[Marxism] Women Making Science Videos on YouTube Face Hostile Comments

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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After studying 23,005 comments left on videos about science and related
topics, a researcher says, “I could see why people would not want to be on
YouTube.”

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are popular topics on
YouTube. Some channels that stream videos on these subjects have millions
of subscribers. Most are hosted by men.

“There is a lot of discussion about YouTube being an unpleasant environment
for female creators,” said Inoaka Amarasekara, an Australian researcher in
science communication. “I wanted to see if that affected science
communication on YouTube, and if that was something I could corroborate.”

In fact it was.

“She so ugly I almost threw up. Ew.”

“I was just staring at your bbbooo.i mean eyes.”

“Go back to the kitchen and make me double stack sandwich.”

These are some of the 23,005 YouTube comments that form the basis of a new
paper

by
Ms. Amarasekara and Will Grant, a lecturer at Australian National
University, published last week in the journal Public Understanding of
Science. They found a tough environment for women who create YouTube videos
centered on science, drawing both more comments per view than men and also
a higher proportion of critical comments as well as remarks about their
appearances.

“The comment space for women on YouTube seems to be more volatile, both
positive and negative,” Dr. Grant said.

Ms. Amarasekara didn’t feel confident that an automated sentiment analysis
could capture the meaning of the comments, so she manually sorted each of
the thousands of comments into one of six categories: positive; negative or
critical; hostile; sexist or sexual; appearance-based; and neutral or
general discussion. Of course, that meant she had to read them all.

“I was quite disappointed by the time I’d gone through them,” she said. “I
could see why people would not want to be on YouTube.”

The researchers found that about 14 percent of comments for female
on-camera hosts were critical, compared to about six percent for male hosts.

They also found female hosts got a much larger proportion of comments about
appearance (4.5 percent for women versus 1.4 percent for men) and comments
that were sexist or sexual (nearly three percent of comments for women
versus about a quarter-percent for men).

There were some positives for women as well. Female on-camera hosts
elicited more comments, likes and subscribers per view than the other
categories. They even received a slightly higher percentage of positive
comments compared to male hosts.

Some of the researchers’ findings echoed a 2014 study
 that
looked at comments on TED Talks. When the presenter was a woman, 15.28
percent of comments were about her as opposed to the talk, TED or other
topic. When the speaker was a man, only 9.84 percent of comments were about
him.

That study also found that comments for videos with female presenters
tended to be more “emotional” — significantly both more positive and
negative.

Facing YouTube critics is like “someone is leaving a Post-it note on your
desk every day telling you why you’re not qualified or why your voice is
horrid,” said Vanessa Hill, who has 435,330 subscribers on her channel
BrainCraft .

“I’m sure it does discourage some female creators from starting a channel,
but I think it goes further than that,” she said. “It discourages female
creators from continuing to make videos and being able to do that at a
professional or semiprofessional level.”

Indeed, Ms. Amarasekara ran into an obstacle immediately with the study,
which was started in 2015 as part of her master’s thesis, because of the
lack of women-led channels.

After getting lists of the 370 most popular YouTube channels in science,
technology, engineering and math, she realized only 32 were hosted by women
— not enough for a significant sample size. To flesh out the study, she
added 21 women-hosted channels from a list compiled by Emily Graslie, host
of the popular science YouTube channel The Brain Scoop
.

In the study, Ms. Amarasekara cited Ms. Graslie’s 2013 video, “Where My
Ladies At? ,” which posited
that sexist, appearance-obsessed comments might be partly why there were so
few female-led STEM channels.

Since then, Ms. Graslie says, her channel’s community has gotten more
positive — but she’s frustrated that the conversation about women on
YouTube doesn’t seem to have evolved.

“We’re still talking about 

[Marxism] More Recycling Won't Solve Plastic Pollution

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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The only thing worse than being lied to is not knowing you’re being lied
to. It’s true that plastic pollution is a huge problem, of planetary
proportions
. And it’s
true we could all do more to reduce our plastic footprint. The lie is that
blame for the plastic problem is wasteful consumers and that changing our
individual habits will fix it.

Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to
halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and
feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and
distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the
first place. The real problem is that single-use plastic—the very idea of
producing plastic items like grocery bags, which *we use for an average of
12 minutes * but can persist in the
environment for half a millennium—is an incredibly reckless abuse of
technology. Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the
problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been
avoided in the first place.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/more-recycling-wont-solve-plastic-pollution/


..

If we keep producing (and failing to properly dispose of) plastics at
predicted rates, plastics in the ocean will outweigh fish pound for pound
in 2050.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/20/by-2050-there-will-be-more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-worlds-oceans-study-says/
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[Marxism] Photos show incredible scale of protests against Donald Trump's visit | Metro News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://metro.co.uk/2018/07/13/photos-show-incredible-scale-protests-donald-trumps-visit-7713893/?ito=social
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[Marxism] Nathaniel Reed, 84, Champion of Florida’s Environment, Is Dead

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Interesting how Nixon-era Republicans make Obama look like Scott Pruitt 
by comparison.)


NY Times, July 13, 2018
Nathaniel Reed, 84, Champion of Florida’s Environment, Is Dead
By Richard Sandomir

Nathaniel Reed, an environmentalist who led conservation fights 
throughout Florida and helped turn the Endangered Species Act into law 
while serving as an assistant secretary of the Interior in the 1970s, 
died on Wednesday in Quebec City. He was 84.


His son Adrian said he died in a hospital of a brain injury he received 
when he fell while fishing on the Grand Cascapédia River in Quebec.


“He had many times told my brother, sister and me, ‘If I could choose to 
leave this earth, I would catch one last beautiful salmon and it would 
be lights off,’ ” Adrian Reed said in a telephone interview.


On July 3, Mr. Reed caught his final salmon — a 16-pounder — and soon 
after that, he slipped and his head hit a rock, causing traumatic injury.


Mr. Reed, who was known as Nat, bemoaned the damage that land 
developers, polluters, politicians and the Army Corps of Engineers had 
done to Florida by the early 1960s. Wetlands were being drained, 
mangrove jungles cleared and swamps filled to build roads and homes. The 
Everglades were being threatened.


“Man was remaking my Florida with the heaviest of hands!” he wrote in 
“Travels on the Green Highway” (2017), a memoir of his decades of 
environmental campaigns. “Development at any cost was the goal of our 
politicians in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.”


Mr. Reed’s rising profile on conservation issues, which included 
speaking at rallies to protest projects that threatened the state’s 
environment, led to an alliance with Claude R. Kirk Jr., a Republican 
running for governor of Florida in 1966. After writing white papers for 
Mr. Kirk during his successful campaign, Mr. Reed was hired in 1967 as 
his dollar-a-year environmental adviser. Because he came from a wealthy 
family, he did not need a salary.


Governor Kirk “wanted to change Florida as badly as I wanted to change 
Florida,” Mr. Reed told Florida Trend magazine in an interview in 2007.


One of their biggest victories was scotching a plan in 1969 to build a 
large jetport in Big Cypress Swamp (now a national preserve) with 
federal funds. Conservationists warned that it would damage wildlife in 
the adjacent Everglades National Park. Governor Kirk, who at first 
supported the jetport, later changed his mind, Mr. Reed wrote, after 
realizing that “he had been taken in by an impossible dream cooked up by 
schemers and land peddlers.”


A deal between Florida, Dade County and the United States government 
guaranteed that a jetport would not be built in Big Cypress Swamp.


After Governor Kirk lost his bid for re-election in 1970, Mr. Reed was 
named assistant secretary of the Interior for fish, wildlife and 
national parks by President Richard M. Nixon. Recalling his introduction 
to the president, Mr. Reed told the news website TCPalm.com last year 
that Nixon told him: “I don’t give a damn about environmental issues. 
I’ve got too many things on my plate.”


