Re: [Marxism] Marxism Digest, Vol 91, Issue 20
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/8/11 2:46 PM, T wrote: Political criticisms in reply: “The argument that the Bulgarian peasant movement of 1923 led inexorably to the rise of a bourgeois nationalist regime in Venezuela today has no foundation in fact, and is complete nonsense. It contributes less than nothing to our understanding of anything. Furthermore, a bourgeois nationalist regime is worthy of defense when attacked by the U.S. Empire, and failure to make that clear serves the U.S. Empire.” This criticizes, however harshly, the argument, rather than invidiously characterizing the person, and therefore would be acceptable. Solidarity, T As it turns out, there is no greater insult in Marxist circles than to be called a reformist. I would rather be called an asshole (and actually enjoy it, if not plead guilty of the charge) than a reformist. I doubt that many people have read this, but I have something written up on www.marxmail.org: MODERATION PRINCIPLES: The Marxism mailing list is extremely permissive. There are a couple of things that are frowned upon strongly. If you come to the list with the attitude that you are a true Bolshevik, who needs to convert 'Mensheviks' to your beliefs, you will be unsubbed. Members of self-declared vanguard parties who can adjust to the tolerant atmosphere of the list are more than welcome, since they usually bring with them years of Marxist study and political experience. We also welcome non-Marxists who come to the list in a respectful attitude, desiring to learn more. However, if you have decided for yourself that Marxism is wrong and that your purpose on the list is to struggle to convince others of that, you should not subscribe. The Internet has many forums where Marxists and anti-Marxists can debate. This is not one of them. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Pham Binh's website
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Binh wrote the guest post review of Chris Williams's book Ecology and Socialism on my blog the other day. For those who want to read other articles by Binh, I invite you to check out: http://planetanarchy.net/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Being played for a sucker by Random House
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/9/2011 2:55 PM, Mark Lause wrote: All of which is discouraging for any of us seeking a sympathetic literary agent There are honorable houses out there. My wife's dissertation is coming out as a book from Ashgate, a British outfit. They have been outstanding. Of course, the books are only sold to libraries so it is not that useful to people looking for a broader audience. But in terms of their responsiveness, they have been fantastic. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Breaking news: Barack Obama is dead
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.cageprisoners.com/our-work/opinion-editorial/item/1534-breaking-news-barack-obama-is-dead Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] How Syria is Bringing Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia Together
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/unholy-alliance-how-syria-is-bringing-israel-iran-and-saudi-arabia-together/238084/ Unholy Alliance: How Syria is Bringing Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia Together By Steven A. Cook In the new Middle East, a previously unthinkable coalition is One of the iron fisted rules of the Middle East seems to be what an Assad giveth, an Assad also taketh away. Since protests began in his country, Syrian President Bashar al Assad has lifted the emergency law, abolished state security courts, and stepped up the repression that has been a hallmark of his now 11-year rule. No one should be surprised that Syria's security forces have used violence against peaceful demonstrators. Still, if there was any lingering doubt about the nature of the regime, the 500 or more dead in the streets across several Syrian cities should be plenty evidence of its brutality. Many smart people, in Washington and elsewhere, have long been willing to forgive the Assad family for their many sins, going back to the tenure of Bashar's father, Hafiz al Assad, who ruled from 1971 to 2000. The allure of bringing the Syrian-Israeli state of war to an end and the tantalizing possibility (a fantasy, it turns out) of breaking the Tehran-Damascus axis led observers to believe that Hafiz was capable of making peace and that Bashar was a reformer. Bashar has been tolerated, engaged, even supported in the hopes that the world could entice him, with the prospects of good relations with the West, to change. But there was never any real evidence that Damascus was genuinely interested in peace or reform. As the world (slowly) comes to grips with the horror of Syria and the Assads, there remains a coalition of nations that appear to be acting under the belief that the Assad regime is better than what might come next. It's an odd group in the rather strange new world of the Middle East: Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. For the Israelis, already reeling from the loss of a regional strategic asset -- Hosni Mubarak's Egypt -- the predictability of Assad's Syria was some consolation. Israel and Syria may be in a technical state of war, but the Syrians have scrupulously kept the armistice on the Golan Heights and it has been a long time since Syria's military posed any significant security threat to Israel. The Israelis put a premium on authoritarian stability in the Arab world, where they fear change will almost always rebound to the benefit of hostile Islamist groups. Sitting in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, it is little wonder the Israeli leadership is having serious qualms about the unrest in Syria. Assad may be an implacable foe, but he is better than the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. From the perspective of the Israeli security establishment, at least Assad is doing what Hosni Mubarak should have done: using all available means to save his regime. For the better part of the last decade, Saudi Arabia has not had very good relations with Syria. But the Arab spring has so unnerved Riyadh that King Abdallah appears willing to let bygones be bygones. In late March, when the protests in Syria were just starting to develop beyond Daraa, the King called Assad to offer his political support. In the short run at least, Riyadh appears willing to overlook both Assad's three decades-long strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia's rival, Iran, as well as Syria's growing influence in Lebanon, which comes at the expense of Saudi's own ability to sway events there. The support for Assad is consistent with Saudi strategy throughout the Arab Spring, which has included support for Bahrain's ruling family and King Abdallah's offer to Hosni Mubarak that he would make up the loss of American aid if the Egyptians undertook a major crackdown. Clearly, the Saudis regard the transformation of the region as a threat to their interests and stability and will do whatever they can to help bring the uprisings to an end. The least surprising member of the region's pro-Assad camp is Iran. Tehran has been trying to tell anyone who will listen that the unrest in the Arab world demonstrates the righteousness of the Iranian revolution and that change in the region only bolsters Iranian interests and influence. Not exactly. So far, this has been mostly a wash for Iran. There is nothing in the Arab uprisings that suggests their instigators want to emulate the Islamic Republic; though, of course, Islamist groups may yet benefit from more open systems in the Arab world. Still, Arabs are demonstrating and dying for more freedom, not for another form of authoritarianism under the guise of theological messianism. And while change in Egypt weakens the region's
[Marxism] Are African lions really roaring?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch May 10, 2011 The Latest Fibs From World Financiers Are African Lions Really Roaring? By PATRICK BOND Apparently, “one in three Africans is middle class” and as a result, Africa is ready for “take off”, according to African Development Bank chief economist Mthuli Ncube last week at the World Economic Forum-Africa summit in Cape Town. “Hey you know what, the world please wake up, this is a phenomenon in Africa that we've not spent a lot of time thinking about.” Ncube defines middle class as those who spend between $2-20/day, a group that includes a vast number of people considered extremely poor by any reasonable definition, given the higher prices of most consumer durables in African cities. The number of people spending between just $2 and $4/day constitutes a fifth of all Sub-Saharan Africans, even Ncube admits, while the range from $4 to $20/day amounts to 13%, with 5% spending more than $20/day. Below the $2/day level, 61% of Africans are mired in deep poverty, a stunning reflection of ongoing underdevelopment due to imperialism, the Resource Curse and nefarious African elites. It’s just as Walter Rodney explained in his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa nearly four decades ago: “the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system.” Playing both roles, the likes of Ncube have not changed their neoliberal tunes, they simply hold up a small sliver of (desperately entrepreneurial) Africans engaged in petty commodity exchange as the hope for the future. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/bond05102011.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Why Greece should reject the Euro
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times Op-Ed May 9, 2011 Why Greece Should Reject the Euro By MARK WEISBROT Washington SOMETIMES there is turmoil in the markets because a government threatens to do what is best for its citizens. This seemed to be the case in Europe last week, when the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the Greek government was threatening to stop using the euro. The euro suffered its worst two-day plunge since December 2008. Greek and European Union officials denied the report, but a threat by Greece to jettison the euro is long overdue, and it should be prepared to carry it out. As much as the move might cost Greece in the short term, it is very unlikely that such costs would be greater than the many years of recession, stagnation and high unemployment that the European authorities are offering. The experience of Argentina at the end of 2001 is instructive. For more than three and a half years Argentina had suffered through one of the deepest recessions of the 20th century. Its peso was pegged to the dollar, which is similar to Greece having the euro as its national currency. The Argentines took loans from the International Monetary Fund, and cut spending as poverty and unemployment soared. It was all in vain as the recession deepened. Then Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt and cut loose from the dollar. Most economists and the business press predicted that years of disaster would ensue. But the economy shrank for just one more quarter after the devaluation and default; it then grew 63 percent over the next six years. More than 11 million people, in a nation of 39 million, were pulled out of poverty. Within three years Argentina was back to its pre-recession level of output, despite losing more than twice as much of its gross domestic product as Greece has lost in its current recession. By contrast, in Greece, even if things go well, the I.M.F. projects that the economy will take eight years to reach its pre-crisis G.D.P. But this is likely optimistic — the I.M.F. has repeatedly lowered its near-term growth projections for Greece since the crisis began. The main reason for Argentina’s rapid recovery was that it was finally freed from adhering to fiscal and monetary policies that stifled growth. The same would be true for Greece if it were to drop the euro. Greece would also get a boost from the devaluation’s effect on the trade balance (as Argentina did for the first six months of recovery), since its exports would be more competitive, and imports would be more expensive. Press reports have also warned of a sharp increase in Greek debt from devaluation if it were to leave the euro zone. But the fact is that Greece would not pay this debt, as Argentina did not pay two-thirds of its foreign debt after its devaluation and default. Portugal just concluded an agreement with the I.M.F. that projects two more years of recession. No government should accept this kind of punishment. A responsible leader would point out to the European authorities that they have the money to support Greece with countercyclical policies (like fiscal stimulus), though they are choosing not to. From a creditors’ point of view, which the European Union authorities have apparently adopted, a country that has accumulated too much debt must be punished, so as not to encourage “bad behavior.” But punishing an entire country for the past mistakes of some of its leaders, while morally satisfying to some, is hardly the basis for sound policy. There is also the idea that Greece — as well as Ireland, Spain and Portugal — can recover by means of an “internal devaluation.” This means increasing unemployment so much that wages fall enough to make the country more internationally competitive. The social costs of such a move, however, are extremely high and it rarely if ever works. Unemployment has doubled in Greece (to 14.7 percent), more than doubled in Spain (to 20.7 percent) and more than tripled in Ireland (to 14.7 percent). But recovery is still elusive. You can be sure that the European authorities would offer Greece a better deal under a credible threat of leaving the euro zone. In fact, there are indications that they may have already moved in response to last week’s threat. But the bottom line is that Greece cannot afford to settle for any deal that does not allow it to grow and make its way out of the recession. Loans that require what economists call “pro-cyclical” policies — cutting spending and raising taxes in the face of recession — should be off the table. The attempt to shrink Greece’s way out has failed. If that’s all that the European authorities have to offer, then it is time for Greece, and perhaps others, to say goodbye to the
[Marxism] Charles Koch buys control of economics department hiring
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Hat tip to Doug Henwood) http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-hiring-decisions-at-florida-state-university-raises/1168680 May 9, 2011 Billionaire's role in hiring decisions at Florida State University raises questions By Kris Hundley, Times staff writer A dean says it would be irresponsible not to accept a large donation. A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university. A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting political economy and free enterprise. Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom. Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet objectives set by Koch during annual evaluations. David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors - one retired, one active - criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom. Rasmussen said hiring the two new assistant professors allows him to offer eight additional courses a year. I'm sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom,'' he said. But it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it. The Koch foundation, based in Arlington, Va., did not return a call seeking comment. Most universities, including the University of Florida, have policies that strictly limit donors' influence over the use of their gifts. Yale University once returned $20 million when the donor demanded veto power over appointments, saying such control was unheard of. Jennifer Washburn, who has reviewed dozens of contracts between universities and donors, called the Koch agreement with FSU truly shocking. Said Washburn, author of University Inc., a book on industry's ties to academia: This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing. . . . The foundation partnering with FSU is one of several non-profits funded by Charles Koch (pronounced coke''), 75, and his brother David, 71. The aim: To advance their belief, through think tanks, political organizations and academia, that government taxes and regulations impinge on prosperity. The Koch philosophy is similar to that of Rick Scott, who, in one of his first acts as Florida's governor, froze all new state regulations on businesses, and has pushed for tax cuts. The Koch brothers own the second biggest private U.S. corporation, maker of such popular products as Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and Stainmaster carpet. Koch Industries, which had $100 billion in sales last year, also owns thousands of miles of oil pipelines, refineries and Georgia-Pacific lumber. The Koch brothers are each worth $22 billion. Charles, chairman and CEO of Koch Industries in Wichita, Kan., cofounded the Cato Institute, a policymaking group, in 1977. His brother serves on the board. David, who lives in Manhattan and is Koch Industries' executive vice president, in 2004 started the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which has worked closely with the tea party movement. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, to which he has given as much as $80 million a year, has focused on advancing social progress and well-being through grants to about 150 universities. But in the past, most colleges, including Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, received just a few thousand dollars. The big exception has been George Mason University, a public university in Virginia which has received more than $30 million from Koch over the past 20 years. At George Mason, Koch's foundation has underwritten the Mercatus Center, whose
Re: [Marxism] Allende
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/salvador-allende/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Imperialism, white headhunting, and hypocrisy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/11/2011 8:11 AM, Scott Hamilton wrote: http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2011/05/white-headhunters.html Coming from the same angle, my take on Shakespeare's The Tempest and cannibalism: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/tempest.htm Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Pressure grows for arch-Zionist to leave CUNY board
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 10, 2011 Pressure Grows for Trustee to Leave Board of CUNY By LISA W. FODERARO and WINNIE HU The day after City University of New York trustees approved an honorary degree for the playwright Tony Kushner, pressure continued to mount on Tuesday for the resignation or removal of the trustee who had raised concerns about Mr. Kushner’s views on Israel. The CUNY faculty union renewed its calls for the trustee, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, to step down, while CUNY officials said they had received dozens of e-mails — including some form letters — demanding his removal. Barbara Bowen, president of the union, the Professional Staff Congress, which represents 22,000 faculty and staff members, said the honorary degree was the latest episode in which Mr. Wiesenfeld had inserted himself inappropriately in university activities. In 2001, he called participation in an October “teach-in” sponsored by the union about the 9/11 attacks “seditious.” In 2006, he blasted a book that Baruch College had chosen for its freshman reading, “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” by Chris Hedges, calling it “deeply offensive” and “anti-Semitic.” “That’s overstepping one’s role as a trustee,” Dr. Bowen said. “There’s a consistent pattern of vilifying students and particularly faculty whose political views he objects to. He is entitled to his political views, but to use those views to interfere with academic freedom is not acceptable.” But Mr. Wiesenfeld indicated Tuesday that he had no intention of resigning, and a number of others questioned the wisdom of trying to force him to do so. “I am proud to represent this great university,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. The son of Holocaust survivors, he was first appointed a trustee in 1999 by Gov. George E. Pataki; he is serving his second seven-year term, which is to end in 2013. Mr. Kushner’s name was removed from a list of honorary degree candidates being considered during a May 2 board meeting, after Mr. Wiesenfeld, a vocal supporter of Israel, denounced Mr. Kushner’s past statements about Israel and the Palestinians, including a reference to “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians during the state’s formation. Mr. Kushner later disputed Mr. Wiesenfeld’s characterization of his views, arguing that he was a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist. Some trustees later said that they were caught off guard by Mr. Wiesenfeld’s last-minute objections to honoring Mr. Kushner. Ten trustees, including the chairman, Benno C. Schmidt Jr., voted to table the matter, effectively denying Mr. Kushner the degree, since the board would not meet again before the graduation ceremony for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which had proposed awarding the degree. The board’s decision provoked a fierce outcry from Mr. Kushner’s fellow artists, his supporters, university professors and civil libertarians, and also led to calls for Mr. Wiesenfeld’s resignation. After the board’s executive committee approved the honor on Monday, some trustees expressed relief that the conflict had been resolved — and apologized. “I participated in an action that damaged CUNY’s reputation, and I’m devastated about that,” said Peter S. Pantaleo, a trustee and a partner in DLA Piper, a law firm, who said he was confused by the proceedings on May 2 and assumed there would be discussion immediately after the motion to award the degree had been tabled. Still, Mr. Pantaleo rejected the idea that Mr. Wiesenfeld should resign. “I think it would be a mistake for trustees to step down based upon their political opinions, no matter how inartfully expressed,” he said. “The calls to resign is the equivalent of the mistake the board made.” One of CUNY’s biggest donors, Larry Field, a real estate developer in Los Angeles, also criticized the notion. Mr. Field, who gave $30 million to Baruch over the past decade, said he strongly agreed with Mr. Wiesenfeld on Israel, though he also supported the Kushner degree. “I would make a bigger stink over that,” he said, referring to Mr. Wiesenfeld’s possible departure. But others, including the writer Michael Cunningham, who last week renounced his own honorary degree from CUNY in support of Mr. Kushner, called for Mr. Wiesenfeld to quit. Mr. Cunningham said Mr. Wiesenfeld’s “biased politics are not appropriate for a board member of one of the greatest university systems in the world.” Under state education law, a trustee appointed by a governor can be removed by the governor only upon proof of official misconduct, neglect of duties or mental or physical incapacity. The trustee also is entitled to notice of the charges and a hearing. Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said Tuesday
[Marxism] Syrian ruling class closes ranks
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 10, 2011 Syrian Elite to Fight Protests to ‘the End’ By ANTHONY SHADID DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s ruling elite, a tight-knit circle at the nexus of absolute power, loyalty to family and a visceral instinct for survival, will fight to the end in a struggle that could cast the Middle East into turmoil and even war, warned Syria’s most powerful businessman, a confidant and cousin of President Bashar al-Assad. The frank comments by Rami Makhlouf, a tycoon who has emerged in the two-month uprising as a magnet for anger at the privilege that power brings, offered an exceedingly rare insight into the thinking of an opaque government, the prism through which it sees Syria, and the way it reaches decisions. Troubled by the greatest threat to its four decades of rule, the ruling family, he suggested, has conflated its survival with the existence of the minority sect that views the protests not as legitimate demands for change but rather as the seeds of civil war. “If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel,” he said in an interview Monday that lasted more than three hours. “No way, and nobody can guarantee what will happen after, God forbid, anything happens to this regime.” Asked if it was a warning or a threat, Mr. Makhlouf demurred. “I didn’t say war,” he said. “What I’m saying is don’t let us suffer, don’t put a lot of pressure on the president, don’t push Syria to do anything it is not happy to do.” His words cast into the starkest terms a sentiment the government has sought to cultivate — us or chaos — and it underlined the tactics of a ruling elite that has manipulated the ups and downs of a tumultuous region to sustain an overriding goal: its own survival. Though the uprising has yet to spread to Syria’s two largest cities — Damascus, the capital, seemingly tranquil, and Aleppo, a key conservative bastion, has been relatively quiet — the protests have unfurled in Damascus’s suburbs and across much of the rest of the country, building on longstanding neglect of the countryside and anger at corrupt and unaccountable security forces. While the government offered tentative concessions early on, it has since carried out a ferocious crackdown, killing hundreds, arresting thousands and besieging four cities. “The decision of the government now is that they decided to fight,” Mr. Makhlouf said. But even if it prevails, the uprising has demonstrated the weakness of a dictatorial government that once sought to draw legitimacy from a notion of Arab nationalism, a sprawling public sector that created the semblance of a middle class and services that delivered electricity to the smallest towns. The government of Mr. Assad, though, is far different than that of his father, who seized power in 1970. A beleaguered state, shorn of ideology, can no longer deliver essential services or basic livelihood. Mr. Makhlouf’s warnings of instability and sectarian strife like Iraq’s have emerged as the government’s rallying cry, as it deals with a degree of dissent that its officials admit caught them by surprise. Mr. Makhlouf, a childhood friend and first cousin of Mr. Assad, whose brother is the intelligence chief in Damascus, suggested that the ruling elite — staffed by Mr. Assad’s relatives and contemporaries — had grown even closer during the crisis. Though Mr. Assad has the final say, he said, policies were formulated as “a joint decision.” “We believe there is no continuity without unity,” he said. “As a person, each one of us knows we cannot continue without staying united together.” He echoed an Arabic proverb, which translated loosely, means that it will not go down alone. “We will not go out, leave on our boat, go gambling, you know,” he said at his plush, wood-paneled headquarters in Damascus. “We will sit here. We call it a fight until the end.” He added later, “They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.” Mr. Makhlouf, just 41 and leery of the limelight, stands as both a strength and liability of Mr. Assad’s rule, and in the interview he was a study in contrasts — a feared and reviled businessmen who went to lengths to be hospitable and mild-mannered. To the government’s detractors, his unpopularity rivals perhaps only that of Mr. Assad’s brother, Maher, who commands the Republican Guard and the elite Fourth Division that has played a crucial role in the crackdown. Mr. Makhlouf’s name was chanted in protests, and offices of his company, Syriatel, the country’s largest cellphone company, were burned in Dara’a, the poor town near the Jordanian border where the uprising began in mid-March. The American government, which imposed sanctions on him in 2008,
[Marxism] Bin Laden Sons Say U.S. Broke International Law
