come to pass unless people take wide-ranging and costly steps 
to adapt to the heat during the next few decades, while nations 
undertake measures to slash emissions of greenhouse gases.
The study depicts a world steadily marching toward a future in which 
many locations approach or reach that survivability threshold, as well, 
a trend that could throw a spotlight on the divide between rich nations 
that are able to adapt to this new reality and poor countries that 
suffer productivity losses and deaths.
The heat in the subtropics constitutes a threat to global stability, 
some researchers say, since they could prompt millions to become climate 
migrants, searching for more temperate conditions elsewhere.
For the research, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and 
Columbia University examined surface temperature data around the world 
on land and sea. They detected, for the first time, the arrival of what 
some scientists have called “Steambath Earth,” with heat waves that 
humans cannot survive after prolonged exposure.
The threshold for survivability occurs when the wet bulb temperature 
hits 95 degrees (35 Celsius).
Meteorologists measure wet bulb temperatures by wrapping a wet wick 
around the bulb of a thermometer. While it may seem to be an esoteric 
figure, it’s highly significant in heat wave situations, since the 
higher the wet bulb temperature gets, the more difficult it becomes for 
the human body to shed metabolic heat into the air through the 
evaporation of sweat.
In fact, mortality increases during heat waves when wet bulb 
temperatures reach temperatures of 88 to 91 degrees (31 to 33 Celsius), 
the study states.
According to study co-author Radley Horton of Columbia University, the 
combination of high temperature with high humidity is, “Maybe the most 
underappreciated of the direct

Re: [Marxism] Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down | Environment | The Guardian

2020-04-28 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Project wrote

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down

Richard Heinberg, who is featured in the film as interviewee but who is 
not identified with its production or construction of its story line, 
gives a more balanced picture in this review 
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/richard-heinberg-review-planet-of-the-humans/. 
I agree with him that over all, given the limited exposure available for 
any documentary critical of prevailing convention, and the depth of the 
crisis, this documentary is worth watching. It does without question 
open up a lot of areas that most people, if not the more-or-less 
informed who are providing these critiques, are still gulled and totally 
uninformed about.


Of course he's right about facile technofixes and the ominous overtones 
of production for profit taking over the environmental movement; but my 
flesh creeps every time someone brings up overpopulation, as Heinberg 
does here and as also does this documentary, as a main problem, without 
more. It's left up in the air, to float around and collect all kinds of 
toxic reactions.


First of all, the population has increased virtually exponentially for 
reasons that need to be aired and explored, so that the right wing and 
their liberal cohorts (even some on the left) don't prevail in 
identifying victims as cause and being complicit in one way or another 
in elimination of the poor and those least able to protect themselves.


Just to review some of the considerations:

Reasons for the population explosion include of course advances in 
sanitation and healthcare and the fact that, until very recently, most 
of the world's people were in rural, peasant, farm-based communities, 
where the life they lived became increasingly at risk as capital drove 
them to the wall by monopolizing the best land and by producing massive 
quantities of cheap agricultural goods; and with the continuing poverty 
and high mortality rates, historically and concurrently and among other 
cultural reasons they produced more children to provide for reproduction 
of the products of their land and for their old age in regions with no 
public provision for the elderly.


Then it's readily evident that, as more fortunate nations produced more 
adequate foodstuffs for much of their populace, the birth rate in those 
places rapidly dropped, as it would anywhere, given more adequate 
satisfaction of needs.


And needless to say, the poor in the world are not at all the consumers 
of diminishing resources responsible for per capita overconsumption - 
rather, it's the upper and middle classes, who remain largely in denial, 
oblivious and culpable in these and related crimes against humanity.


Distribution of what's now produced is so skewed across the planet, so 
much of the arable land is given over to livestock, biofuels and other 
superfluouscommodities, or otherwise occupied with useless or 
dispensable luxury and sprawling conurban complexes, and is abused by 
mono-cropping, fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides and 
clear-cut forests and dead soil. How would we know how much is enough or 
how many people is really too much? Certainly not by divination or by 
sputtering old Malthusian misconclusions.


That's not covered in the comments on this documentary that I have seen.

And the discussants don't grab on and hold fast to the ineluctable 
conclusion that it is neither technofixes nor even solar and wind 
alternatives nor individual adjustment in consumption that will solve 
our problems; again, it's root and branch extirpation of capital as the 
primary (dis)organizer of production of our needs.


I kind of identify with Vijay Prashad, that we should no longer 
juxtapose ourselves as the "left" against some balancing "right": we 
have proceeded way beyond that - capital as solution is dead, and so 
figuratively are its apologists.

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[Marxism] Anti-Capitalist Politics in the time of Covid-19: An Essay by David Harvey

2020-04-22 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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I don't think this has been posted here yet.

https://www.democracyatwork.info/anti_capitalist_politics_in_the_time_of_covid_19_essay_by_dh 


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[Marxism] Some may have to die to save the economy?

2020-04-19 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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My response to a friend who wrote this to his family copy to me:

On 4/18/2020 11:02 AM, - wrote:



  Some may have to die to save the economy?

This headline in my paper today summarizes my opinion about the 
"early" opening.  It is easy to want a return to normality. Our Wall 
Street government will lie and downplay the dangers. Our family 
shouldn't be seduced.

Pops
Well I don't know. I've lived in the relatively good times, for anyone 
in the American middle class especially. And now I feel as if I as one 
of an age bracket most susceptible could go out, willingly, gloriously, 
to save Trump by saving the economy and helping to make America even 
greater again, for another term.


I have thoughts about these things. Something like this:

I can't for the life of me see how the economy recovers. First and 
foremost there's the whole global environment collapsing and we're 
either oblivious or frozen in place, business as usual, and it's coming 
with its penumbra to our neighborhood as sure as we're sitting here. And 
do we maybe think we're just going to wait alongside and watch it 
happening somewhere else?


And what do we really know about this virus or possibly others to 
follow, how long they last and spread in a closely-packed, 
interdependent if seemingly remote slum, favela, barrio and ghetto 
world, and how they relate to what we're doing to the environment and 
where there might be prevention or testing or cure or vaccination or 
some sort of magic foresight or scientific breakthrough?


And then because look, we all stop, supposedly just for the time being, 
buying cars and washing machines and electronic gismos and chotchkies 
and we stop going to the barbershop and the theater and the hardware and 
restaurants and air travel and other tourism stuff and everybody either 
loses their job or is cut so far back that nobody can pay the mortgage 
or the rent or the utilities or the credit cards and loans or medical 
and dental bills and the debt and interest pile up and shops, stores, 
warehouses and offices and hospitals close down along with their 
employees and municipal, state and local governments lose their tax 
revenue and the supply chain that's supposed to ship us sustenance 
collapses and big corporations eat more small corporations and strip 
their assets and fire everybody and declare a big dividend and the 
government prints endless currency without backing any place in the real 
economy, the world of productive activity, and throw it out the window 
of the helicopter Milton Friedman style, but only just enough monthly 
for a couple of good lunches, a tank full of gas and a stiff belt. And 
even that's late and its continuation uncertain and it doesn't go to 
those who need it most, underneath the bridges.


And then we're supposed to have enough left over to start buying again?

So then we think the economy just picks up and marches on once the 
honchos give the order to resume, even though before the virus showed up 
no one was investing in productive enterprise because the rate of profit 
has been higher in non-productive assets, and so the transnational 
corporations just keep plowing it back into mergers and acquisitions and 
stock and bond buybacks and military hardware and shoveling profits out 
the door to Biden's Delaware or some island or some humongous capsule 
out there in space colonies reserved for their class, Bezos-and-Musk-style?


And then Trump and Biden and the rest of our anointed political 
protectors and their corporate ringmasters who haven't a clue or a plan 
how to save anything except their own asses and sequester it someplace 
for themselves and cohorts later, are supposed to come to our rescue? I 
don't think so.


This may at first glance seem off topic but I heard Vijay Prashad 
saylast week that right now in India 700 million people don't know where 
their next meal is coming from. The repressive Modi government, backed 
by US military supplies and by granting them, as convenient allies 
against our enemy China, diplomatic, geopolitical, trade and narrow 
class advantages has ordered that during this virus crisis all migrant 
labor, millions on millions of displaced Indians, are to leave the 
centers of production and go back to their villages, walk 1100 
kilometers with no food and no cash, most ending up as unlamented, 
unnoticed corpses on the roadside. And some in my middle class American 
circle here actually say what has that got to do with me and what can I 
do about it? If like most Americans we read only what's supplied to us 
by our corporate media, haven't a clue as to how the world works, 
therefore haven't been

[Marxism] The Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Climate-Change Future by David Wallace-Wells

2020-04-10 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-coronavirus-is-a-preview-of-our-climate-change-future/ar-BB12kdVb 


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[Marxism] Corporations Are Broke. It’s Time to Cut Up Their Credit Cards By Christian Parenti and Dante Dallavalle

2020-03-31 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/corporate-debt-crisis-coronavirus-financial-covid-19

Given present uncertainties, this is well-documented, thoughtfully 
argued and seems prescient. The thesis has obviously been gestating with 
these authors well before this crisis broke.


Not factored in are the effects on the world economy of environmental 
collapse, plus the likely turbulent global and geopolitical 
ramifications of the financial disaster that they portray so convincingly.



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Re: [Marxism] Relief Package is neither stimulus nor workers' lifeline, it’s again massive bailout to tottering corporations By Mike Whitney

2020-03-31 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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It would have been helpful (but improbable and 'impolitic' I guess) if 
AOC and others, in the midst of the pernicious backroom negotiations on 
this massive handout to capital ('disaster capitalism' in motion), with 
whatever bully pulpit access to media they could muster, early on, 
including speeches on the House floor, had described in more explicit 
and accessible language the dirty specifics of the bill, as have Mike 
Whitney and to a limited extent Jimmy Dore ... if they had, more 
importantly, attempted to mobilize their constituents and to bring them 
out in the streets against this hand-over of our future well-being, 
perhaps survival, part of a monstrous plan of total subjugation, to 
implacable class enemies. Did any of these 'progressives' ('vote for a 
woman.' as if women were class-exempt) attempt to do that? Of course not 
- they maneuver in a parliamentary setting that precludes that. How roll 
logs on behalf of your business and middle class constituents, and grab 
onto influential Congressional committee sinecures to ensure that 
process, committee assignments granted and withheld by Congressional 
party disciplinarians -- and reelection?


I have problems with the term 'progressive.' It manages to conflate and 
confuse liberal reformism and root and branch radical socialism to the 
detriment of the latter, and that misleads a whole lot of people. 
Unfortunately, Jimmy Dore falls into that mode, and I question whether 
he really understands the difference. Call a spade a spade - socialism 
is socialism, reformism is reformism. The latter may have its place in 
giving people space to survive to realize the latter, but we risk 
fooling ourselves: we are not emancipated by tweaking and fooling around 
with a system fundamentally incompatible with our emancipation from an 
ideology and practice of alienation and self-destruction.


[I'm quoting all that Dayne contributed, although it might seem 
extraneous, to illustrate the differences and similarities, down to 
Jimmy Dore [rightly] identifying himself and Democracy Now! with 
'progressive media.' Both make good points but don't connect the dots. 
They don't lead their audience beyond reformism. They haven't read their 
Marx - carefully.]



Dayne Goodwin via Marxism wrote:

   AOC blasts 'shameful' $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill for
   bailing out
   corporations


She raised some correct points in her rant. But don't let her empty 
theatrics ("blast") fool you. She didn't shame anyone but herself. She 
voted for that bill.


Instead of mobilizing 'the squad' and sympathetic Republicans to work 
against the bill including stalling it while the public is made aware of 
its many shortcomings, the so-called progressives gave grandstanding 
speeches like AOC's aforementioned speech. Instead of voting against the 
bill and being in a position to say she was looking out for her 
constituents' interests (even if the bill passed it wouldn't have been 
because of her), she now joins Tulsi Gabbard, Ayanna Pressley, Ro 
Khanna, Elizabeth Warren, Ilhan Omar, "and anyone else who wants to call 
themselves a progressive" (as Jimmy Dore said) in voting for this 
massive big business bailout bill that is the largest wealth transfer. 
That one-time $1,200 check some Americans will get won't purchase what 
Americans need and deserve.


Jimmy Dore has been making YouTube videos on this recently 
(https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy/videos is his channel) including 
pointing out how shameful it is to think that AOC's arm-waving speech is 
in any way comparable to Congressional votes 
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOPSq705To), how California's 3-month 
mortgage payment moratorium is going to be followed by allowing banks to 
demand all of those unpaid payments on month 4 
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQmn9o6NZVo) meaning that in month 4 
one owes the unpaid 3 payments plus the regular monthly payment -- 4X 
their regular mortgage payment in one lump sum.


And, as Dore has been explicitly clear, "It is stunning to watch 
progressive media fall down on this". Very few news and/or commentary 
outlets are covering what a bad bill this is for the 99% and how things 
look very bad for a lot of Americans in the short-term future. One 
notable example: Democracy Now! earned a reputation for championing 
progressive politics during the run-up to the 2003 US/UK-led invasion of 
Iraq. DN has squandered all of that good will in recent years as Amy 
Goodman uncritically repeated Russiagate lies, echoed talk of the 
alleged gas attack in Douma that now 4 OPCW scientists say did not 
happen, and DN lost critical voices like former DN

[Marxism] Relief Package is neither stimulus nor workers' lifeline, it’s again massive bailout to tottering corporations By Mike Whitney

2020-03-27 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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The Senate’s Coronavirus Relief Package Must be Stopped!
By Mike Whitney
Global Research, March 27, 2020
Region: USA Theme: Global Economy, Law and Justice, Science and Medicine

The Senate’s $2 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Package is not fiscal 
stimulus and it’s not a lifeline for the tens of millions of working 
people who have suddenly lost their jobs. It’s a fundamental 
restructuring of the US economy designed to strengthen the grip of the 
corrupt corporate-banking oligarchy while creating a permanent 
underclass that will be forced to work for slave wages. This isn’t 
stimulus, it’s shock therapy.


Who can survive on $1,200 for one, two or three months time? And what 
happens to the millions of people who paid no taxes last year? Are they 
supposed to scrape by on nothing? Congress knows that most households 
live paycheck to paycheck. With no savings how will they pay the rent, 
the electric bill, the phone and the cable? Congress is quibbling over 
an extra $600 per month unemployment for those who are lucky enough to 
get it, when most people are just trying to figure out how they’re going 
to survive, how they’re going to pay the mortgage, when they’ll be able 
to go back to work, and whether their job will still be there when this 
nightmare is finally over?


