[Marxism] Granma English

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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http://www.granma.cu/idiomas/ingles/

I regularly go to Telesur and to Granma. Has Granma English been updated since 
December 16 or is there something wrong with my connection?

ken h
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | New Politics

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 2/2/15 7:40 PM, Michael Karadjis wrote:

-Original Message- From: Louis Proyect via Marxism
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | New Politics

"Why, as
the regime is bombing many regions in the country every day, killing
dozens of people every day, are the leftists in the West as silent as
the rightists? Could the reason be that the public killer Bashar and his
elegant wife are symbols of the First World inside Syria, a couple with
whom those in the First World identify easily?"

Few have expressed it more perceptively than this. Perfect.






Moreover, the president of Syria has a weapon in the obligatory media 
war accompanying any protest in a geopolitical hotspot these days, which 
neither any other Arab regime nor the Islamic Republic of Iran can 
claim: his undeniably charming wife Asma.  Perhaps not altogether 
inconsequential in the age of celebrities.


full: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/syria300311.html
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | New Politics

[Michael Karadjis via Marxism]

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-Original Message- 
From: Louis Proyect via Marxism

Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | New Politics

"Why, as
the regime is bombing many regions in the country every day, killing
dozens of people every day, are the leftists in the West as silent as
the rightists? Could the reason be that the public killer Bashar and his
elegant wife are symbols of the First World inside Syria, a couple with
whom those in the First World identify easily?"

Few have expressed it more perceptively than this. Perfect.


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[Marxism] Fwd: Syria and the Left | New Politics

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Syria and the Left
by Yassin Al-Haq Saleh

Yassin Al Haj Saleh is one of Syria’s leading political dissidents. He 
spent from 1980-1996 in Syrian prisons and became one of the key 
intellectual voices of the 2011 Syrian uprising. He spent 21 months in 
hiding within Syria, eventually escaping to Istanbul. He was interviewed 
via email by New Politics co-editor Stephen R. Shalom in early November 
2014.


New Politics. You have written eloquently about the ongoing struggle for 
progressive values in Syria. In most Western nations, particularly in 
the United States, the left has relatively little power. What do you 
think the Western left could best do to express its solidarity with the 
Syrian revolution?


Yassin Al Haj Saleh. I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in 
the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely 
hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that 
mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its 
society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary 
history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a 
genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this 
curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us 
at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old 
anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate. So 
they do not really need to know about us. For them the country is only a 
black box about which you do not have to learn its internal structure 
and dynamics; actually it has no internal structure and dynamics 
according to their approach, one that is at the same time 
Western-centered and high-politics centered.


The problem is that their narrow anti-imperialist worldview only sees 
Obama, Putin, Holland, Erdoğan, Khamenei, Qatari Emir Hamad, Saudi King 
Abdullah, Hassan Nasrallah, and Bashar al-Assad. Possibly they see also 
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. We, rank-and-file Syrians, 
refugees, women, students, intellectuals, human rights activists, 
political prisoners … do not exist.


I think this high-politics, Western-centered worldview is better suited 
for the right and the ultra-right fascists. But honestly I’ve failed to 
discern who is right and who is left in the West from a leftist Syrian 
point of view. And I tend to think that these are the poisonous effects 
of the Soviet experience, fascist in its own way. Many Western leftists 
are the orphans of the late father, the USSR.


Besides, what prevents them from seeing the victims of Bashar, when they 
see perfectly well ordinary people in Kobanê? Why wasn’t there the 
slightest interest in the slaughter of 700 people at the hands of ISIS 
thugs themselves in Deir Ezzor last August? One is forced to ask: Do 
victims have different values based on who their murderers are? Why, as 
the regime is bombing many regions in the country every day, killing 
dozens of people every day, are the leftists in the West as silent as 
the rightists? Could the reason be that the public killer Bashar and his 
elegant wife are symbols of the First World inside Syria, a couple with 
whom those in the First World identify easily?


Before helping Syrians or showing solidarity with Syrians, the 
mainstream Western left needs to help themselves. Their views are 
totally misguided, and the Syrian cause was only a litmus test of their 
reactionary and decadent perspectives.