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 10, 2011 Bin Laden Sons Say U.S. Broke International Law By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The adult sons of Osama bin Laden have lashed out at President Obama in their first public reaction to their father’s death, accusing the United States of violating its basic legal principles by killing an unarmed man, shooting his family members and disposing of his body in the sea. The statement, provided to The New York Times on Tuesday, said the family was asking why Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, “was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world.” Citing the trials of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader, and Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, the statement questioned “the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated,” but the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were ignored. “We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems,” the statement said, adding that “justice must be seen to be done.” The statement, prepared at the direction of Omar bin Laden, who had publicly denounced his father’s terrorism, was provided to The Times by Jean Sasson, an American author who helped the younger Mr. Bin Laden write a 2009 memoir, “Growing Up bin Laden.” A shorter, slightly different statement was posted on jihadist Web sites. Omar bin Laden, 30, lived with his father in Afghanistan until 1999, when he left with his mother, Najwa bin Laden, who co-wrote the memoir. In the book and other public statements, the younger Mr. bin Laden had denounced violence of all kinds, a stance he repeated in the sons’ statement. “We want to remind the world that Omar bin Laden, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances,” the statement said. “Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks.” Condemning the shooting of one of the Qaeda leader’s wives during the assault on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the statement added, “As he condemned our father, we now condemn the president of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women.” In explaining the killing of Bin Laden, Obama administration officials have cited the principle of national self-defense in international law, noting that Bin Laden had declared war on the United States, killed thousands of Americans and vowed to kill more. The sons’ statement called on the government of Pakistan to hand over to family members the three wives and a number of children now believed to be in Pakistani custody and asked for a United Nations investigation of the circumstances of their father’s death. None of Osama bin Laden’s sons other than Omar, who lives in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were named in the statement; Ms. Sasson said she believed it was approved by three other adult sons who have not lived with their father for many years. Before Osama bin Laden fled Afghanistan in 2001, he had at least 11 sons, one of whom was killed in the assault last week, and nine daughters, by Ms. Sasson’s count. In addition to the statement, Ms. Sasson shared notes on what Omar bin Laden, who declined to be interviewed directly, had told her by telephone in recent days. The notes describe Mr. Bin Laden’s struggle, as he came of age, to understand and eventually reject his father’s embrace of religious violence. Mr. Bin Laden told Ms. Sasson that the death of his father “has affected this family in much the same way as many other families” that experience such a loss. But he also described a childhood of “upheavals and relocations” that, she said, “caused his mother and siblings great upset and danger.” Mr. Bin Laden said that by the age of 18, after Al Qaeda had plotted the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa and two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he had concluded “that the course of action his father was taking was not for him, irrespective of what his father’s wishes were,” Ms. Sasson said. Eventually he asked his father’s permission to leave Afghanistan with his mother and younger siblings. He told Ms. Sasson that he “thanks Allah that his father granted his permission for this departure, otherwise the grief the family faces could be even greater.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your
[Marxism] Externalities
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Les Schaffer just sent me a link to an article by Chomsky that contains the following: Public attitudes are a little hard to judge. There are a lot of polls, and they have what look like varying results, depending on exactly how you interpret the questions and the answers. But a very substantial part of the population, maybe a big majority, is inclined to dismiss this as just kind of a liberal hoax. What's particularly interesting is the role of the corporate sector, which pretty much runs the country and the political system. They're very explicit. The big business lobbies, like the Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, and others, have been very clear and explicit. A couple of years ago they said they are going to carry out -- they since have been carrying out -- a major publicity campaign to convince people that it's not real, that it's a liberal hoax. Judging by polls, that's had an effect. It's particularly interesting to take a look at the people who are running these campaigns, say, the CEOs of big corporations. They know as well as you and I do that it's very real and that the threats are very dire, and that they're threatening the lives of their grandchildren. In fact, they're threatening what they own, they own the world, and they're threatening its survival. Which seems irrational, and it is, from a certain perspective. But from another perspective it's highly rational. They're acting within the structure of the institutions of which they are a part. They are functioning within something like market systems -- not quite, but partially -- market systems. To the extent that you participate in a market system, you disregard necessarily what economists call externalities, the effect of a transaction upon others. So, for example, if one of you sells me a car, we may try to make a good deal for ourselves, but we don't take into account in that transaction the effect of the transaction on others. Of course, there is an effect. It may feel like a small effect, but if it multiplies over a lot of people, it's a huge effect: pollution, congestion, wasting time in traffic jams, all sorts of things. Those you don't take into account -- necessarily. That's part of the market system. full: http://chomsky.info/talks/20100930.htm As you might recall, I have pondered long and hard the question of why the bourgeoisie is threatening the lives of their grandchildren. I think I understand Chomsky's argument but it still does not satisfy me. We do know that the bourgeoisie has been able to transcend externalities in the past. Theodore Roosevelt's ambitious conservation program was evidence of that (so much so that Lenin sought to emulate it in the USSR), as was the creation of a public school system that was second to none in the world. Something else is going on that I can't quite put my finger on, but it has something to do with the decline of America as an industrial power. Investments in infrastructure and education are usually connected with a belief that your own country has a future as an economic power. Just look at China's investment in green technology. Perhaps the shortsightedness of the American bourgeoisie reflects a sense that it has no future as a hegemon? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Intern Nation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == London Review of Books Vol. 33 No. 10 · 19 May 2011 A Capitalist’s Dream Andrew Ross Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin Verso, 258 pp, £14.99, May 2011, ISBN 978 1 84467 686 6 In the heyday of the labour movement, it was often observed that bosses needed workers but workers didn’t need bosses. Yet in the third and fourth quarters of 2010, corporate America posted record profits while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the real unemployment rate at 17 per cent. Does this mean the bosses have learned to get by without workers? Not exactly, but two reasons for the high profits are beyond dispute. First, corporations are moving more and more of their operations offshore, especially jobs in highly-skilled sectors where the largest savings in labour costs can be made. So they still need workers, but not expensive ones. Second, employees are either working harder and longer for the same salary or are taking a pay cut. In any downturn, employers will push their advantage in this way, but in a recession like this one, the assault comes from all sides: pay freezes, concessions, furloughs, layoffs or casualisation. A third reason – a less familiar one – is the growing reliance on new kinds of free labour. Hard evidence for this is not so easy to muster but the anecdotal record is strong. Free or token-wage labour is increasingly available through a variety of channels: crowdsourcing, data mining or other sophisticated digital techniques that allow monetisable ideas or information to be extracted from user-participants; expanded prison labour programmes; the explosion of near obligatory unpaid internships in every white-collar sector; and the gamut of contestant volunteering that has transformed so much of our commerce in culture into an amateur talent show. The web-based developments have attracted the most media attention, not least because free online content directly threatens the livelihoods of the people who write the news. The sale of the Huffington Post to AOL in February prompted a sharp reaction from the hundreds of bloggers whose unpaid work had built up the title’s cachet. It sparked outrage (and a class-action lawsuit) only because the owner, Arianna Huffington, had made so much money out of the bloggers’ work: AOL paid $315 million for the site. Elsewhere on the web working for nothing has become routine, and is not experienced as exploitation. Web 1.0 was built by unpaid teenagers for whom the task of designing a website was too cool to pass up. The social networking platforms of Web 2.0 take advantage of the zeal of youth in more ingenious ways. Most Facebook users don’t realise they are working as ‘prosumers’, generating data for the owners to sell. Last year, Facebook made $2 billion in revenue, almost a third of which was net profit, yet it had only around 1700 paid employees. Google has 23,000 employees, and in 2010 turned over more than $29 billion for an $8.5 billion profit. These steep ratios depend directly on free access to the input of users. Similarly, the technical ease with which crowdsourcing can be carried out online has enabled all sorts of tasks to be performed for nothing or at cutprice rates. It seems that as long as a task can be advertised as creative and fun, there’s a good chance you can get it done for free, or for a pittance, from the ever obliging crowd. Yet digital technology alone can’t be blamed for punching a colossal hole in the universe of standard employment. After all, old media, still highly unionised, have also been infiltrated by the volunteer economy. Since 2001, with the success of Survivor, Big Brother and The Weakest Link, the programming share claimed by reality TV and game shows has ballooned. The production costs of these shows are a fraction of those for conventional, scripted drama, while ratings and profits have been extremely high. The cinéma vérité feel of reality programming was pioneered by the Fox series COPS, a scab labour effort cooked up during the 1998 Writers Guild of America strike. Such programming is still used to circumvent union pay-scales: TV stations insist that the producers and editors who work on reality shows are not real ‘writers’ and so the Writers Guild has effectively been shut out of reality programming. Talent show contestants aren’t much better off. A few will make a bundle but for most the price for their shot at fame is to be manipulated in such a way as to spark conflict onscreen. The most widespread trend in the world of working for nothing, however, is the explosion of white-collar and no-collar interning. Not only is interning the fastest-growing job category, it is also
[Marxism] Rapper Lupe Fiasco no fan of Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/385703/may-09-2011/lupe-fiasco?xrs=share_copy Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Notes from the Scrap Heap
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/11/11 4:28 PM, Thomas Bias wrote: http://thomasbias.wordpress.com/notes-from-the-scrap-heap-if-we-make-it-thro ugh-december-we%e2%80%99ll-be-fine/ Try this instead: http://thomasbias.wordpress.com/notes-from-the-scrap-heap-if-we-make-it-through-december-we%e2%80%99ll-be-fine/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Homo academicus
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.counterpunch.org/rimbert05112011.html May 11, 2011 Action or Academe? Can France's Left Thinkers Escape the Ivory Tower? By PIERRE RIMBERT A doctoral degree ensures a solid analytical method, a corpus of knowledge and even, sometimes, critical sense. But it also teaches propriety and precedence, encourages a willingness to surrender strong opinions, highly values give and take, and (because of over-specialization within disciplines) promotes the view that things are “always more complicated” than they may actually be. It authorizes criticism but rejects politics, and blurs the line between seriousness and pomposity. Homo academicus, when asked to decide the editorial fate of an article that challenges the established order, is not neutral; he uses both the knowledge and bias that go with his position. (clip) Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Marxian-Dialectical, 'Intra-Dual' Design of Democratic-Communist Constitutions
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/11/11 6:14 PM, Tom Cod wrote: Is Professor Irwin Corey part of this outfit? Let's not sell the 97 year old Professor Corey short. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin_Corey Irwin Corey was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York. Poverty stricken, his parents were forced to place him and his five siblings in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, where Corey remained until the age of 13, when he rode the rails out to California. During the Great Depression, he worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and while working his way back East, became a featherweight Golden Gloves boxing champion. Corey has always supported left-wing politics. When I tried to join the Communist Party, they called me an anarchist.[3] He has appeared in support of Cuban children, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the American Communist Party, which resulted in his eventual Hollywood blacklisting in the 1950s, the effects of which he says still linger on to this day. (Corey never returned to Late Night with David Letterman after his first appearance in 1982, which he claimed was a result of the blacklist still being in effect.[4]) During the 1960 election, Corey campaigned for president on Hugh Hefner's Playboy ticket.[3] He accepted the National Book Award Fiction Citation on behalf of Thomas Pynchon for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. He is also briefly mentioned in Chapter 22 of the Robert A. Heinlein novel Friday, but as the World's Greatest Authority. Irwin Corey resides in the Murray Hill neighborhood of New York City. In 1938, Corey was back in New York, where he got a job writing and performing in Pins and Needles, a musical comedy revue about a union organizer in the garment trade in New York. He was fired from this job (he has said) for his union organizing activities, the irony of which was not lost on him. Five years later, he was working on another revue, New Faces of 1943 and appearing at the Village Vanguard, doing his stand-up comedy routine. He was drafted during World War II, but was discharged after six months, after (according to Corey) convincing an Army psychiatrist that he was a homosexual. From the late 1940s he cultivated his Professor character. Dressed in seedy formal wear and sneakers, with his bushy hair sprouting in all directions, Corey would amble on stage in a preoccupied manner, then begin his monologue with However ... He created a new style of doublespeak comedy; instead of making up nonsense words like krelman and trilloweg, like double-talker Al Kelly, the Professor would season his speech with many long and florid, but authentic, words. The professor would then launch into nonsensical observations about anything under the sun, but seldom actually making sense. Changing topics suddenly, he would wander around the stage, pontificating all the while. His very quick wit allowed him to hold his own against the most stubborn straight man, heckler or interviewer. One notable fan of Corey's comedy was Ayn Rand,[5] and influential theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote of the Professor in The New Yorker, Corey is a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear, and one of the funniest grotesques in America. He is Chaplin's tramp with a college education.[6] In 1951, Corey appeared as Abou Ben Atom the Genie in the cult classic flop Broadway musical Flahooley along with Yma Sumac, the Bil and Cora Baird Marionettes and Barbara Cook (in her Broadway debut). Corey's performance of Springtime Cometh can be heard on the show's original cast album. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Brazil CP votes for expanding agribusiness in rainforest
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 11, 2011 Brazil Debates Easing Curbs on Developing Amazon Forest By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil’s Congress fiercely debated changing a cornerstone environmental law on Wednesday night, a move conservationists warned could roll back one of the most effective pieces of legislation protecting forests and biodiversity in Brazil and undermine the country’s efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The debate pitted powerful agribusiness interests and the government’s own plans for infrastructure projects against scientists and environmentalists concerned that the Brazilian Amazon, one of the world’s largest forests, could be reaching a tipping point in its deforestation. After announcing an agreement late Wednesday, the government's leader in Congress could not raise a quorum and the vote was pushed to next week. A group of so-called Ruralistas in Congress, who favor expanding Brazil’s agribusiness, including Representative Aldo Rebelo of the Communist Party, proposed changes to the law that would open up more land for agricultural expansion. Currently the law, known as the Forest Code, requires that 80 percent of a property in the Amazon, and 20 to 35 percent of land in certain other areas, remain forest. The proposed revisions would exempt small farms from those rules, potentially accelerating deforestation, environmentalists said. “It is a recipe for disaster,” said Thomas E. Lovejoy, of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. A proposed revision was first submitted to Congress last June that claimed Brazil’s current law, first enacted in 1934, was holding back the country’s economic development. With some countries scrambling to ensure food security, including China, Brazil stands as the nation with the greatest potential in the world to expand land for cultivation and cattle grazing, agricultural experts say. Despite restrictions in the Forest Code, Brazil has become the world’s largest exporter of beef and second only to the United States in the export of soybeans. But despite Brazil’s efforts to slow deforestation, scientists say the Amazon is approaching a tipping point where enough tropical biomass has been lost to cause large areas of the forest to shift irreversibly into savanna or other less biodiverse landscapes. Opening up more land to cultivation could reduce rainfall in the Amazon and place vast stretches of the tropical forest at risk of this “dieback,” researchers say. About 18 percent of the Brazilian Amazon has been deforested, according to official figures. Climactic changes in the rain forest have begun to alarm researchers. The Amazon suffered its worst two droughts on record last year and in 2005. “There are enough signals out there to not rush into this,” Mr. Lovejoy said. Antonio Nobre, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute of Space Studies, has complained about the lack of scientific input in the proposed changes to the Forest Code. “If we had more time to debate, we would have an opportunity to construct environmental legislation suitable for the 21st century,” Dr. Nobre said this month. Some members of the government of President Dilma Rousseff, including her environment minister, have raised questions about the proposed revisions to the law. If it passes the lower house of Congress, it will need to be approved by the Senate. Ms. Rousseff could veto elements of the proposed changes before they become law. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Cuba's New Socialism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch Weekend Edition May 13 - 15, 2011 Lobster is For Tourists Only Cuba's New Socialism By RENAUD LAMBERT Fidel Castro's brother Raúl is taking a pragmatic approach to economics in his presidency, but how far will he be able to correct Cuba's situation? In 1994 Raúl Castro, then defence minister, voiced a rare disagreement with his brother Fidel: The main threat is not American guns, it's beans - beans the Cuban people can't get. Fidel opposed liberalising agriculture, which would have boosted food production. But since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, GDP had fallen by 35%, the US had tightened the trade embargo and Cubans were suffering from malnutrition. Raúl was certain that if things did not change, he would have to bring the tanks out. At the end of the year, the government authorised free farmers' markets. Raúl is president now and maintains Cuba is still not out of the special period . In 2008 three hurricanes caused $10bn worth of damage to infrastructure (equivalent to 20% of GDP) and the international financial crisis hit the strongest sectors of the economy, especially tourism and nickel. Unable to meet its obligations, Cuba froze foreign assets and restricted imports, although this slowed the economy further. In 2009 agricultural production fell by 7.3%; between 2004 and 2010 food imports soared from 50% to 80%. In December 2010 Raúl told the National Assembly: We are treading a path that runs along the edge of a precipice; we must rectify [the situation] now, or it will be too late and we will fall. The president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón (once rumoured to be a prime candidate to succeed Fidel Castro) said: Yes, Cuba will open up to the world market - to capitalism. Building socialism in one country is not easy, especially if its domestic market is small, so would Cuba abandon the revolution? Alarcón dismissed the idea: We will do our utmost to preserve socialism; not the perfect socialism we all dream of, but the kind of socialism that is possible here, under the conditions we are facing. And we already have market mechanisms in Cuba. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/lambert05132011.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] History of CPUSA
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/13/11 4:48 PM, Michael Smith wrote: Millions? Really? That must have been some organization. And here I thought you were the mordant wit. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Greek austerity spawns anarchism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-greece-austerity-kindles-deep-discontent/2011/05/05/AFUQGy2G_story.html In Greece, austerity kindles deep discontent By Anthony Faiola, Published: May 13 Athens — Already struggling to avoid a debt default that could seal Greece’s fate as a financial pariah, this Mediterranean nation is also scrambling to contain another threat — a breakdown in the rule of law. Thousands have joined an “I Won’t Pay” movement, refusing to cover highway tolls, bus fares, even fees at public hospitals. To block a landfill project, an entire town south of Athens has risen up against the government, burning earth-moving equipment and destroying part of a main access road. The protests are an emblem of social discontent spreading across Europe in response to a new age of austerity. At a time when the United States is just beginning to consider deep spending cuts, countries such as Greece are coping with a fallout that has extended well beyond ordinary civil disobedience. Perhaps most alarming, analysts here say, has been the resurgence of an anarchist movement, one with a long history in Europe. While militants have been disrupting life in Greece for years, authorities say that anger against the government has now given rise to dozens of new “amateur anarchist” groups, whose tactics include planting of gas canisters in mailboxes and destroying bank ATMs. Some attacks have gone further, heightening concerns about a return to the kind of left-wing violence that plagued parts of Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. After urban guerrillas mailed explosive parcels to European leaders and detonated a powerful bomb last year in front of an Athens courthouse, authorities here have staged a series of raids, arresting dozens and yielding caches of machine guns, grenades and bomb-making materials. The anarchist movement in Europe has a long, storied past, embracing an anti-establishment universe influenced by a broad range of thinkers from French politician and philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Karl Marx to Oscar Wilde. Defined narrowly, the movement includes groups of urban guerillas, radical youths and militant unionists. More broadly, it encompasses everything from punk rock to WikiLeaks. “Many of these are just a few frustrated high school students with a Web site,” said Mary Bossi, one of Greece’s leading terrorism experts. “But as we continue to see, others have the potential to be dangerous.” Not ready for austerity The rolling back of social safety nets in Europe began more than a year ago, as countries from Britain to France to Greece moved to cut social benefits and slash public payrolls, to address mounting public debt. At least in the short term, the cuts have held back economic growth and job creation, exacerbating the social pain. And Greece is not the only place in which segments of society are pushing back. Though unions and political movements have always used tough tactics in Europe, observers are particularly noting a surge in lower-grade militancy among a “lost generation” of young Europeans who have come of age in the aftermath of the global economic crisis. For most — like the Italian students who draped the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Rome’s Coliseum in anti-austerity slogans last November — protests have become a cathartic outlet to express genuine discontent. For others, they have become an invitation for more radical acts. In Britain, for instance, 10 activists formed the UK Uncut group in a North London pub late last year, spawning a national wave of civil disobedience against spending cuts, bankers’ bonuses and tax evasion by the rich. During a March protest, they used Twitter and text messages to organize a “flash mob” that saw hundreds occupy and vandalize London’s famous Fortnum Mason’s food store. In recent months, other actions have forced at least 100 bank branches across Britain to temporarily close. Last week, officials in the western city of Bristol said they uncovered a plot by violent demonstrators to throw Molotov cocktails at a supermarket and arrested 30 protesters after a pitched battle with riot police. “There is a sense of general injustice, that the government bailed out capitalism and the citizens are footing the bill while the capitalist system is running like nothing ever happened,” said Bart Cammaerts, an expert in anarchist movements at the London School of Economics. “And yet, things have happened. There are more taxes, less services, and anger is emerging from that tension.” ‘Edge of bankruptcy’ No country is under more pressure to roll back spending than near-bankrupt Greece, a once booming nation now saddled with 35 percent youth unemployment and
Re: [Marxism] History of CPUSA
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/14/11 9:49 AM, Mark Lause wrote: A turn to industry means many things in the concept but have an impactr very different when implimented. In the case of the SWP, we can think of a number of plausible ideas promulgated in a boneheaded way that had boneheaded results. The irony is that vast numbers of SWP'ers had public type jobs covered by AFSCME, the AFT and other such unions. They were pressured into going into industry or resigning. One was Ray Markey, president of the librarian's union in NY who is now on the Central Labor Council. Isn't it obvious that the public sector is in the same key position as auto or steel were in the late 30s? Frankly, the basic mistake was to project the 1930s on 1980s reality. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Iranian Marxists analyze Arab revolt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://revolutionaryflowerpot.blogspot.com/2011/05/sharp-rise-in-food-prices-arab_13.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Arab reactionaries hire Blackwater chief to build private armies
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 14, 2011 Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand. The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom. Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times. The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest or were challenged by pro-democracy demonstrations in its crowded labor camps or democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year. The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials. In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion. The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington. “The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.” Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department. Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years. The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment. For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power
[Marxism] 9 Killed as Israel Clashes With Palestinians on Four Borders