Did you know that “if you don’t already have direct-deposit information 
on file with the IRS from previous tax returns, you won’t get the 
emergency funds for up to 4 months”? That means millions of people will 
have zero income for 4 months! What will become of them? Where will they 
go? Who will provide them with shelter and food? Shouldn’t congress be 
asking these questions?


And what happens to the 50% of the American people who had less than 
$400 saved before the crisis hit? What happens to them when they fall 
between the cracks and lose their apartments, lose their jobs, and lose 
their ability to maintain their tenuous standard of living? These people 
will never regain their financial footing. Never. It’s a death sentence. 
We’re going to see an explosion of homelessness, drug addiction, 
depression, alcoholism, suicide and crime unlike anything this country 
has ever seen before. Are the imbeciles in congress so blind that they 
can’t see that they’re condemning a large part of the population to 
permanent, inescapable, grinding poverty and desperation? Can’t they see 
that?


Do you understand why this bill is being rushed through congress?

It has a lot to do with the falling stock market but more precisely with 
the hundreds of corporations that have been hawking bonds to gullible 
investors who thought they were buying the debt of responsible, 
well-managed companies that used the money to improve their 
product-line, train workers, or build new factories. But instead, greedy 
CEOs have been using the money to buy shares in their own companies to 
boost executive compensation and reward shareholders. It’s a 
multi-trillion dollar scam that blew up in their faces causing a 
complete freeze-over in the corporate bond market. That’s what’s really 
going on, there’s a massive credit crunch that has a stranglehold on the 
bond market and there are only two ways to fix the problem:


Let the failing corporations default and pick up the pieces after the 
dust settles or… Launch a major $4.5 trillion bailout for busted 
corporations that drove their companies off a cliff.


Those are the two choices. Naturally Treasury Secretary Mnuchin chose 
the latter which suggests that the real motive for giving working people 
the $1,200 checks was simply to divert attention from the massive 
trillion dollar bailout to teetering corporations. That’s the real 
objective of the so-called fiscal stimulus bill. It’s another giant 
welfare check for the plutocrats.


The centerpiece of the new legislation is a provision for $425 billion 
giveaway to big business. The New York Times explains what is going on 
in a recent article. Here’s an excerpt:


“Republican senators have suggested creating a fund of $425 billion at 
the Treasury Department that the Fed could use to back emergency lending 
facilities — which would enable such programs to grow far beyond that 
scale.


Because the Fed cannot take on substantial credit risk itself, the 
Treasury Department backs its emergency lending, using money from a fund 
that contains just $95 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on 
Sunday suggested that the new money in the Republican bill could be 
leveraged by the Fed to back some $4 trillion in financing.


“We do have limited amounts of money we’re using before Congress passes 
this bill, so we’re not waiting on Congress,”

Re: [Marxism] How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders - The New York Times

2020-03-22 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

Louis Proyect

(Some Political Revolution that avoided directly attacking the
shittiest presidential candidate of the Democratic Party since
Grover Cleveland.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-2020.html

Maybe so. But also, and maybe more to the point, on momentum against
Sanders in the South and aftermath: Fear Pervades Black Politics, and
Makes Us Agents of Our Own Oppression
https://www.blackagendareport.com/fear-pervades-black-politics-and-makes-us-agents-our-own-oppression.

I think that the pro-Bernie Black columnist Glen Ford here slights the
genuine fears of long-time, insecure, settled, voting African Americans,
who have a justified fear of another four years of Trump and "the white
man's party," and who may not think that Bernie, whatever the merits of
his program, is as sure a bet to defeat Trump as is Biden.

Ford clearly recognizes that fear but I don't think it helps in the
circumstances to attack his fellow Blacks for it by again attaching
Malcolm X's 'we's sick" to them. It has a long, painful history. It's as
Trump says dismissing the unfairness of testing the elite in sports,
business and politics before the rest of us, "a fact of life."

More appositely, what does anyone propose doing about it? One thing,
first, is to pinpoint the responsibility of what he calls the
self-serving "Black Misleadership Class," who in conducting their
constituents through the thicket of American politics have long since
abandoned their class and ethnic origins.

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Re: [Marxism] "personal distancing plus social solidarity" Re: Fwd: [pen-l] If we want everyone to stay home during a coronavirus crisis, we need deep change to make that possible

2020-03-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Chris Slee wrote

Are there any alternative forms of struggle?

Not necessarily an alternative but a possible example would be the photo 
depicted online yesterday of voters arranging themselves at an 
appropriate distance in the open air outside a precinct so that they 
were unlikely to expose each other even to an airborne virus. With 
adequate advice and monitoring in a mass protest, why not?



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Re: [Marxism] Rethinking Voting for Democrats

2020-03-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Walter Daum wrote

Really what? That’s a neat little article by Lenin, concisely dissecting 
the U.S. bourgeois parties of his day. It doesn’t say anything about 
tactically voting for one of them to stop the other, but I assume he was 
against, as was Debs. He doesn’t suggest that the Dems were a lesser 
evil than the Repubs, or vice versa. Lenin had equally strong 
denunciations of the bourgeois parties of his own country, Russia, and 
there, under specific circumstances, he advocated a defensive vote for 
Cadet candidates to stop the Black Hundreds from taking office. So 
where’s the principle of *never* voting for a bourgeois candidate?--


The principle of *never* voting for a bourgeois candidate may be beside 
the point.


What of the people who called and knocked on doors and posted signs and 
generally busted ass and spent much enthusiasm in support of Bernie - 
whatever the intent or effect? What if in substantial numbers they 
decide that, if Biden doesn't buy the program that they worked so hard 
for, he doesn't buy their votes either? What if they they decide that 
Biden is part of the problem, another messenger boy fronting for the 
implacable enemy. And voting for the lesser evil has invariably left us 
further from our goal of working class emancipation. Are they going to 
somehow listen up and follow your advice, and put defeat of Trump up 
front as you advocate (or is it just this tiny choir of ex-Trots that 
you address)?


So long as the preponderance who vote are not buying into even a mild 
reform program in their interests and are timorous about the 
consequences, who apparently comprise in their numbers older, 
self-indulgent, pro-military, xenophobic members of the middle class in 
the US (the 20% that follows on after the 1% because they still 
visualize the benefits to them of the power of US capital - and who vote 
in line with that interest) how then do we bring about change? By, in 
our ineffectual numbers, joining them?


CBS conducted an exit poll after one of the recent primaries, in which 
one of the questions asked was would you prefer a candidate who a) 
reflects the policies of Obama, b) is more liberal, c) is more 
conservative? The reported answers were a) 49%, b) 37%, and c) 14%. And 
that's just the Democrats.



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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] The Harsh Reality of Job Growth in America | Reports from the Economic Front

2019-12-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

Louis Proyect wrote

The current US economic expansion, which began a little over a decade
ago, is now the longest in US history. But while commentators celebrate
the slow but steady growth in economic activity, and the wealthy toast
continuing strong corporate profits, lowered taxes, and record highs in
the stock market, things are not so bright for the majority of workers,
despite record low levels of unemployment.

The fact is, despite the long expansion, the share of workers in
low-wage jobs remains substantial. To make matters worse, the share of
low-quality jobs in total employment seems likely to keep growing. And,
although US workers are not unique in facing hard times, the downward
press on worker well-being in the US has been more punishing than in
many other advanced capitalist countries, leaving the average US worker
absolutely poorer than the average worker in several of them.

full:
https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2019/12/17/the-harsh-reality-of-job-growth-in-america/

The demographic threat to America's jobs boom
Greg Ip - The Wall Street Journal. - Wednesday, December 18, 2019

The U.S. job market continues to blow through expectations, generating
200,000 new jobs month after month and driving unemployment far below
what economists thought a decade ago was the lowest possible level.

The main reason is that the economy tends to keep creating jobs until
interrupted by a recession. The current expansion has now lasted a
record 10-plus years. So long as the usual recession triggers—rising
inflation and interest rates, or financial excess—remain absent, job
creation should continue.

Yet eventually it will hit a constraint: The U.S. will run out of people
to join the workforce. Indeed, this bright cyclical picture for the
labor market is on a collision course with a dimming demographic
outlook. While jobs are growing faster than expected, population is
growing more slowly. In July of last year, the number of Americans stood
at 327 million, 2.1 million fewer than the Census Bureau predicted in
2014 and 7.8 million fewer than it predicted in 2008. (Figures for 2019
will be released at the end of the month.)

The U.S. fertility rate—the number of children each woman can be
expected to have over her lifetime—has dropped from 2.1 in 2007 to 1.7
in 2018, the lowest on record. From 2010 through 2018, there were 3
million fewer births and 171,000 more deaths than the Census Bureau had
projected in 2008. Death rates, already rising because the population is
older, have been pressured further by “deaths of despair”—suicide, drug
overdoses and alcohol-related illness.

Aging doesn’t spell economic doom: Germany’s population is flat and
Japan’s is falling, yet both boast lower unemployment than the U.S. But
in the long run, job creation is constrained by the number of people of
working age, which is why the International Monetary Fund puts Germany’s
long-run growth rate at 1.3% and Japan’s at 0.6%, both lower than the
U.S. at 1.9%.

The latest employment data underscore these dynamics. In the 12 months
through November, the number of people working rose 1.2% from the prior
12 months, according to the Labor Department. That was slightly faster
than 1% growth of the labor force—the number of people working or
looking for work—and thus the unemployment rate fell. Labor-force growth
was in turn faster than the 0.6% growth in the working-age population.
As a result, the share of working-age people who are in the labor force,
known as the labor-force participation rate, rose.

Unemployment is already as low, and possibly lower, as many economists
think can be sustained in the long run.

Related video: America's changing workforce: Independent and gig workers
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Re: [Marxism] No False Consolations | Novara Media

2019-12-13 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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John Edmundson wrote

Yes, but perhaps part of the problem was the Left's faith in the Labour 
Party. Have we still not figured that out. It's disappointing to see 
that Richard Seymour, who used to get this, has dived deep into such a 
failed project. When your only mass movement is to the ballot box, a la 
Bernie Sanders' campaign, why should anyone expect a deep commitment 
from the voters?


Cheers,
John

[https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/13/no-false-consolations/]

This is the sort of sensible comment I haven't seen much of. Yes, 
apparently from these results and others elsewhere, much of the working 
class, with insecurity of life chances and resentment at its status in 
the system and at the other, either votes on nationalist grounds for the 
rightwing misleader or stays at home. For now - but it's inevitable that 
the failure of the right is going to become palpable to workers 
everywhere as the system grinds to a halt for most, and that's already 
happening, especially if the protests breaking out are any indication. 
And with the failing ecosystem and the debt-infested stagnant economy, 
there is no fallback to growth for the system anymore; nor will 
no-growth panaceas of any sort work under capitalism, including 
especially those that only benefit the richer nations.


How long will it take before the working class and left leadership of 
the world accept, despite the interim right-populist upsurge and its 
reasons, that declared social democratic parties, with no credible, 
viable socialist program, will never be able to manage or change the 
capitalist state? Will never be able to mobilize a base of power in the 
working class?


Too many contradictions, especially that to simply manage capitalism, to 
ensure the profitability of a capitalist regime on which its survival 
depends, any social democrat apparition must accede to the imperatives 
of accumulation and profitability, and to accomplish that, to pretend, 
equivocate and evade; ultimately, to retain power, workers be damned. Or 
war.


Tony Blair is one poster child among many. An array of populist 
Bonapartists in the poorer countries. Bernie's prospects apply here as 
well. This is certainly not 1933 and no New New Deal or faux Green New 
Deal will do it. If workers now seem unreceptive to the message from the 
left, to the imperative that we take charge of our destiny - I 
nevertheless look to us sooner or later to come to the conclusion that 
there really is no other way. If that does not happen, or does not 
happen in time, before chaos sets in, there's not much anyone can do, 
except stick to the message, counsel people to start by reading Capital 
and take it from there, as my older socialist friends once counseled me, 
and think and act to help fellow workers to devise, from the objective 
conditions and mounting contradictions, the alternative objective and 
the route to it.


It is to the contradiction between capital and labor that we should 
adhere, and never forget or forego.


I immediately think of that knight in the Monty Python skit who keeps 
taunting and tilting against the giant until, where arms or legs were, 
only bloody stubs are left, and who declares he will prevail with his 
lance in his teeth. But that's just my bad monster in there. After all, 
it's Friday the thirteenth.

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Re: [Marxism] Defense Industry Gives More to Bernie Than Any 2020 Candidate | The American Conservative

2019-12-10 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect 
wrote


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bernie-gets-more-cash-from-war-inc-than-any-2020-candidate/

I hold no special brief for Bernie, but I do think this article has to 
be read critically, especially since it suggests things in its heading 
that it suggests only with significant qualifications in its content. It 
is on the whole a biased and unfair heading, as well as being in its 
totality a biased article. It is written by a defense analyst who has 
worked for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Writing this as he 
does for the American Conservative, why do I suspect he's not a Sandernista?


The headline attributes those contributions to "the defense industry." 
That's carelessly or intentionally misleading. The article seems  to 
accurately report the findings of the survey, and it is probably 
credible to the extent that it suggests that Bernie is protective of the 
economic benefits to constituents' employment prospects that result from 
keeping production of the ridiculously expensive and impracticable, “too 
big to fail” F-35 aircraft in his jurisdiction.


One comment appended to the article states "I went to the open secrets 
page and he's getting less than 1%**of his donations in 2020 from 
individual donors who work in the defense industry."


And "According to Washington Post: When not counting transfers, 77 
percent of Sanders’s fundraising this year came from donations of $200 
or less. That’s the highest share of small-dollar donations relative to 
total fundraising among all major candidates.*"*


The article acknowledges that the contributions that the headline 
implies come from industry employees and not from the defense industry 
contractors themselves. The article acknowledges that "Defense industry 
PACs, and the corrupting influence they have over compliant politicians, 
are not the source of this money...and most seem to be from engineers, 
technicians, and other non-management types." So not from owners or 
managers, but from workers, more particularly then from mid-level 
workers it would appear. It is plain enough to me that, in terms of 
total individual contributions to Bernie's campaign which presently 
exceed those made to any of the other candidates, the proportionate 
number of contributions from employees of the defense industry is at 
least as much as or more in keeping with his support from the working 
class generally, as it is a reflection of defense industry support.