As a Syrian, I only need them if they are well-informed. Syria is a 
microcosm, and I do not think that the nature of their understanding and 
their policies in relation to the macrocosm is in any way better when 
their position on the Syrian cause is mistaken to this degree.


Of course, these remarks are not meant to deny the existence of a small 
number of courageous dissident Western leftists who saved the moral and 
political dignity of the left in the United States and the West at large.


full: http://newpol.org/content/syria-and-left
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[Marxism] Fwd: James Bloodworth: The Progressive Case for Fracking - WSJ

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This is the fuckwit who wrote an attack on Che Guevara for Jacobin and 
whose sliming of Syriza I took note of in my article "Against 
Manachaeism". A truly disgusting individual. Writing a pro-fracking 
opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. Perfect.


http://www.wsj.com/articles/james-bloodworth-the-progressive-case-for-fracking-1419898265
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Problematising the Left (I): A Leftist Who Found The Road To Success. | The Shrieking Man

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 2/2/15 5:21 PM, A.R. G wrote:

Uhhh...why are you posting this? This analysis is quite poor!


For laughs. David Harvey gets trashed as well. I am in good company. But 
the idea of CounterPunch as being run by a big cabal of old independent 
Trotskyites is really a hoot, especially with all the Andre Vltchek 
articles.

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Problematising the Left (I): A Leftist Who Found The Road To Success. | The Shrieking Man

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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Uhhh...why are you posting this? This analysis is quite poor!

- Amith

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> It might seem like a big jump from this to an individual who doesn’t at
> first sight seem much like this. Louis Proyect is certainly no anarchist
> nor post-structuralist, and he entered the American far left long ago
> enough to view such concepts with some scorn. Proyect, who blogs under the
> “Unrepentant Marxist” label (the Creator has asked before why anyone should
> expect a Marxist to be repentant; it smells of defeatism) is not a complete
> nobody on the left; he moderates the “Marxmail” discussion group for
> Kommunist Keyboard Kommandoes. He’s also also the film critic for the
> Counterpunch website run by a big cabal of old independent Trotskyites,
> formerly lead by the late ultra-leftist and red- (and green-, being brought
> up in Ireland)-diaper baby Alexander Cockburn.
>
> full: https://hismastersvoice.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/
> problematising-the-left-i-a-leftist-who-found-the-road-to-success/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: USACBI Statement in Solidarity with Professor Angela Y. Davis | US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

[Joseph Catron via Marxism]

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Yes, pretty successfully:

"The UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor spoke to hundreds at the Martin
Luther King Jr. Convocation on Wednesday at the Santa Cruz Civic
Auditorium, which was filled to capacity."

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/social-affairs/20150128/angela-davis-keynote-draws-more-than-a-thousand-in-santa-cruz

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 4:06 PM, William Quimby via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> This was held on January 28, right? Did she speak after all?
> The statement doesn't make it clear.
>
> - Bill
>
> On 02/02/2015 1:16 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote
>
>
>
> ---
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-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Dress rehearsals for revolution

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 2/2/15 5:05 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

There seems to be relatively little going on compared to the situation in
Chile during the Popular Unity government, or Portugal in 1974 or France in
1968.


In fact there has been a decline in street actions in recent years, 
mostly I suspect because they failed to put a dent in austerity. 
Meanwhile, a party has been elected that by all accounts owns its 
success to the street actions of preceding years. Once it takes office, 
it blocks privatizations, reinstitutes the minimum wage and declares war 
on austerity. There is a dialectical interrelationship between Syriza 
and the street actions and I suspect that people will mobilize when the 
need arises. The vote, like the vote for Labour in Britain after WWII, 
was a class vote. And as was the vote for Chavez and other Latin 
American leftist governments. I think it is best to see Syriza from that 
perspective, as its leaders certainly do.