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 15, 2011 9 Killed as Israel Clashes With Palestinians on Four Borders By ETHAN BRONNER JERUSALEM — Israel’s borders erupted into deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians — marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank — confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary when Arabs mourn Israel’s creation. As many as nine Palestinians were reported killed and scores injured in the unprecedented wave of coordinated protests. The biggest confrontation took place on the Golan Heights when hundreds of Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four of them. At the Lebanese border Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to cross, killing four protesters and wounding dozens more, according to Lebanese officials. Every year in mid-May many Palestinians mark what they call Nakba, or the catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the start of a war in which thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight. But this is the first year that Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon tried to breach the Israeli military border in marches inspired by recent popular protests around the Arab world. Here too, word about the rallies was spread on social media sites. “The Palestinians are not less rebellious than other Arab peoples,” said Ali Baraka, a Hamas representative in Lebanon. Officials and analysts have argued that with peace talks broken down and plans for a request of the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood in September, violence could return to define this conflict, which has been relatively quiet for the past two years. “This is war, we’re defending our country,” asserted Amjad Abu Taha, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem as he took part along with thousands in the West Bank city of Ramallah near the main military checkpoint to Israel. He held a cigarette in one hand and a rock in the other. Hundreds of Israeli troops using stun guns and tear gas roamed the area. In Gaza, a march toward Israel also resulted in Israeli troops shooting into the crowd and wounding dozens. The Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators walked on foot and reached a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years. Later, in a separate incident, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he was trying to plant an explosive. The chief Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, said on Israel radio that he saw Iran’s fingerprints in the coordinated confrontations although he offered no evidence. Syria has a close alliance with Iran, as does Hezbollah, which controls southern Lebanon, and Hamas, which rules in Gaza. Yoni Ben-Menachem, Israel Radio’s chief Arab affairs analyst, said it seemed likely that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was seeking to divert attention from his troubles caused by popular uprisings there in recent weeks by allowing confrontations on the Golan Heights for the first time in decades. “This way Syria makes its contribution to the Nakba day cause and Assad wins points by deflecting the media’s attention from what is happening inside Syria,” he added. Last week, in an interview with The New York Times, a top Syrian businessman and cousin of the president said, “If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel.” He urged the West to reduce pressure on the Syrian government. An Israeli military spokesman, Captain Barak Raz, said that Israeli troops at the Syrian border fired only at those infiltrators trying to damage the security barrier and equipment there. Some 13 Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded from thrown rocks. The day’s troubles began when an Israeli Arab truck driver rammed his truck into cars, a bus and pedestrians in Tel Aviv, killing one man and injuring more than a dozen others in what police described as a terrorist attack. Later, hundreds of Lebanese joined by Palestinians from more than nine refugee camps in Lebanon headed toward the border, around the town of Maroun al-Ras, Lebanon, scene of some of the worst fighting in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. They passed posters that had gone up the past week on highways in Lebanon. “People want to return to Palestine,” they read, in a play on the slogan made famous in Egypt and Tunisia, “People want the fall of the regime.” Though the Lebanese army tried to block them from arriving at the border,
[Marxism] Statements on Greece
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dear comrades and friends, During the General Strike on 11th May 2011 the Communist Party of Greece(marxist-leninist), Class March and the Militant Movement of Students had been the main (but not only) target of the police brutal attack along with another two political groups (EEK Trotskyites and OKDE), two grassroots workers unions (cooks waiters union and grassroots union of motorbike workers (couriers etc)), an anarchist group and some grassroots groups that are active in specific neighborhoods and areas concerned with mainly local issues. I have attached a statement of the Communist Party of Greece(marxist-leninist) along with statements of three of the militants injured during the brutal police attack. Their photographs where the signs of brutality are very visible can be found at: http://antigeitonies.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_14.html -- Christos Mais (Marxmail does not allow attachments. They are, however, included as text below) State terrorism will not prevail! The people’s struggle will win! Without any provocation or pretext the PASOK government attacked and bloodied the huge demonstration of May the 11th 2011 during the general strike in Athens. The government, scared of the “enemy people’s” rise, initiated an orgy of state violence and terrorism using its praetors, the riot police, against the demonstrators. Our block, as well as several other blocks, received an unprovoked and maniacal attack by the riot police, who surrounded the demonstration in order to dissolve it, and went on with relentless use of tear gas and savage beatings against workers, unemployed, young people and women. The result was that dozens of demonstrators were transferred to hospital with head injuries. One of them is in Intensive Care fighting for his life after being operated in the head. The message was clear. The government and their masters, the imperialists of the IMF and the EU, want to stop any popular resistance against the austerity measures. The people must stay in its corner terrified. We “must not” demonstrate, “must not” strike, “must not” fight back. We “must” accept with fatalism the butchering of our rights, our future, our lives and that of our children. But they cannot rule out the people’s struggle! The cruel reality that the people are forced to live urges them to the road of resistance. The only way to combat state terrorism and repression is to continue more resolutely and massively our resistance against the barbaric policy of an exploitative and unjust system. PUNISHMENT OF THE MURDEROUS POLICEMEN! DEMONSTRATIONS FREE OF POLICE! THE BARBAROUS POLICY OF GOVERNMENT – EU – IMF WILL BE OVERTHROWN WITH MASS STRUGGLES! May 12, 2011 Communist Party of Greece (marxist-leninist) “They wanted dead…” In one of the most peaceful marches of the last years I was “fortunate” to accept the special “protection” of the riot police, alongside dozens of other demonstrators, young men and women as well as senior citizens, who were protesting against the politics of poverty and misery. I participate at least 25 years in the popular movement. I have never seen such rage against us by the repressive forces. The strikes were aimed at our heads clearly wanting dead among us! These were their orders. This is democracy at our times of the PASOK government and the EU-IMF-ECB Memorandum. Everybody is entitled to his opinion provided he does not express it. Anyone expressing his opinion will be “protected” like me. It is clear that this government is in the service of our foreign “protectors” and so is unscrupulous and dangerous to the people. Sotiris Legas Pharmacist – Tradeunionist Former chairman of Ikaria Hospital Trade Union --- The demonstration in which I participated yesterday was met by brutal and murderous force by the riot police. There was at first a huge amount of tear gas and then the attack. We were lucky we didn’t have dead among us. This was a show of force against the people who are resisting against the austerity measures. They cannot terrorize us! We will continue on the path of struggle, the only way open for our people! Resistance in order to overthrow the austerity measures! Roula Sakka Chairman of 7th Athens IKA Hospital Trade Union -- I was marching with the Class March block chanting slogans against the antipopular politics of the government and its new austerity measures when on Panepistimiou Street we were surrounded on all sides by riot police and attacked without provocation with tear gas and truncheons aimed at our heads. In the ensuing chaos and the stampede I was hit on the head by a policeman. I sensed the blood running on my face. I
Re: [Marxism] Racism in Libya,
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/15/11 7:16 PM, Suresh wrote: For some reason Einde, instead of dealing with the facts in the article, decided to post a quote by Lenin. Personally, I'd rather deal with the concrete issues of nation, class, and anti-imperialism in Libya than seek recourse to the same old revolutionary catechisms. Well, what you posted was old news. Within a week after the Benghazi revolt, there were copious reports in the bourgeois press and uber-copious reports on the MRZine, Chossudovsky, Marcyite wing of the left about all this. It was in line with all the reports about the CIA connections, the monarchist flags, et al. If posting all this stuff was supposed to motivate opposing imperialist intervention, that was the equivalent of breaking down an open door--at least as far as this mailing list is concerned. Nobody supported western intervention even though I and others were slandered to this effect. Let's leave it at this. The Qaddafi dynasty looks like it is on its last legs. NATO bombing, rebel resilience and its own internal rot conspires to bring this to a conclusion. I should add those that who equated Qaddafi's militias to the Cuban efforts at the Bay of Pigs should probably have their heads examined. The New York Times May 14, 2011 Saturday Late Edition - Final Captive Soldiers Tell of Discord In Libyan Army By C. J. CHIVERS MISURATA, Libya -- The army and militias of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who for more than two months have fought rebels seeking to overthrow the Libyan leader, are undermined by self-serving officers, strained logistics and units hastily reinforced with untrained cadets, according to captured soldiers from their ranks. In interviews this week in a rebel-run detention center where more than 100 prisoners from the Libyan military are housed, the prisoners consistently described hardships in the field and officers who deceived or failed them. They spoke bitterly of their lot. While some showed signs of mistreatment or of making statements to ingratiate themselves with their captors, the accounts of their logistical and tactical problems portrayed a Libyan force suffering from growing problems in a war that began as a mismatch, settled into stalemate and has recently shown signs of rebel advance. On one hand, Libyan military units and militias went to war with clear material and organizational advantages, equipped with tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, rockets and vast stores of munitions. They arrived to battle with trained snipers and mortar, rocket and artillery crews. On the other, the Libyan Defense Ministry thickened the ranks with veterans recalled to duty in poor physical condition and cadets with almost no combat training or experience. Then, after facing weeks of airstrikes and a growing rebel force, some of these units were cut off, prisoners said, and officers betrayed the rank and file. ''The commanders told us, 'Stay here and we will be back with more ammunition,' '' said a cadet who claimed to have been pressed into service as an untrained infantryman last month, and was assigned to the fight for this city's center. ''But they did not come back, and the rebels surrounded us and we had to put down our weapons and quit.'' The prisoners' identities, which were provided by the interviewees, have been withheld to protect them and their families from retaliation. The cadet, who had a shaved head and slender hands protruding from a long black robe, described many forms of disappointment in the Qaddafi military. At the start of the war, he said, he was a second-year cadet, and was told by his instructors that he must go serve. His and his classmates' first mission, he said, was to search vehicles and check identification cards at one of the country's myriad checkpoints. There were 11 cadets at the gate of the town where he was assigned, he said. ''After a while they came and said 11 at the gate is too much,'' he said. ''And they took six of us and gave us Kalashnikovs and took us into Misurata.'' That was in April, when Misurata was the center of Libya's most pitched fight, a block-by-block contest that cost the lives of hundreds of men on both sides. Inside the city, he said, he found he was in an unknown neighborhood, hidden with others in an apartment building as rebel fighters pressed near and the Libyan Army's lines of logistics were slowly but persistently severed behind them. Other prisoners described constant deception by their officers. One prisoner, a member of the 32 Reinforced Brigade of Armed People, a unit often called elite and which is led by Khamis Qaddafi, one of Colonel Qaddafi's sons, said he was the third contingent of the brigade to be sent from
Re: [Marxism] Cornel West goes ballistic over Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/16/2011 9:59 AM, Mark Lause wrote: This is a superb piece on what I would see as a very important development. And here are the material conditions that are driving it: http://www.theroot.com/buzz/black-unemployment-depression-level-highs-some-cities Black Unemployment: Depression-Level Highs in Some Cities By nsenga.burton Janell Ross is reporting that unemployment rates for blacks have remained critically elevated since the Great Recession. She gives the example of Wanda Nolan, an educated, gainfully employed woman who was essentially living the American dream. Her job was eliminated in 2008, and she has remained unemployed since then. Like Nolan, many members of the black community have seen their lives devolve from a model of middle-class African-American upward mobility into an example of a disturbing trend: the 15.5 percent of African Americans out of work and still looking for a job. The nation's overall unemployment rate sits at 8.8 percent, and the rate among white Americans is at 7.9 percent. For a variety of reasons -- ranging from levels of education and continuing discrimination to the relatively young age of black workers -- black unemployment tends to run at twice the rate for whites. Yet since the Great Recession, joblessness has remained so critically elevated among African Americans that it is challenging long-standing ideas about what it takes to find work in the modern-day economy. Ross writes, Millions of people like Nolan, who have precisely followed the oft-dictated recipe for economic success -- work hard, get an education, seek advancement -- are slipping backward. Even as they apply for jobs and accept the prospect of a future with less job security and lower pay, they remain stalled in unemployment. Trading down has become a painful truth for much of working America, and the disparity between unemployed college-educated whites and college-educated blacks has widened. Tell us something we don't know. It pretty much sucks to follow the blueprint for achieving the American dream and to have it snatched away from you. It's even worse when you are qualified but can't get a shot at another comparable job because there are so few of them. Some have argued that the concept of the American dream was concocted without black folks in mind. Unemployment and its impact on all parts of our community -- educated and uneducated -- reflects this sentiment Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Call for arrest warrants against Gaddafis escalates war (Guardian ite
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/16/2011 2:20 PM, Fred Feldman wrote: Introductory comments: I suspect that more than a few right-thinking leftists will be more pleased than they care to admit that Gadhafii and son seem to face trial in the International Criminal Court. (I think the formal issuance of warrants is a slam dunk.) Right. I am going out drinking with Michael Berube tonight to celebrate. The demand for an imperialist show trial of Gadhafi and sons should be strongly opposed not only by opponents of war and imperialism (including our current crop of anti-anti-imperialists (who still clearly consider themselves to be the REAL anti-imperialists) but by all supporters of democratic rights. This reminds me. When I was writing my review of Burma Soldier, the excellent HBO documentary that airs on Wednesday and can be seen on-demand, I was curious to see what people were saying about Myanmar, a country that I pointed out had a socialist government just like Libya's. Surprise-surprise. Walter Lippmann was crossposting stuff from the Workers World newspaper that reads exactly like their junk on Libya. Just replace Myanmar with Libya and you get the same arguments: After 1988’s brutal repression and with the more revolutionary leadership of the 1988 movement dead, in jail or on the run, the U.S. began funding an opposition to the generals that was deemed friendlier to U.S. corporate interests. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the George Soros Open Society Institute, Freedom House, the Albert Einstein Institute and the U.S. State Department have helped in funding, training and providing material support and communication for a new generation of opposition to the general’s rule. NED funds of $2.5 million annually since 2003 have focused on regime change. The NED admits to funding the key opposition media such as New Era Journal, Irrawaddy and the Democratic Voice of Burma radio. The U.S. Consulate General office in neighboring Thailand, now under a dictatorship that is friendly to U.S. interests, has provided key logistical support and training. Whether these subversive organizations can control Myanmar’s mass movement remains to be seen. Although the military dictatorship in Myanmar has complied with many imperialist demands for greater access to its once nationalized resources, it is an unstable repressive regime that understands that there is a 150-year history of opposition to colonialism, and especially to British imperialism, among Myanmar's population. Fearful for its own survival, the regime has been unwilling to grant U.S. military bases. This has frustrated the Pentagon's plans for the region. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] For Fairport Convention fans like me
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times May 12, 2011 Primordial Soup, a Musical Brew By DWIGHT GARNER ELECTRIC EDEN Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music By Rob Young Illustrated. 664 pages. Faber Faber. $25. The brilliant and largely forgotten critic Seymour Krim (1922-1989) grew up, as have so many American readers, worshiping those writers who captured what he called “the unofficial seamy side of American life.” The excitable Krim put it this way: “I dreamed Southern accents, Okies, bourbon-and-branchwater, Gloria Wandrous, jukejoints, Studs Lonigan, big trucks and speeding highways, Bigger Thomas, U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!” Krim’s ecstatic catalog suggested a sense of the “old, weird America” that fed Greil Marcus’s essential 1997 book about American folk culture and music, “Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.” (That book has since been issued under the title “The Old, Weird America.”) Mr. Marcus examined, through Dylan and the Band, as if in Imax wide-angle, “how old stories turn into new stories.” The British rock critic Rob Young’s excellent new book, “Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music,” is a response of sorts to Mr. Marcus’s volume, and to Krim’s longing for a raw-boned alternative America. Mr. Young’s book, which is largely about England’s amped-up folk music during the late 1960s and early ’70s, is ardent and learned in its search for what the author calls “a speculative Other Britain.” Mr. Young is a former editor of The Wire, the eclectic British music magazine. He originally conceived “Electric Eden,” he says, as a group biography of artists including Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Pentangle, Vashti Bunyan and the Incredible String Band. Collectively, this music means a lot to him; it represents, he argues, “British folk-rock’s high-water mark.” Gathering string for this project, he tripped into a sonic wormhole. His book becomes an insinuating meditation on how British music — and all British literature and art — “accumulates a powerful charge when it deals with a sense of something unrecoupable, a lost estate.” England didn’t have a W.P.A. or a Leadbelly or a Jack Kerouac. It has no tradition of the open road, so urgent an injection into American culture. But Mr. Young, working his way through poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley; through William Morris’s novel “News From Nowhere” (1890) and “Paradise Lost”; through films up to and including “Withnail and I,” among many other cultural artifacts, provides a sense of British music as “a primordial soup waiting for an electrical spark.” That spark arrived from musicians who glanced back in order to rush forward. They intelligently plundered, Mr. Young writes, “pagan chant and Christian hymns; medieval, Tudor and Restoration secular sounds; the nature-worshiping verse of the revolutionary Romantics.” They developed, he says, “an occult communion with the British landscape.” The resulting agrarian noise thrills Mr. Young. About an early record by the band Steeleye Span, he observes the way acoustic and amplified instruments “rub up against each other like a shedload of rusted, notched and pitted farm implements.” Mr. Young charts the history of Britain’s folk movement, through the work of early song collectors like Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams, and the songs (both original and traditional) of ruddy midcentury performers like Ewan MacColl. He is quite hilarious while dispatching effete, drawing-room folk singing. He quotes one critic lambasting the championing of “clodhopping bumpkin folderol” by, all too often, “prancing curate[s] in cricket flannels.” The author is blissfully quotable. He calls Nick Drake “a lost, inchoate genius that you sometimes wish you could grab by the shoulders and shake.” Talking about Fairport Convention’s talented drummer, Dave Mattacks, he doesn’t note just the “funky plod” of his attack. He writes: “In his hands, the beats fall with a heaviness that seems to gouge at the earth itself.” These lines about the early years of the British psychedelic movement are so terrific that they contain the seeds of a sour, funny, lovely Philip Larkin-ish poem: “When Joni Mitchell sang of getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a host of naked longhairs disporting themselves in love games on the cliffs of Big Sur. For Brits, the image that springs to mind is a cheeky reefer in the potting shed before getting back to work on the allotment.” Artists like Van Morrison, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Pink Floyd are considered in this volume. But Mr. Young is more interested in the era’s crisscrossing undercurrents. He resurrects and contemplates the work of many lesser-known musicians, among them John Martyn, Mick
[Marxism] Obama and the Latino vote
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://blackagendareport.com/content/black-president-and-brown-vote The Black President and the Brown Vote By Bruce A. Dixon Can Barack Obama be re-elected without the overwhelming majorities he received in Latino communities across the country? The short answer is probably not. Detentions, deportations, raids, profiling and mass roundups of immigrants are at an all time high. The border wall that Obama originally campaigned against has been built with his endorsement, and generous federal contracts to jail detained immigrants have rescued the private prison industry. What happened, Latino activists are asking, to the president's commitments to fairness, human rights and a path to citizenship? And what will happen to the Latino vote in 2012? In 2008, President Obama got a full two-thirds of the Latino vote [4], a greater slice than of any ethnic group apart from African Americans. The brown vote for Obama was decisive in Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado and topped 70% in California, Illinois and New Jersey. Can the president count on that kind of overwhelming support in 2012? With deportations and family separations at an all time high, and no end in sight, some Latino activists think not. “We can't hide from it, even if we wanted to,” Roberto Lovato, writer and co-founder of Presente.Org [5], the nation's premiere on-line Latino advocacy group told Black Agenda Report. “Just about every Latino family contains undocumented people, along with citizens and adults registered to vote. They know. They can see that deportations are at an all time high. The number of these brutal family separations where children and old people are left behind has never been greater. They see this in their own families and the families of friends and neighbors. The level of actual fear people live in, in their homes, on the street or at the job has never been more intense than it is right now.” In the generation since the Freedom Movement ended, black politicians and the black church have appropriated its mantle and symbols to market black candidates in black constituencies for every office from city council to president as the heirs and fulillers of Dr. King's Dream. Hence candidate Obama didn't even have to make black America any promises. Black voters bit the marketing, made up the promises in their own heads, and flocked to the polls in record numbers. But along with the slick marketing and the slippery language of “comprehensive immigration reform” Barack Obama did make a handful of specific commitments to Latinos. He promised a road to citizenship for the millions of undocumented, along with a more just and fair immigration regime. He hasn't delivered. “The fact is that on immigration issues,” Lovato continued, “Barack Obama has been the worst US president of modern times. Supporting him again, for many Latinos is a proposition that flies in the face of our own dignity and self-respect.” Without overwhelming majorities in brown constituencies, re-electing Barack Obama will be difficult [6] indeed. White support for the president is dropping, and even African American support is softening. Latino support for the president, according to an authoritative February 2011 survey by Latino Decisions and impreMe, is around 70%. But that number, they caution, “...does not translate into automatic votes for 2012...” The second part of that poll reveals that while Republicans are gaining no ground in Latino communities, only 43% of Latino voters are certain they will support Barack Obama next year. The White House knows it's in deep trouble. “My sources in DC tell me that when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus called for the President Obama to use his executive authority [7] to suspend or alter the so-called “Secure Communities” program under which hundreds of workplace raids and countless incidents of profiling, indiscriminate roundups, detentions and deportations have occurred, the White House responded by working the phones, calling up key House Democrats and cautioning them to keep their distance from the caucus on this. “The president is running around the country, showing up at town hall meetings claiming that federal policies are only deporting criminals, but everybody knows it's not true. At one meeting a young woman, a college student stood up and pulled out her own deportation order to show the president. The president is convening panels of Latino celebrities [8], asking them to spread the word about the good work he's doing for our people. But it's not working, not as well as he needs it to. There is a solid and growing base of people and organizations in our communities who just aren't buying it. “There are moves to
[Marxism] NDP's real power comes from organized labor
