[Marxism] New on Redline
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Daphna Whitmore on the government's new ten-year project aimed at improving the life chances of young New Zealanders: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/a-better-start-or-a-detour/ Ben Hillier and Diane Fieldes of the Australian revolutionary organisation Socialist Alternative look at nationalism v internationalism: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/internationalism-versus-nationalism/ Education for anti-capitalists: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/education-for-anti-capitalists/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Interview with Tony Norfield
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Recently I interviewed Tony Norfield about his book on finance and the world imperialist system. See: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/interview-with-tony-norfield-on-finance-and-the-imperialist-world-system-today/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sankara lays out strategies needed for Sanders campaign [was Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara lays out strategies needed for Sanders campaign]
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * [heading name misspelled] http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content=view=31=74=15749 --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara lays out strategies needed for Sanders campaign
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content=view=31=74=15749 --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: A march for Bernie Sanders, a call to run as an independent - seattlepi.com
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * We should be glad to see this as a demand . . . even of several hundred people described as "the Socialist Alternative movement." Are people seeing any similar marches or demonstrations calling on Sanders to run as an independent? Is there any way in which this is serious? . . . that Sanders would take it serious? The latest news on this is that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has resigned from the DNC to endorse Sanders. http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/28/tulsi-gabbard-rising-democratic-star-endorses-bernie-sanders/?_r=0 The paradox here is that the more you struggle within the Democratic Party, the more you become entangled in it. And the less likely you could have the freedom of action to take an independent course. And that's without considering all the ballot-access problems the twin parties have may for any opposition. ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: A march for Bernie Sanders, a call to run as an independent - seattlepi.com
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * A nice idea but unlikely. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/A-march-for-Bernie-Sanders-a-call-to-run-as-an-6858666.php _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Bolivian Town Drifts From President Evo Morales, Despite Promises Kept to Left
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (NY Times forced to admit that the left is here to stay in Latin America.) NY Times, Feb. 28 2016 Bolivian Town Drifts From President Evo Morales, Despite Promises Kept to Left By NICHOLAS CASEY COBIJA, Bolivia — When Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, took office a decade ago, he vowed to put this impoverished town in the Amazon Basin on the kind of pedestal often reserved for a capital city. He filled its coffers with profits from the country’s natural gas industry. He even seized large estates and handed them to new arrivals like Tania Chao, 19, whose family received a house when it came to Cobija with nowhere to live. Yet when Mr. Morales asked Ms. Chao to vote for him last week, in a referendum to let him run for a fourth term, she did not feel that she could return the favor. The president had improved the town, she said, but he had been in office for longer than most people had lived in Cobija. “It’s time to find someone else to continue what he did,” she said after the referendum, which Bolivians rejected. Latin American leftists like Mr. Morales have suddenly felt their longevity ebb as a tide rises against them. But is the wave of discontent a rejection of the left? Or is it something more personal, aimed at the outsize leaders themselves, not necessarily at the ideas they have promoted? In Venezuela, former President Hugo Chávez’s movement lost by a landslide in recent elections. In Argentina, the left-wing allies of former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner could not hold onto her office. Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, a populist educated in the United States, abandoned an effort to seek another term. Corruption accusations and economic woes have left President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil battling impeachment proceedings. But while longstanding leftist leaders and their movements may be faltering, their policies have taken a lasting hold in Latin America. Much as President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took the United States and Britain down a more conservative path, leaders like Mr. Morales made a commitment to diminishing inequality that is expected to remain even as governments come and go. “No leader in Latin America today can afford not to focus on inequality and go back to the neoliberal formulas of the 1990s,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy institute in Washington. “Whatever criticism you might have of the leaders of the left, they put their finger on the legitimate grievance of Latin Americans: that they had been excluded from the political system.” For some of the opponents now taking power, the question is not about razing the leftist models, but about making repairs and adjustments to them. No case is more extreme than Venezuela, where years of government controls over the economy and reliance on a booming oil industry diminished agricultural production to the point that the country was importing its meat, milk and rice. Then came the perfect