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[Marxism] Fwd: Problematising the Left (I): A Leftist Who Found The Road To Success. | The Shrieking Man

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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It might seem like a big jump from this to an individual who doesn’t at 
first sight seem much like this. Louis Proyect is certainly no anarchist 
nor post-structuralist, and he entered the American far left long ago 
enough to view such concepts with some scorn. Proyect, who blogs under 
the “Unrepentant Marxist” label (the Creator has asked before why anyone 
should expect a Marxist to be repentant; it smells of defeatism) is not 
a complete nobody on the left; he moderates the “Marxmail” discussion 
group for Kommunist Keyboard Kommandoes. He’s also also the film critic 
for the Counterpunch website run by a big cabal of old independent 
Trotskyites, formerly lead by the late ultra-leftist and red- (and 
green-, being brought up in Ireland)-diaper baby Alexander Cockburn.


full: 
https://hismastersvoice.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/problematising-the-left-i-a-leftist-who-found-the-road-to-success/

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[Marxism] How the Left's shill for Obama's red-line con fueled the rise of ISIS

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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/New from Linux Beach://
/


  How the Left's shill for Obama's red-line con fueled the rise of
  ISIS
  



> For four years now, US President Barack Obama has been conning the
> world and most importantly, the Syrian people, about his support for
> the popular uprising to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of Bashar
> al-Assad. He has been playing an old con game with Assad's opposition,
> one best played by people with power, known as /"Good Cop, Bad Cop"./
>
> In the game of /"Good Cop, Bad Cop"/ you are confronted by two cops.
> One is mean, roughs you up, and is clearly intent on sending you to
> Hell. The other speaks out in your favor, claims to see your side,
> befriends you, complains about the /"Bad Cop"/ and brings you the
> occasional candy bar. In the case of some /"favored"/ Syrian rebel
> brigades, that might be as little as 16 bullets
> 
> per man. Just enough for the shills to call them /"the US-backed
> rebels."/ The /"Good Cop"/ always claims that he would do more but for
> the constraints put on him by the police organization, in this case
> the United Nations, and his partner, in this case Vladimir Putin. The
> /"Good Cop"/ works hard to convince the target that he is in the
> mark's corner just so that he will be in a position to pull the rug
> out from underneath the victim of the con at the critical moment,
> known as The Sting.
>
> Getting the mark to believe something that is not true is pivotal to
> every con job and that's why every grift requires a shill. The Long
> Con  says of this role
> /"The Shill: An accomplice to the grifter, who has no apparent
> connection to the con. Shills are put in place to encourage the mark
> to act in the desired way." /The book also says /"Long cons play on
> one or both basic human frailties: greed and desperation."/ In the
> case of Syria, it has been the desperation of a people facing daily
> slaughter that has led the mark to seek the aid of the grifter in the
> first place.
>
> Given the lack of much of a material reality behind Obama's /"support
> for the Syrian rebels"/, he badly needed a shill to pull his con off.
> He needed a seemingly independent, or better still, seemingly
> oppositional voice, also loudly claiming that Obama really was for
> overthrowing Assad. The Left obliged him, even staging years of
> /"Hands off Syria"/ demonstrations, as if! As if Obama was ever going
> to get militarily involved in a serious way except on Assad's side.
>
> 
> Obama's famous /"red-line"/ proclamation of August 2012 has turned out
> to be his most cynical and destructive con job to date. At the time I
> said
> 
> he was giving a green light to Assad's slaughter by every other means.
> Here we had the /"Good Cop"/ saying, I may not be able to stop the
> /"Bad Cops"/, Assad and Putin, from shelling hospitals and barrel
> bombing schools, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let them kill you
> with chemical weapons too. It was a con from the minute he said it.
> Who uses language like /"a whole bunch of chemical weapons"/ in an
> ultimatum he wants taken seriously? Just what constitutes /"a whole
> bunch of chemical weapons"/ anyway? How do we know when /that/
> red-line has been crossed?


*More...*

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[Marxism] Fwd: Dress rehearsals for revolution

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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One of the rather odd things about Greece is that almost all hopes for
social change seem to have been invested in parliamentary politics, most
particularly in Syriza.

But where are the factory occupations, the mass workers' assemblies, the
radical union movement, etc etc?

There seems to be relatively little going on compared to the situation in
Chile during the Popular Unity government, or Portugal in 1974 or France in
1968.