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/05/16/union-made/ The NDP’s union-made caucus The real power structure in the party comes from organized labour by John Geddes on Monday, May 16, 2011 9:45am - 5 Comments Union made After all the drama and tension of a landmark election, Canadians probably needed a little comic interlude. The NDP provided one, although quite unintentionally. They served up the whimsical story of Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, whose upset victory in Sherbrooke, Que., made him the youngest MP ever, and meant he’d have to forgo his summer job on a golf course. Then there were the three McGill University students who will have to suspend their studies after surprising even themselves by capturing Quebec seats. And, of course, there was Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the assistant pub manager at Ottawa’s Carleton University, who hadn’t even visited the Quebec riding of Berthier-Maskinongé before winning it handily. Just as well, since Brosseau’s French isn’t so good and most of her constituents don’t speak English. Jack Layton spent much of his first post-election news conference fending off questions about the scant experience of these and other rookies in his much enlarged Quebec contingent. With the collapse of the Bloc Québécois, an astonishing 58 NDP MPs from the province were elected on May 2, up from just one, Montreal’s Thomas Mulcair, before the election. But if all the attention on Layton’s youth brigade suggested an NDP caucus characterized by dewy-eyed campus idealism, that’s a misleading impression. In fact, the front benches of the second party in the House—traditionally seen as a government-in-waiting—will feature many tough-minded former union leaders. “We have some pretty major labour folks,” says veteran Vancouver NDP MP Libby Davies. “That’s a connection to a very solid base of activism, an understanding of politics and how it works.” Davies herself came to federal politics by way of a position with the Hospital Employees’ Union, along with five terms on Vancouver’s city council. Among MPs expected to be assigned high-profile jobs by Layton, organized labour credentials are predominant. Take, for instance, just those who have been teachers’ union officials. Paul Dewar, who was NDP foreign affairs critic in the last Parliament, and is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to Layton, is one. Irene Mathyssen, the London, Ont., MP who chaired the NDP’s key women’s caucus before the election, is another. They will be joined by rookie B.C. MP Jinny Sims, who was president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation during the 2005 strike, when it was fined for contempt of court for ignoring a return-to-work order. But the teachers’ unions are outgunned in Layton’s caucus by the Canadian Auto Workers. Returning MPs with CAW backgrounds include Nova Scotia’s Peter Stoffer and Ontario’s Malcolm Allen. Joe Comartin, the Windsor, Ont., MP who was Layton’s respected justice critic, is a former CAW lawyer. Another Ontario MP, David Christopherson, was a United Auto Workers local president way back in the 1970s, and has led the NDP charge on democratic reform issues. Claude Patry, a retired CAW local president, was elected as part of the NDP’s Quebec breakthrough. The best-connected New Democrat in the current CAW, however, is Peggy Nash, a former top negotiator for the union, who won back the Toronto riding she held from 2006 to 2008. Nash is the sort of union stalwart who drives Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to distraction. In her previous stint as an MP, she spearheaded resistance to the naming of retired oilman Gwyn Morgan, a Calgary business icon, as head of Harper’s proposed public appointments review board. Morgan was the Prime Minister’s hand-picked choice to usher in a new era of clean federal appointments. But Nash argued he was too much a Tory partisan for the post, and she raised sensitive racial issues by criticizing comments he had made linking immigration from the Caribbean and Asia to crime in Canadian cities. Opposition MPs voted down Morgan, and a furious Harper shelved the whole impartial appointment-review concept. Nash’s return to the House is touted by Layton’s top advisers as a key addition to their bench strength. More than the impact of any single politician, though, it’s the union culture so many NDP MPs share that sets them apart from the Liberals they have suddenly supplanted. Dewar says one big difference is organized labour’s emphasis on contract bargaining. He says that showed in the way the Liberals, along with the Bloc, allowed the Conservatives to largely set the rules for deciding how documents related to the contentious handling of Afghan detainees would be vetted for release—terms the
[Marxism] Obama more secretive than Nixon
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer A Reporter at Large The Secret Sharer Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state? by Jane Mayer May 23, 2011 On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years. The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.” Top officials at the Justice Department describe such leak prosecutions as almost obligatory. Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General who supervises the department’s criminal division, told me, “You don’t get to break the law and disclose classified information just because you want to.” He added, “Politics should play no role in it whatsoever.” When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years. Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010), argues for more stringent protection of classified information, says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.” (clip) Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] George Soros contributes $60 million to Bard College colonial ventures
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/george-soros-contributes-60-million-to-bard-college-colonial-ventures/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] JP Morgan's hunt for Afghan gold
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/11/jp-morgan-hunt-afghan-gold/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Trotskygrad on the Altiplano
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/17/11 6:05 PM, CallMe Ishmael wrote: https://nacla.org/article/trotskygrad-altiplano Reviews Trotskygrad on the Altiplano by Bill Weinberg Bolivia’s Radical Tradition: Permanent Revolution in the Andes by S. Sándor John, University of Arizona Press, 2009, 320 pp., $55 (hardcover) Bolivia, notoriously landlocked and impoverished, is today at the forefront of forging a post–Cold War anti-imperialism—emphasizing an indigenous vision rather than European ideologies. But it was generations of bitter struggle that culminated in the 2005 election of the Aymara peasant leader and declared socialist Evo Morales to the presidency. As elsewhere in South America, world ideological contests, including the schisms within the socialist camp, played themselves out in Bolivia during the years between the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The way they did, however, made Bolivia unique. So I’m sitting in the third row at the Brecht Forum last Thursday night waiting for Michael Yates to begin his talk on his new book “Why Unions Matter” and guess who I run into? None other than Red Jackman, the barfly and Shachtmanite I haven’t seen since 1975 from Club 55 down on Christopher Street in the Village. The Club 55 was where Red held court. It was a hangout for beatniks and 1950s radicals, especially those with connections to the Trotskyist movement. I used to drink there with my friend Nelson, who was editor of the Trotskyist newspaper The Militant, whose offices were 5 blocks away on the Hudson. Red was a raconteur and a ne’er-do-well charmer, who was either being thrown out of his apartment by a girlfriend or wife, or out of the Club 55 by the bartender. After Michael’s talk, Red went up to him and told him how much he appreciated it. He told a funny story about some Shachtmanites he knew who had ended up in the International Department of the AFL-CIO reporting to Jay Lovestone. When the Bolivian revolution broke out in 1953, these two ended up down there like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern trying to promote AFL-CIO influence, even though they were still left-wingers. They ended up getting kidnapped by the miners, who took them back to their clandestine headquarters. They plead their case with the miners, in fear of their lives. Who could blame them for being scared, since the miners were fierce-looking Quechuans who carried around dynamite sticks to throw at the army. When the miners learned that the two Americans were Shachtmanites, the mood changed completely. Drinks were served and a convivial debate opened up which lasted through the night about the class nature of the Soviet Union, with half the miners insisting in orthodox Trotskyist fashion that it was a degenerated workers state and the other half defending Shachtman’s “third camp” position. It turned out that the miners union was a Trotskyist stronghold. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/red-jackman/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Chávez and the Arab dictators
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://socialistworker.org/2011/05/17/chavez-and-the-arab-dictators Chávez and the Arab dictators by Lance Selfa Venezuela's Hugo Chávez is respected as a left opponent of U.S. imperialism--but he is lending support to Middle East despots who are trying to suppress popular uprisings. May 17, 2011 WHEN THE revolution sweeping the Arab world struck Libya and Syria, the governments there chose to act in the same way that the Bahraini monarchy did against its internal opposition: Open fire on unarmed crowds, arrest large numbers of people and outlaw demonstrations. These actions have rightly received widespread condemnation from supporters of the Arab revolutions. But they have received at least tacit support from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who is widely considered an important figure on the international left. I don't know why, but the things that have happened and are happening there remind me of Hugo Chávez on April 11, Chávez told reporters, comparing the democracy rebellion in Libya to the U.S.-backed right-wing coup against him in April 2002. A mass outpouring of Venezuelan workers and poor people defeated the coup and returned Chávez to office. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro went even farther than Chávez, declaring the Libyan government's suppression of the uprising there to be essential to peace and national unity. Needless to say, these statements of support for the suppression of a popular uprising are disconcerting for those who support the democratic awakening in the Middle East--especially coming from Chávez and his government. In fact, the popular uprisings in the Middle East have more in common with the mass resistance that defeated the 2002 coup than with the coup. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SINCE HE was first elected in 1998 with widespread support from Venezuela's workers and the poor, Chávez has attempted to offer a challenge to the reigning neoliberal orthodoxy. Much of the international left has praised his paradigm of 21st century socialism as a model for achieving social justice in today's world economy. So how is it possible that the originator of 21st century socialism can support dictators like Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who are ordering the shooting down of ordinary people demanding freedom and equality? Of course, the international right has an easy answer to this question. To it, Chávez is nothing more than a dictator himself--so his backing of Qaddafi, Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is of a piece. The Miami Herald, whose views on Latin America track closely with the right-wing anti-Castro lobby, editorialized on May 2: With dictators toppling like dominoes across the Middle East, Venezuela's president-for-life, Hugo Chávez, is signaling worry about his own despotic rule. Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan diplomat who identifies with the right-wing opposition to Chávez, told a small demonstration at the Libyan Embassy in Caracas: Hugo Chávez is complicit with Qaddafi's regime of tyranny. If his friendship with Qaddafi is greater than his responsibility as head of state, then he should go to Tripoli and help him there, but not in the name of Venezuela. Before accepting these condemnations of Chávez, consider their source. The Venezuelan right--which operates with much more freedom in Venezuela than does any opposition in Libya or Syria, or Saudi Arabia for that matter--can hardly tout its democratic credentials. These were the same people who launched the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, and who cheered the 2009 coup in Honduras against Chávez's ally, President Manual Zelaya. What's more, it's hypocritical for anti-Chávez forces to point out Chávez's support for Syria's Assad while ignoring that other world leaders hoping for Assad to prevail include Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia's monarchy, which supports the Syrian regime as a bulwark of stability in the region. Clearly, Chávez doesn't have much in common with these reactionary players in the Middle East. But in lending his credibility to figures like Qaddafi and Assad, he's undermining the support he had gained for championing 21st century socialism. When Chávez denounced Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon and expelled its charge d'affairs from Venezuela, ordinary Arabs and activists cheered him. Back then, Dima Khatib, Al Jazeera's Latin American correspondent, wrote: Today on many Arabic Internet sites, one can read comments such as: 'I am Palestinian, but my president is Chávez, not Abu Mazen.' Or: 'I don't want to be an Arab. From now on I shall be Venezuelan.' Also, to millions of Arabs, Venezuela's use of its oil wealth to fund
[Marxism] Burma Soldier reminder
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This documentary airs tonight at 8pm EST on HBO. It is a first-rate portrait of a soldier who became a pro-democracy activist. It is also quite relevant to what is happening in the Arab world today. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Interesting comments on the Hedges interview with Cornel West
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This just showed up as a comment on my blog: Whether or not we agree with Cornel West on specific issues, we must acknowledge that his voice is highly respected in the Black community and in other sections of the population as well. This makes his break with Obama and his willingness to criticize the President he campaigned for in relatively radical terms significant. I presume that is why Louis decided to share Chris Hedges' interview of him. On the other hand, there are clearly elements of West's new critique that reveal not only a bruised ego, but more importantly the limits of -- what else to call it -- his social democratic thinking. Those on the self-described left who supported Obama fell, I believe into two camps: -- those who believed that Obama's background in academia and community organizing and his contact, however opportunistic, with various left-wing activists (e.g., the African American CPer Frank Marshall Davis in Hawaii, former SDSer/Weather Undergrounder cum education radical Bill Ayers, Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi, Black liberation pastor Jeremiah Wright, etc.) might make him more receptive to the demands of the progressive mass movements that they hoped would emerge in the wake of the '08 elections than any of the other leading candidates would be. -- those who'd convinced themselves that Obama campaign constituted a progressive movement that would, via his Presidency, make a serious, if not quite radical, effort to curb or at least regulate corporate power, adopt a more Keynesian approach to the economic crisis, reverse the more egregious aspects of the Bush foreign policy agenda while struggling to maintain American global hegemony, and re-establish the credibility of government intervention in addressing problems such as unemployment, poverty, housing, health care, etc. This is a distinction that leftists who opposed Obama probably regard as insignificant, but West's embrace of the second view underscores a flaw in his self-described socialism. His expectations of Obama clearly reveal a conventional social democratic belief in the ability of the capitalist state to act on behalf of, rather than in response to, popular interests. West acknowledges that he was reading more into it more than there was, but the it so far as he is concerned seems to be Obama's political character and instincts rather than the progressive capacity of the U.S. federal government in the absence of strong challenges from labor, minorities, immigrants, the left and other forces. The other disturbing part of the Hedges' interview is West's focus on Obama's reluctance to acknowledge West's support and the President's public chastisement of West for daring to criticize him. West's response to these slights barely suggests that they represent a broader attack on the left. One therefore wonders whether he'd still be on board had Obama invited him to meetings at the White House as he has some white (and mainly Jewish) critics of his policies such as Stiglitz and Krugman. I'd like to give West the benefit of the doubt on this one, but note that decades of marginalization have inclined more than a few radicals to settle for the proverbial seat at the table. Despite these misgivings, I would not underestimate the potential significance of West's dissent. Opposition to racism and, correspondingly, African American activism have been central to the left's agenda in the United States. To the extent that Obama's Presidency has neutralized these, thoughtful challenges to him from within the Black community are important. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Translation (Cuba): Guidelines debate 4, Cooperatives
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/19/2011 9:53 AM, Marce Cameron wrote: From Cuba's Socialist Renewal http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com To sign up as a follower or receive email updates click link above http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/05/translation-guidelines-debate-4.html Cooperatives seem poised to multiply, expand their range of activities and play a critical role in the new Cuban socialist-oriented economic model that is emerging. Here is Part 4 of my translation of the booklet Information on the results of the Debate on the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution, an explanatory document that has been published together with the final version of the Guidelines adopted by the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) Congress in April. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin On Cooperation Written: January 4 6, 1923 It seems to me that not enough attention is being paid to the cooperative movement in our country. Not everyone understands that now, since the time of the October revolution and quite apart from NEP (on the contrary, in this connection we must say—because of NEP), our cooperative movement has become one of great significance. There is a lot of fantasy in the dreams of the old cooperators. Often they are ridiculously fantastic. But why are they fantastic? Because people do not understand the fundamental, the rock-bottom significance of the working-class political struggle for the overthrow of the rule of the exploiters. We have overthrown the rule of the exploiters, and much that was fantastic, even romantic, even banal in the dreams of the old cooperators is now becoming unvarnished reality. full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Big Uneasy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Best known as a comic actor, and especially for his performance as a maladroit heavy metal musician in the mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap”, Harry Shearer is also one of the entertainment industry’s most trenchant social critics. Sometimes he combines comedy and social criticism in the same package. His radio show “Le Show” (is this where Stephen Colbert got the inspiration for the French pronunciation of his last name?) is archived at http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/ls and will introduce you to his sharply honed satire. As a part-time resident of New Orleans, Shearer was understandably traumatized by the Hurricane Katrina flooding and began blogging about it on Huffington Post a while back. On August 29, 2010 he filed an item titled President Obama Speaks to New Orleans From Planet Zarg that pretty much sums up the subject of his powerful documentary “The Big Uneasy” that opens tomorrow at Cinema Village in New York (screening information for other cities is at http://thebiguneasy.com/showtimes.php): Sorry, can’t be sure that’s the planet he’s living on, but this intelligent, well-informed man surely can’t be living on this orb. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to start off his speech at Xavier University Sunday afternoon with this reprise of his town-hall remarks here last October: “It was a natural disaster but also a manmade catastrophe; a shameful breakdown in government that left countless men, women, and children abandoned and alone.” Note that the “manmade catastrophe” and “breakdown” are linked only to the response to the flooding of New Orleans, not the cause, as if this intelligent, well-informed man is unaware that two separate, independent forensic engineering investigations of the disaster, conducted over a period of a year or more, agreed on this conclusion (in the words of UC Berkeley’s ILIT report): the flooding of New Orleans was “the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl”. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/the-big-uneasy/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Gary Younge on Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (A pretty decent article by an Obama supporter in 2008.) http://www.thenation.com/article/160782/paradox-hope-obamas-presidency-breaks-racial-barrier-most-black-americans-are-worse The Paradox of Hope: Obama's Presidency Breaks Racial Barrier, But Most Black Americans Are Worse Off Gary Younge | May 18, 2011 When Barack Obama was pondering a run for the presidency Michelle asked him what he thought he could accomplish. He replied,“The day I take the oath of office, the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently. That alone is something.” His victory was indeed something. The world certainly looked at America differently, though this had as much to do with who he wasn’t—George W. Bush—as what he was, black, among other things. Polls show that African-Americans indeed look at themselves differently. A January 2010 Pew survey revealed huge optimism. The percentage of black Americans who thought blacks were better off than they were five years before had almost doubled since 2007. There were also significant increases in the percentages who believed the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks was decreasing. But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself and looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In fact, it has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and white has grown since Obama took power. Under his tenure black unemployment, poverty and foreclosures are at their highest levels for at least a decade. Millions of black kids may well aspire to the presidency now that a black man is in the White House. But such a trajectory is less likely for them now than it was under Bush. Herein lies what is at best a paradox and at worst a contradiction within Obama’s core base of support. The very group most likely to support him—black Americans—is the same group that is doing worse under him. This condition was best exemplified by Velma Hart, the black chief financial officer for a Maryland veterans organization, who backed Obama in 2008. She told Obama at a town hall meeting in September, “I’m exhausted of defending you…. My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed again.” In November Velma Hart was laid off. If it were white Americans who remained this loyal to a Republican president under whom they were doing this badly, the left would be claiming false consciousness. If a Republican president were behind statistics like these, few liberals would be offering that president the benefit of the doubt. So, how do we explain this apparent inconsistency? There would appear to be three main reasons. The first is white people. Not all of them. But enough. Half of white Americans in a Pew survey shared the birthers’ doubt that Obama was born in this country. After the president produced his long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump demanded his college transcripts (claiming he was not smart enough to get into the Ivy League), and Newt Gingrich branded him the “food stamp president.” In the face of such brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama’s right to the office becomes easily blurred with defending his record. Second, the post–civil rights era concept of corporate diversity, which many black people have embraced, is central to his symbolism. Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a process of social change but of individual promotion—the elevation of black faces to high places. Instead of equal opportunities, we have photo opportunities. “We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions,” Angela Davis told me before Obama’s nomination. “But then we have far more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder….There’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.” Third and perhaps most important, the discrepancy reflects a mixture of realism and low expectations. That black Americans are doing worse than everyone else, and that the man they elected to turn that around has not done so, does not fundamentally change their view of how American politics works; almost every other Democratic president has failed in a similar way. Conversely the fact that a black man might be elected president, that enough white people might vote for him, that nobody has shot him, really has changed their assumptions. In the black commentariat, opinion is divided over whether African-Americans should demand a more overt commitment to racial
Re: [Marxism] City of Life and Death, China does big budget block buster
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/19/11 10:22 PM, DW wrote: City of Life and Death is a new film out from China. It's first big budget film, according to the raves. It will also be controversial...not in China so much, but in Japan. It's about the Rape of Nanking. From the synopsis: Reminder. I reviewed it here: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/burma-soldier-city-of-life-and-death/ Basically I said that it lacked historical context. You have no idea why the Japanese committed atrocities. The movie is based on Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking which a number of historians consider flawed. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Encounters with Louis R. Proyect
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == All about my cousin Louis, a retired Wall Street lawyer, rock-ribbed Republican, and observant Jew. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/encounters-with-louis-r-proyect/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Sexual Affronts a Known Hotel Hazard
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (I have to admit that when I first heard about DSK's sexual assault on a housekeeper, I had a hard time imagining such a thing taking place. The guy was certainly a predator but the described encounter seemed at variance with his standard modus operandi which was using his official power to take advantage of women he worked with. But this article reminded me that the hotel encounter is a staple of pornographic movies. There's a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that plays it for laughs. A male hotel detective goes to a room occupied by two women to investigate some problem and is forced into bed by them. DSK sounds exactly the kind of guy who might have had a big porn stash that would have had scenes where a man takes advantage of a housekeeper. Of course, in porn the women are always willing. The scumbag DSK confused his own sexual fantasy with reality.) NY Times May 20, 2011 Sexual Affronts a Known Hotel Hazard By STEVEN GREENHOUSE A lot of people were shocked by the charges that the head of the International Monetary Fund sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper in New York last weekend. But housekeepers and hotel security experts say that housekeepers have long had to deal with various sexual affronts from male guests, including explicit comments, groping, guests who expose themselves and even attempted rape. “These problems happen with some regularity,” said Anthony Roman, chief executive of Roman Associates, a Long Island company that advises hotels on security matters. “They’re not rare, but they’re not common either.” Hotels are reluctant to discuss such incidents, but security experts say the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the I.M.F. chief, will prompt some hotel managers to review their security practices to better protect their housekeeping staff. Zemina Cuturic, a refugee from Bosnia who works at the Tremont Chicago Hotel, said she remained frightened whenever she had to clean Room 410 because of what happened there a year ago. She was vacuuming, she said, and the guest, who had left the room minutes earlier, suddenly reappeared and “reached to try to kiss me behind my ear.” “I dropped my vacuum, and then he grabbed my body at the waist, and he was holding me close,” Ms. Cuturic recalled. She persuaded the guest to let her go, and she fled. “It was very scary,” she said. Ms. Cuturic reported the incident to hotel management, but decided against going to the police. “I was kind of scared that he’d come back the next day if I did,” she said. A Tremont official said the hotel, part of the Starwood chain, has a full-time security guard whose only job is to watch over the housekeeping staff. In the incident that Ms. Cuturic described, the official said that management confronted the man and insisted that he leave the hotel. Housekeepers, nearly all of whom are women, talk of guests who offer them $100 or $200 for sex, apparently thinking that the maids, often low-paid immigrants, are desperate to earn more money. Some women complain of episodes in which they were bending over to, say, clean a bathtub, and a guest sneaked up and stuck his hand up their skirt. Tom Whitlatch, president of Risk Services, a security consulting firm, said many hotel companies were taking a new look at safety after the accusations against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who has resigned from the I.M.F. to focus on fighting the charges against him. “I can assure you that the big hotel chains are aware of this incident and are saying, ‘We need to make sure our housekeepers are trained about this and we’re doing enough to prevent things like this from happening,’ ” he said. Mr. Whitlatch said that there was little that hotels could do to prevent some of the incidents, but that training and good security procedures could reduce the risks to housekeepers. Kathryn Carrington, a retired housekeeper who worked 30 years at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, recalled several occasions when she went into a room to clean, only to have a male guest emerge from the shower in his bathrobe, which then suddenly opened. In one case, she said, a guest propositioned her, saying, “I see a pretty dark girl. Can you do something for me?” Ms. Carrington acknowledged that she used to carry a can opener with her in case she ever needed to defend herself from a guest. The Grand Hyatt’s management was very supportive, she said. “They’d tell you, ‘If any situation occurred, get to the nearest phone and call the supervisor and leave the room. Someone else will help you do the room,’ ” she said. The Hyatt Corporation declined an interview request, but said in a statement, “The safety and security of guests and associates is one of our top concerns.” It noted that