Politicians, moreover, know the difference. He cannot reasonably take 
his acceptance of that support from workers as obligating him, in the 
way contributions from corporate industry create obligations to the 
politician, to support the defense industry and all it entails tout court.



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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] On Those Questionable Jobs Numbers….Again!

2019-12-10 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Great Employment Numbers: 44% of Fully Employed Make $18,000 a Year or Less
https://therealnews.com/stories/employment-numbers-fully-employed-low-pay-no-security


On 12/10/2019 8:14 AM, charles1848 wrote:
Doug Henwood skewered Rasmus' misunderstanding of Dept. of Labor 
unemployment stats. See

https://lbo-news.com/2019/05/06/misreading-the-latest-jobs-numbers/
and
https://lbo-news.com/2019/05/07/responding-to-rasmuss-response/


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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] » On Those Questionable Jobs Numbers….Again!

2019-12-09 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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By Jack Rasmus.

It’s important that readers understand that the monthly jobs numbers 
don’t represent actual jobs. They are a statistic. That means the raw 
actual number of jobs are not what’s reported. It’s a statistical 
manipulation–based on a series of complex assumptions and even more 
complex mathematical formula adjustments of the raw jobs data–that gets 
reported monthly as the job numbers.


Moreover, the monthly numbers reflect jobs, not actual workers getting 
new employment. There may be workers adding second and third jobs, 
reflecting the jobs increase, but not actual new employment increase. 
The US Labor Dept. claims it captures added jobs by those already 
employed, but the numbers suggest its methodology may not be that 
accurate. The US labor markets have radically changed since the late 
1990s and the BLS methods may no longer be accurate for picking up 2nd 
and 3rd jobs. The changes also suggest that maybe the government’s 
statistical adjustments for seasonality are not that accurate any more.



full: 
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/on-those-questionable-jobs-numbers-again/


More on the disfunctional economy - homelessness

The value of the wage must be reassessed when rents have grown at five 
times the wage rate in the last twenty years. We have a looming wage 
shortage, where working isn't working anymore. Moreover, with the 
developing trade war, the cushion to wages offered by cheaper imported 
goods is diminishing.


As one of of the barometers of a dysfunctional economy,one in every ten 
children in NYC public schools is homeless, and given the skewed 
distribution in our communities, that puts a plurality of whole 
classrooms in that bracket. As to the underlying issue of poverty, one 
is told that those who don't work don't want work. that it's culpable 
addiction, failing to take advantage of the opportunities for education. 
There is no mention that jobs don't pay a living wage, with wages 
off-shored or replaced by robots, or reshaped into independent 
contractual status with no assured minimum time employed and no 
benefits; there's no jobs program, Trump is blaming local governments 
for homelessness, andneither political party pushes this as a major issue.


You feel like a failure, you're either on the street or in a shelter or 
one paycheck away from it. Shelter is obviously no solution; it creates 
a stopgap and enables avoidance of the issue. Women, children and 
disabled people especially need not a shelter but a home, stable living 
space. Rental agencies don't want them: single parents are undependable 
rent-payers, children are vandals, a nuisance and extra expense, as are 
the disabled.


The right to a home is basic, intrinsic to a humane society.

So we put a billionaire real estate mogul in charge, and another one, a 
declared real estate development advocate, throwing vast funds into 
overcoming a Democratic Party candidate deadlock and replacing him.

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Re: [Marxism] The Mafia as the Capitalist Avant Garde: On Scorsese and The Irishman

2019-12-01 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Project wrote

http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/irishman

I watched this yesterday. This is a good review, except that it and all 
the reviews I've seen so far miss what is to me a crucial point,//that 
could and should have been extended as major in the plot line of the 
film (along with the connections to "higher-ups" and the relationships 
between corporate, political and mob crime) - maybe was more adequately 
dealt with in the book, I don't know - - that The Irishman , depicted in 
the first frames as shooting a couple of helpless, unarmed Italian POWs 
in cold blood and casually walking away, is simply following orders, 
convenient to the "higher-ups." This follows throughout the film. He is 
a guy conditioned by his war experience to simply follow orders, from 
"higher ups," without question and without feeling. And walk away, 
except for the largely unexplored but ubiquitous PTSD. And reject 
religious expiation because he can feel no remorse; except for his 
daughters, his nuclear "family," and the Mafia, his extended family. To 
one of his daughters, his explanation is simply and lamely that he was 
protecting them because "there's lots of bad guys out there."


In the beginning of the film this aspect of following orders without 
question as extending from Sheeran's military conditioning should have 
been emphasized, drawn out and alluded to frequently. Thereby the 
millions who will watch this star-studded, Academy award-prone high 
point of Scorsese's career would have had the point saturated within 
them as they reflect on the message.


This message could also bring home the US's increasing dependence on 
raw, remote, technologically driven military weapons, peddled to 
dictators and proxy ruling families and rained indiscriminately by the 
US military on whole populations foreign and soon probably domestic, to 
preserve threatened US hegemony in consequence of the waning of legitimacy.


The message underplayed, that the military takes draftees and the poor 
and uneducated, teaches them to hate other hapless people and then 
teaches them to kill those people, without conscious feeling beyond 
hatred of the other, calls to mind the footage made notorious by Chelsea 
Manning and Julian Assange of the helicopter-borne US military war 
criminals mowing down unarmed, clueless Arabs, with pure loathing and 
with complete official impunity. And like the "soldier of the King" Lord 
Jeffrey Amherst, "looking around for more when they were through." And 
finding their more in the rescuers and children in the van, who come to 
haul away the dead bodies.


That's where we seem headed, increasingly. This is a Roy Cohn world, 
unbridled. We've certainly been there all along and not just with Trump, 
but never before with the intensity, lethality and potentially 
devastating consequences we face now.


As I recall, in the discussion among the principals following the film, 
Scorsese alludes to the effects of The Irishman's WW2 experience as a 
major element, but he seems to have decided to dismiss it, largely 
because I gather the major actors were so well-known to the audience, 
and he couldn't extend the anti-aging technology back to do any detailed 
treatment of that period or plausibly use a younger version of the 
iconic De Niro, played by a younger actor./

/
I think, given the possibilities available and obvious, eliding this 
element is a major flaw of the film which could have greatly amplified 
its power./

//
/From the review:

"The Irishman is the mob film for the era of Trump, not to mention 
Netanyahu, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and the many other “world leaders” with 
unhidden connections to the criminal (not so) underworld.


Like Buffalino, he dies alone, with no family but the church.

The previous films were about the Mafia supplying a need to American 
society and were critiques that addressed the audience of the eighties 
and nineties, one still presupposing a formal separation between 
organized crime and the ruling class as a whole.


it is implied that perhaps the mob was involved in the Kennedy 
assassination but this is an afterthought. The point of the inclusion is 
again counter-intuitive. Buffalino and Sheeran, mob middle management 
and soldier alike are mournful in spite of themselves, but Hoffa, if 
anything is happy. He refuses to fly the flags at Teamster headquarters 
at half mast.


They inevitably turn to the church, the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The Irishman//is the end of the mob film as statement, the end of the 
figure of the Mafia. This signifier no longer has

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] A Spy Complex Revealed - Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Tehran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq

2019-11-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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   Here's the plain message to US policymakers, divulged in these
   leaks, that Risen emphasizes - "We invaded, and Iran won the war ...
   It’s a warning against further aggression in the region." (but which
   is unlikely to be heeded - US policy is too far gone in the
   direction of naked power and reliance on crude military measures as
   policy).

   As an extension of what Anwar Shaikh emphasizes, capitalist economic
   power exists to out-maneuver the competition for market share. That
   includes, in a turbulent and uncertain global era, maneuvering for
   domination over cheap labor, resources and untrammeled flow of
   global investment and its return in a process in which the
   initiating party seeks to impose more damage on the
   competitor/adversary than it visits upon itself, even to the point
   of risking unintended chaos. That is the nature of the capitalist
   process, and capitalist wars are an extension of that principle:
   ergo, "further aggression in the region" is a given; and the policy
   conclusion has to be that though Iran may have won the battle. we
   will continue, through necessary exercise of the power we have and
   for geopolitical and economic reasons must use, by any means
   necessary, to win the war in the sense that more damage is imposed
   than incurred. And that there is no alternative. That's what "two
   minutes to midnight" signifies.

   https://tinyurl.com/yx5dtdj6*
   *

   *JAMES RISEN:* You see in the documents several people who were
   Iraqis who had worked with the CIA, who were now unemployed. So they
   go to the Iranians and say, “I’d be happy to work with you if you
   pay me.” And the Iranians, in these documents, are interested in
   talking to them, but the first requirement they have is that they
   tell them everything they ever did with the CIA. …

   To me, the message of these documents — and I hope this is the way
   we’ve presented it — is the United States’ invasion of Iraq was an
   historic mistake, a strategic blunder of massive proportions. We
   invaded, and Iran won the war. That is a lesson to be learned today
   in how we operate in the Middle East, what we do in the Middle East.
   It’s a warning against further aggression in the region. …

   Iran had two adversaries on its borders. One was the Taliban Afghan
   government, and the other was the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein.
   Both were enemies of Iran. We deposed both of them. It’s such a huge
   thing to admit to yourself, as a country, that everything we’ve done
   in Iraq for the last 15 years was a mistake. All these lives lost
   were in vain. All the money poured into there has gone for a
   misbegotten, tragic mistake, that we have benefited what we now
   consider one of our biggest enemies. It’s almost like it’s such a
   huge thing to admit, that nobody wants to admit it. And I think
   that’s the real power of these documents.

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[Marxism] A Spy Complex Revealed - Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Tehran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq

2019-11-17 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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The Intercept and the New York Times shared leaked documents detailing 
the operations of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iraq 
from late 2013 through early 2015.


https://tinyurl.com/uqs2uek

EDITOR’S NOTE

An Unprecedented Leak

The source said they wanted to “let the world know what Iran is doing in 
my country Iraq.” They sent The Intercept 700 pages of secret 
intelligence reports, but never revealed their own identity.


This kind of leak is unprecedented for Iran, a country with a highly 
secretive government and spy agencies that guard their confidential 
information zealously.


In the months after we received the leaked documents, we had them 
translated from Persian and then had the translations cross-checked. 
Once we determined their significance — the reports detail the 
operations of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iraq from 
late 2013 through early 2015 — we approached the New York Times and 
proposed a reporting partnership. The article we jointly published with 
the Times just moments ago is the product of months of collaboration.


We found in the files a fascinating tale of how Tehran’s spies and 
assets wove a vast web of influence in Iraq, infiltrating nearly every 
aspect of social and political life. Popular outrage over Iranian 
meddling was already fueling massive protests in Iraq as this story went 
to press.


The Intercept also published stories based on the leaked reports 
exploring how Iranian intelligence conducted its own shadow campaign 
against ISIS; how the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s Quds Force held a 
secret summit in a Turkish hotel to plot against their common enemy, 
Saudi Arabia; and how the disastrous U.S. invasion gave Iran an opening 
to shape a new political order in Iraq.

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Re: [Marxism] Blow to Amazon as Seattle socialist looks to have triumphed in key vote | US news | The Guardian

2019-11-10 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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It occurs to me that this is one of many issues of its kind, where what 
we push for is well beyond what capital can put up with and which 
resonates with a large section of the population in all its 
permutations. Setting up an exacerbation of contradiction which can only 
favor workers in its effects. We know this, but it's a reminder that the 
world is teeming with such issues, and it's the type of fight where 
reformism has an appropriate place, in dismantling rather than buoying 
capital. 
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/08/how-big-tech-is-dragging-us-towards-the-next-financial-crash.


Louis Proyect wrote

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/09/seattle-amazon-kshama-sawant-socialist-elections
-

Interesting that one of the primary issues in this race was Sawant's 
full-on leadership in the fight for a head tax, a tax which would have 
funded public housing in a city with the third largest homeless 
population in the nation (after NYC and LA), a per-employee tax on large 
corporations which would have come down on Amazon in particular. 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/05/amazon-seattle-councilwoman-kshama-sawant-re-election-bid. 



So Jeff Bezos threatens to take his company, which has a virtual 
lock-down and concentration of power in the retail online shopping 
business, out of Seattle and let Seattle voters stew in their Commie 
juices. We'll see a lot of that, I'd think, and the interesting thing 
here is that it's so transparent - if the media play it at all.


Homelessness may finally become an issue that can no longer be ignored, 
with real estate billionaire Trump entering with club feet and 
advocating the equivalent of confinement in 19th century poor houses in 
LA, in the context of housing shortage, rising rental prices and real 
estate wealth, evictions, especially of homeless single mothers with 
"bothersome" children who are the main victims in this. There is a 
national reporting agency, according to Matt Desmond in his book 
"Evicted", which property managers subscribe to, which reports on 
evictions everywhere. So if you've been evicted in one region of the 
country you're poison all over.


It may be the right issue at the right time. It feeds into people's 
growing sense of insecurity and injustice, a great preponderance of new 
jobs being part-time, low-end, temporary, without benefits, and it just 
might contribute to a sense of our common identity. Especially to 
younger workers, those most closely affected, who have as a cohort been 
reluctant and largely cynical about prospects of resistance, for too long.




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Re: [Marxism] Blow to Amazon as Seattle socialist looks to have triumphed in key vote | US news | The Guardian

2019-11-10 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/09/seattle-amazon-kshama-sawant-socialist-elections

Interesting that one of the primary issues in this race was Sawant's 
full-on leadership in the fight for a head tax, a tax which would have 
funded public housing in a city with the third largest homeless 
population in the nation (after NYC and LA), a per-employee tax on large 
corporations which would have come down on Amazon in particular. 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/05/amazon-seattle-councilwoman-kshama-sawant-re-election-bid.


So Jeff Bezos threatens to take his company, which has a virtual 
lock-down and concentration of power in the retail online shopping 
business, out of Seattle and let Seattle voters stew in their Commie 
juices. We'll see a lot of that, I'd think, and the interesting thing 
here is that it's so transparent - if the media play it at all.


Homelessness may finally become an issue that can no longer be ignored, 
with real estate billionaire Trump entering with club feet and 
advocating the equivalent of confinement in 19th century poor houses in 
LA, in the context of housing shortage, rising rental prices and real 
estate wealth, evictions, especially of homeless single mothers with 
"bothersome" children who are the main victims in this. There is a 
national reporting agency, according to Matt Desmond in his book 
"Evicted", which property managers subscribe to, which reports on 
evictions everywhere. So if you've been evicted in one region of the 
country you're poison all over.