France, May-June 1968: the glimmer of revolution

Forms of popular power in Chile, 1970-1973

The grandeur of workers’ revolution: Portugal, 1974

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[Marxism] The contradiction between the crap that is and people's consciousness of it

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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I tend to think that NZ is the least political country in the world, in any
meaningful sense of the term 'political'.

Perhaps the most striking thing here is the way that workers' on-the-job
conditions have gotten worse, union rights have been whittled away, workers
are working longer, faster, harder for relatively less pay and there is
even less social mobility, yet workers' horizons and expectations have been
lowered so successfully that they just accept it as their lot.  Their
expectations are so low that as long as attacks on them are relatively
small they are happy enough and any little crumbs make them even more so.

This is the reality for workers in NZ:

This is the reality of 21st century NZ capitalism (low pay, longer hours
and less social mobility):
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/low-pay-longer-hours-and-less-social-mobility/

But this is what people accept (widening pay and income gaps but no serious
opposition):https://rdln.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/3215/
and more job losses but no fightback:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/more-job-losses-but-wheres-the-fightback/

and the strange paradox of NZ workers accepting or being happy with this
crap:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/a-strange-paradox-how-can-nz-workers-be-happy-with-this-crap/

Further to people’s lowered horizons and resulting preparedness to accept
crap and pretend it tastes nice:

Low horizons and the legacy of defeats:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/low-horizons-and-the-legacy-of-defeats/

The politics of stasis:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/a-few-thoughts-on-the-politics-of-stasis/

How true is this of the working class in other imperialist centres?  It
seems to me that elsewhere there is at least some form of struggle, even if
it's not much.

Phil
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: USACBI Statement in Solidarity with Professor Angela Y. Davis | US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

[William Quimby via Marxism]

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This was held on January 28, right? Did she speak after all?
The statement doesn't make it clear.

- Bill

On 02/02/2015 1:16 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote



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[Marxism] Russia Has No Troops in Ukraine, but a Mother of Seven Faces a Treason Trial for Warning Ukraine They Were Coming

[Thomas Campbell via Marxism]

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http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/30-000-people-ask-putin-to-let-mother-of-7-await-ukraine-treason-trial-at-home/515247.html

https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/daniel-kennedy-grigory-tumanov/russian-woman-accused-of-treason-for-phoning-ukrainian-emba
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[Marxism] 02-02-15 France Supports Greece in EU Debt Battle

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Marv Gandall wrote

Despite the predictable hardline posturing by Germany, the ECB, and the 
EU, this weekend’s sympathetic comments by French finance minister Sapin 
and US President Obama can’t help but reinforce the Syriza leadership’s 
conviction that it can exploit strategic divisions at the top concerning 
austerity and the debt crisis.


I noted several weeks ago that “the likeliest outcome is an eventual 
compromise which limits, but does not entirely impair, Syriza’s ability 
to provide jobs, income support, and debt relief to Greece’s beleaguered 
population. Such an outcome would be in keeping with the growing 
conviction of the European elites that its brutal austerity regime is 
undermining economic growth and political stability throughout Europe 
and that some accommodation to mass distress and discontent is necessary.”



France Supports Greece in EU Debt Battle
By MARCUS WALKER, INTI LANDAURO and ANDREW ACKERMAN
Wall Street Journal
Feb. 1, 2015
(Behind a paywall)

(...)

Lemme see if I have this right:

First of all, Europe as the second or third largest economic player has 
a heavy bearing on the global economy and appears to be in a very 
tenuous state which is partially concealed by its opaque structure.


I'm wondering, if Germany begins to get pressure from other governments 
that it doesn't feel it can accommodate for whatever reasons having to 
do mainly with its net export position, with the position of the 
Bundesbank and the moral hazard effect on other indebted governments, 
what do we think is the likelihood (I've read that it is a probability) 
- and the effect - of a complete pull-out of Germany from the Eurozone, 
re-instituting the Deutschmark or a similar separate German medium of 
exchange?