[Marxism] Harold Camping and Jack Barnes
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/harold-camping-and-jack-barnes/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Swans Release: May 24, 2011
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Welcome to Swans Commentary http://www.swans.com/ May 23, 2011 $$$ Many thanks to Perle Deutsch-Shadpour, Helen Steve Mader, and CG for their generous financial contributions. $$$ Note from the Editors: Hallelujah, here it is, May 22, 2011, and we at Swans woke up alive today, having not been raptured -- we trust our dear readers are still with us as well (if you're out there, send us a Letter to the Editor to confirm...). With this farce behind us (until the next nutcase prediction), we can turn our attention to the matters at hand, with scandals aplenty and two high- profile politicos who are probably wishing they'd been raptured out of their public and private hell -- Arnold Schwarzenegger with his admitted lovechild, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn with his denied sexual assault. The former waited till he left the California governor office to come clean; the latter was charged before beginning his presidential campaign, leaving the 2012 French election landscape in shambles. At a time in which even the mainstream media can't spell Judgment Day correctly, who are we to judge? In fact, Gilles d'Aymery offers a different perspective on the crimes of DSK -- not the alleged personal assault, but the wholesale raping of nations he committed as head of the IMF. As always, a perspective you won't read in the MSM, and worthy of deliberation. History will judge America's intervention in the Philippines, and to help set the record straight, Michael Barker continues his analysis of the US meddling in that country's people-power movement. As for the US role in Libya, Aleksandar Jokic asked in an Op-Ed if we are a morally dumb nation, to which a high-ranking European military official took umbrage. The critic declined a public debate, so Jokic answers his charges herein, leaving the detractor unnamed. Turning our attention to less judgmental matters, Peter Byrne reviews the literary anthology edited by the Sarajevo-born American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, Best European Fiction 2011, and Isidor Saslav recounts his undeniably memorable recent musical and operatic tour through London, including a concert for his late friend, English bassoonist William Waterhouse. Byrne returns with a conversation that attempts to explain to a schoolboy the shrinking -- and growing -- middle class, while Femi Akomolafe converses about the significance of Osama bin Laden's death. Raju Peddada celebrates a monument of civilization and engineering feat, the F-1 engine that launched man into space, and Bashir Sakhawarz propels us to Delhi with a short story of an Afghan man's brief and jet-lagged layover with his intoxicating lover. Old friend Martin Murie graces our poetry corner with an excerpt of Casino Bear, and Claudine Giovannoni Guido Monte's multilingual verse take us to the Promised Land. We close with your letters, which judge Gilles d'Aymery as utterly wrong and utterly right about the US economy and its regressive tax system. # # # # # All the articles and the Letters to the Editor can be freely accessed from Swans front page. Please go to: http://www.swans.com/ You can also access our past issues at: http://www.swans.com/library/past_issues/past_issues.html And you have access to almost 15 years of archives by date, author, and subject at: http://www.swans.com/library/archives.html Remember, what's free to you is not to us! To help our work financially please visit http://www.swans.com/about/donate.html # # # # # Swans (aka Swans Commentary), ISSN: 1554-4915, is a bi-weekly non-commercial ad-free Web-only magazine which provides original content to its readers. We encourage pulp publications to republish Swans Work in print format. Please contact the publisher at aymery AT ix.netcom.com. Please, do not repost Swans Work on the Web and other mailing lists: Hypertext links to any pages of Swans.com are authorized; however, republication of any part of this site, inlining, mirroring, and framing are expressly prohibited. (You are receiving this E-mail notification for you have expressed your interest in Swans and the work of its team. If you wish not to receive these short notifications, simply reply to this E-mail (delete the content) and enter the word REMOVE in the subject line.) Cordially, Gilles d'Aymery -- Swans Hungry man, reach for the book: It is a weapon. B. Brecht Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Samir Amin on Qaddafi
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/24/11 11:53 AM, Vladimiro Giacche' wrote: You're obviously right. But you forget an important fact: this war was prepared and launched in a few weeks. Also the public opinion in western countries was - so to speak - prepared for war in a couple of weeks, using the real uprising against Gaddafi and a lot of false news. I would add that this rapid deployment of mainstream media is one of the most important factors in this war - and a quite astonishing one. A lesson for all us, for the future. I don't question the demonization of Qaddafi, the CIA ties to elements of the self-elected leadership, etc. What I question is the notion that the West and Libya were on some type of Milosevic collision course. There are all sorts of desperate attempts to paint Qaddafi as an anti-imperialist hero. Such a bid is only possible by flushing 10 years of history into the memory toilet. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Five animated features from 2010
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Reviews of: 1. How to Train Your Dragon 2. Toy Story 3 3. The Illusionist 4. Legend of the Guardians 5. Despicable Me A guide for Marxists on what to watch with their children or grandchildren. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/five-animated-features-from-2010/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] After Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/25/11 4:43 AM, John oneill wrote: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Daniel Ortega became a victim of his own success. His socialist revolution brought democracy to Nicaragua, but the people refused to elect him. In 2007 he finally became president of the country, and now he is launching a power grab for himself and his family that is breathtaking in its ruthlessness, writes TOM HENNIGAN in Managua http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2011/0507/1224295952855.htm This was behind a firewall. Here's the text: The Irish Times May 7, 2011 Saturday After the revolution SECTION: MAGAZINE; Magazine Features; Pg. 19 LENGTH: 3404 words In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Daniel Ortega became a victim of his own success. His socialist revolution brought democracy to Nicaragua, but the people refused to elect him. In 2007 he finally became president of the country, and now he is launching a power grab for himself and his family that is breathtaking in its ruthlessness, writes TOM HENNIGANin Managua ITH HIS SHORT-SLEEVED shirt open to the navel and a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, el Chapiollo navigates a way through Managua s unruly traffic with an air of authority that belies the fact that his car is one of the most dilapidated on the road. Maneouvering with a mixture of precision and measured aggression that has other drivers backing off, he recounts his soldier s life: At 14 years of age my family sent me to a military academy. But a year later my cousin warned me the army was doomed and told me to get out before everything went to hell. So I ran away and joined the guerrillas in the mountains. It was sound advice. In July 1979, the guerrillas routed the military and entered Managua, overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship. Nicaragua s Sandinista revolution was underway. El Chapiollo joined the new national army and spent the 1980s fighting the Contras, counter-revolutionaries backed by the Reagan administration in Washington, which viewed the Sandinistas and their leader Daniel Ortega as a Soviet Trojan horse in the heart of Central America. Battled hardened, el Chapiollo would be sent to Cuba for training and, on his return home, was assigned to an elite special-forces battalion, engaging the Contras alongside Soviet and Libyan advisers in the same mountains he had fought over as a teenage guerrilla. The Contra war was very ugly. They were more terrorists than soldiers. So when Ortega lost the presidential election in 1990, there was a general feeling of frustration in the army. After so many deaths we felt the people were ungrateful and that our sacrifice was all for nothing. He remained in the military where widespread Sandinista sympathies were at odds with those of the pro-Washington presidents who succeeded Ortega. They even sent us to Iraq to fight in the imperialists war! he says incredulously. All the soldiers were all against it. But we went. Then, after 16 long years in opposition and three presidential election defeats, Ortega finally led the Sandinistas back to power when he won the 2006 presidential election. Today, all over Managua, his smiling face beams down from billboards proclaiming: Viva la Revolución! But asked if he is happy about his old comandante s return to power, el Chapiollo, a civilian again after 27 years, pauses. Then, speaking with the same deliberate precision as his driving, he gives his answer. No. Today I am still a Sandinista but I am not an Ortegista. Ortega has betrayed the revolution. He is no longer a socialist but a capitalist. He has turned into a caudillo [a dictator with a military background]. Daniel has become a new Somoza. The people need to open their eyes and see what is happening. IT WAS UNDER Ortega s leadership that the Sandinistas were supposed to have ended Nicaragua s long tradition of rule by caudillo strongmen with the toppling of the Somozas. The family, which used a mix of paternalism, corruption and state violence to build a hereditary dictatorship that lasted more than four decades, was meant to be the last of a dictatorial tradition that had plagued the country since independence from Spain in 1821. As well as socialism, the revolution of 1979 brought democracy to Nicaragua. The presidential elections of 1984 and 1990 were widely seen as free and fair. Expected to be comfortably re-elected beforehand, Ortega s defeat in 1990 shocked most observers, domestic and foreign it was, perhaps, the best endorsement of the integrity of the country s fledging democracy. But ever since peacefully leaving office, Ortega has been slowly rewinding the tape of Nicaraguan history, back to before the revolution, and in doing so, he is reviving the spectre of
[Marxism] Diane Ravitch on Bill Gates's attack on public education
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-23/bill-gates-selling-bad-advice-to-the-public-schools/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Obama's Middle East: rhetoric and reality
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From the always insightful David Bromwich: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/may/22/rhetoric-and-reality/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Iranian Marxists on US role in Arab counter-revolution
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://revolutionaryflowerpot.blogspot.com/2011/05/us-role-in-arab-counterrevolution.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Overvaluing Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Kloppenberg’s esteem for Obama leads him to over-value Obama as an intellectual. Here the praise strains credulity. He deems Obama’s books “the most substantial books written by anyone elected president of the United States since Woodrow Wilson.” Obama is credited with being “able to interrogate his own convictions—to place them in a broader cultural and historical context by imaginatively scrutinizing them from a position centuries in the future—without abandoning them, much as William James did.” Of one excerpt from Obama’s prose, Kloppenberg writes that “neither Madison nor Jefferson, neither James nor Dewey … could have said it better.” Kloppenberg routinely presumes Obama to be “immersed” in the current intellectual debates of Harvard Law School, “wrestling with texts such as Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” and “probing the arguments in [Walter] Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery.” Isn’t it possible that Obama, like a lot of us who loaded up on humanities courses in college, left a few classic works on his shelves with their spines uncracked? Besides, does undergraduate and graduate reading really make one a full-fledged philosopher? full: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/reading-obama-james-kloppenberg Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Rashid Khalidi: How Obama enables Israel's worst impulses
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.salon.com/news/israel/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/27/rashid_khalidi_obama_palestine Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Saif Qaddafi profile
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://nymag.com/news/politics/saif-qaddafi-2011-5/index3.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Billionaire conservatives buying influence in the academy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/151066/ayn_rand_u_rich_conservatives_--_not_just_the_kochs_--_buying_up_professors_and_influence_on_campus/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Review of new Lars Lih bio of Lenin
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/lenin-lars-t-lih-review-a-heroic-scenario/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] My favorite passage from B. Traven
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From Trozas: Don Remigio left the men, who had been on the march since one in the morning to get there from their last bivouac by midday, standing in the tropical glare of the sun as if they were blocks of stone. Whether they were seriously sunburnt or even collapsed or went off their head, that didn’t seem to worry him. They cost so much of his money. He had to pay off each individual’s debts, since it was on account of them that the man had been sold or peddled to him. For each individual he had to pay the president of the municipality of Hucutsin the tax on the labor contract at a rate of twenty-five pesos, so that the authorities would arrest the man if he ran away. What is more, he had to pay a high commission to the advertising agents who bought out peons from the fincas, the estates and the villages, who were in debt to their masters, as well as other Indians whose police fines had to be paid in order to bring them here. No one could expect that the enganchadores, the advertising agents, would work for nothing, still less as they were in a business in which they hoped to get very rich. Finally, a cash advance had been paid to every man recruited by the agents, the better to tempt the men to confirm their contracts before the municipal president and thus, in the eyes of the civilized world, give the impression that it was a simple labor contract such as can be concluded anywhere on earth. The old cacique knew far better than the newly fledged dictators how to conceal the true conditions in his country from the suspicions of the other nations, helped by a gagged and self-corrupting press that groveled before him. What the workers themselves said or spread abroad was nothing but lies and slander. Truth was only what was written in the labor contracts, acknowledged by the workers, and stamped by an official authority. That the Indian workers could neither read nor write the dictator did not regard as his fault. Why didn’t they learn to read and write? They were too stupid for it and just didn’t want to learn. All the amounts and payments that the contratista [contractor] laid out for a man he had recruited, that man had to earn back in the jungle. A contratista could not be expected to pay out all those amounts for an Indian, or even for two hundred of them, out of pure philanthropy, and then tell the man: Many thanks for your friendliness, allowing me to pay your debts and give you an advance, which you take so you can get pissed and go whoring. Go back to your father’s house, increase and multiply, and live happy and contented to the end of your days! What would become of a contratista who did that sort of thing? In this world, where everybody has to fight for a crust of bread, even a contratista cannot give things away without there being something at the other end. He has to work damned hard to be able to live and to make something of it. If it happens that he has nothing once he is old, then he can go begging. So he must take care of his welfare as long as he is in a position to. Wife and children at home have to live too. And if he has to work hard himself, why not the peons? They’re not used to anything else anyway and do nothing but fool around. If they have no work to do, they just get pissed. Instead of thinking of something else, most of all how they can pay off their debts and escape from enslavement, they waste their good strength on nothing but bringing a crowd of kids into the world. Besides, the people in New York and London want mahogany furniture. Why they want it has nothing to do with us contratistas. That is their business. But there is money to be made from it, a lovely mountain of money. Our jungles are full of caoba. We have no idea what to do with so much caoba. We have such an infinite amount of it that we actually make our railroad ties out of mahogany and ebony. Why shouldn’t we provide a few tons of our rich excess of this handsome wood for suffering mankind? Of course, it does have to be got out of the jungle. We contratistas can’t do that by ourselves. I least of all. I get great blood-blisters on my hands if I cut caoba just for three hours. Mahogany is as hard as iron, damn it. But those Indians, boozy fuckers that they are, are lucky to be able to do something for their fatherland and raise the exports figure. This attitude of the contratistas is thoroughly comprehensible; it shows reason and a profound insight into the confused laws of world economics. Of course, the Indian thinks about it differently. But then he is only a wretched proletarian, not a director of a bank. And it is simply incomprehensible to any normal-thinking man that those goddamn proletarians simply won’t ever
[Marxism] How Bernard-Henri Levy fought his way into chronic interventionism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_02/7708 Summer 2011 The Strenuous Life How Bernard-Henri Levy fought his way into chronic interventionism Christopher Caldwell I. Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so. Perhaps, Zéro speculated, it had to do with dual identity. There was Bernard-Henri Lévy, who launched his career in the 1970s with La Barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face), an attack on Communism, and who in the decades since had written three dozen more books, most of them about current affairs, and many of them best sellers. Then there was BHL (“Bay-Arsh-Ell”), as he was called in the gossip magazines, the very wealthy heir to a lumber fortune, who owned John Paul Getty’s old palace in Marrakech, who had married a fashion model, and who had counted the country’s last three presidents among his personal friends. Zéro seemed to suggest that the glamour and privilege of BHL clashed with the roles that Lévy accorded himself in his writings—Tribune of Democracy and Conscience of France. Lévy had another theory. He believed he provoked strong feelings among French people because he was right so often. “Because I was right about Bosnia,” he said. “Because I was right about Rwanda. Because I was right about Darfur. Because I was right about Communism.” The West has good reason to hope Lévy is right just now. He is credited with—or blamed for—having started the war that NATO is fighting in Libya. Lévy chartered a jet in late February, flew to the Egypt-Libya border, and made contact with the National Transition Council (NTC), a rebel group in Benghazi. He was swept off his feet. This was at the point when a Libyan uprising seemed to have a good chance of driving Múammar Gadhafi from power, although the dictator was beginning a counteroffensive. Lévy phoned Nicholas Sarkozy—a friend of three decades’ standing, with whom he has vacationed several times—to urge him to back the rebel group with air strikes. Lévy set up a meeting between the rebels and Sarkozy on March 10, and Hillary Clinton met their de facto leader, Mahmoud Jibril, in Paris a few days later. Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, began calling for air strikes himself. On March 17th, ten countries on the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, and the French Air Force swung into action to block Gadhafi’s army at the gates of Benghazi. Going to war has looked like a less good idea ever since. Sarkozy and Cameron, writes the military historian Max Hastings in the Financial Times, “have supported the weaker faction in a civil war without knowing who the rebels are or whether their cause is sustainable.” Barack Obama has been willing to invest US machinery in the war (including drones), but not troops or political capital. As prospects on the ground look more dire, Zéro’s question about dual identity takes on a paramount importance. Sarkozy’s future may hinge on whether it was Bernard-Henri Lévy or BHL who prodded him to act. It is one thing to take one’s country to war after consulting with a thoughtful moral philosopher, quite another to do so at the urging of a rich and influential crony. II. Lévy recently wrote of his late mentor at the École Normale Supérieure, the brilliant and doomed Marxist Louis Althusser: “In ‘doing philosophy,’ Althusser used to say, the important word is not ‘philosophy’ but ‘doing.’” Lévy thinks a philosopher must be a man of action, in contrast to those who believe his purpose is to “reflect or meditate or ruminate.” For him, the only kind of intellectual is a public intellectual. The register in which Lévy tends to write is that of Zola’s “J’accuse” and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” He wants not to interpret the world but to change it. You can see this in his prose. “It is, once again, five minutes to midnight in Benghazi,” he wrote in mid-April in his “notebook” in the French weekly Le Point, but then, it always is. These notebooks have an undercurrent of hot rumor and unverified intuition about them, as when Lévy, in April, derided “the attitude of an Obama whom people here in Benghazi are beginning to suspect of dreaming of a new Dayton Accord, an agreement to partition the country.” The result resembles yellow journalism, except that a sentimental idea of humanity takes the place of the usual nationalism. The “fair wind of democracy,” to use a phrase of Lévy’s, is always blowing at gale force. It is false to say, as some do, that “only France” could produce such a figure as Lévy. He is a type of journalist recognizable in any country—the
[Marxism] Costa Rica notes, part 1
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == About halfway to Costa Rica a week ago Sunday on a nonstop TACA Airbus, we ran into some turbulence that lasted a good hour or so. During the worst of it, my wife clutched my arm and said that she hoped the plane would not go down. In my all-so-knowing manner, I told her that most accidents occurred during taking off and landing. She replied that planes do go down in severe turbulence. Not wanting to prolong a stressful conversation, I changed the subject. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/costa-rica-notes-part-1/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] James Wolcott on Lady Gaga
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/05/fried-gaga.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] My notes on a talk by Chris Hedges.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 5/30/2011 10:36 PM, caroltheart...@aol.com wrote: I went to a talk by Chris Hedges last week. I took lots of notes. I was wondering anyone would like to give an analysis, a Marxist analysis of it. I like some of what he said, but he calls the Liberals ' a class '. Maybe you can also talk about Liberals, a definition of it. Don't Liberals sort of give justification to the system. They want to try to solve problems within the Capitalist system, reform it. He doesn't talk in terms of the Capitalist system. Maybe its because of his religious background. He said that he comes out of the religious left. Chris Hedges is our version of Dave Dellinger, a religious pacifist who was a key leader of the Vietnam antiwar movement even when he was doing everything he could to turn it into ineffective street theater. I would love to see Chris run for president with Glenn Greenwald (or vice versa), even though neither are socialists. We should only be so lucky. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Students organize against anti-union food provider
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/31/ohio_state_washington_and_emory_students_arrested_for_protesting_sodexo_university_contracts Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A Foreign Affair
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Until now, Billy Wilder’s 1948 “A Foreign Affair” has only been available as a BitTorrent download. But now thanks to Youtube, you can watch this fascinating 1948 film in 12 parts. For those of who are unfamiliar with arguably one of America’s greatest director/screenwriters let me mention a few of the films he is associated with in either capacity: “Ninotchka”, “Double Indemnity”, “A Lost Weekend”, “Sunset Boulevard”, “Stalag 17″, “Some Like it Hot”, and “The Apartment”. In both his comedies and his serious dramas, you will often find a lead character, either male of female, who can be described as either a cynic or illusion-free. William Holden is the archetypal Wilder hero (or anti-hero to be more exact.) In “Stalag 17″, he plays J.J. Sefton, an American soldier in a Nazi prison camp (Stalag) and opportunistic black marketeer redeemed in the climax through his leadership of a prison break. Here he is challenged earlier on by a fellow prisoner: Duke: Come on, Trader Horn, let’s hear it. What’d you give the krauts for that egg? Sefton: 45 cigarettes. Price has gone up. Duke: They wouldn’t be the cigarettes you took us for last night? Sefton: What was I gonna do with them? I only smoke cigars. Duke: Niiice guy. The krauts shoot Manfredi and Johnson last night, and today he’s out trading with them. Sefton: Look. This may be my last hot breakfast on account of they’re going to take that stove out of here, so would you let me eat it in peace? full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/a-foreign-affair/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Double dip in the offing?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The slowdown has begun. The economy has started to sputter and unemployment claims have tipped 400,000 for the last seven weeks. That means new investment is too weak to lower the jobless rate which is presently stuck at 9 percent. Manufacturing--which had been the one bright-spot in the recovery-- has also started to retreat with some areas in the country now contracting. Housing, of course, continues its downward trek putting more pressure on bank balance sheets and plunging more homeowners into negative equity. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05312011.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Indians consider the origins of capitalism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20110617281207400.htm Points to ponder C.T. KURIEN A critical discourse on the interconnectedness of capitalism, colonialism and globalisation with a well-defined focus. WHEN ‘globalisation' became a talking point a few decades ago, there was a lot of discussion and debate as to what it was. The difference of opinion was mainly between those who maintained that it was primarily a technological phenomenon and those who held that it was essentially caused by economic factors. By and large the latter position is now widely accepted. Most people have also come to accept that it is the latest manifestation of capitalism reflecting its innate propensity to go beyond national boundaries. Even for those who are fairly familiar with colonialism, though, the link between it and capitalism, on the one hand, and between it and globalisation, on the other, appears to be rather vague. A popular point of view is that colonialism is an old and globalisation the latest version of capitalism. Those who do not see this connection frequently maintain that the colonial era is over and that the present is the age of globalisation. Yet another position is that colonialism was a crude version of capitalism associated with political domination, but globalisation is quite refined and totally devoid of any colonial element. What the volume under review attempts is to make a critical evaluation of the interconnectedness of capitalism, colonialism and globalisation. It is a discourse among academics, the papers brought together having been originally presented at a panel on economic change organised by the Aligarh Historian Society in Delhi in May 2010. The papers in this volume are essentially exploratory in nature with a well-defined focus. The lead essay is by Irfan Habib on “Capitalism in History” and is a contribution towards the old and ongoing discussion (perhaps debate) on how capitalism emerged and what contributed to its early growth. A widely held view is that capitalism emerged because of the innate evolutionary proclivity of social systems. Those who hold this position may find Habib's categorical statement that “[t]he arrival of capitalism was not a natural, internal process. Subjugation of other economies was crucial to the formation of industrial capital within it” rather difficult to accept. But Habib is not making a glib statement; he has long historical research to support his position. He goes on to indicate that if the development of capitalism in a country depends on the flow of resources from other countries in its early stages, imperialism was and is a necessary element of capitalism after it has developed. That is how capitalism, colonialism and globalisation are interlinked, according to him. (clip Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Traven