It may be the right issue at the right time. It feeds into people's 
growing sense of insecurity and injustice, a great preponderance of new 
jobs being part-time, low-end, temporary, without benefits, and it just 
might contribute to a sense of our common identity. Especially to 
younger workers, those most closely affected, who have as a cohort been 
reluctant and largely cynical about prospects of resistance, for too long.


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[Marxism] Paul Jay and Sharmini Peries Ousted from The Real News Network in June; Current Fundraiser Hides that Fact; Falling Viewership and Liberal Turn Result

2019-11-08 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://tinyurl.com/yytpqm3b

"I got this reply less than 24 hours later, from t...@therealnews.com 
headed “Your email:


Hi Ms. Webber –
Thank you for your note and request for information about the 
whereabouts of Paul Jay and Sharmini Peries.


Paul and Sharmini were on leave over the summer and subsequently left 
the organization, and are in conversations with the TRNN Board about 
finalizing the terms of their departure. Unfortunately we haven’t been 
able to comment while that process is underway.


The Board is in the process of launching a search for their successors.

All the best, and thank you for your support

Tom Livingston"

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[Marxism] Julian Assange’s Extradition Process Is ‘A Charade’

2019-11-05 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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"...so many human rights groups are deeply political, Amnesty 
International never made Chelsea Manning a prisoner of conscience. A 
really disgraceful thing. Chelsea Manning, who was effectively tortured 
in prison, and they haven’t, as you say, they haven’t elevated Julian’s 
case. Why? Well, they’re an extension. They’re an extension of an 
establishment that is now almost systematically coming down on any form 
of real dissent. In the last five, six years, the last gaps, the last 
bolt holes, the last spaces in the mainstream media for journalists, 
from average journalists for the likes Assange, not only Assange, for 
the likes of people like even myself and others, have closed.


The mainstream media, certainly in Britain, always held open those 
spaces. They’ve closed, and there is generally I would think a fear, 
right throughout the media, a fear about opposing the state on something 
like the Assange case. You see the way the whole obsession with Russia 
has consumed the media with so many nonsensical stories. The hostility, 
the animosity towards Julian. My own theory is that his work shamed so 
many journalists. He does what journalists ought to have done, and don’t 
do any more. He’s done the job of a journalist. That can only explain 
it. I mean when you take a newspaper like The Guardian, which published 
originally the WikiLeaks revelations about Iraq and Afghanistan, they 
turned on Julian Assange in the most vicious way.


They exploited him for one thing. A number of their journalists did 
extremely well with their books, and Hollywood scripts, and so on, but 
they turned on him personally. It was one of the most unedifying sights 
I think I’ve ever seen in journalism. The same thing happened in the New 
York Times. Again, I can only surmise the reason for that. It’s that he 
shames them. We have a desert of journalism at the moment. There are a 
few who still do their jobs; who still stand up against establishment 
power; who still are not frightened. But there’re so few now, and Julian 
Assange is totally fearless in that. He knew that he was going to run 
into a great deal of trouble with the state in Britain, the state in the 
United States–but he went ahead anyway. That’s a true journalist."


Full: 
https://therealnews.com/stories/julian-assange-extradition-process-charade



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[Marxism] Erdogan says he wants nuclear weapons - New York Times

2019-10-21 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Erdogan says he wants nuclear weapons
David E. Sanger and William J. Broad - The New York Times - Sunday, 
October 20, 2019


WASHINGTON — Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants more than 
control over a wide swath of Syria along his country’s border. He says 
he wants the Bomb.
In the weeks leading up to his order to launch the military across the 
border to clear Kurdish areas, Mr. Erdogan made no secret of his larger 
ambition. “Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads,” he told 
a meeting of his governing party in September. But the West insists “we 
can’t have them,” he said. “This, I cannot accept.”
With Turkey now in open confrontation with its NATO allies, having 
gambled and won a bet that it could conduct a military incursion into 
Syria and get away with it, Mr. Erdogan’s threat takes on new meaning. 
If the United States could not prevent the Turkish leader from routing 
its Kurdish allies, how can it stop him from building a nuclear weapon 
or following Iran in gathering the technology to do so?
It was not the first time Mr. Erdogan has spoken about breaking free of 
the restrictions on countries that have signed the Nuclear 
Nonproliferation Treaty, and no one is quite sure of his true 
intentions. The Turkish autocrat is a master of keeping allies and 
adversaries off balance, as President Trump discovered in the past two 
weeks.
“The Turks have said for years that they will follow what Iran does,” 
said John J. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense who now runs 
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But 
this time is different. Erdogan has just facilitated America’s retreat 
from the region.”
“Maybe, like the Iranians, he needs to show that he is on the two-yard 
line, that he could get a weapon at any moment,” Mr. Hamre said.
If so, he is on his way — with a program more advanced than that of 
Saudi Arabia, but well short of what Iran has assembled. But experts say 
it is doubtful that Mr. Erdogan could put a weapon together in secret. 
And any public move to reach for one would provoke a new crisis: His 
country would become the first NATO member to break out of the treaty 
and independently arm itself with the ultimate weapon.
Already Turkey has the makings of a bomb program: uranium deposits and 
research reactors — and mysterious ties to the nuclear world’s most 
famous black marketeer, Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan. It is also 
building its first big power reactor to generate electricity with 
Russia’s help. That could pose a concern because Mr. Erdogan has not 
said how he would handle its nuclear waste, which could provide the fuel 
for a weapon. Russia also built Iran’s Bushehr reactor.
Experts said it would take a number of years for Turkey to get to a 
weapon, unless Mr. Erdogan bought one. And the risk for Mr. Erdogan 
would be considerable.
“Erdogan is playing to an anti-American domestic audience with his 
nuclear rhetoric, but is highly unlikely to pursue nuclear weapons,” 
said Jessica C. Varnum, an expert on Turkey at Middlebury’s James Martin 
Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. “There would be 
huge economic and reputational costs to Turkey, which would hurt the 
pocketbooks of Erdogan’s voters.”

“For Erdogan,” Ms. Varnum said, “that strikes me as a bridge too far.”
There is another element to this ambiguous atomic mix: The presence of 
roughly 50 American nuclear weapons, stored on Turkish soil. The United 
States had never openly acknowledged their existence, until Wednesday, 
when Mr. Trump did exactly that.
Asked about the safety of those weapons, kept in an American-controlled 
bunker at Incirlik Air Base, Mr. Trump said, “We’re confident, and we 
have a great air base there, a very powerful air base.”
But not everyone is so confident, because the air base belongs to the 
Turkish government. If relations with Turkey deteriorated, the American 
access to that base is not assured.
Turkey has been a base for American nuclear weapons for more than six 
decades. Initially, they were intended to deter the Soviet Union, and 
were famously a negotiating chip in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile 
Crisis, when President John F. Kennedy secretly agreed to remove 
missiles from Turkey in return for Moscow doing the same in Cuba.
But tactical weapons have remained. Over the years, American officials 
have often expressed nervousness about the weapons, which have little to 
no strategic use versus Russia now, but have been part of a NATO 
strategy to keep regional players in check — and keep Turkey from 
feeling the need for a bomb of its own.
When Mr. Erdogan put down an attempted military

[Marxism] Will Trump Be Removed from Office? Elizabeth Drew

2019-10-20 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://tinyurl.com/y2hggm8k

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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] 10-19-19 Opinion: Watch Senate Republicans. They might reach the point of no return - Washington Post

2019-10-19 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Correction: conviction, not impeachment (simple majority), of the 
president requires at least two-thirds of the Senate, or 67 members.


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[Marxism] 10-19-19 Opinion: Watch Senate Republicans. They might reach the point of no return - Washington Post

2019-10-19 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Opinion: Watch Senate Republicans. They might reach point of no return.
Jennifer Rubin - The Washington Post - Friday, October 18, 2019

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) responded to acting White House chief of 
staff Mick Mulvaney’s confession that Ukrainian aid was held up until 
the Ukrainian government would help him prove his cock-and-bull story 
about the Democratic National Committee server and find dirt for him on 
former vice president Joe Biden.


“Yes, absolutely that’s a concern,” Murkowski said. "You don’t hold up 
foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political 
initiative. Period.”


This suggests that a certain type of Republican (one with a modicum of 
independence, a smidgen of patriotism and/or a healthy survival 
instinct) might reach the point of no return based on Mulvaney’s 
confession and Trump’s comment in his July 25 call (he needed “a favor 
though," he told the Ukrainian president). With a stream of mid-level 
career civil servants available to attest to the holdup in aid — despite 
Mulvaney’s attempt to walk back his confession later — there can be 
little doubt of a quid pro quo, otherwise known as an extortion attempt 
by President Trump to use government funds to attain personal political 
advantage.


How many Mitt Romneys and Lisa Murkowskis are out there? Well, let’s 
look at some polling. Morning Consult finds that “Republicans 
representing Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Maine and Iowa all saw 
their net approval — the share of voters who approve of a senator’s job 
performance minus the share who disapprove — decline between the second 
and third quarters of 2019.” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Cory Gardner 
(R-Colo.), who could not manage to tell us whether it is wrong for the 
president to enlist a foreign government to influence our elections, are 
down 9 points and 3 points, respectively.


Ernst is in particular trouble. “The slide places her underwater with 
Iowa voters (39 percent approve and 43 percent disapprove) for the first 
time and among the 10 most unpopular senators in the country,” the polls 
found. “Iowa voters of all partisan leanings soured on the first-term 
senator, but GOP voters were most likely to take a dimmer view of her 
job performance. Her net approval dropped by 13 points among 
Republicans, compared with respective 9- and 7-point drops among 
Democrats and independents.” Uh-oh.


Ernst is not alone. “Ernst is not the only Republican up for re-election 
next year with a home-state approval below 40 percent: Among the 
vulnerable incumbents, Martha McSally of Arizona, Cory Gardner of 
Colorado and Thom Tillis of North Carolina are all below that threshold 
following a quarter where each saw little movement.”


Meanwhile, vulnerable Democratic incumbents are rising in polls. Sens. 
Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Doug Jones (D-Ala.) are up 1 points and 3 
points, respectively. If these sort of numbers persist, or get even 
worse for Republicans, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will lose his majority.


McConnell, infamous for his shameless, ice-water-in-his-veins brand of 
politics, will do whatever he must to save his members. If that means 
shoving Trump off-stage, he will gladly do it. (Notice his especially 
tough condemnation of Trump’s Syria debacle.)


A mound of evidence of plainly impeachable conduct. A GOP majority at 
risk. One could reasonably expect to see indications that a significant 
number of Republican senators would kick Trump to the curb to save their 
own necks and the GOP Senate majority. The game of chicken (“Resign, or 
we vote to remove you!”) might begin in earnest. Alternatively, Trump 
could decide that he has accomplished more in three years than any other 
president accomplished in eight (the best ever!). Why not retire early, 
grab a pardon from Mike Pence and spend all his time golfing? It is not 
as far-fetched as it used to be.



"Ppoint of no return." Maybe so, but the numbers aren't stated here - 
it'd take 20 Republicans (with 45 Dems plus 2 Independents) to impeach. 
And it depends on how rational Trump is as it plays out, a real unknown. 
Could he grow cold feet and resign with compromise agreement not to 
prosecute him and his family? As did Nixon? One thing, since Nixon the 
political climate has grown more cynical and as apathy has grown the bar 
for conduct in office seems much lower, while Trump appears to thrive on 
risk and the thrill of it all, and is in many ways a one-off. More tea 
leaves but not much more probability.



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[Marxism] Donald Trump’s sanity is not the question. The real issue is how he got into office - The Guardian

2019-10-18 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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“The great man of the age,” wrote Friedrich Hegel – using “great” to 
mean powerful rather than wonderful – “is the one who can put into words 
the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. 
What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualises his age.”


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/18/donald-trump-sanity-free-market-white-supremacist-nationalism


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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Re: Brief Reflection on Trump?s Impeachment By Roberto Savio

2019-10-17 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Opinion: Don’t Be Surprised If Trump Is Never Impeached
David Marcus - The Federalist - Thursday, October 17, 2019

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of 
Representatives would not move forward with a vote on impeachment any 
time soon. The statement comes as a month of pressure has built up 
behind efforts to unseat the president over a phone call with the 
Ukrainian president. While Democrats insist, contrary to precedent, that 
they do not need to hold a vote, their unwillingness to hold one may 
show the impeachment train is skidding off the tracks.


In the giddy early days of the “impeachment investigation” over Ukraine, 
Democrats saw the polls move in their direction. But those polls have 
now stabilized and in some cases crept back against impeachment. Even at 
the peak, impeaching and removing the president was only popular among 
those who already opposed the president.


So as the groundswell subsides, could Democrats really reverse course 
and abandon an impeachment that just last week seemed imminent? 
Surprisingly, yes, they could.


The central thing to consider here is that impeachment is a political, 
not a legal, process. Despite their insistence that there are plenty of 
reasons to impeach Trump, Democrats have yet to do so. Why not? It seems 
clear that they do not believe they have sufficient political support in 
the country for the move. Not only do they risk infuriating Trump’s 
base, there are also many independent voters who seem to have little 
interest in this process.


Along with this, consider that when and if the House Democrats ever 
actually hold a vote on impeachment, which could leave incumbents in 
purple seats vulnerable, the ball will move into the Senate’s court and 
Pelosi and the House will have no more control over it. That’s a very 
big deal, because from the day they took over the House the Democrats 
have been able to frustrate Trump with impeachment talk any time they 
want to step on his initiatives or triumphs. Once a vote is held, that 
is over.


Put simply, the build up to impeachment is much more politically 
valuable to Democrats than impeachment itself. An actual vote to impeach 
Trump puts the story out of their hands and into Senate Majority Leader 
Mitch McConnell’s. He could choose, like a cat playing with a soon-dead 
mouse, to drag the inevitable acquittal of Trump out as long as he 
wants. Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party, including its eventual 
nominee for president, will be demanding a Senate conviction that won’t 
happen.


Instead, Senate Republicans and Trump himself would use the Senate trial 
as an opportunity to prove that this has all been a witch-hunt. They 
would argue that, after the special counsel investigation, once promised 
to be Trump’s Waterloo, failed, the floundering Party of Jefferson and 
Jackson found a second-rate scandal to hang impeachment. Yet it isn’t 
any kind of crime or misdemeanor, high or otherwise.