As you say, an eventual compromise at a low level of debt relief appears 
as the likely prospect, but 80-90% of the bail-outs the Greeks have been 
getting go to pay interest and principle on outstanding indebtedness at 
the expense of Greek (and European) taxpayers, which is why Syriza 
concludes that more loans at anything like existing terms are less than 
useless, and that they absolutely cannot pay them with a shrinking 
economy anyhow.


There seems to be no question that Syriza's approach owes more to Keynes 
than to Marx, that the effort is being characterized as first allevating 
the most acute points of domestic distress and then advancing proposals 
to save European capital from itself, especially since other European 
taxpayers are paying for this debacle as well - - but look, Syriza only 
obtained 36% of the participating electoral vote, their parliamentary 
plurality of 49% exists as an anomaly of the rules of apportionment of 
seats, they cannot propose that a socialist government will expect the 
Greek people to agree to cut their economy loose from its European 
moorings and share a dwindling nothing, they cannot survive without 
external aid at this point, no one, other than other European states 
(collectively) that fear penumbral effects on their own financial 
prospects of Greek collapse, will willingly invest in a faileing state 
-- and the Greek people in the light of all this are not regarded by 
Syriza as ready for a socialist revolution - nor given the options do 
they see a viable plan for such a situation. And when anyone suggests 
that you let Greece crash completely, and then there will be conditions 
ripe for revolution, and autarky, we have to remember that they do not 
have anything like the resources available to Argentina which, with its 
vast land and relatively large productive infrastructure for providing 
inputs and for growing soybeans for China was able to recover from 
default. Even Ireland, which has had some recovery from imposed 
austerity under terms similar to those imposed on Greece has a 
historical relationship as a platform for plant and investment by 
international capital that Greece lacks.


From what I'm also learning, one of the main impediments to a 
restructuring of the Eurozone, in order to construct a recycling or 
redistributive mechanism which does not leave each individual state 
responsible for its own indebtedness - where one state (Germany) is a 
net exporter and most others are net importers (think the US, with the 
federal government being able to distribute say Boeing plants to 
strapped states when Boeing asks Congress for a subsidy for expansion, 
or when Congress distributes venues for military bases) - is that many 
other European nation's finance ministers seem to know full well that 
the present structure is untenable and p

[Marxism] Fwd: USACBI Statement in Solidarity with Professor Angela Y. Davis | US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.usacbi.org/2015/02/usacbi-statement-in-solidarity-with-professor-angela-y-davis/
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[Marxism] FOR MASS PROTESTS AGAINST GUARDIAN COLUMNIST ASH WHO IS ALMOST CALLING SHORT OF WAR WITH RUSSIA!

[Anthony Brain via Marxism]

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https://defendtrotskyism.wordpress.com/2015/02/02/for-urgent-protests-against-the-guardian-in-repsonse-to-timothy-garden-ashs-very-provacivley-for-arming-western-ukraine-with-miltiary-delivaries-to-knock-out-russian-missiles-within-eastern-ukraine/
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[Marxism] Meanwhile in Latin America: "Venezuela: Coup In Real Time"

[Manuel Barrera via Marxism]

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>From Telesur, Eva Golinger analyzes U.S. maneuvers in promoting a Chile 1973 
>coup in Venezuela:
"There is a coup underway in Venezuela. The pieces are all falling into place 
like a bad CIA movie. At every turn a new traitor is revealed, a betrayal is 
born, full of promises to reveal the smoking gun that will justify the 
unjustifiable. Infiltrations are rampant, rumors spread like wildfire, and the 
panic mentality threatens to overcome logic. Headlines scream danger, crisis 
and imminent demise, while the usual suspects declare covert war on a people 
whose only crime is being gatekeeper to the largest pot of black gold in the 
world."
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Venezuela-Coup-in-Real-Time-20150201-0015.html
  
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[Marxism] Bill Browder’s ‘Red Notice,’ About His Russian Misadventures

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Feb. 2 2015
To Russia, With Capitalist Ambitions
Bill Browder’s ‘Red Notice,’ About His Russian Misadventures
by William Grimes

RED NOTICE
A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
By Bill Browder
Illustrated. 396 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28.