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/1/2011 10:57 AM, Richard Fidler wrote: See Jonah Raskin, My Search for B. Traven (Methuen, 1980). Dan wrote: Travenologists (as they are called) will spend entire congresses discussing who Traven really was, whether he was a German anarchist who spent time in the US and Mexico, or ... Just to say that The Death Ship is definitely a great, and short, novel that is sure to enthrall any young (or older) reader. Back in the 70s, I used to keep two items on my cubicle wall wherever I worked. One was a copy of the cover of Death Ship. The other was words from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: ...the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What 5 years of Lexis-Nexis reveals about Libya and the West
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Just around the time that the West began military operations against Libya, there were ex post facto attempts to describe the assault as the culmination of long-standing hostilities. The model for many, especially Diana Johnstone and Jean Bricmont, was Yugoslavia with Qaddafi serving as a Milosevic type figure. This approach struck me as incoherent in light of the evidence that Libya had been pursuing the same type of neoliberal economic policies as post-Milosevic Serbia for the better part of a decade. There was also an attempt to equate the Benghazi-based rebellion as Libya’s version of the KLA. This involved attempts to uncover conspiracies by the West to stir up trouble in the eastern regions of Libya and get the “restless natives” to rise up against a benevolent leader who had showered them with wealth for the longest time. The latest instance of this came to my attention in a post to the Marxism mailing list that linked to an article by Michel Collon that appeared—unfortunately—in Granma Internacional. Collon is a member of the Axis for Peace, a project initiated by the Voltaire Network based in France. Collon described a plot that was hatched by the West well before the February 2011 uprising: What was the role of secret services? In fact, the Libyan case didn’t start in February in Benghazi, but in Paris October 21st, 2010. According to the revelations of Italian journalist Franco Bechis (Libero, 24th of March) it is that day that the French secret service had prepared the revolt of Benghazi. They then “returned” (or perhaps even before) Nuri Mesmari, Chief of Protocol of Gaddafi, who was almost his right hand against him. He was the only one who enters the residence of the Libyan leader without knocking. Coming to Paris with his family for a surgery, Mesmari didn’t meet any doctor there, but on the other side, he would talk to several officials of the French secret services and Sarkozy’s close aides, according to the latest web Maghreb Confidential. On November 16th, at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette, he prepared a large delegation that would go two days later to Benghazi. Pretty good stuff, I must say. If I were to turn this into a movie, I’d cast John Turturro as Nuri Mesmari and Tony Shalhoub as Qaddafi. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/what-5-years-of-lexis-nexis-reveals-about-libya-and-the-west/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Diane Ravitch op-ed piece on education reform
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/1/11 7:46 PM, Mark Lause wrote: It's not just that she wants the space between the immediate needs of business and schooling, but she sees education as an essential feature of the infrastructure that makes capitalism work as it has in the past. The problem with the current spate of reforms is that they are essentially premised on the idea that education must be cost-effective in some sense immediately evident in profit terms. This relates to the question that has preoccupied me for some time, namely the seeming incapacity of the contemporary ruling class to be able to act in its own long-term interests around a range of questions such as infrastructure, environment, education, etc. Ravitch would seem to be committed to the New Deal project while the social basis for such a project disappeared long ago. Interesting contradiction. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Peak water in China?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times June 1, 2011 Plan for China’s Water Crisis Spurs Concern By EDWARD WONG DANJIANGKOU, China — North China is dying. A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill. Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people. The engineering feat, called the South-North Water Diversion Project, is China’s most ambitious attempt to subjugate nature. It would be like channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington. Its $62 billion price tag is twice that of the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest hydroelectric project. And not unlike that project, which Chinese officials last month admitted had “urgent problems,” the water diversion scheme is increasingly mired in concerns about its cost, its environmental impact and the sacrifices poor people in the provinces are told to make for those in richer cities. Three artificial channels from the Yangtze would transport precious water from the south, which itself is increasingly afflicted by droughts; the region is suffering its worst one in 50 years. The project’s human cost is staggering — along the middle route, which starts here in Hubei Province at a gigantic reservoir and snakes 800 miles to Beijing, about 350,000 villagers are being relocated to make way for the canal. Many are being resettled far from their homes and given low-grade farmland; in Hubei, thousands of people have been moved to the grounds of a former prison. “Look at this dead yellow earth,” said Li Jiaying, 67, a hunched woman hobbling to her new concrete home clutching a sickle and a bundle of dry sticks for firewood. “Our old home wasn’t even being flooded for the project and we were asked to leave. No one wanted to leave.” About 150,000 people had been resettled by this spring. Many more will follow. A recent front-page article in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said the project “has entered a key period of construction.” Some Chinese scientists say the diversion could destroy the ecology of the southern rivers, making them as useless as the Yellow River. The government has neglected to do proper impact studies, they say. There are precedents in the United States. Lakes in California were damaged and destroyed when the Owens River was diverted in the early 20th century to build Los Angeles. Here, more than 14 million people in Hubei would be affected if the project damaged the Han River, the tributary of the Yangtze where the middle route starts, said Du Yun, a geographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, the provincial capital. Officials in provinces south of Beijing and Tianjin have privately raised objections and are haggling over water pricing and compensation; midlevel officials in water-scarce Hebei Province are frustrated that four reservoirs in their region have sent more than 775 million cubic meters, or 205 billion gallons, of water to Beijing since September 2008 in an “emergency” supplement to the middle route. Overseers of the eastern route, which is being built alongside an ancient waterway for barges called the Grand Canal, have found that the drinking water to be brought to Tianjin from the Yangtze is so polluted that 426 sewage treatment plants have to be built; water pollution control on the route takes up 44 percent of the $5 billion investment, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. The source water from the Han River on the middle route is cleaner. But the main channel will cross 205 rivers and streams in the industrial heartland of China before reaching Beijing. “When water comes to Beijing, there’s the danger of the water not being safe to drink,” said Dai Qing, an environmental advocate who has written critically about the Three Gorges Dam. “I think this project is a product of the totalitarian regime in Beijing as it seeks to take away the resources of others,” she added. “I am totally opposed to this project.” Ms. Dai and some Chinese scholars say the government should instead be limiting the population in the northern cities and encouraging water conservation. The project’s official Web site says that the diversion “will be an important and
[Marxism] Tornado kills 4 in Massachusetts
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (This is as dramatic a sign of climate disorder as the murderous tornado in Joplin, Missouri. It is almost equivalent to an article with the heading Blizzard kills 25 in Florida.) NY Times June 1, 2011 At Least 4 Are Killed in Massachusetts Tornadoes By ABBY GOODNOUGH BOSTON — At least four people were killed when tornadoes touched down Wednesday in Springfield, Mass., and a number of nearby towns. The twisters flipped vehicles, collapsed buildings and stunned residents who are not used to such violent storms. Gov. Deval Patrick activated the National Guard and declared a state of emergency. He said that at least two tornadoes had hit and that serious damage had been reported in 19 communities, many of them small towns along the Massachusetts Turnpike. One man was killed when his car overturned in West Springfield, Mr. Patrick said. Two other deaths were reported in Westfield and one in Brimfield, he said, though he had no details. With storms continuing into the night, Mr. Patrick found himself in the unusual position of instructing New Englanders more accustomed to blizzards to take shelter in basements and bathrooms if necessary. The scope of the damage was still unclear, but photos and videos showed buildings with roofs and sides sheared off. The police were going door to door in some neighborhoods to make sure residents were unharmed. “There’s just total destruction,” said Michael Day, a plumbing inspector from Agawam who was driving through West Springfield shortly after the first tornado struck around 4:30 p.m. “All I can hear is ambulances. There’s a lot of police sirens around and fire trucks.” Tornado warnings had been issued for much of the state earlier Wednesday. One of the confirmed tornadoes traveled east from Westfield to Douglas, Mr. Patrick said, and the other traveled east from North Springfield to Sturbridge. Mr. Patrick said 1,000 members of the Massachusetts National Guard were being dispatched to help with debris removal and, if necessary, search-and-rescue efforts. He said that State Senator Stephen Brewer had told him that Monson, a town of about 9,000 east of Springfield, appeared to have suffered some of the worst damage. “He said, ‘You have to see Monson to believe it,’ ” Mr. Patrick said. In Springfield, Mayor Domenic J. Sarno said in a briefing at 11 p.m. that more than 40 residents had been injured and 250 were spending the night at a shelter set up in a local arena. While tornadoes are relatively rare in New England, one that hit Worcester in 1953, known as the Worcester Twister, killed 94 people and injured more than 1,000. Senator John Kerry, who called the twisters a “once-in-100-years” event, said teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were on the way. Mr. Patrick said, “We are hoping and praying and working as hard as possible to keep the fatalities limited.” Katie Zezima contributed reporting. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: A Traven Contemporary and other thoughts
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sent to me by accident rather than the list? Original Message Subject:A Traven Contemporary and other thoughts Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 23:38:07 -0400 (EDT) From: sha...@aol.com To: l...@panix.com Another interesting work that sprang from the Mexican Revolution is Maneul Azuela's The Underdogs of Los de abajo. Returning to Traven, however, it seems to me that theories that Traven's works must have been the works of multiple writerss because of his use of Spanish, English and other languages, however, is misplaced. Europeans seem to have a propensity for multiple languages, because of the closeness of boundaries and thus adjacent linguistic groups, and, as well, the multilingual nature of the pre-war European left. Examples of these would include Max Beer, whose command of English, although much of what he wrote was in German, is remarkable. See, for example, History of Class Struggles or History of British Socialism. Jan Valtin (Richard Krebs), author of Out of the Night and other novels, was a multi-lingual German seaman who mastered English prose in San Quentin. And Angelica Balabanoff - English, German, Russian and Italian. Victor Serge, Russian, French and Spanish. You could add to these the American, Waldo Frank who wrote in English, French and Spanish. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Books on Dialectical Materialism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sent to me by accident rather than the list? Original Message Subject:Books on Dialectical Materialism Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2011 01:51:34 -0400 (EDT) From: sha...@aol.com To: l...@panix.com Some contributors recently commented on available works on dialectical materialism. Works on this subject were available to active Marxists from the twenties onward. Edward Conze, known mostly for his later years as a Buddhist scholar, was the author of Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, a compendium of articles he wrote for Plebs (or it may have been Labour Mounthly) in the early twenties, as well as Scientific Thinking, an Introduction to Dialectical Materialism. August Thalheimer, German Communist and then right oppositionist, wrote Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, a series of lectures given at Sun Yat Sen University in Moscow for the Comintern as a teaching vehicle for Chinese radicals studying there in the twenties. (Both Conze and Thalheimer were ihad associations with the POUM. Conze wrote Spain Today: Revolution and Counter Revolution written before the outbreak of the Civil War, and based in part on Joaquin Maurin's Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain, which Conze had first intended to translate but then decided to do his own work. Thalheimer's Notes on a Visit to Catalonia being reports sent back to Heinrich Brandler in 1936 and available on the net is an extremely insteresting document). Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Books on Dialectical Materialism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/2/2011 10:20 AM, Tom Cod wrote: Hey, wasn't this guy one of the Soviet regime's ideological Three Card Monte men? The Healyites were into this intellectual psychology as well which is designed to convince people to abandon their common sense for some dimly understood dogma that served as theological window dressing for obeisiance to the august and wise leader. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_card_monte This mailing list has been very civil lately and I hope that it remains this way. Let's try to avoid needless acrimony. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Rejoice and Shout
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Without gospel music, there would not be Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles and a host of other great Black rhythm and blues musicians. And without these musicians, there would certainly not be rock-and-roll. Given its overarching significance for American popular culture, which after all is its greatest contribution to world civilization, we can only rejoice over the arrival of “Rejoice and Shout”, the definitive documentary on gospel music starting tomorrow at the Film Forum in New York. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/rejoice-and-shout/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Libyan Rebels to Recognise Israel?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/2/2011 4:03 PM, Ismail Lagardien wrote: Libya’s rebel National Transitional Council (NTC) is ready to recognise Israel, according to French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who says he has passed the message on to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. http://www.english.rfi.fr/africa/20110602-libyan-rebels-will-recognise-israel-bernard-henri-levy-tells-netanyahu They should be ashamed of themselves. Lucky we have defenders of the Palestinians fighting on the other side. The Philadelphia Inquirer OCTOBER 5, 1995 Thursday FINAL EDITION PALESTINIAN RIVALS UNITE IN ATTACK ON GADHAFI / LIBYA'S LEADER WAS ASSAILED FOR FORCING PALESTINIANS TO MOVE TO GAZA OR JERICHO. HE OPPOSES THE PEACE PACT. / BYLINE: Sami Aboudi, REUTERS DATELINE: RAMALLAH, West Bank Supporters and Islamic opponents of PLO head Yasir Arafat, in a rare show of unity, heaped scorn on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi yesterday for what they called the transfer of Palestinians from Libya. Gadhafi, a rabid opponent of the PLO-Israeli peace accord, has decided that Libya's 30,000 Palestinian residents should return to Palestinian self-ruled areas and expose the shortcomings of the peace deals. In recent weeks, Libyan authorities have fired hundreds of Palestinian expatriates from their jobs and confiscated their houses. About 900 are stranded at a makeshift Libyan-run camp on the border with Egypt, waiting for Egypt's permission - so far not forthcoming - to cross to PLO-ruled Gaza and Jericho. United Nations officials say more than 5,000 Palestinians have been expelled in the last three months. Libya insists that the Palestinians have chosen to leave in response to appeals from Gadhafi. This is a collective transfer, which is taking place in a strange way in an Arab country, Yahya Yakhlof, director-general of the Palestinian Culture Department, told a news conference. It is a new dagger that is added to the body of the Palestinian people, said Sheik Hassan Yousef, who spoke on behalf of the Islamic movement. President Gadhafi's step only pressures the Palestinian people to accept even something worse than what we are already in, said Yousef, referring to the Israeli-PLO peace moves, which Islamic groups regard as a sell-out. But Libya's deputy foreign minister yesterday rejected the denunciations, saying Libya was, in fact, promoting Palestinians' claims to a homeland. We are telling the entire world: Here is a people expelled from its land by Israel, Abdelati al-Obeidi said during a visit to Ukraine. We have deported 5,000 to 10,000 Palestinians, why is there such a fuss? Other Arab countries expelled Palestinians in the past, yet everyone remained silent. Obeidi said there was an international policy aimed at resolving the Palestinian problem by dispersing them in various Arab countries. In this way, it is hoped the Palestinian problem will be resolved when there are no more Palestinians wanting to return to their homeland, he said. We are reminding the world that the Palestinian problem exists and there are Palestinians now forced to live in exile. They have the full right to return to their historic homeland. We do not want the Palestinian people to live like refugees in tents and receive humanitarian aid. Thousands of Palestinian teachers and doctors moved to Libya in the early 1970s, after Gadhafi opened his country to professionals from Arab countries. But Gadhafi, who once was regarded as one of the chief backers of the Palestinian cause, has become critical of the Palestinians since Arafat signed an interim peace deal with Israel in 1993. He was even more critical of Arafat's recent accord with Israel on handing over authority in the West Bank to the PLO. During a news conference yesterday near the makeshift camp at the border with Egypt, Gadhafi urged Arab countries to follow his example and send home all Palestinians, in order to expose what he said was Israel's plan to create a Palestinian state in name only. The Zionist plan is to create a Palestine without Palestinians. . . . Other Arab countries are taking part in this Zionist plan by allowing the Palestinians to stay in their land, he said. Camp residents and Libyans cheered, waving banners saying, Palestinians should go home. If we prevent the Palestinians from the right to return, then we are participating in the imperialist plan which calls for their settlement in Arab lands forever, Gadhafi said. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Reflections on the World Socialist Web Site
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/reflections-on-the-world-socialist-web-site/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Turkish army's boots: Made in Israel
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch Weekend Edition June 3 / 5, 2011 Turkey Shoes Israeli Army Off With Their Boots By MICHAEL DICKINSON Late on Monday night as I was getting ready for bed I suddenly heard angry Late on Monday night as I was getting ready for bed I suddenly heard angry chanting, shouts and cries echoing in the air, coming from the direction of nearby Taksim Square in the heart of Istanbul. It sounded like a huge demonstration, and I wondered what it was about, surprised that it should be happening as midnight approached. I stood and listened on my balcony, unable to quite hear the words of the roared slogans, apart from Allahuekber (God is Great). I wondered if the Turks had suddenly caught the fever of the rebellious Arab Spring, and were demanding the overthrow of the government. My Turkish flatmate appeared a short time later and told me there were thousands of protestors on the streets, many of them Muslim Fundamentalists carrying flaming torches, commemorating the anniversary of the killing by Israeli soldiers of 9 Turks on the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships in an aid flotilla attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip last year, and expressing support for a new convoy of 15 ships, including the Mavi Marmara, which plans to set off at the end of June carrying medical, school and construction materials, organised by the Humanitarian Relief Foundation. I learned next day that some 30,000 Turks had taken part in the demonstration, many of them shouting slogans such as Against the Zionist blockade stands our Islamic solidarity, and carrying posters reading, Cooperation with Israel is a crime against humanity. Following the raid on the Mavi Marmara last year Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Israel stands to lose its closest ally in the Middle East if it does not change its mentality. Meanwhile however, I wonder if the protesters are aware that business between the two countries is booming. Turkey is currently Israel's biggest trade partner in the region and its second-biggest in the world, following the United States. In the first three months of 2011, Turkey exported products worth $579.3 million to Israel and imported goods worth $397.3 million. While Turkey purchases high-tech defense-industry equipment from Israel, amongst the goods they export are military uniforms and footwear for the Israeli army. Would the well-meaning protesters who demonstrated on Monday night not feel dismayed and ashamed if they knew that the boots on the feet of the Israeli soldiers who tramp through occupied territory and kick down the doors of Palestinian family homes are labelled 'Made in Turkey'? To put real pressure on the Israeli government to consider changing its racist apartheid elitist regime surely trade sanctions and boycotts would be the most effective measure. Let Turkey cease its role as cobbler and tailor to the tyrants, and let a new slogan be added to those chanted by the protesters demanding an end to cooperation with Israel: No more in Cahoots! Off with their Boots! (Naturally, it wouldn't sound quite the same in Turkish.) Michael Dickinson lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted at http://yabanji.tripod.com/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Dr. Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83; Backed Assisted Suicide
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times June 3, 2011 Dr. Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83; Backed Assisted Suicide By KEITH SCHNEIDER Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the medical pathologist who helped dozens of terminally ill people kill themselves, becoming the central figure in a national drama surrounding assisted suicide, died on Friday in a Detroit-area hospital. He was 83. The cause was not immediately known, but local media reported that he had suffered from kidney and respiratory problems and that his condition had been worsening in recent days. His death, at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., was confirmed by Geoffrey Feiger, the lawyer who represented Dr. Kevorkian during several of his trials in the 1990s. Dr. Kevorkian challenged social taboos about disease and dying, willfully defying prosecutors and the courts as he actively sought national celebrity. He spent eight years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the last of the more than 100 terminally ill patients whose lives he helped end. From June 1990, when he assisted in the first suicide, until March 1999, when he was sentenced to serve 10 to 25 years in a maximum security prison, Dr. Kevorkian was a controversial figure. But his critics and supporters generally agree on this: As a result of his stubborn and often intemperate advocacy for the right of the terminally ill to choose how they die, hospice care has boomed in the United States, and physicians have become more sympathetic to their pain and more willing to prescribe medication to relieve it. In 1997, Oregon became the first state to enact a statute making it legal for physicians to prescribe lethal medications to help terminally ill patients end their lives. In 2006 the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found that Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act protected a legitimate medical practice. During the nine years between the law’s passage and the court’s ruling, Dr. Kevorkian’s confrontational strategy consumed thousands of column inches in national newspapers, graced the covers of national magazines and drew the attention of “60 Minutes” and other television news programs. His nickname, Dr. Death, and his self-made suicide machine, which he variously called the “Mercitron” or the “Thanatron,” became fodder for late-night television comedians. His story became the subject of the 2010 HBO movie You Don’t Know Jack. Al Pacino, who played Dr. Kevorkian in the movie, earned Emmy and Golden Globe awards for his performance. In his Emmy acceptance speech, Mr. Pacino said he had been gratified to “try to portray someone as brilliant and interesting and unique as Dr. Kevorkian and that it had been a pleasure to know him. Dr. Kevorkian, who was in the audience, smiled in appreciation. Given his obdurate public persona and his delight in flaying medical critics as “hypocritic oafs,” Dr. Kevorkian invited and reveled in the public’s attention, regardless of its sting. The American Medical Association in 1995 called him “a reckless instrument of death” who “poses a great threat to the public.” Diane Coleman, the founder of Not Dead Yet, a right-to-life advocacy group that once picketed Dr. Kevorkian’s home in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, attacked his approach. “It’s the ultimate form of discrimination to offer people with disabilities help to die,” she said, “without having offered real options to live. But Jack Lessenberry, a prominent Michigan journalist who closely covered Dr. Kevorkian’s one-man campaign, said: “Jack Kevorkian, faults and all, was a major force for good in this society. He forced us to pay attention to one of the biggest elephants in society’s living room: the fact that today vast numbers of people are alive who would rather be dead, who have lives not worth living.” In the late 1980s, after an undistinguished career in medicine and an unsuccessful try at a career in the arts, Dr. Kevorkian rediscovered the fascination with death, not as a private event but as a focus of public policy, that had marked his early years in medicine. As a student at the University of Michigan Medical School, where he graduated in 1952, and later as a resident at the University of Michigan Medical Center, Dr. Kevorkian proposed giving murderers condemned to die the option of being executed with anesthesia in order to subject their bodies to medical experimentation and allow the harvesting of their healthy organs. He delivered a paper on the subject to a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Kevorkian shelved his quixotic campaign to engage death for social purposes and pursued a largely itinerant career as a
[Marxism] A Cree Professor Helps Create a Record of Canada's Infamous Residential Schools