An eventual Trump victory in a Senate trial, whenever it comes, perhaps 
leading into his convention for example, will be used by the president 
to proclaim total exoneration. “Not guilty!” he will insist. “Proof of 
the witch hunt!” He'd take victory laps that would put Mario Andretti to 
shame. And what can the House Democrats say when that happens? That they 
knew it would happen? That it was inevitable with a GOP majority in the 
Senate? Well, if so, why did they engage in this farce to begin with?


No. Today the inevitable is starting to seem far less likely. The pros 
of formally impeaching the president are a molehill next the mountain of 
cons. If they finish their process, impeach, and yield to the Senate, 
they become irrelevant. Their constant yammering about wrongdoing turns 
into a legal process where facts will be demanded and the president will 
walk free.


Anyone paying attention knows this is what Pelosi has feared from day 
one, and with good reason. Her far-left caucus has been goading her, as 
has the president, into an informal impeachment, and she clearly still 
does not want it. She is wise not to.


There is one more issue here: the media. Won’t the leftist press be 
outraged if once again the House Democrats demur on impeachment? No, 
they won’t. As always, they will call the move brave and wise, and laud 
Pelosi for keeping the House the narrator of the White House story with 
forever investigations instead of handing that story to the Senate. 
Nothing ventured, something gained, the stories will say.


The bottom line is this. Once the gavel falls on an actual impeachment, 
the House, the only chamber the Democrats hold, becomes

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Re: Brief Reflection on Trump?s Impeachment By Roberto Savio

2019-10-15 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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It is soon before the fact. It's more like reading tea leaves at this 
premature point. But just for the sake of argument, I recall that Trump 
was down and out in polls assessing the popular vote last time around, 
but they had it wrong. 'Class dynamics' did not prevail over media and 
electoral savvy, and he has part of the ruling class, at least and 
possibly a preponderance, going along with him, especially if he shows 
promise of leading the Republicans into majorities in Congress. Without 
some countering crisis, always. With that in mind and no alternative 
strong candidate in the wings for them, with their ability to twist 
rules and procedure, McConnell, Graham and House Republican counterparts 
may well be effective in shutting off and damping criticism as partisan 
and distorted. The Democratic-led House placing disproportionate 
emphasis on Ukraine and China, or maybe even finances and emoluments 
seems like a loser for a 2/3 majority to impeach, and so what else? No 
prospects for 29th amendment. Proof of incompetence to voter and 
Senate-majority satisfaction? Pence as alternative? Rock and a hard place.


And given his demonstrated capacity to manipulate and virtually command 
a generally hostile msm, the blowback and his declaration of victory and 
cleanliness with an unsuccessful attempt to impeach him has to be factored.


Moreover, as to his 'demented' condition, that may be but with all his 
practice on his tv show he plays on that quality of sarcastic, outraged, 
zany, off-the-prompter unpredictability quite effectively. Watch that 
speech in Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/yxvc4ncj; it's the first time 
I have watched all the way through a Trump rally. There's a woman in 
about the third row on his left, looks like just out of a tanning 
parlor. She also looks as though she might be on something 
mind-altering. But she epitomizes to me a Trump supporter: going ape at 
his every exaggerated, distorted, deflecting or untruthful phrase, 
without a critical or reflective cell in her brain. I fear, when the 
frenzy rises near election time, in a severely divided, disaffected 
polity, with an unspoken background elements of class, xenophobia, 
resentment at elitism and lost status driving it, that this is an 
amplifying trend. We know the history of authoritarian rule and the 
irrational and the present course and we should not ignore it.


And the uncertain disarray among the discredited Democrats - they're not 
like the Republicans last time, set to field a runaway candidate, not 
one with appeal to enough of their base, at any rate, out of a pack 
where the leaders, equally divided in preference, are 71, 78 and 79 
(historically, according to Nate Silver, 55 is the median age for 
presidents) with heart problems suddenly on the minds of Democratic 
votersand never mind Trump at 73 with his domination of candidacy and 
his conservative, older, more committed constituency.


I don't have to present as a Cassandra to conclude that we're in dire, 
dangerous straits, regardless of the outcome of all of this, given the 
larger picture and all that is coming at us - and the absence of 
visible, viable alternatives. So what of that?


https://www.other-news.info/2019/10/brief-reflection-on-trumps-impeachment/


On 10/14/2019 8:30 PM, Michael Meeropol wrote:
Some people are worried that the promise of a civil war may become a 
reality --- the democratic majority (especially if the election is 
close in some key states) will have to rely on the "discipline" of the 
police forces and the military -- especially the hierarchy --- Granted 
the military hierarchy will stick with the ruling class -- but there 
could be SERIOUS civil disorders by the "militias" and who knows where 
the local police forces will be -- (throw in ICE agents who are BIG 
supporters of Trump as well as the military folks who have been 
brainwashed) --- I do believe that unless there is very successful 
voter suppression, that the Dems will pull it out -- BUT -- it will 
depend on the Obama coalition coming out to vote ---



:I do not agree with this article. I don’t think it’s a good analysis. 
Firstof all, the author completely fails to understand what’s really 
at work inthese proceedings, which is another way of saying he ignores 
the classdynamics. In my opinion, the mainstream of the capitalist 
class has finallydecided that it cannot allow a demented (seriously) 
person to continue hisdrive for one man rule unchecked. In his Ukraine 
actions, Trump showed thathe was going to do whatever it took to 
continue down that path for anotherfour years. His Syria blunder 
“worse than a crime - a mistake”

[Marxism] Brief Reflection on Trump’s Impeachment by an informed outsider

2019-10-13 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Brief Reflection on Trump’s Impeachment
By Roberto Savio
https://www.other-news.info/2019/10/brief-reflection-on-trumps-impeachment/

Good analysis by an Italian-Argentinean who stands outside of US 
politics but appears to know the inside well. He is the Director for 
international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.


To sum up his argument, he thinks it's very likely that the idea of 
impeaching Donald Trump will boomerang; his support for that view seems 
cogent.


He notes that Trump fans are listening to a furious campaign which 
smacks of coup d’etat, calling the accusers traitors who deserve to go 
to jail. Watch for example his speech in Minneapolis on Friday, typical 
of his results and revealing in the call and response 
https://tinyurl.com/yxvc4ncj. Think in listening about his mentor Roy 
Cohn's stratagem: 1) never acknowledge wrongdoing, 2) always 
counterattack, 3) even if called out successfully, declare victory, and 
4) rely on constituents' short memories.


Savio observes that within 3 hours of Pelosi's declaration that an 
impeachment process would be launched, Trump received $1 million 
dollars, $5 million in 24 hours, and $8.5 million in two days, as well 
as 50,000 new donors. He connects the success of Trump's team strategy 
in part to the fact that, for historical reasons related to how the 
Union was created, the less populated and less developed states have 
proportionately more delegates than the large and wealthy states, and 
that Trump ran his campaign in these less developed and less populous 
states, ignoring big cities and more populous states,


He thinks that the Democrats have done Trump a great favour in the 
impeachment effort - that even if impeachment passes in the House with 
its Democratic majority, there's very little chance it passes in the 
Senate where, again for historical reasons linked to the creation of the 
union, each state has 2 senators, regardless of population, that Wyoming 
with 578,000 inhabitants has 2 senators as does California, with 37.2 
million people. He cites the obvious fact that less developed states, 
those with smaller populations, enable the Republican majority in the 
Senate, and that for the impeachment to be successful, a 2/3  senatorial 
majority is needed, a highly unlikely occurrence.


He notes that much will depend on who the Democratic candidate will be, 
that demonising Joe Biden will have impact, and that the "progressive" 
Sanders and Warren seem too elitist to Trump supporters, who are from 
very conservative regions, where Trump has the unconditional support of 
Catholics and of the 40 million-strong Evangelical Church parishioners.


He factors in the possible game-changer of an economic crisis, since 
Americans traditionally vote with their pockets; but that otherwise, 90% 
of Republican voters – as well as his Congressional support – remain loyal.


He notes the fragility of democracy, when it is based on non-democratic 
rules, and among other examples how the Supreme Court with a Republican 
majority changes the American legal system considerably; that capitalist 
democracy functions effectively if it has laws that guarantee the 
balance of power and if there is a conscious and interested citizenry in 
the common good, which is not divided as it now is in a partisan way, 
where the other is considered the enemy and not as people with different 
ideas.


As case in point, he notes that Viktor Orban, after being democratically 
elected, developed a xenophobic policy against migrants, carried out 
tight control of the press, the National Election Commission and the 
judiciary, enriched his faithful with funds from the EU, changed the 
entire electoral system, accommodating it to his party and then declared 
himself follower of an illiberal democracy.


Similarly, he notes Hitler and Mussolini, who came to power in a 
democratic way and then eliminated democracy by identifying an enemy of 
the people, in whose name they said they spoke: Jewish power - as today 
the main targets of the populist and xenophobic right for raising its 
electoral quotas are immigrants - and how Brexit was largely due to the 
announced arrival of millions of Turks, who were not even in the 
European Union, analogous to how Trump made the Mexican and Central 
American “invasion” the strong point of his defence of the American 
people, along with the Chinese threat. If the voter swallows these 
mythologies, he thinks democracy is certainly in danger, and he sees 
Trump and Johnson as just the tip of the iceberg.


And of course, if and when impeachment fails and especially if the 
Democrats again fail to

Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Country Music | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2019-10-12 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

Many people associate country music with those whom Hillary Clinton 
called “deplorables” or those Obama characterized as clinging to their 
guns and religion. I felt that way myself until I got to Houston in 1973 
and began listening to country music driving to work each day. This was 
before the two country stations had become commercialized and 
unlistenable just as is the case with NYC’s WNSH (as in Nashville). You 
could hear Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Loretta Lynn, and even 
classics from Hank Williams in each and every hour. It also helped that 
my best friend in Houston, the late Nelson Blackstock, was an avid 
country music fan with a large collection. The two of us used to go hear 
Asleep at the Wheel whenever they were in town. This was a Western Swing 
band that played in the style of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. It 
was led by Ray Benson, a Jew from Philadelphia who Nelson adored.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/10/12/country-music/

“If it sounds good, it IS good.”
--Duke Ellington

That's how I feel about country music. I didn't like country music when 
I was growing up in the Midwest. I associated it with bad hooch, 
roadside joints and mean-spirited, red-eyed drunks. When I got to 
California in the 50s, I heard the Alabama group Mattox Brothers and 
Rose performing "Laid Around and Played Around This Old Town Too Long' 
and the for its time risque 'Sally Let Your Bangs Hang Down', then 
Lester Flatt and the incomparable Earl Scruggs on banjo, the blind Doc 
Watson in Ashland, OR in one of the most eerie cloudbursts I've ever 
been in, then the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's double album 'Will the Circle 
be Unbroken' with gracious old Mother Maybelle Carter, A.P. Carter's 
wife and June Carter's mother, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Earl Scruggs, 
Vassar Clements and Roy Acuff. I had been listening mainly to jazz and 
baroque and other classics, but I decided this too was really good 
music, as was and is a lot of reggae, rock, old and new ballads and rap. 
While much of any original music type, given the nature of the business 
rapidly becomes commercial and vapidly routinized, in every genre 
somebody always comes along who's doing it right. So Duke, yeah.




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[Marxism] Harvard law professor: Trump civil war tweet impeachable on its own

2019-09-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://tinyurl.com/y6j8k8cs

The "then what" question answers itself. If this is piled onto the 
articles of impeachment it at least is another bow in the quiver against 
Trump in the election.


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Re: [Marxism] Greta Thunberg, AOC and the Green New Deal - Climate and the Money Trail

2019-09-28 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

On 9/28/19 5:05 PM, Ralph Johansen wrote:

 *

   There are highly paid policy wonks and apologists for
   capital in think tanks and right wing funded foundations,
   those with control of the media, the IMF, World Bank, EU and
   transnational capitalist agencies all over the capitalist
   world, some of whom no longer think denial is going to get
   it - the evidence is too palpable - and they are instead
   pondering how they can divert attention and attack from
   those with the real power, the real culprits, corporate
   perpetrators of climate destruction, Syngenta, Monsanto,
   Cargill, ADM, Dupont, the oil and gas and transport.
   banking, industrial and commercial and distributional
   factions who know that it's either growth or death for
   capitalism, to government epigones in the process who are
   hopelessly bought and kept in place by their corporate
   sponsors. Including Democrats, those who would reform
   capitalism to save us all as well like the current pack of
   presidential candidates.



   I don't give a good god-damn if Goldman-Sachs makes billions
   from investments in windmills, solar panels and all the rest. We
   have a situation now where Yupiks in Nome are having their lives
   destroyed because the ice is disappearing--as I pointed out in
   an earlier post today.

   I have a different take on this stuff than A. O-C, Greta
   Thunberg, Bill McKibben and even Naomi Klein. I think that we
   are headed toward massive crises because neither wing of the
   capitalist class is capable of what they call "de-growth". You
   have an enormous contradiction between the 500 years of
   capitalist accumulation tendencies and the needs of the human
   race to survive in harmony with nature. As the century staggers
   on, there will be bloody confrontations between the capitalist
   class and ordinary people over these matters. Right now, people
   are fleeing Central America not just because of gangs but
   because climate change is making farming impossible.

   Against this major confrontation, we are faced with clashes
   within capitalism that we have to take a proper stand on. The
   Paris Accords were woefully lacking but we have to speak out in
   favor of enforcing them even if that puts on the same side as
   Goldman-Sachs. Wildlife preservation and many other aspects of
   life on earth need defending. It is only the class-conscious
   vanguard of the ecosocialist movement that can be consistent in
   such a struggle, not Goldman-Sachs.

   As for Engdahl and Cartalucci, these are supporters of the most
   reactionary sectors of the petrochemical industry. They are like
   Spiked Online and all the other snakes who take money from the
   Koch brothers. I don't need them to tell me that Goldman-Sachs
   is against socialism. I worked there for over 2 years and don't
   need Larouche's stooges to educate me on that. 
   


Lou, how could I not agree with everything you're saying? Just 
acknowledge that we have to confront the fact that what these 
conspiracists write here has substance in part, that enormously powerful 
people have the means and every design, not just to profit from 
windmills but to seize the issue of climate disaster and run with it in 
directions that will mean still more years of evasion, run-away 
profit-taking, increasing inequality and confusion, untold suffering for 
most of us, irreversible destruction of our planet, buttressing of 
capital as solution or only alternative, more of the "lesser evil," more 
delay in tackling the real problem, exacerbation of these enormous 
contradictions, and that we're kind of facing a diversion point that we 
should be very wary of, chilled by, cataclysmally frightened about. Then 
this discussion is put to rest, to that extent.