In the early 1990s Bill Browder invested $2,000 in a handful of Polish 
companies being privatized after the collapse of Communism. Eastern 
Europe was dipping a toe into the cold bath of free-market capitalism, 
and Mr. Browder, fresh out of Stanford University’s business school, 
wanted to jump in, too.


His small investment quadrupled in value within the year and went on to 
repay him tenfold. “For those who don’t know, the sensation of finding a 
‘ten-bagger’ is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine,” he 
writes in “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One 
Man’s Fight for Justice.” “Once you’ve done it, you want to repeat it 
over and over and over as many times as you can.”


Mr. Browder continued to smoke the crack pipe with gusto, shifting his 
action to Russia and creating a wildly successful investment fund, 
Hermitage Capital Management. His freewheeling, snappy book describes 
the meteoric rise, and disastrous fall, of a buccaneer capitalist who 
crossed the wrong people and paid a steep price.


The highs were very high. Mr. Browder excelled at sniffing out 
undervalued companies, rolling the dice and reaping fantastic returns. 
After determining that a little-known oil company called Sidanco was 
actually worth as much as Lukoil, for example, he bought about $11 
million worth of its stock at $4 a share. The gamble was vindicated a 
year later when British Petroleum bought a block of the company’s stock 
at a 600 percent premium over that price.


Within two years after Hermitage’s founding in 1996, its assets had 
swelled from $25 million to more than $1 billion, making Mr. Browder the 
largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market. In 2000, Hermitage 
was named the best-performing emerging-markets fund in the world, having 
generated returns of 1,500 percent to its original investors. Its assets 
would grow to $4.5 billion by 2005.


The lows, however, were very low. A hefty portion of the book describes 
Mr. Browder’s frantic efforts to fight off a wolf pack of oligarchs 
trying to muscle in on Hermitage’s action and strip its assets.


The cut and thrust, and the high stakes, make for a zesty tale. Mr. 
Browder and his Russian team became adept at amassing scandalous 
information about their foes and then presenting the findings, tied up 
in a neat package, to Western journalists who could inflict maximum damage.


Mr. Browder admits to a fatal miscalculation. He assumed that his 
American citizenship made him untouchable. In fact, he was living on 
borrowed time. When Vladimir V. Putin was intent on reining in the 
oligarchs, his interests and Mr. Browder’s coincided. But at a certain 
point, they did not.


In 2005, deemed a “threat to national security,” Mr. Browder was kicked 
out of Russia, and his companies were seized. Later the Russian 
government asked Interpol to issue an all-points bulletin, or red 
notice, for his arrest on tax evasion charges. Interpol rejected the 
request, calling it politically motivated. Mr. Browder was then 
convicted by a Russian court in absentia. “When the Russian government 
turns on you, it doesn’t do so mildly — it does so with extreme 
prejudice,” Mr. Browder notes ruefully.


Worse, the Interior Ministry arrested Sergei L. Magnitsky, Hermitage’s 
tax lawyer. After being held in custody for more than a year, Magnitsky 
was found dead on a prison floor in Moscow after being beaten and tortured.


Mr. Browder began a relentless campaign to expose and punish Mr. 
Magnitsky’s persecutors, turning his case into an international cause 
célèbre. His efforts helped pressure Congress to pass a law in late 
2012, commonly known as the Magnitsky Act, that barred 18 Russian 
officials connected with Magnitsky’s death from entering the United 
States or using its banking system, and set a precedent for future visa 
sanctions and asset freezes. Last spring the European Parliament passed 
its own version of the act.


It’s a Hollywood ending, right down to the standing ovation given by 
more than 700 European members of Parliament after passing the legislation.


Mr. Browder makes an unlikely hero and even more unlikely capitalist. 
His grandfather was the head of the American Communist Party and 
featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1938 as “Comrade Earl 
Browder.” Felix Browder, Earl’s son, became a mathematics professor at 

[Marxism] Fwd: What caused the killings? | SocialistWorker.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Ahmed Shakwi interviews Gilbert Achcar on Charlie Hebdo.

http://socialistworker.org/2015/02/02/what-caused-the-killings
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[Marxism] The lurid tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged ‘pimping’ parties

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Washington Post, Feb. 2 2015
The lurid tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged ‘pimping’ parties
By Terrence McCoy

On May 11, 2011, the world’s most powerful economist’s career exploded. 
Rumors and whispers had long followed Dominique Strauss-Kahn — he was a 
womanizer, a philanderer, an adulterer. But on that day in May, when New 
York police arrested the managing director of the International Monetary 
Fund on charges of sexual assault, another label was added to that list 
of allegations: rapist.