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://chronicle.com/article/A-Cree-Professor-Helps-Create/127693/ May 29, 2011 A Cree Professor Helps Create a Record of Canada's Infamous Residential Schools By Karen Birchard When Greg Younging, an assistant professor of indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus, joined the staff of the Canadian government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he knew he would be helping to make accessible long-suppressed stories of the way many of the country's aboriginal children were treated in the residential schools they were forced to attend. As the commission's assistant director of research, Mr. Younging, who is an Opaskwayak Cree, is dealing with the types of experiences his own relatives might have had when they were sent away from their families as part of the federal effort to civilize aboriginal people. He will play a key role in writing the first set of recommendations to the federal government, based on personal memories now being heard by the panel. It's a daunting responsibility, he says of his appointment, made this past winter, but I couldn't refuse because of my own family history. I feel it as a moral obligation. Beginning in the 1840s, many aboriginal children were removed from their homes and sent to church-run, government-financed schools across Canada. The schools' policy was to strip away the children's language and culture, says a commission summary, in an attempt to kill the Indian in the child. The last of the schools closed in 1996. Paulette Regan, the commission's research director, says the panel is lucky to be able to tap Mr. Younging's talents in publishing and research, especially as it works to establish a national center that will house documents and recordings of the stories it gathers. Mr. Younging has two master's degrees—one in native studies and another in publishing—and a Ph.D. Before he did his doctorate, he managed an indigenous book-publishing company, Theytus Books, where he also did much of the editing. He brings with him a depth of knowledge and experience because of the research he's done, especially on international conventions and the human-rights aspects of issues raised by residential schools, she says. Beyond that, he has a personal understanding of the issue. His parents met in the military, and the family moved from base to base in Canada until Greg was 7 and his father was sent to study electrical engineering at George Washington University. Greg happily spent most of his teen years at the Canadian Forces Base in Lahr, Germany, where his father was posted. It wasn't until around the time he was heading for Carleton University, in Ottawa, that he learned from his cousin about the existence of residential schools and that his grandfather, his mother, and her siblings had endured the system. While some of the aboriginal children benefited from their education in the residential schools, many suffered physical or sexual abuse, or even died there. The effects have manifested themselves in subsequent generations through a wide range of health and behavioral issues, including poor parenting skills and distrust of the educational system, academic research has found. I was enraged at what had happened to them, Mr. Younging says of what he learned of the schools and the abusive treatment of his family members. His late discovery of what they went through, he has realized, is pretty much the experience of other children. The parents did not tell them, did not talk about the schools, and they find out in their late teens. And they begin to piece together why there are so many problems in their communities. Mr. Younging, who is 50, said he was happy just doing his teaching, but accepted the research position on top of his academic job in part because of his mother's work. N. Rosalyn Ing went back to school as an adult, getting her high-school diploma, her bachelor's, her master's, and eventually her Ph.D. She is regarded as a pathfinder, the first to do research on the effects of the schools on second and third generations. He hopes the commission's findings will become part of the national consciousness after it finishes its work in 2014. He knows from studying other Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that findings and recommendations are put under the microscope and usually criticized from all angles—from the government, from the general public, and even from the victims. That's just what happens when you do a TRC and bring up these harsh issues. So I'm fully expecting that. I'm not looking forward to the criticism, the backlash, the continuing denial. It'll bring up another wave of denial against residential schools. That's the
Re: [Marxism] The Optimism of a Double-Dip
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 6/3/2011 11:57 AM, michael perelman wrote: A crisis is the method by which a capitalist economy partially purges itself of the effects of past mistakes while imposing misery on the masses. Lately I have been wondering if the business cycle model makes sense. Isn't it possible that American capitalism has entered a new phase of decline that bubbles preempted only up to a point? Could we be the next Japan? Furthermore, this boom-and-bust paradigm only seems to make sense when it is applied to a G8 type nation. When is the last time that Paraguay or Malawi went through a business cycle? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Syria and Hizballah
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1737/syria-and-hizballah Jun 02 2011 by Khalid Saghieh [This article is written by Khalid Saghieh and translated by Assaf Khoury*] Translator's Introduction Up until a few months ago, Hizballah could legitimately claim pride of place in the Arab anti-imperialist camp. Hizballah was the only Arab force that repeatedly stymied the powerful Israeli military and never caved in. Over a period of nearly two decades, it was the most stubborn obstacle to imperialist domination of the Middle East. In more recent years, to its credit, Hizballah embraced an inclusiveness it had shunned in earlier times. It shed its earlier visceral enmity of left secular groups and parties, however fitfully, and welcomed their support, both inside and outside Lebanon. The recent revolutionary upheaval shaking the Arab world has given rise to a new powerful contender, the massive and largely decentralized mobilization of hundreds of thousands openly defying despotic rulers. It introduces an irreversible re-ordering of political forces, from Morocco to Bahrain and from Syria to Yemen, whose ultimate outcome is too early to predict. Friends and foes have therefore closely monitored Hizballah's positioning relative to the tectonic shifts affecting the Middle Eastern political landscape. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah's secretary-general, has publicly praised the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain – but not in Syria. May 25 is Liberation Day in Lebanon. (On May 25, 2000, the Israeli army was forced to withdraw from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.) It is an occasion for speech-making, and staking positions and counter-positions, in the perpetual carousel of Lebanese politics. Given Hizballah's history and reliance on Syria, there was perhaps no surprise in Nasrallah's devoting some 10 minutes of his hour-long speech to defend the Syrian regime. Nonetheless, there was also disappointment in his inability to at least acknowledge a Syrian revolt that is riding and continuing the revolutionary wave sweeping across Arab lands. The article below appeared in Arabic, as an editorial in the Beirut daily al-Akhbar of May 26, and reflects this sentiment of disappointment. Its author, Khalid Saghieh, is al-Akhbar's managing editor. The significance of al-Akhbar is that it is decidedly left-wing and normally the most supportive of Hizballah of the three major Arabic-language dailies in Beirut] Syria and Hizballah by Khalid Saghieh There would be no surprise if anyone said that Hizballah is not a reformist party. It does not have a reform program in Lebanon, nor does it campaign in support of fundamental reforms promoted by any of its allies. When it felt secure there would be no internal attempt to reduce or eliminate it as a resistance movement, Hizballah did not insist on getting its fair share in the government or even taking part in it. Hizballah does not therefore belong to the “democracy-first” camp. As a party, its priority is resistance to Israel, for which it is willing to sacrifice many aspects of democratic principles, if these are in contradiction with its role as a resistance movement. All of this is well known and amply demonstrated by Hizballah's history. Hizballah, the party that succeeded in liberating the land in May 2000 and in withstanding the Israeli onslaught in July-August 2006, is the same party that did not hesitate to confront its internal enemies in May 2008 by force of arms. In the latter case, there were internal and external forces colluding to curtail Hizballah as a resistance movement. Hizballah put an end to these attempts using means contrary to accepted norms of democracy, by besieging several Beirut neighborhoods and forcibly disarming its opponents. It is true that Hizballah prefers that the country be ruled by a majority that supports it as a resistance movement. However, it will not relinquish its function as a resistance, even if it cannot secure the support of such a majority. If this is Hizballah's view on issues of reform and democracy in Lebanon, it stands to reason that it holds a similar view on events in Syria. Hizballah will not abandon a friend or an ally that does not abide by rules of democracy. It would therefore be naive to expect Hizballah to support the toppling of the regime in Syria. Those who have been so eager to bestow a romantic aura on Hizballah, as a disciplined liberation movement, should try to restrain their ardor a little, in fairness to Hizballah's self-definition as a resistance, first and foremost, if only to avoid facing countless disappointments in months ahead. That said, it seems that
[Marxism] Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times June 3, 2011 Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79 By NATE CHINEN Ray Bryant, a jazz pianist whose sensitivity and easy authority made him a busy accompanist and a successful solo artist, beginning in the mid-1950s, died on Thursday. He was 79. His wife of 20 years, Claude Bryant, said he died at New York Hospital Queens after a long illness. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens. Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church. And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a sensibility but never as an affectation. All of this contributed to his accomplishment as a solo pianist. His first solo piano album was “Alone With the Blues,” in 1958, and he went on to make a handful of others, including “Alone at Montreux,” “Solo Flight” and “Montreux ’77.” His most recent release, “In the Back Room,” was yet another solo album, recorded live at Rutgers University and released on the Evening Star label in 2008. Raphael Homer Bryant was born on Dec. 24, 1931, in Philadelphia, and made his name in that city during its considerable postwar jazz boom. Along with his brother, Tommy, a bassist, he played in the house band at the Blue Note Club in Philadelphia, which had a steady flow of major talent dropping in from New York. (Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were among the musicians they played with there.) In short order Mr. Bryant had plenty of prominent sideman work, both with and without his brother. One early measure of his ascent was the album “Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant,” released on Columbia in 1955. It was a splashy introduction for him as well as for Ms. Carter, the imposingly gifted jazz singer. It was soon followed by “The Ray Bryant Trio” (Prestige), an accomplished album that introduced Mr. Bryant’s composition “Blues Changes,” with its distinctive chord progression. That song would become a staple of the jazz literature, if less of a proven standard than “Cubano Chant,” the sprightly Afro-Cuban fanfare that Mr. Bryant recorded under his own name and in bands led by the drummers Art Blakey, Art Taylor and Jo Jones. Mr. Bryant had several hit songs early in his solo career, beginning with “Little Susie,” an original blues that he recorded both for the Signature label and for Columbia. In 1960 he reached No. 30 on the Billboard chart with a novelty song called “The Madison Time,” rushed into production to capitalize on a dance craze. (The song has had a durable afterlife, appearing on the soundtrack to the 1988 movie “Hairspray,” and in the recent Broadway musical production.) He later broke into the Top 100 with a cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” released just a few months after the original, in 1967. But Mr. Bryant’s legacy never rested on his chart success or his nimble response to popular trends. It can be discerned throughout his own discography and in some of his work as a sideman, notably with the singers Carmen McRae and Jimmy Rushing, and on albums like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Sonny Side Up,” on Verve. “After Hours,” a track on that album, begins with Mr. Bryant and his brother playing a textbook slow-drag blues. Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks, the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”; and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Alabama new anti-immigrant law harsher than Arizona's
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times June 3, 2011 In Alabama, a Harsh Bill for Residents Here Illegally By JULIA PRESTON Alabama has passed a sweeping bill to crack down on illegal immigrants that both supporters and opponents call the toughest of its kind in the country, going well beyond a law Arizona passed last year that caused a furor there. The measure was passed by large margins in the Alabama Senate and the House, both Republican-controlled, in votes on Thursday. Governor Robert Bentley, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill into law. “Alabama is now the new No. 1 state for immigration enforcement,” said Kris Kobach, a constitutional lawyer who is secretary of state in Kansas. He has helped write many state bills to curtail illegal immigration, including Alabama’s. “This bill invites discrimination into every aspect of the lives of people in Alabama,” said Cecillia Wang, director of the immigrants’ rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has brought legal challenges against several state immigration-control laws. Calling Alabama’s bill “outrageous and blatantly unconstitutional,” Ms. Wang said, “We will take action if the governor signs it.” The Alabama bill includes a provision similar to one that stirred controversy in Arizona, authorizing state and local police officers to ask about the immigration status of anyone they stop based on a “reasonable suspicion” the person is an illegal immigrant. Federal courts have suspended most of that Arizona law. Alabama’s bill goes beyond Arizona’s. It bars illegal immigrants from enrolling in any public college after high school. It obliges public schools to determine the immigration status of all students, requiring parents of foreign-born students to report the immigration status of their children. The bill requires Alabama’s public schools to publish figures on the number of immigrants — both legal and illegal — who are enrolled and on any costs associated with the education of illegal immigrant children. The bill, known as H.B. 56, also makes it a crime to knowingly rent housing to an illegal immigrant. It bars businesses from taking tax deductions on wages paid to unauthorized immigrants. “This is a jobs-creation bill for Americans,” said Representative Micky Hammon, a Republican who was a chief sponsor of the bill. “We really want to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and to prevent those who are here from putting down roots,” he said. The Alabama bill comes at the end of a legislative season when many states wrestled with immigration crackdown proposals. Measures focusing only on enforcement failed in 16 states, according to a tally by the National Immigration Forum in Washington, a group opposing such laws. In May, Georgia adopted a tough enforcement law, which civil rights groups filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to stop. Proponents of state immigration enforcement laws won a major victory last week when the Supreme Court upheld a 2007 law in Arizona imposing penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants. Alabama’s law includes some provisions similar to the Arizona statute that courts rejected as incursions on legal terrain reserved for the federal government. But Michael Hethmon, general counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, said the Alabama bill was a compendium of measures against illegal immigrants that his group had tested in other states. Mr. Hethmon’s group is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to reduce immigration. The bill requires all Alabama employers to use a federal system, E-Verify, to confirm the legal status of all workers. The measure also makes it a state crime for an immigrant to fail to carry a document proving legal status, and makes it a crime for anyone to transport an illegal immigrant. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A warming planet struggles to feed itself
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Kurdish culture and the Turkish response
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/arts/turkeys-kurds-slowly-build-cultural-autonomy.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Costa Rica notes, part 2
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == One of the reasons I was anxious to see Costa Rica with my own eyes is that the country was hailed throughout the 1980s as an alternative to Sandinista Nicaragua. Liberals and social democrats always held up Costa Rica as being within Nicaragua’s grasp rather than the socialist model embraced by the FSLN leaders. There was something seductive about this argument given the two countries’ obvious similarities. Both had an abundance of volcanoes that erupted periodically, spilling natural fertilizers into the soil. Both were endowed by natural beauty, an asset that clearly could have benefited the tourist industry. One imagines that this model might have been in the back of the FSLN leaders’ minds despite their lip service to Cuba. With their go-slow attitude toward agribusiness, some Marxists often accused them of being sell-outs. Perhaps they always considered development along Costa Rican lines as a contingency. Unfortunately, the animosity of Washington condemned them to follow a path much more like Haiti’s. Costa Rica enjoys the reputation of being the Switzerland of Central America, a nation that is democratic, egalitarian and pacifist. In other words, it is the polar opposite of Nicaragua, as well as every other country there. Why? While this image promoted heavily by Costa Rican bourgeois historians doesn’t take into account the brutal commonalities that exist between banana republic Costa Rica and banana republic Honduras, there is still some truth to it. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/costa-rica-notes-part-2/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] James Petras M.I.A.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == James Petras M.I.A. By Max Ajl · In Spring 2011 Book Review: War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America by James Petras James Petras has been cloned. Petras I is still reliable, if a bit creaky in his old age. He digs for information in Chapare, Chiapas, and elsewhere in the Latin American countryside, interviewing militants from the Venezuelan National Peasant Front Ezequiel Zamora, rural organizers from the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movements, syndicalists in Uruguay, and slum-dwellers in Argentine villas de miseria. He pores through primary resources in Portuguese and Spanish, clattering out endless reams of political journalism on the struggle of the dispossessed in Latin American, situating their struggles within the political economy of global imperialism. Petras I’s analysis may be a little theoretically fuzzy, but he gets his hands dirty and deals with facts. Then there’s another Petras. Petras II is slightly off the rails. Still kind of coherent, he deploys Marxist sociological analysis in the pursuit of a highly idiosyncratic series of theses: that an interwoven complex of institutions called the Zionist Power Configuration has taken over the American government, that the ongoing aggression against Iraq emerged not out of Texaco, but out of Tel Aviv, and that the Iranian Green Movement was a bunch of Gucci revolutionaries from the posh neighborhoods of North Tehran. Both are busy, but especially the latter, who has been churning out pamphlets accusing Israel of allying with an American Fifth Column at the rate of one a year for the past half decade. full: http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2011/james-petras-m-i-a/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Swans Release: June 6, 2011
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Welcome to Swans Commentary http://www.swans.com/ June 6, 2011 $$$ Oops, no donation this time around... $$$ Note from the Editors: The dumbing down of America appears to be the only thing that is working effectively in the country, when one considers that the populace is at present more interested in whether Representative Anthony Weiner tweeted a photo of his bulging underwear to a female college student than if the ruling elite will succeed in destroying Medicare. From the demise of the health care system to that of education, the future does not look pretty, particularly when one considers Professor Jonah Raskin's observations that college students have become an infantilized generation of illiterates. Actually, one institution that is going strong is the prison-industrial complex. Michael Barker reports on Michelle Alexander's study that concludes that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow. As for the health care system, Gilles d'Aymery looks at the Randian roots and neoliberal efforts of Representative Paul Ryan, the current champion of the bipartisan anti-Medicare cause. Also threatened are rural health care centers across the country, including the Anderson Valley Health Center near Swans headquarters that lost its state funding and is months away from perhaps closing its doors, while the federal grants that could have helped were compromised away in the recent budget debate... As Charles Marowitz observes, we assume in the Middle East that the status quo must be overthrown -- whereas in America we delude ourselves that new elections will save us. According to Louis Proyect's book review, there are alternatives, and we must do everything in our power to build a world movement that understands that without democracy, there cannot be socialism and that without socialism, there cannot be democracy. In light of the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and the death of Lawrence S. Eagleburger, the former secretary of state and career foreign service civil servant, we are republishing Gilles d'Aymery's July 2005 article Srebrenica Mon Amour. Eagleburger spent seven years of his career in Yugoslavia, whose dissolution he likened to a Greek tragedy. From Italy, Peter Byrne takes us on a trip to the buried heart of Matera -- not your typical small Italian city; while from Ghana, Femi Akomolafe calls for his fellow Africans to dream big and ask what exactly is wrong with them. Raju Peddada concludes his series on the engineers with big dreams who developed the F-1 rocket engine. In the French corner, Francesca Saieva contemplates the social aspects of Italian writer Italo Calvino's protagonist Marcovaldo, and Simone Alié-Daram's poem makes a splash with three angels. Guido Monte's blending describes the night thoughts of a Tunisian woman on a death-boat along the waves of the Sicily Channel, and we close with your letters, with thoughts on Aymery's coverage on the last edition's scandal du jour, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and more. # # # # # All the articles and the Letters to the Editor can be freely accessed from Swans front page. Please go to: http://www.swans.com/ You can also access our past issues at: http://www.swans.com/library/past_issues/past_issues.html And you have access to over 15 years of archives by date, author, and subject at: http://www.swans.com/library/archives.html Remember, what's free to you is not to us! To help our work financially please visit http://www.swans.com/about/donate.html # # # # # Swans (aka Swans Commentary), ISSN: 1554-4915, is a bi-weekly non-commercial ad-free Web-only magazine which provides original content to its readers. We encourage pulp publications to republish Swans Work in print format. Please contact the publisher at aymery AT ix.netcom.com. Please, do not repost Swans Work on the Web and other mailing lists: Hypertext links to any pages of Swans.com are authorized; however, republication of any part of this site, inlining, mirroring, and framing are expressly prohibited. (You are receiving this E-mail notification for you have expressed your interest in Swans and the work of its team. If you wish not to receive these short notifications, simply reply to this E-mail (delete the content) and enter the word REMOVE in the subject line.) Cordially, Gilles d'Aymery -- Swans Hungry man, reach for the book: It is a weapon. B. Brecht Send list submissions to:
[Marxism] Albertina Sisulu, Who Helped Lead Apartheid Fight, Dies at 92
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times June 5, 2011 Albertina Sisulu, Who Helped Lead Apartheid Fight, Dies at 92 By BARRY BEARAK JOHANNESBURG — Albertina Sisulu, considered by many to be the mother of South Africa’s liberation struggle, a woman who was hounded and jailed by the apartheid government but who lived to see her children assume leadership roles in a democratic nation, died here on Thursday. She was 92. The African National Congress confirmed her death. Mrs. Sisulu’s passing extinguishes another light of a generation that fought one of the great moral battles of the 20th century. Since her death, virtually every one of this nation’s leaders have come to her home to offer condolences. Only Nelson Mandela has been conspicuously absent. He is increasingly frail, and members of the Sisulu family visited him instead. A humble but forceful woman, Mrs. Sisulu was the widow of Walter Sisulu, one of Mr. Mandela’s earliest political mentors, who died in 2003. She kept her dignity through decades of government harassment. Mr. Sisulu was imprisoned for 26 years, and she herself was repeatedly jailed, held incommunicado and “banned,” a restriction limiting where she could go and how many people she could see. “But try as they might, they could not break her spirit, they could not make her bitter, they could not defeat her love,” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said in one of the many tributes offered after her death. Nontsikelelo Thethiwe was born into a poor farming family in the Transkei, a former British protectorate that is now part of Eastern Cape Province. When she enrolled in a school run by missionaries, she was given a list of Christian names to chose from and selected Albertina. Her father died when she was 11, and poverty might have kept her from finishing her education had she not won a scholarship to a Roman Catholic secondary school. After graduation, she accepted the advice of an admired priest and moved to Johannesburg to study nursing, a career that offered a small salary as she apprenticed. In 1941, she was training at the Non-European General Hospital when she met Mr. Sisulu, a political activist with the African National Congress. Their courtship would be her political awakening. They married three years later. Nelson Mandela was best man at the ceremony. In his autobiography, Mr. Mandela describes Albertina as a “wise and wonderful presence.” At the Sisulus’ wedding reception, he wrote, an A.N.C. stalwart warned the bride, “Albertina, you have married a married man: Walter married politics before he met you.” She, in turn, was marrying the liberation movement. The Sisulus’ home in the Orlando area of Soweto became a central meeting place for the robust discussions that shaped the direction of the A.N.C. She combined her work as a visiting nurse with the distribution of political pamphlets. On Aug. 9, 1956, Mrs. Sisulu was a leader of a historic march by 20,000 women against the nation’s pass laws, which restricted the movements of blacks. One slogan from the protest was, “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.” Aug. 9 is now celebrated in South Africa as Women’s Day. Walter Sisulu would go on to head the A.N.C., and later, along with Mr. Mandela and others, create an armed wing of the organization. The Sisulus’ relationship has been celebrated in South Africa as a great love story, but during the first 20 years of their marriage, he was so often in jail or on the run that the couple barely spent 9 years together. Once, in 1963, when the police failed to locate her husband, they seized Mrs. Sisulu instead, arresting her while she was treating patients. She was placed in solitary confinement under a notorious law that allowed detention for 90 days without charges. “There was nothing to read, nothing to do, nothing to occupy my mind—nothing except to think of what was happening to my children at home,” she recalled in a 2002 biography written by her daughter-in-law, Elinor Sisulu. The couple had five children and raised three more who belonged to Mrs. Sisulu’s deceased sister. Unknown to Mrs. Sisulu, after she was jailed, her 17-year-old son Max was arrested and held under the same law. In 1964, Mr. Sisulu was sentenced to life imprisonment, serving most of his time, like Mr. Mandela, on Robben Island. Mrs. Sisulu was banned for 10 years. Her children either went into exile or entered boarding school. As the decades passed, MaSisulu, as she was affectionately called, was frequently arrested, locked up for infractions as slight as attending the funeral of a friend. Her children faced similar harassment. “I did not mind going to jail myself, and I had to learn to cope without Walter,” Mrs. Sisulu once said. “But