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Re: [Marxism] Greta Thunberg, AOC and the Green New Deal - Climate and the Money Trail

2019-09-28 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Tony Tracy wrote

In an earlier email, Ralph Johansen wrote:


https://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-money-trail/5690209


The link that he posted from longtime Canadian conspiracist website 
“Global Research” was to an article written by longtime Larouchite F. 
William Engdahl [they had reprinted the article from a website called 
/“New Eastern Outlook.” , /which from a 
cursory look seems unexceptionable   rj]./

/

Engdahl is has been part of Lyndon Larouche’s conspiracist cult for many 
years, and has been frequently published by Larouchite publications such 
as the “Executive Intelligence Review”.


Engdahl is also a global warming denialist 
; according to 
Engdahl, global warming, like peak oil, is merely a “scare” and a 
“thinly veiled attempt to misuse climate to argue for a new Malthusian 
reduction of living standards for the majority of the world while a tiny 
elite gains more power.”


Neither Engdahl, nor the publisher of this article (“Global Research”) 
are credible sources on either climate change, economics, or anything else.


I’m appalled to see this sort of conspiracist still being sent to the 
Marxism email list.


Cheers,

Tony

—
Tony Tracy
*President, IAMAW Local Lodge 3111 CULR*

Phone: 902-223-9489 
Email: presid...@culr1.org  and/or 
t...@tonytracy.ca 


*IAMAW Local Lodge 3111 CULR*
/Canadian Union of Labour Representatives/

*AIMTA Section locale 3111 SCRRS*
/Syndicat canadien de représentantes et représentants syndicaux

/All of which may be perfectly true but is ad hominem attack and doesn't 
deal with the substance of what I sent. While it often makes sense to 
track the messengers to their lairs on the right and therefore shorten 
time and avoid having to deal with what they say, even conspiracists 
manage to be right on some things some of the time, and in those 
respects should not be dismissed or ignored. And what of the other 
article I sent https://tinyurl.com/y6c7ljem?


Greta Thunberg I'm sure has brought a fresh, young element into the 
discussion of global collapse. Same with AOC. They're presence is sorely 
needed. That said, I just don't think It's that simple. There are highly 
paid policy wonks and apologists for capital in think tanks and right 
wing funded foundations, those with control of the media, the IMF, World 
Bank, EU and transnational capitalist agencies all over the capitalist 
world, some of whom no longer think denial is going to get it - the 
evidence is too palpable - and they are instead pondering how they can 
divert attention and attack from those with the real power, the real 
culprits, corporate perpetrators of climate destruction, Syngenta, 
Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, Dupont, the oil and gas and transport. banking, 
industrial and commercial and distributional factions who know that it's 
either growth or death for capitalism, to government epigones in the 
process who are hopelessly bought and kept in place by their corporate 
sponsors. Including Democrats, those who would reform capitalism to save 
us all as well like the current pack of presidential candidates.


Anything but look at the real problem which is the cancerous, moribund 
method of getting out of product which is called capitalism and the 
screaming imperative to kick it all over. So why not if they can swing 
it, foist these youthful enthusiasts on us to lead us in exactly the 
wrong direction, if they'll just hold still long enough to maybe 
haplessly serve as poster children for policy by means of which the 
vitally involved parties can continue to plunder in the name of saving 
the planet and the system - hopeless, obfuscating carbon counting and 
"footprint" mitigation and Green New Dealing, and profit-taking on 
disaster one more time and all at the expense of poor working blokes 
everywhere in the tax and consumer base while the real criminals against 
planet and humanity run with the loot to the Caymans and the Bahamas and 
to underground safe houses. And successfully tout simultaneous 
planet-saving and unlimited growth and capital expansion. Again, as 
Frederic Jameson has it, it's more convenient to maybe even think of the 
end of the world than it is to think of the end of capitalism. And be 
careful what you wish for.



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[Marxism] Greta Thunberg and Big-Biz’ Climate Charade | New Eastern Outlook

2019-09-27 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://tinyurl.com/y6c7ljem

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[Marxism] Greta Thunberg, AOC and the Green New Deal - Climate and the Money Trail

2019-09-27 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-money-trail/5690209

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[Marxism] Tomgram: Michael Klare, A Formula for Catastrophe in the Arctic | TomDispatch

2019-09-12 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176603/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_a_formula_for_catastrophe_in_the_arctic/#more 



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Re: [Marxism] Does capitalism need saving from itself? | Financial Times,

2019-09-07 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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"Subscribe to the FT to read: Financial Times Does capitalism need 
saving from itself?" says FT

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Re: [Marxism] Navigating the Zeitgeist | Socialist Review

2019-09-04 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

One important point to make about Helena Sheehan’s political odyssey — 
from a conservative Catholic upbringing through the radicalism of the US 
left in the 1960s and early 70s, on to Official Sinn Fein and the 
Communist Party of Ireland, and then into the Irish Labour Party — is 
that it demonstrates with crystal clarity the importance of the theory 
of state capitalism for revolutionary politics.

[...]
full: http://socialistreview.org.uk/449/navigating-zeitgeist

Helena Sheehan's earlier book "Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A 
Critical History" is a must-read by a remarkable person, a chronicling 
of the dialectics of nature debate, beginning with Engels and Marx's 
ideas on the developmental history and the structure of natural science. 
Sheehan describes their impact on 20th century historians and 
philosophers of human and other natural sciences. She has chapters on 
the Marxism of the 2d International, that of Russian Marxism and 
pre-revolutionary debates, the debate that took place in the period 
following the October Revolution, and the Dialectics of Nature debate 
during the Comintern period. In the 2017 afterword, when this book 
originally published in 1985 was republished by Verso, among other 
things she discusses the crucial role of Bukharin in the shaping of the 
debates, in works that have subsequently come to light, and Bukharin's 
cri de couer for socialist humanism. Sheehan writes with much feeling 
for Marx's view of science in a "more contextual, sociohistorical" 
context, probing into the role of ideology in relation to science and 
the philosophy of science. She has informative profiles of the major 
discussants in this debate, including not only Engels and materialism 
and dialectics but Liebnecht, Kautsky, Max Adler, the Polish Marxists, 
the Russian Machists , Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Pavlov, Lysenko, 
Lukacs, Korsch and the neo-Hegelian revival, Gramsci, Bernal, JBS 
Haldane, Joseph Needham, Maurice Cornforth, and most interestingly, the 
brilliant flash of intuition and intense study on the part of the 
ill-fated Christopher Caudwell, killed in his first battle encounter in 
Spain, then the Frankfort School, Lefebvre, Brecht, Reich, Hook, Eastman 
and Hermann Muller. A fascinating read, and one which among other things 
prompted in me a new appreciation of the need to jettison the linear in 
favor of a dialectical approach to our most important 
theoretical/practical problems, and not only in science - an immense but 
essential task.


In her new book among other topics she tells the story about writing 
this book and the political climate in which she conducted her research 
in the International Lenin School in Moscow.

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[Marxism] Reflections on the Start of World War II, Sep 1 1939

2019-09-02 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/01/re-reflections-start-world-war-ii

Auden's remarkable poem on the occasion

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939


www.michaelmunk.com 
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Re: [Marxism] 44 percent of workers in Brandenburg voted AfD yesterday

2019-09-02 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Angelus Novus wrote

Interesting breakdown by social class:
https://twitter.com/formelfriedrich/status/1168402855880994816
In confronting the rise of authoritarian far-right populism, Marxists 
should really re-think the old Trotskyist shibboleths about fascism 
being a primarily petit-bourgeois or "Bonapartist" phenomenon.  It's 
pretty clear that the new far-right has a substantial proletarian base.


Oh wow. So many questions. How far do we have to reach to understand a 
trend such as this, which becomes general and undeniable in the west, no 
matter how you parse class, it seems. Why is the left so weak? Are we in 
abject denial about that? There is nothing in the recent history of the 
left, as presently perceived, to give the working class any real hope in 
a socialist direction. Social democracy, top-down authoritarianism in 
left history and experience, euro-communism and the communism of the 
USSR and eastern Europe, the experience of Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, 
Chile, Portugal, and failed left-Bonapartism in Venezuela, the general 
failure of socialism in one country, now approaching in Cuba, as in 
North Korea in the face of China's trajectory, China's turn toward 
capitalist authoritarian government, and its success for some and for 
how long, as AI proceeds and resource wars and chaos kick in. The 
absence of a viable vision for the working class among Marxists. And the 
effects of nationalism-chauvinism-racism-immigrant-bashing-patriarchy in 
a fractured capitalist society and culture. Where the existing shallow 
version of capitalist governance is no longer serving the interests of 
the majority of workers and supporting their hopes for their life 
chances, as that burgeoning, dynamic system has in the recent past, and 
the vaguest promise on the right is the only alternative left to so many 
- for now. We know we're in deep doodoo, and we can see only faint, 
flickering embers in movements of protest around the world right now. We 
aren't really reaching effectively for underlying conditions producing 
that turn to the authoritarian right. And what we can do once we 
understand that. Where there is no vision the people perish., and yet 
never more needed, in a time of powerful waning-systemic centrifugal 
forces moving us closer to annihilation, and the irreversible effects of 
the past 200 years of capitalist surge on climate.


The surprise remaining may be due to the shallow nature of working class 
support for capitalism and its very evident lack of direction or 
program, and the coming economic (and environmental) collapse, which on 
the basis of past periodic recurrence of panic is overdue. Can we 
somehow come through the gathering storm without nuclear holocaust? Have 
contradictions in the system reached the point of impasse? Can 
capitalism find its way through, overcome yet another set of barriers 
and find its legs again? If not, socialism has an opening - if theory, 
from the working class itself, informs practice with a credible program 
and an awakened leadership. The working class appears to have come a 
long way on that path so far, in many vital respects, and has much 
experience to build on and lessons to be
well-learned from. As communication, coordination and combination have 
become global for capitalist production, that is also true, potentially, 
for its adversary as well, renewing hope for solidarity. The challenge 
and the trend in the wrong direction seem insuperable, if we lose sight 
of our already amply demonstrated, potential collective genius and 
power, and build on it.

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[Marxism] Capital has an Internationale and it is going fascist: time for an international of the global popular classes, William I. Robinson

2019-08-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Capital has an Internationale and it is going fascist: time for an 
international of the global popular classes

William I. Robinson
https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2019.1654706

Published online: 27 Aug 2019.S

William I. Robinson, Department of Sociology, University of California 
at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA


ABSTRACT

Global capitalism is approaching a general crisis of capitalist rule. It 
is urgent to renovate a popular revolutionary project and refound the 
state if we are to combat the onslaught of the neo-fascist right. Amin’s 
call for a new Internationale is a timely move in that direction, 
notwithstanding the many challenges of organizing such an 
Internationale. Developing an umbrella program must engage political and 
theoretical debate on the nature of the new global capitalism, learn 
from the failures of Syriza in Greece and the Pink Tide in Latin 
America, and reconceive the three-way relationship between states,  
parties, and social movements.  The  downward  mobility  and 
destabilization of working classes in the former First World and the 
destruction of the old labor aristocracies provides the recruiting 
grounds for 21st century fascism but also new opportunities for 
transnational North-South solidarities. A new Internationale must 
identify and prioritize the class antagonisms within and across 
countries and regions over core-periphery or Global North-South 
contradictions.


Full at https://tinyurl.com/yxdaug7p
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[Marxism] Reminder: DNC Lawyers to Court, "We Do Not Owe Voters an 'Impartial' or 'Evenhanded' Primary Election" | naked capitalism

2019-08-30 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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natch, who said life is fair? Now vote for our anointed candidate and STFUp.
https://tinyurl.com/y3jdp7cm
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Re: [Marxism] C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.

2019-08-21 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

Louis Proyect wrote

NY Times, Aug. 21, 2019
C.E.O.s Should Fear a Recession. It Could Mean Revolution.
By Farhad Manjoo

This is the extent of what NYT views as the limits of a "revolution":
"the [Business] Roundtable’s empty statement could be read as an effort
to stave off structural economic reform rather than accelerate
ittheir statement lacks any call for greater structural changes in
the American economy — changes to how companies are taxed or regulated,
or how executives are paid, or how they should be judged."

And the same day from Dahr Jamail comes this
https://truthout.org/articles/living-in-two-worlds-capitalism-pretends-all-is-well-while-the-world-is-burning/:

"Global capitalism demands we pretend all is well, while climate and
political realities already reveal the end game we are living in. The
U.S. government, along with many others in the western world, has
lurched into overt authoritarianism, while climate chaos accelerates at
a breakneck pace...Those of us who are lucky enough to be living
somewhere in the world where there is enough food to eat, water to
drink, and security for us and our loved ones, are living in a bubble...
Fagre told me he didn’t expect there to be any more glaciers in Glacier
National Park by 2030, and likely none anywhere in the lower 48 states
by 2100...The pain of existing in this evaporating world intensifies
against the backdrop of the rise of authoritarianism across much of the
western world, the daily increasing wealth disparity between the
grotesquely rich and the poverty-stricken, worsening racism, sexism,
mass shootings, misogyny, xenophobia, and mounting pressure from the
global refugee crisis...I find that remembering to find gratitude for
even the smallest things helps: having clean water to drink, fresh air
to breathe, food to eat when I am hungry, and my physical and mental
health...He already knew of the climate crisis, yet asked me to fill in
the details. Over the days of our time together in the backcountry, I
walked him through my findings from the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon
and Alaskan glaciers. I told him of my time in Utqiagvik (formerly
Barrow) Alaska studying the thawing permafrost and venting methane, and
of the rising seas in South Florida, and how even the sturdy giant
Sequoia trees are under threat. I told him how much of a privilege it
was for me to get to go see these places, and how I used the opportunity
to say goodbye to many of them, which I expect will likely be gone
within my lifetime, and certainly within his."