storm when oil prices sank last year, creating triple-digit inflation and food shortages. In parliamentary elections, leftists were wiped out after 16 years of control. The opposition rose by criticizing government subsidies, but its plan focuses on cutting them for the wealthy and stabilizing them for the poor. President Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Chávez’s successor, agreed to raise the price of gasoline, reducing a subsidy seen as benefiting the car-owning wealthy. No one has suggested making changes that could harm the poor. Argentina’s new president, Mauricio Macri, has enacted sweeping changes that have shifted the country to the center-right, including shrinking the state payroll and reducing electricity subsidies. But Mr. Macri has maintained price control strategies intended to shield people from inflation. He also extended a child benefit program that was the cornerstone of Mrs. Kirchner’s social policy. “Macri, as well as the rest of Latin America, now understands that it’s necessary to maintain and improve the social agenda,” said Alejandro Grisanti, a former Latin America economist at Barclays Capital. Here in Bolivia, many point out that while Mr. Morales was blocked from running in the next election, no successor could undo his work in Cobija. This small Amazonian rubber port became a laboratory for Mr. Morales’s project to bring the government to the country’s poor periphery. The portion of Cobija’s annual municipal budget from national gas taxes increased to $40 million today from $1.2 million in 2006, the year Mr. Morales took office, and
[Marxism] Apple is right. Our smartphones must be kept secure
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * FT, February 26, 2016 5:16 pm Apple is right. Our smartphones must be kept secure by Evgeny Morozov To watch the confrontation between the US’s most valuable company and its top law enforcement agency is to find oneself in a state of nearly permanent cognitive dissonance. Apparently, America’s government agencies are both omnipotent and helpless. Omnipotent because, as this week’s batch of surveillance revelations from WikiLeaks suggests, they have no problems intercepting highly secretive communications between their European allies. Helpless because, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s bosses keep repeating, they need Apple’s co-operation in order to break into the iPhone of the shooter in the San Bernardino attacks. It gets worse. On February 9, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, boasted in his Senate testimony that “in the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.” Now we learn that such agencies cannot get into our smartphones . . . let alone our smart fridges. Something in the government’s rhetoric does not add up. The FBI either has solid reasons to break into that phone — in which case it is not obvious why the mighty power of the National Security Agency and other government bodies has not yet been mobilised — or it is simply using the San Bernardino case as an excuse to redefine its relationship with Silicon Valley. Asked by a judge about its willingness to enlist the help of all the federal agencies in a similar case from 2015, the government responded that “federal prosecutors don’t have an obligation to consult the intelligence community in order to investigate crime.” And since very little is known about the true capabilities of America’s intelligence community, everyone involved in the current debate has to pretend that the world’s most powerful spying agency does not exist. While the FBI’s defence has been that their request is extremely narrow — once Apple has facilitated access to that single phone, it is free to destroy the code required to do so — the broader political context in which this battle unfolds suggests that Apple’s stance will have far-reaching implications. First, the FBI’s request comes at a time when the US government is exerting immense pressure on America’s largest technology companies to join it in the fight against Isis. Both the state department and the Department of Defense have recently expanded their presence in Silicon Valley. While many such requests are straightforward — removing jihadist propaganda from YouTube or Twitter, for example — there are concerns that such pressure might extend to modifying their algorithms in order to hide certain types of content from easily susceptible users. Google knows what is in your inbox; why should it not modify your search results to make you less of a terrorist? Second, it is hard to believe that the San Bernardino case will be an isolated episode. Not only are there several similar cases already pending in US courts but many prosecutors have already indicated they have their own backlog of phones to unlock. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance said recently that he would “absolutely ... want access to all those phones that are crucial in a criminal investigation.” Even if Apple chose to destroy the code it writes to help the FBI on this occasion, it would need to rewrite it for a new request. Should it keep this code forever, it would be holding on to a magic key to its devices — a highly prized asset for any hacker. Given the publicity of the case, any terrorists would probably stop using Apple’s products anyway. The only people to suffer would be ordinary users, stuck with their iPhones and iPads. Third, the FBI’s rationale in this case would make any other manufacturer of smart devices — including all those smart fridges and smart thermostats in your smart home — subject to similar requests. If Apple can be forced to modify security protocols on its phone, what stops the FBI from asking the manufacturer of the smart smoke detector to trigger a fake smoke alarm? Or asking the manufacturer of the smart car to drive suspects directly to the police station? All of this would seem neat so long as the government agencies were competent and nobody else could take advantage of such vulnerabilities. This is not so. The San Bernardino case — where the FBI had a chance to break into the phone but blew it by changing the suspect’s Apple