[Marxism] Review of Michael Lebowitz's The Socialist Alternative
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Michael Lebowitz's The Socialist Alternative by Louis Proyect Book Review Lebowitz, Michael A.: The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Monthly Review Press, New York, ISBN 978-1-58367-214-3, paperback, 191 pages. (Swans - June 6, 2011) Despite his identification with the Venezuelan revolutionary process, Michael Lebowitz differs from 20th Century Socialists who hitched their wagon to an actually existing system. For obvious reasons, Soviet, Maoist, and even Cuban socialism has too often tended to foster the rigid pursuit of a certain kind of model, either economically or organizationally. There was an unfortunate but understandable need to elevate Soviet-style planning or Bolshevik party-building methods (even if they were never actually pursued by Lenin) into some kind of catechism for the Marxist faithful to follow. Obviously, none of this applies to Venezuela -- a country that is still capitalist by strict definitions. Marxist theory is challenged to describe the ever-shifting reality of a society permeated by working-class power and institutions that represent profound challenges to the existing system. Co-ops, for example, are a principal medium for economic development outside the profit system. If one has no patience for explaining contradictions, then one might be advised to avoid Venezuela. full: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/lproy70.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What Gilded Age railroad-building frenzy reveals about American greed
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (The robber baron Henry Villard referred to in this book review purchased the Nation Magazine in 1881. After he died in 1900, his son Oliver Garrison Villard took it over.) http://www.slate.com/id/2296082/ The Transcontinental Travesty What Gilded Age railroad-building frenzy reveals about American greed. By Donald Worster Updated Monday, June 6, 2011, at 6:56 AM ET The corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street, distilled the essential philosophy of the Reagan era, when we were supposed to get back to basic principles: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Although almost every ethical philosopher or religious leader of the past came out against greed as an emotion that distorts judgment and corrupts society, the Gekko-Reagan creed has usually been an easy sell in America. Running against that tradition, Richard White, in his new book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, doggedly persists in challenging the notion of greed as either rational or virtuous. He has a big job on his hands. No matter how many dot-com crashes or overleveraged credit debacles we go through, the core faith in greed as the engine of American greatness seems all but unshakable. One legendary moment of greatness was the completion of the first transcontinental. There is a legend- making photo taken at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 1869, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific joined tracks and reunited a war-divided people. After that came the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, the Atlantic, Topeka, and Santa Fe, and other lines that brought a transportation revolution to the West. White debunks the legend, arguing that the achievement was shoddy and chaotic and benefited the nation very little. The money that built those lines did not come from the railroad men themselves— Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and Thomas Scott. Instead, they persuaded Congress to lay out enormous subsidies. The Union Pacific alone raked in $43 million in interest subsidies on federal loans, and railroads east and west of the Mississippi River received more than 131 million acres in free land. White explains that largesse as a result of political corruption. But then why did so many investors, including shrewd Germans and Brits, throw money into these enterprises as well? Not until the 20th century would there be enough white settlement and shipping traffic in the West to justify such investments. No rational need existed for decades, yet a railroad- building frenzy went on and on. The builders made a lot of money for themselves, but why did so many people give them so much capital? Other government subsidies came in the form of stifling, with armed force, any resistance from Indians or any move on the part of immigrant laborers to try to make the railroads serve their needs. White describes in brilliant detail the infamous Pullman strike of 1893, when the government blatantly took the side of the corporations. By and large, the western railroads remained what they had been before the strike—bloated, ill managed, heavily indebted, and corrupt. … Many were now wards of the federal courts, and all of them depended on the might of the federal government to control their own workers. The dean of business historians Alfred Chandler Jr., in The Visible Hand (1977), described the 19th-century railroad corporation as the harbinger of order, rationality, and efficient organization. White scoffs at such an image. These corporations were made up of divided, quarrelsome, petulant, arrogant, and often astonishingly inept men. And instead of the conventional leftist picture of a ruthless, soulless, but all-powerful business that crushed its opponents, the infamous Octopus of novelist Frank Norris, he finds a group of fat men in an Octopus suit. They were morally challenged men, dripping with hypocrisy, mean-spirited, and grasping. But White, who is a master of invective, describes them also as stupid and incompetent. Their only claim to genius was their ability to find occasions for profit in their own ineptitude. Leland Stanford, for example, was well-known to his companions as dim-witted, careless, selfish, lazy, and yet filled with immense self-regard. That tone of criticism appears all through the era. The Massachusetts railroad executive Charles Francis Adams, dismissed his fellow businessmen as creatures of low instincts, … essentially unattractive and uninteresting. This is essentially White's view also, and he finds their success more than reprehensible; that such reptilian types ever gained so much power and wealth is bewildering. That their
[Marxism] Voters disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-loses-bin-laden-bounce-romney-on-the-move-among-gop-contenders/2011/06/06/AGT5wiKH_story.html Obama loses bin Laden bounce; Romney on the move among GOP contenders By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen, Tuesday, June 7, 12:05 AM The public opinion boost President Obama received after the killing of Osama bin Laden has dissipated, and Americans’ disapproval of how he is handling the nation’s economy and the deficit has reached new highs, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The survey portrays a broadly pessimistic mood in the country this spring as higher gasoline prices, sliding home values and a disappointing employment picture have raised fresh concerns about the pace of the economic recovery. By 2 to 1, Americans say the country is pretty seriously on the wrong track, and nine in 10 continue to rate the economy in negative terms. Nearly six in 10 say the economy has not started to recover, regardless of what official statistics may say, and most of those who say it has improved rate the recovery as weak. New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign. Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent. Overall, about six in 10 of those surveyed give Obama negative marks on the economy and the deficit. Significantly, nearly half strongly disapprove of his performance in these two crucial areas. Nearly two-thirds of political independents disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, including — for the first time — a slim majority who do so strongly. In another indicator of rapidly shifting views on economic issues, 45 percent trust congressional Republicans over the president when it comes to dealing with the economy, an 11-point improvement for the GOP since March. Still, nearly as many, 42 percent, side with Obama on this issue. The president has sought to point to progress on the economy, particularly in the automobile industry, and to argue that the policies he put in place at the beginning of his term are working. But the combined effects of weak economic indicators and dissatisfaction among the public are adding to the political pressures on the White House as the president’s advisers look toward what could be a difficult 2012 reelection campaign. Meanwhile, Romney emerges in the new survey as the strongest current or prospective Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential field. Although he is by no means in a secure spot, on virtually every measure, the former governor appears better positioned than any of his rivals. In contrast, the poll brings more bad news for former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whose bus tour along the East Coast last week renewed speculation that she might join the race. Almost two-thirds of all Americans say they “definitely would not” vote for Palin for president. She is predictably unpopular with Democrats and most independents, but the new survey underscores the hurdles she would face if she became a candidate: 42 percent of Republicans say they’ve ruled out supporting her candidacy. More than six in 10 Americans say they do not consider Palin qualified to serve as president. That is a slightly better rating for the former governor than through most of last year, but is another indication of widespread public doubts about a possible presidential run. The Post-ABC poll asked Republicans and GOP-leaning independents whom they would vote for if a primary or caucus were held now in their state. Romney topped the list, with 21 percent, followed by Palin at 17 percent. No one else reached double digits, although former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has suddenly shown interest in becoming a candidate, is close, at 8 percent. Without Palin in the race, Romney scores 25 percent, with all others in the single digits. In another measure of the field, Republicans chose Romney as the only one of a dozen possible candidates they would “strongly consider” for the party’s nomination as opposed to stating that they definitely would not vote for him. He and Palin scored equal numbers of respondents who said they would strongly consider supporting them, but Palin has more than double the percentage who have ruled her out. Other candidates fared poorly on this count, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), whose campaign got off to a rocky start; Rep.
[Marxism] The Lebanese Left Fails in Syria
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1786/the-lebanese-left-fails-in-syria The Lebanese Left Fails in Syria Jun 07 2011 by Khalil Issa This article is written in Arabic by Khalil Issa and translated into English by Hanna Petro] When the left loses all the resources [needed] for its steadfastness, as a result of its mistakes on the one hand and because of surrounding local pressures on the other, it is usually left with nothing but the political-ethical discourse as a principled stance on the basis of which to fight. In the end, being a leftist is to side with justice against oppression, with the victim against the perpetrator, with the exploited against the exploiter. This is the moral position that keeps us leftists after the (near) death of the Lebanese left, as an organized political movement. Today, in the abyss of the broad revolutionary protest movement—which is demanding freedom in all corners of Syria and which has faced terrifying repression that resulted in more than 1100 deaths and tens of thousands of people detained, most of whom are members of the Syrian toiling class, peasants and workers—came the latest memorandum from the political bureau of the Lebanese Communist Party (issued on April 20, 2011), reminding the Syrian people that it has the right to “mobilize through all peaceful and democratic means for the sake of social, political, and economic reforms and the combating of corruption.” Conversely, it fails to name any martyrs and murder victims in Syria, and “wishes that [the Syrian government] be quick in implementing all the reforms put forth by President Bashar al-Asad.” The ambiguous position of the party becomes more distinguishable when we see a nonsensical speech about “Syria confronting internal strife, which imperialist America and Israel strive towards in cooperation with some of the collaborating forces inside and outside of Syria, which are [themselves] steeped in reactionary politics.” But there is something we do not understand: Which fitna [strife] is the Lebanese Communist Party referring to? And why is it not appropriate to mention fitna except when the speech [being labeled as fitna] is assumed to be against oppression, murder, and terrorism? Have the national opposition members in Syria like Michel Kilo, Aref Dalila and Yasin al-Hajj Salih—who are all “comrades” by the way—suddenly become agents of the imperialist “circles?” Or has the absurd fitna theory, which constitutes an offshoot of the “conspiracy” theory, become an alternative to all the positions that must be undertaken by a party which is supposed to be a “party of the people” par excellence? The position of the Communist Party on what is happening in Syria is a failure on both the ethical and political levels. Here, [failure with respect to] the sense that policy [is supposed to] truly serve the interests of the oppressed classes, [and this] makes the party one with a rightwing leadership. It practically rejects the change demanded by the toiling class and the workers in Syria, as well as adopts the regime’s “external conspiracy” narrative. All that remains for the comrades of the political bureau is to participate in the propaganda against the protesters, calling them “conspirators” or “armed gangs.” This is especially [the case] since [the Communist Party’s] Secretary General Khalid Hadada confirmed once again the centrality of “the conspiracy against Syria” in an article of his in al-Safir newspaper (May 28th, 2011). If he rejects the security solution in Syria, he also repudiates “attempted bullying by the outside.” Here, we ask Comrade Khalid Hadada which of the protestors in Syria today is asking for bullying by the outside? Or have these verbal pretexts always been present –because the history of imperialist intervention in the region is well known and destructive—[so as] to make us produce an unethical political position, which completely ignores what is happening on the ground in Syria? Why is imperialism so inserted where it is not, that we start to see imperialism where in directions it does not exist. What dialogue is the Communist Party calling for while, for example, Azmi Bishara says in one of his latest media appearances that “it is clear that there is dialogue. Unfortunately, only dialogue pertaining to reform, but there is an instigation to murder and shoot at those who demand reform.” Given that the communist leadership is rightwing to this degree, this does not summarize the entire problem. Many–not all, of course—of the Lebanese leftists, both from within the [Communist] Party and outside of it, are convinced that what is happening in Syria is the doing of the “Salafis” or the
[Marxism] Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Catching up from my home delivery of the NY Times when I was in Costa Rica.) NY Times May 22, 2011 Workers of the World, Please See Our Web Site By JOSEPH BERGER You can still be a card-carrying Communist in New York, but these days committed Communists usually register online. “We actually have a card, but we don’t make a big deal of it,” said Sam Webb, the national chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A. The Socialist Party U.S.A. does distribute red cards to members willing to “subscribe to the principles” of the party, but another leftist group, the Democratic Socialists of America, prefers online registration, with members using a virtual shopping cart to pay yearly dues of about $60 by credit card — Marx be damned. In some ways, the Left remains locked in place. Its three major national parties are still confined to cramped Manhattan offices that are plastered with gaudy posters and honeycombed with pamphlets for distribution and envelopes for stuffing. But in other ways the landscape has changed significantly. All three parties are finding the Internet to be a fruitful recruiting tool and believe their message has been given a fresh, beguiling appeal by the failures of capitalist symbols like Lehman Brothers and by debacles like the billions of dollars in securities tied to subprime mortgages. “The economic crisis of 2008 gave us new life,” said Billy Wharton, a co-chairman of the Socialist Party, who grew enamored of socialism while battling tuition increases as a student at the College of Staten Island. “We have ideas for resolving the economic crisis, and people began to listen to them.” Rather than trumpeting membership numbers, the parties, embracing the norms of the digital era, prefer to discuss the number of hits on their Web sites and Facebook pages. And philosophically, they take a kind of I-told-you-so schadenfreude in statistics that indicate a growing gap between the rich and the poor, with top chief executives now making 275 times as much as the average proletarian. Still, it is hard to imagine that the parties have inherited a revolutionary tradition once so popular that in the 1932 presidential election, Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate, garnered 884,000 votes and William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate, had over 100,000. But then again, after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialist republics in Eastern Europe, some people may be surprised to learn that these parties are still around. All three have greatly shrunk from their heydays. The Socialist Party has about 1,000 members nationally. The Communists claim 2,000. The Democratic Socialists, which for many years included luminaries like Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, have about 6,000. “It’s not easy to make political progress outside the two-party structure because people don’t want to waste their votes,” said Frank Llewellyn, 62, the national director of the Democratic Socialists, who became a socialist as a result of the civil rights and antiwar movements. Rather than battling for power through elections, all three parties try to sway the national conversation through coalitions with labor unions and other mainstream organizations. Both socialist groups turned out at City Hall this month to protest budget cuts, at a rally that was largely organized by the unions. But on matters of principle, the leftist parties diverge. All three oppose President Obama’s health care program, seeing it as a giveaway to insurance companies and preferring either a single-payer government plan or a socialized system like that of Britain, where doctors work for the government. The Socialists sometimes do have candidates who run in states where the rules for getting on the ballot are not too onerous; Greg Pason, the national secretary, ran for governor of New Jersey in 2009. But the Democratic Socialists see that effort as futile and prefer endorsements; they supported David N. Dinkins and Ruth W. Messinger in their mayoral bids in New York City. The parties’ enduring character is obvious in visits to their offices. The Socialist Party is housed in a tumbledown building on Lafayette Street known informally as the “Peace Pentagon” or the A. J. Muste building, not because the name approximates its mildewed atmosphere but because Mr. Muste was a benefactor of the peace groups that the building houses. The Democratic Socialists even have a foothold on Wall Street, with cluttered offices in a building on Maiden Lane. It is not because Wall Street has suddenly adopted a philosophy of “to each according to his own needs.” “It’s cheap,” Mr. Llewellyn explained. “This is an area of the city where you get the best deals.” The
[Marxism] African economic realities
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://articles.cnn.com/2011-01-17/world/razia.khan.africa_1_trend-growth-economic-growth-commodity-prices?_s=PM:WORLD Africa's economic growth picking up, says expert ECONOMIC GROWTH January 17, 2011|From Zain Verjee. CNN The economic outlook for several African countries is expected to improve this year, according to a leading analyst. In 2011 there is a chance that we will get that much closer to those pre-crisis trend growth rates, said Razia Khan, head of African research for Standard Chartered Bank. We were looking at 6% to 7% growth rate in a number of frontier market economies -- that is the key expectation, she said. Issuing a positive outlook, Khan, whose job is to investigate everything that contributes to Africa's economic standing, said the continent has emerged from the grips of the global financial crisis much better than many had anticipated. --- NY Times May 25, 2011 Chasing Riches From Africa to Europe and Finding Only Squalor By SUZANNE DALEY PALOS DE LA FRONTERA, Spain — Back home in Gambia, Amadou Jallow was, at 22, a lover of reggae who had just finished college and had landed a job teaching science in a high school. But Europe beckoned. In his West African homeland, Mr. Jallow’s salary was the equivalent of just 50 euros a month, barely enough for the necessities, he said. And everywhere in his neighborhood in Serekunda, Gambia’s largest city, there was talk of easy money to be made in Europe. Now he laughs bitterly about all that talk. He lives in a patch of woods here in southern Spain, just outside the village of Palos de la Frontera, with hundreds of other immigrants. They have built their homes out of plastic sheeting and cardboard, unsure if the water they drink from an open pipe is safe. After six years on the continent, Mr. Jallow is rail thin, and his eyes have a yellow tinge. “We are not bush people,” he said recently as he gathered twigs to start a fire. “You think you are civilized. But this is how we live here. We suffer here.” The political upheaval in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa has opened the way for thousands of new migrants to make their way to Europe across the Mediterranean. Already some 25,000 have reached the island of Lampedusa, Italy, and hundreds more have arrived at Malta. The boats, at first, brought mostly Tunisians. But lately there have been more sub-Saharans. Experts say thousands more — many of whom have been moving around North Africa trying to get to Europe for years, including Somalis, Eritreans, Senegalese and Nigerians — are likely to follow, sure that a better life awaits them. But for Mr. Jallow and for many others who arrived before them, often after days at sea without food or water, Europe has offered hardships they never imagined. These days Mr. Jallow survives on two meals a day, mostly a leaden paste made from flour and oil, which he stirs with a branch. “It keeps the hunger away,” he said. The authorities estimate that there are perhaps 10,000 immigrants living in the woods in the southern Spanish province of Andalusia, a region known for its crops of strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, and there are thousands more migrants in areas that produce olives, oranges and vegetables. Most of them have stories that echo Mr. Jallow’s. From the road, their encampments look like igloos tucked among the trees. Up close, the squalor is clear. Piles of garbage and flies are everywhere. Old clothes, stiff from dirt and rain, hang from branches. “There is everything in there,” said Diego Cañamero, the leader of the farm workers’ union in Andalusia, which tries to advocate for the men. “You have rats and snakes and mice and fleas.” The men in the woods do not call home with the truth, though. They send pictures of themselves posing next to Mercedes cars parked on the street, the kind of pictures that Mr. Jallow says he fell for so many years ago. Now he shakes his head toward his neighbors, who will not talk to reporters. “So many lies,” he said. “It is terrible what they are doing. But they are embarrassed.” Even now, though, Mr. Jallow will not consider going back to Gambia. “I would prefer to die here,” he said. “I cannot go home empty-handed. If I went home, they would be saying, ‘What have you been doing with yourself, Amadou?’ They think in Europe there is money all over.” The immigrants — virtually all of them are men — cluster by nationality and look for work on the farms. But Mr. Cañamero says they are offered only the least desirable work, like handling pesticides, and little of it at that. Most have no working papers. Occasionally, the police bring bulldozers to tear down the shelters. But the men, who have usually used their
[Marxism] At On-Air Haven for Dissent, a Dissenting Voice Is Silenced
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (I've had my differences with Weinberg in the past, mostly about Yugoslavia, but it is a disgrace that he has been censored at WBAI.) NY Times May 26, 2011, 7:44 am At On-Air Haven for Dissent, a Dissenting Voice Is Silenced By COLIN MOYNIHAN For nearly 20 years, an East Village journalist named Bill Weinberg has been a familiar late-night voice on the left-leaning radio station WBAI-FM (99.5), ruminating about radical politics, global turmoil and life in New York City. In mid-March, however, the station canceled Mr. Weinberg’s program, the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, after he accused WBAI of promoting fringe right-wing commentators and conspiracy theories claiming that the United States government was behind the destruction of the World Trade Center. Mr. Weinberg, who runs a blog called the World War 4 Report, has reported for The Nation and The Village Voice and written a book about the Zapatistas in Mexico called “Homage to Chiapas.” Since his ouster, he has hardly withdrawn — he has posted the Radio Crusade’s “Statement of Continued Resistance — In Exile” on World War 4 Report, and has spoken at any number of political forums. But on the airwaves, Mr. Weinberg’s insistent, raspy voice has fallen suddenly silent. Mr. Weinberg said that though it was disappointing to lose the program, he did not regret speaking up. “It was ethically necessary,” he said. “I absolutely thought I had a responsibility.” The station refused to comment on his departure. In Mr. Weinberg’s two decades at WBAI, he connected peace activists from Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo on the air during Balkan wars and more recently interviewed secular Iraqis who oppose both American soldiers and the religious jihadis who attack them. Mr. Weinberg said the disagreements that led to his departure began in 2009 when he questioned gifts sent to people who had donated money to the station. The gifts included documentary-style DVDs like “Painful Deceptions” and “Loose Change 9/11,” which presented the destruction of the World Trade Center as “an inside job” orchestrated by the Bush administration or by foreign governments with ties to it. Although the DVDs were popular with some listeners, Mr. Weinberg said they were intellectually lazy productions full of falsehoods and speculation, unworthy of a station that aspires to produce serious news. Given WBAI’s history — the station went to the Supreme Court in the 1970’s to battle the federal government over the broadcast of satire by George Carlin, and bears the motto “Free Speech Radio” on its Web site — Mr. Weinberg decided his program provided the perfect forum to broadcast his dissent. Management, however, disagreed and called him on the carpet. Mr. Weinberg said he told a program director, Tony Bates, that he would refrain from issuing criticisms on his program. But when the station later broadcast comments from the Sept. 11 conspiracist David Icke, who is also known for his interest in “shape shifting” humans who may turn into reptiles, Mr. Weinberg could not hold his tongue. “The output of the lugubrious mini-industry which has sprung up around 9/11 conspiranoia has become increasingly toxic over the passing years,” Mr. Weinberg said on the air. “The most innocent of the DVDs and books are just poorly researched, merely exchanging the rigid dogma of the ‘official story’ for another rigid dogma, no more founded in empiricism or objectivity. But, not surprisingly, lots of creepy right-wing types have got on board, using 9/11 as the proverbial thin end of a wedge.” A few weeks later, his program was moved from midnight to two a.m. and shortened from 90 minutes to an hour. Mr. Weinberg called the change “an act of censure for political dissent” and declared the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade to be in a “state of resistance.” He openly criticized ideas expressed by other producers. In mid-March, Mr. Bates wrote a letter to Mr. Weinberg saying that he had broken “a cardinal rule” by “denigrating other programmers on the airwaves,” and added: “We have decided to sever the relationship between you and WBAI.” Berthold Reimers, the general manager of WBAI, could not be reached at the station and did not respond to voicemail messages left on his cellphone. Mr. Weinberg, who has supported himself as a freelance copy editor, has not yet formulated the next chapter of his radio career but is considering the idea of doing his program on an Internet station. On a recent evening, he showed up at a lecture series in Chelsea called the Anarchist Forum. Mr. Weinberg weighed in on the dilemma facing leftists who deplore Western intervention in the Middle East but who must acknowledge that many in Libya have