Back to my immediate reality: Monday we saw our adopted 19-year old
daughter back off to college. She has fallen seriously in performing to
her potential. She had crashed and burned in her second semester,
unknown to us, even though she has an ACT score in the 99th percentile
and is a gifted autistic phenomenon, in my judgment. She has been placed
on academic probation. She may lose all her scholarship, tuition and
stipend benefits. She tells me that she has no motivation. She has
talked of suicide. She has read everything about what's happening to the
climate and in our authoritarian-bound Trump world. She declares herself
a socialist, but she feels all hope is lost. Over the summer we have
tried everything to help with her motivation. We have connected her with
a hands-on adviser and a mentor at her school, having last year joined
her with what disability help and psychological counseling is available
to autistically challenged students - to little or no avail. I have
talked with her about never giving up, fighting the power, asking if it
isn't arrogant and senseless to say that you in your vaunted 19-year
experience have the judgment to declare that all is lost. I sent her an
e-mail the other day about her favorite (despite my explanations about
quadrennial lesser-evil illusions in the Democratic Party, not excluding
the Bernie, and my many friends who 11 years ago were misty-eyed,
literally, over the coming of Obama) Elizabeth Warren declaring that she
is "capitalist to my bones" and reportedly standing and applauding when
Trump in his 2019 SOTU address challenged Congress to never allow
socialism in the US. Sam came to me crying. She is a dear, sweet,
well-liked and well-intentioned person with a lot of the kind of promise
it takes.

I had described to her how in order to change anything at all, certainly
capitalism, you had to thoroughly understand it, and I had recommended
as the obvious starting point reading Marx's 3 volumes of Capital, that
I knew

[Marxism] Fwd: [pen-l] Paul Buhle on Sanders and socialism - GreenLeftTV Aug 12, 2019

2019-08-13 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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 Excuse me, should read Paul Le Blanc on Sanders and socialism


 Forwarded Message 
Subject: 	[pen-l] Paul Buhle on Sanders and socialism - GreenLeftTV Aug 
12, 2019

Date:   Tue, 13 Aug 2019 14:15:51 -0700
From:   Ralph Johansen 
To: 	pe...@mail.csuchico.edu , 
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu




https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8W1PDkZhEDTV9H31hwJQqQ

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[Marxism] Paul Buhle on Sanders and socialism - GreenLeftTV Aug 12, 2019

2019-08-13 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8W1PDkZhEDTV9H31hwJQqQ
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[Marxism] Re ZCommunications » The Global Currency War Has Begun

2019-08-05 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

Over this weekend, China’s Yuan currency broke out of its band and 
devalued to more than 7 to $1. At the same time China announced it would 
not purchase more US agricultural goods. The Trump-US Neocon trade 
strategy has just imploded. As this writer has been predicting, the 
threshold has now been passed, from a tariff-trade war to a broader 
economic war between the US and China where other tactics and measures 
are now being implemented.


https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-global-currency-war-has-begun/

What appears to me to be missing in Rasmus's analysis is emphasis on the 
effect on exchange rates of the fact that the US is no longer 
competitive, against China especially, in the global market. And that is 
not going away, whatever happens to the world economy generally. US 
policy has no answer to that, except to accuse China of manipulating the 
exchange rate, unfairly, and purloining trade secrets and innovative 
technology. This won't get them a plug nickel.


It seems reasonable that shifting exchange rates are not so much a 
result of tactical manipulation of that rate as they are of the shift in 
the relative accretion of surplus value, and what it does to global 
competitive position over all. Capital will flow where the return on 
capital investment is expected to be highest, and that is foreordained 
by the never-ending savage competition by different nation-state-based 
transnational corporations for market share which pervades global trade. 
This information should be front and center when we on the left consider 
geopolitics and investment strategy.


To extract from foreign-based capital generally as a condition of 
sharing in domestic production, venture capital and markets the 
concession that they also share the trade advantages and innovative tech 
and organizing tactics that go along with that cooperation is to be 
expected.


Competition in capitalism always has been a no-holds-barred war for 
competitive advantage, literally by any means necessary, as Anwar Shaikh 
says, including stealth-stealing of technology documentation and burning 
down the warehouse, or prolonged proxy-conducted and direct military 
conflict, So nothing new here.


So with the "broader economic war between the US and China where other 
tactics and measures are now being implemented."


We on the historical-materialist, socialist left should, by the way, in 
order to get the longer view be studying the financial and business 
literature, WSJ, NYT Financial, Harvard Business Review, Barron's, 
Bloomberg, IMF, World Bank and BIS reports, what capitalists want to 
know, as much as or more than the surface appearances in the daily msm. 
What do we think got Marx so far ahead, other than close attention to 
all these deeper manifestations in his time?

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[Marxism] U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses - CounterPunch.org

2019-07-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/22/u-s-economic-warfare-and-likely-foreign-defenses/ 


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[Marxism] Lenin - "Communism becomes a mere empty phrase, a mere facade..."

2019-07-13 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Communism becomes a mere empty phrase, a mere facade, and the communist 
a mere bluffer, if he has not worked over in his consciousness the whole 
inheritance of human knowledge. - Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth 
Leagues,” Selected Works 3, p. 414.

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[Marxism] 'We Can't Be Radical Enough' as Ice Melts and Global Mass Extinction Threatens

2019-07-09 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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*https://tinyurl.com/y27mqwbl

Moreover:
*
*Nearly 1/2 of the world's population - more than 3 billion people - 
live on less than $2.50 a day.
More than 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty - less than $1.25 a 
day.

1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.
And there are 140 million people who are either poor or low income here 
in the United States.


The poorest among us globally, ***those who are without work to sustain 
them as the corporate imperative of profit by keeping labor costs low 
increasingly compels substitution of machine power, robotization and 
artificial intelligence for paid human labor, *those who live on the 
edges of our continents midst rising seal level, those who are or will 
soon be without food and water resources as *the glaciers 
recede,*** rivers atrophy, oceans, land and atmosphere deteriorate,** 
those who must become homeless migrants ***and move elsewhere *in order 
to survive, those who cannot afford the inevitably rising costs of food 
and survival, these are the first and most severely affected, but not 
the last, to need our compassion, solidarity and mutual aid.


And every aspect of our planetary existence - sentient and all - is at risk.

The US middle and upper classes, less than 4% of the world's population, 
including me and all those around me, consume about 1/4 of the planet's 
resources. The most indulged, arrogant and ill-informed upper and middle 
class - willfully and by ruling design - in history. Our ability to 
continue in this mode is protected and advanced by the most effective 
lethal, destructive persuasion, enforcement and military power ever 
assembled.


Those who know this, who continue to accept it and benefit from it 
instead of fighting against it, those who know the effects of that 
system on climate change, those who know all this and do not exert every 
possible effort, in cooperation with all others, in every waking moment, 
to understand the system responsible for this condition in order to 
change it, are failing their responsibilities to their progeny, their 
species and to the earth that sustains us. By now in criminal ways, 
given the accruing despoliation, looting and mayhem created.




*
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[Marxism] Corporate Team of Rivals: Harris Now in Top Tier with Biden to Prevent a Progressive Nominee

2019-07-09 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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 My published comment on
 



 
*https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/07/08/18824542.php?show_comments=1#18824559*


 Thanks For Publishing Content To Indybay.

Your comment should appear immediately but sometimes you may need to 
wait or refresh if your browser has cached the version from before the 
comment was added.


§Re: 
Corporate 
Team of Rivals: Harris Now in Top Tier with Biden to Prevent a 
Progressive Nominee 


by Ralph Johansen
/Tuesday Jul 9th, 2019 12:55 PM /
First of all, Solomon here employs the term "progressive."

"Progressive" has become a buzz word to conflate reformists with 
revolutionaries - a category where those who advocate reform within the 
capitalist system of seeking highest profit on investment as the primary 
precept are subsumed, to our increasing disservice and confusion, with 
those who know that this is just another route to capitalist predation 
and planetary destruction, and who demand the extirpation, top to 
bottom, of the capitalist system.


Any candidate for office within the two-party system serves that 
pro-capitalist purpose. Some seek alliance with root-and-branch-radicals 
around reform, as so-called "progressives," but they are guaranteed, 
within the process set up by corporate design for governance, to instead 
haplessly attempt to manage capitalism. It has happened over and over 
with reformists (witness social democracy or "euro-communism" in Europe 
over the years, the just-now deposed Greek Syriza regime), and we are 
increasingly mired in our own excrescence as we continue to tolerate it.


Never has it been more imperative, for our very survival as a species 
and for the survival of our natural sources of sustenance, that we stop 
deluding ourselves that the capitalist transnational corporate structure 
and its hopelessly bought-and-paid-for government agents any longer 
serve any valid social purpose, and therefore that we affirm by 
consensus that they must be chased the hell out of power.

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[Marxism] William I. Robinson - U.S. trade war against China ascribed to the crisis of legitimacy of the US state and use as a lever to further open China to transnational capital

2019-07-03 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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William I. Robinson, Sociologist 
 

June 25 at 1:27 PM 
·


**The Economist magazine reported in its May 25 issue that U.S. 
technology companies have invested $1bn in Chinese ones since the start 
of last year, while Chinese tech firms poured nearly four times as much, 
$3.8 billion, into U.S. based companies. Previously, Apple put $1bn into 
the Chinese ride hailing company Didi Chuxing, and Microsoft bought 
state in Laiye, an “AI butler” that handles voice commands through apps. 
Intel has taken stakes in a number of Chinese startups. Nvidia, a U.S. 
maker of AI chips, is invested in WeRide, a Chinese leader in 
self-driving technology. And the list on Chinese-US capital integration 
goes on and on, in tech and in all sectors of the economy.


As this data (and much more) makes clear, the U.S. trade war against 
China cannot be explained as competition and rivalry among respective US 
and Chinese capitalist groups. I and my colleagues from the “global 
capitalism school” approach to 21st century capitalism have long since 
argued that the leading capitalist groups worldwide has become so 
intertwined, cross-invested and integrated into one another that these 
leading sectors are no longer national (“US capital”, “Chinese capital”, 
“French capital”) but transnational. Hence the transnational capitalist 
class (TCC) is the ruling group worldwide, and this TCC has no interest 
in economic nationalism, trade wars, and tariffs.


A better explanation for Trump’s trade war with China would focus on two 
things. First is the crisis of legitimacy of the US state and Trump’s 
effort to shore up his rocky social base by deploying the rhetoric and 
policies of economic nationalism alongside his racist scapegoating, 
especially of immigrants, even as the TCC opposes these trade policies. 
Second, the Chinese market is more closed to transnational capital than 
is the US market. The threat of tariffs and sanctions is a lever to 
further open China up to transnational capital.


Meanwhile, the global economy is moving ever closer towards recession. 
The G20 will meet on June 28 and 29 in Japan. If a deal is not struck 
between US and Chinese trade negotiations, a sell-off of shares would be 
the likely outcome. Would such an outcome be a trigger for the recession?


more at https://tinyurl.com/yypa9vev 



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Re: [Marxism] There Is No Strike Wave in the Private Sector | Joe Burns | Jacobin

2019-06-14 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo wrote

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/private-sector-strike-wave-union-strategy

This article, with its emphasis on reviving the strike, especially in 
the "private sector," gets us not one flea-hop closer to any resolution 
of the barriers to working class organization. Referring to the "private 
sector" as some kind of monolithic entity is one problem. There are 
virtually countless divisions within private sector employment and 
moreover within the working class generally, including the workers whose 
labor cannot be shipped offshore; and there's the obvious, but 
completely overlooked in this article, move of capital to cut costs by 
shipping more and more production jobs to low-wage areas. And what's 
also blindingly obvious is that this cries out for worker organizing and 
solidarity globally, not just locally, and an end to pitting national 
divisions of labor against each other. As far as the author gets is: 
"isolated groups of workers...will require the support of national unions."


There's the long-established, structurally entrenched practice of labor 
leadership aligning with capital, behind workers' backs and against 
workers' interests; and as well, the virtually undisguised state support 
of capital against labor, through repressive labor legislation and 
stacked mediating bodies set up by government.


There's the fact that almost all areas of labor are increasingly subject 
to automation, artificial intelligence, digitation, unforeseen 
permutations and spin-offs leading to further ways capital can displace 
human labor, if and when the cost of labor is perceived to be greater 
than the cost of the dead labor/constant capital which can replace it. 
There's the threat that this furthers invidious distinctions among 
fully-employed, partially employed and unemployed workers, and the 
threat of increase in the reserve army of labor, adding to the 
effectiveness with which wages are kept below subsistence, and 
augmentation of the pool from which labor is easily replaced.


There is the undoubted fact that workers in the privileged regions of 
the world, and within national boundaries, are separated by jealously 
guarded distinctions from workers in lower-wage areas. This is 
reinforced by nationalism, racism, anti-immigrant bias, invidious job 
description and feelings of cultural superiority. It would seem, at 
least for now with worker power decimated, as if the only discernible 
way out is through a growing downward spiral of wages in dominant 
privileged areas toward global wage equalization.


There's the growing recognition by capital of its global positioning, 
and of its need for closer, more sophisticated, more authoritarian 
combination among segments of world-wide capital - facilitated through 
international organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, ILO, 
NAFTA, CAFTA, EU, G7 and G20, instrumentalized UN organizations, Davos, 
Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, World Economic Forum.


It does not so much as mention any of these impediments to worker 
organization, let alone any discussion of the blindingly obvious need to 
kick over the whole vicious, treacherous, dangerously destructive system 
of capital accumulation.


One thing going for us, which calls for a wholly expanded discussion pro 
and con, is the diversifying global supply chain, where work stoppage in 
any sector of these channels can impede over-all profitable production 
in multiple areas. Another is the shrinking opportunities for profitable 
return on productive capital entailed in the dwindling market for 
commodities and services, and the growing spread of cheapened machinery, 
as an increasingly unemployed and inadequately employed world population 
can no longer buy these commodities.


There's much more wrong with this piece, but the foregoing is a taste of 
the woeful, sophomoric level of analysis produced here.


Kind of appears that this article typifies the orientation of Jacobin. 
Who vets selection and quality, and who is presently on the board?