That case, which ignited a chain reaction of allegations against the 
French economist, was later dismissed — but not before Stauss-Kahn lost 
his $500,000-a-year job atop the IMF, which had brought him to the 
pinnacle of establishment power and prestige. Now nearly four years 
since that epic collapse, the silver-haired economist known as “DSK” may 
yet have further to fall.


On Monday, the man many thought would one day be president of France 
will stand trial in the city of Lille in northern France. He’s faced 
with charges he helped procure sex workers for sex parties from Paris to 
Brussels to Washington. Dubbed the Carlton affair because it involves 
the Hotel Carlton in Lille, the case stars luxury hotel managers, 
Freemasons, Viagra, purple carpet and even a brothel owner called “Dodo 
the Pimp” (Dodo la Saumure). In a charging document that runs 240 pages, 
French authorities said Strauss-Kahn may have helped organize the 
affairs, during which female attendants were allegedly paid to have sex 
with businessmen.


Strauss-Kahn has acknowledged participating in group sex but denied 
being involved in prostitution. “I challenge you to tell the difference 
between a naked prostitute and a naked woman of the world,” his lawyer, 
Henri Leclerc, said in 2011, according to the Guardian.


French judges described Strauss-Kahn as the “king of the party” — the 
“linchpin” who orchestrated what amounted to “carnage on a pile of 
mattresses on the floor,” where Strauss-Kahn allegedly partook in “pure 
sexual consumption.” These were no ordinary swingers’ parties, a French 
legal document reported by the Telegraph said. It was “factory line sex” 
and “orders for services.”


But beyond its salacious aspects, the case is something of a crossroads 
for French society. Bolstered by strict privacy laws, French journalists 
long prided themselves on their discretion when it came to the personal 
lives of public figures. Leave the sensational sex scandals to the 
Americans and the Brits. Personal lives — like Strauss-Kahn’s — that 
brim with the lurid should stay in the shadows. Until it becomes a legal 
matter.


“If a politician is alcoholic, that’s his private life,” Christophe 
Barbier, editor of L’Express, told Reuters in 2011. “If he walks the 
streets screaming out loud in the middle of the night and gets arrested 
by the police, we talk about it.”



Strauss-Kahn, a man married three times who doesn’t deny he loves a good 
sex party, now talks openly about his proclivities. “I long thought that 
I could lead my life as I wanted,” the New York Times quoted him as 
saying in 2012. “And that includes free behavior between consenting 
adults. There are numerous parties that exist like this in Paris, and 
you would be surprised to encounter certain people. I was naive. I was 
too out of step with French society. I was wrong.”


But prosecutors are alleging what he did wasn’t just wrong — it was 
illegal. In France, prostitution is legal. But procuring it is not. And 
that represents the crux of the case: Strauss-Kahn admits attending the 
sex parties, which were reportedly posh, $13,000 affairs that called 
together international businessmen looking to ingratiate themselves with 
Strauss-Kahn. But the economist denies he either organized those soirees 
or had any knowledge women were paid to be there. He said prosecutors 
are trying to “criminalize lust.”


The drama ensnared Strauss-Kahn just as he was emerging from a 2011 New 
York scandal ignited by a 32-year-old Guinean maid who accused him of 
accosting her. In allegations later dismissed, she said he forced 
himself on her after he emerged from the shower. Then the  economist was 
hit with more charges that he participated in the gang rape of a 
prostitute in a New York hotel room, allegations he denied and that were 
later dropped as well.



This time, he hasn’t been as lucky. French authorities said they came 
across Strauss-Kahn by chance. In May of 2011, investigators were 
looking into an alleged prostitution ring in northern France. From 
there, some of the prostitutes started mentioning Strauss-Kahn’s name, 
Agence France-Presse re