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[Marxism] Global Capitalist Crisis and Twenty-First Century Fascism: Beyond the Trump Hype by WILLIAM I. ROBINSON - Science & Society April 2019

2019-06-14 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://tinyurl.com/y3qzp42r
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[Marxism] The Thought Police Are Coming

2019-06-11 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/first-assange-then-us/
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Re: [Marxism] [UCE] 'Pay Your Workers a Living Wage, ' Sanders Tells Walmart to at Its board meeting

2019-06-09 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Another thing we should know, but not be surprised at when it comes to 
traditional reformist politics:


I notice on the list of participants at the elite Bilderberg conference 
today in Switzerland, alongside, of course, Henry Kissinger, James H. 
Baker, Director, Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of 
Defense, Eric Schmidt of Google(also chair of the Pentagon’s new 
National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence), Peter Thiel 
CEO of PayPal. Vernon E. Jordan, Jr./, /Senior Managing Director, Lazard 
Frères & Co., Henry R. Kravis, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis 
Roberts & Co., Jared Cohen, Founder and CEO, Jigsaw, Alphabet's 
technology incubator focused on tackling geopolitical problems, -- all 
in all, by invitation only, 130 stalwarts among capital's most rapacious 
schemers and activists, appears the name of Mary Kay Henry, 
International President, Service Employees International Union -- whose 
union on the same day announced support for the Green New Deal 
resolution. This is being touted by many on the left as a sign of the 
solidarity of one of the nation's largest unions with the cause of 
environmentalism, and by inference part of a viable program to realize 
the goal of preserving what's salvageable of our environment. Now, why 
in the world would this person, who purports to represent the interests 
of workers in home care, security, airlines, and much more, why would 
she be invited to a conference such as this? Oh, workers' mole in wolf's 
clothing, I get it.//**

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[Marxism] [UCE] 'Pay Your Workers a Living Wage, ' Sanders Tells Walmart to at Its board meeting

2019-06-05 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Not that this is a wrong or totally ineffectual thing to do for a 
political leader who purports to represent workers; it will certainly 
resonate with his base. But Walmart can turn right around and say that 
it has to keep costs low to counter the threat of giants like Amazon, 
which with their simplified marketing ploy of enabling online ordering, 
as short as two-day home delivery and markedly reduced costs, are 
threatening Walmart's market share. And that to lose market share is to 
go in the direction of contraction, rather than the imperative under 
this system of constant expansion, and towards collapse. So then, we go 
with hat in hand tremulous outrage to Amazon - or whatever innovating 
competitor is next-in-line to steal a march on market domination and 
therefore market share.


And this is about as far as any major candidate in this insanely 
protracted presidential campaign is likely to get - New Deal solutions 
all over again to unprecedented levels of looting the common weal and 
looming economic, social and environmental crisis - in the absence of an 
overwhelmingly powerful surge of worldwide worker awareness, organizing 
and solidarity. To match the increasingly informed, integrated and 
organized challenge of globally insurgent concentrated and centralized 
capital.


https://tinyurl.com/y6jk4zcq

Bernie Sanders delivered this resolution request from the floor today at 
the meeting of Walmart's board of directors:


Let me thank Walmart employee Kat Davis for introducing this resolution, 
and it states, and I quote,


Resolved, shareholders of Walmart urge the board to adopt a policy of 
promoting significant representation on employee perspectives among 
corporate decision makers by requiring that the initial list from which 
candidates are chosen by the nominating and governance committee include 
hourly associates. The policy should provide that any third party 
consultant asked to furnish an initial list that includes such 
candidates. End of quote.


Madame Chair, the issue that we are dealing with today is pretty simple. 
Walmart is the largest private employer in America and is owned by the 
Walton family, the wealthiest family in the United States, worth 
approximately 175 billion dollars. And yet, despite the incredible 
wealth of its owners, Walmart pays many of its employees starvation 
wages. Wages are so low that many of these employees are forced to rely 
on government program like food stamps, Medicaid and public housing in 
order to survive.


Frankly, the American people are sick and tired of subsidizing the greed 
of some of the largest and most profitable corporations in this country.


They are also outraged by the grotesque level of income inequality in 
America, as demonstrated by the CEO of Walmart making a thousand times 
more than the average Walmart employee. Last year, Walmart made nearly 
10 billion dollars in profit it paid its CEO over 20 million dollars in 
compensation and it has authorized over 20 billion dollars in stock buy 
backs, which will benefit its wealthiest stockholders.


Surely, with all of that, Walmart can afford to pay all of its employees 
a living wage of at least 15 dollars an hour.


And that is not a radical idea, because many of Walmart's competitors, 
like Amazon, Costco and Target have already moved in that direction.


Further Walmart could give a voice to its workers by allowing them seats 
on the board of directors. The concerns of workers, not just 
stockholders, shouldbe part of board decisions.


Today, with the passage of this resolution, Walmart can strike a blow 
against corporate greed and a grotesque level of income and wealth 
inequality that exists in our country.


Please do the right thing. Please pass this resolution.

Thank you very much.



largest


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[Marxism] Arctic Is Thawing So Fast Scientists Are Losing Their Measuring Tools

2019-06-03 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://truthout.org/articles/arctic-is-thawing-so-fast-scientists-are-losing-their-measuring-tools/ 


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[Marxism] U.N. Special Rapporteur Calls for Julian Assange to Be Freed, Citing “Psychological Torture”

2019-05-31 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/31/seg_1_julian_assange_please_update
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Re: [Marxism] Could Democratic Socialists and Big Business Become Allies? | Fortune

2019-05-31 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Michael Meeropol wrote

   I read it -- it's total nonsense 
   
   To wit?

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[Marxism] 18 Ways Julian Assange Changed the World

2019-05-26 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/18-ways-julian-assange-changed-the-world/
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Re: [Marxism] Mozart: Rational revolutionary

2019-05-22 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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 Louis Proyect wrote

Their audience, then, knew what Da Ponte and Mozart were getting into. 
Joseph II was never going to tolerate explicit revolutionary language, 
and Da Ponte softened it considerably in devising his libretto. But 
Mozart deepened it again with his music, giving three dimensions to 
two-dimensional characters by granting them real-life emotional 
complexity. Instead of political force, they get emotional depth, and as 
real people, their fates once again acquire political force.


full: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/mozart-grace-notes/




 That was part of the genius and beauty of Mozart, who wrote his first
 symphony at age eight. Reminds me of the narrative, as I recall it
 from reading the book long ago, of coming back across France toward
 central Europe after the first World War on a train loaded with
 refugees, peasants who after fleeing the ravaging of their homelands
 were being forced back to their villages and countryside to a hopeless
 future, with their lands having been taken by the banks and rich
 landlords who profited from war. The narrator looks at the children of
 the refugees. Their eyes are bright and still full of hope and
 expectation, their demeanor full of activity and mischief. Then he
 looks at the returning peasants. Their eyes are dull and listless,
 their shoulders slumped and motionless, their cheeks hollowed and
 ashen. He writes: “What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor
 the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of
 Mozart murdered.”

And no change: they are murdering the Mozarts.


― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars 


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[Marxism] [UCE] America’s False Narrative on China by Stephen S. Roach

2019-05-12 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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*2d try:
https://tinyurl.com/y4cfdac7*



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[Marxism] Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls - Bloomberg

2019-05-06 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation?srnd=premium 


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[Marxism] Commemorating 201st Anniversary of Marx's birthday, May 5 1818

2019-05-05 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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A reminder on this day of initial, seminal formulations and of how these 
thoughts inform Marx's works throughout:


Theses On Feuerbach

/Written: by Marx in the Spring of 1845, but slightly edited by Engels; 
First Published: As an appendix to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of 
Classical German Philosophy in 1888; Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, 
Volume One, p. 13 – 15. Note that this version differs from the version 
of Engels’ edition published in MECW Volume 5, pp. 6-8; Publisher: 
Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1969; Translated: W. Lough from the 
German; Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins; Copyleft: 
Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1995, 1999, 2002. Permission 
is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of 
the Creative Commons ShareAlike License; Proofread: by Andy Blunden 
February 2005. /


I

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of 
Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is 
conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as 
sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in 
contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed 
abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous 
activity as such.


Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought 
objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective 
activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the 
theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while 
practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical 
manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of 
“revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.


II

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking 
is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove 
the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his 
thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of 
thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.


III

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and 
upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is 
essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, 
therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to 
society.


The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity 
or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as 
revolutionary practice.


IV

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the 
duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His 
work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.


But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes 
itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by 
the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The 
latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its 
contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after 
the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, 
the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.


V

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; 
but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous 
activity.


VI

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the 
human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.


In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is 
consequently compelled:


To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious 
sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – 
isolated – human individual. Essence, therefore, can be comprehended 
only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites 
the many individuals.


VII

Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is 
itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he 
analyses belongs to a particular form of society.


VIII

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead 
theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and 
in the comprehension of this practice.


IX

The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, 
materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical 
activity, is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.


X

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil

[Marxism] [UCE] Re: Happy anniversary

2019-05-02 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Louis Proyect wrote

The Marxism list was launched on May 1, 1998 and still going strong.

I have probably been here more or less since the list began. I can say 
that not only does Lou put up some invaluable stuff, but quality has 
improved with age. As he has mellowed and learned from all this input 
and from a few mistakes. I'm hoping you last long, Lou, and this list too.

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Re: [Marxism] Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

2019-04-28 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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Of course, being who they are, the NYT misses the crucial sequence that 
defines the prospects: capitalism is a system of producing goods which 
depends totally on profitable return on investment, without which 
investment is pointless and will not take place. In which case 
capitalism, predicated on continued expansion from successive increments 
of accumulation, would collapse. There is no room within such a system 
for the drastic measures which are essential to preserving our 
environment, among which foremost is no further growth, in the sense of 
the incremental accretion of commodities on which capitalism depends, no 
further capital accumulation. Which is why, under the spell of 
capitalism and its distortions and misinformation about results and 
prospects, most of the rest of us have hardly a clue as to what must be 
done, more than likely until it is way too late. That awareness is 
indispensable to the task of system change. It certainly won't emanate 
from the corporate boardrooms or their governmental satraps. Figure that 
out and we might have reason for the hope that NYT reassures us about.


Louis Proyect wrote

NY Times Sunday Book Review, April 28, 2019
Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis
By John Lanchester

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH

   Life After Warming
   By David Wallace-Wells

   LOSING EARTH
   A Climate History
   By Nathaniel Rich

   Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively
   faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also
   poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are
   arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have
   to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your
   own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so
   that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that
   beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of
   recognition, representation and rights.

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[Marxism] Julian Assange's Arrest and gutting the First Amendment

2019-04-27 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/whats-really-behind-julian-assanges-arrest/

"The indictment charges Assange and Chelsea Manning with conspiracy, and 
in particular conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, which has never 
been used against a journalist in the history of the United States, or 
against a publisherit’s kind of a shame that we have to say, put in 
this disclaimer, “whatever you think of Julian Assange.” Because of 
course, any whistleblower is going to be attacked, and it’s the 
traditional argument of shooting the messenger."


Good policy to keep precedent-breaking, and probably for that matter 
Constitutional, laws on the books such as the Espionage Act, to bring 
forth when the times, class interest, a compliant SCOTUS and collapsed 
public interest, are aligned propitious.


That it affects oligopsonist publishers as well like the NYT and WAPO, 
is largely irrelevant, since there comes a time when their well-being 
depends much more on their deployment with their class on matters of 
social control than on any benefits to them advanced by investigative 
reporting.

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Re: [Marxism] The Mueller Report: Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston on Trump-Russia Ties, Obstruction & More

2019-04-20 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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John Reimann wrote

Ralph Johnson, apparently approvingly, quotes Glenn Greenwald: "I think 
Donald Trump is a huge danger and menace to the republic for a lot of 
reasons that David is very adeptly covering, and I really hope that we 
can now turn our attention to those things, now that we?re done with 
this espionage thriller that has dominated us for three years. I hope we 
can focus on the things that matter."

"But Greenwald? His views should not be taken seriously."
--- 

I accept that you will document what you write about Greenwald on 
request, but what is it that you object to in these three sentences:


"Donald Trump is a huge danger and menace to the republic for a lot of 
reasons...


I really hope that we can now turn our attention to those things, now 
that we're done with this espionage thriller that has dominated us for 
three years.


I hope we can focus on the things that matter."

You may differ about what "things that matter" means to Greenwald, as 
opposed to what it may mean to a Marxist, but to me it's a sort of an 
unobjectionable, fill-in-the-blanks statement.


Moreover, Greenwald whatever his warts is an exceptionally astute, 
well-informed spokesperson for the civil libertarian liberal left, the 
kind I would not parse and quibble over as compared to all the criminals 
in high places out there, And as to his omissions and errors on the 
issues you mention that you oppose, this was hardly the place for him or 
anyone else to focus on them.


Greenwald's observations on the Mueller Report read as if he was 
prepping to represent a litigant, at $750 an hour, rather than as an 
investigative reporter, however much his compensation - which cannot be 
a bad thing for us. Greenwald convinces me that there is no comforting 
life left in this project, either from DOJ or Congress, despite or just 
because of what's not been covered, and projecting politically, won't.


Is It an appropriate time to trot out your list of his other political 
shortcomings, and then in conclusion write, "But Greenwald? His views 
should not be taken seriously."


Sort of calls to mind those ad hominem attacks on Assange for his warts 
at this critical juncture, joining the attack dogs, rather than keeping 
our eyes on the main threat posed by his abduction and 7-year 
confinement to one room in the embassy, convening of a 
Pentagon-neighborhood secret Grand Jury to come up with a guaranteed 
indictment, and impending delivery to the dungeon in order to 
definitively chill whistle blowers and investigative reporters for the 
duration.


We need all the help we can get, including when it comes to speaking 
out, effectively, on behalf of our dwindling civil liberties. Or do you 
think otherwise.



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[Marxism] The Mueller Report: Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston on Trump-Russia Ties, Obstruction & More

2019-04-19 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/19/the_mueller_report_glenn_greenwald_vs

This exchange between Greenwald and Johnston pretty much puts paid to 
this whole dreary, dragged-out investigation.


As Greenwald concludes: "I think Donald Trump is a huge danger and 
menace to the republic for a lot of reasons that David is very adeptly 
covering, and I really hope that we can now turn our attention to those 
things, now that we’re done with this espionage thriller that has 
dominated us for three years. I hope we can focus on the things that 
matter."

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Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] A Socialist Defector | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2019-04-19 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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One of your best, Lou.

On 4/19/2019 7:22 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:

There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.

– Bertolt Brecht, “In Praise of the Fighters” (song)

full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/04/19/a-socialist-defector/



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[Marxism] Xi Jinping in Italy: It’s the Ports!,https://journal-neo.org/2019/04/01/xi-jinping-in-italy-it-s-the-ports/

2019-04-06 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism


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https://journal-neo.org/2019/04/01/xi-jinping-in-italy-it-s-the-ports/
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