But, Mr. Reed added, “Nixon wanted a better environmental record than 
Jack Kennedy had.”


Asked by Nixon what his priorities were, Mr. Reed said that he wanted to 
ban the pesticide DDT and Compound 1080, a poison that killed coyotes 
and other animals in the West.


The Nixon administration banned them both. But a larger issue galvanized 
Mr. Reed: endangered species legislation.


He became the administration’s point man, testifying in the House and 
Senate, briefing members of Congress — and helping to draft the 
Endangered Species Act of 1973 with government officials at a Chinese 
restaurant, he told The Tampa Bay Times.


William D. Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental 
Protection Agency, recalled in a telephone interview that Mr. Reed was 
“vigorous and aggressive in pushing his views about endangered species 
and more broadly, wildlife.”


“He was a positive force in dealing with issues that were new and had 
public policy ramifications that hadn’t been dealt with before, like the 
Endangered Species Act,” Mr. Ruckelshaus added.


The legislation, which passed Congress overwhelmingly, gave the 
government authority to prevent the extinction of animal and plant 
species by eliminating threats to their survival. The American bald 
eagle was the first species listed.


Four years after the law was enacted, the alligator was no longer on the 
endangered species list.


“This proves that we can do it,” Mr. Reed said in a news release at the 
time. “We can reverse the trend toward extinction and save a 

Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected (Jason)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/13/18 7:08 PM, Jason wrote:


I might do that at some point, but I want to be clear that is not an 
alternative--it is an evasion. It is you evading backing up your claims, 
explicit and implicit, that there is some kind of obvious tradition that 
revolutionary socialists don't vote for liberals (or however one prefers 
to phrase it).


-Jason Hicks


I am actually working on a longish article about all this, including 
very relevant material from August Nimtz's book on Lenin's electoral 
strategy. And stop telling me I am being evasive because I don't answer 
your questions to your satisfaction. That is just a cheap demagogic 
trick that won't work, especially on Marxmail where most people have a 
visceral hatred for the Democratic Party.

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Re: [Marxism] DSA member Ocasio-Cortez elected (Jason)

[Jason via Marxism]

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> Let me propose an alternative. Why don't you write a 2000-3000 word
> article defending support for the Democratic Party and post it to the list?


I might do that at some point, but I want to be clear that is not an
alternative--it is an evasion. It is you evading backing up your claims,
explicit and implicit, that there is some kind of obvious tradition that
revolutionary socialists don't vote for liberals (or however one prefers to
phrase it).

-Jason Hicks
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[Marxism] Notes on Labor Migration as an Internationally Unregulated Human Supply Chain

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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'When I read that a coyote referred to the migrant he was smuggling as a 
“package,” I was immediately reminded of the Atlantic slave trade, with 
its human “cargo.” It has always seemed reasonable to me to 
conceptualize the Atlantic Slave Trade — the triangular trade — as a 
supply chain'..A human supply chain. This would have the advantage, by 
focusing on the international working class as a whole, of avoiding 
siloed victimology narratives[2] like “forced labor” — what, exactly, is 
not forced about the global norm of wage labor?


...they consider the workers as inputs to the global supply chain of 
manufactured goods, and do not consider the supply of those human inputs 
(“cargo,” “packages”) as constituting a supply chain in and of itself. 
Hence they can only think in contractual, and not class terms. (It’s a 
bit like trying to dope out the supply chain for the iPhone by examining 
bills of lading.)


...a strategy of asking questions about human capital requirements that 
borrows from the questions supply chain managers typically ask, such as 
“Do we have the right parts in stock?” or, “Do we know where to get 
these parts when we need them?” and, “Does it cost a lot of money to 
carry inventory?”


...a deep bench in a supply chain is a costly way of preparing for 
demand. “The same applies to traditional succession management—you’re 
paying people to essentially ‘sit on the shelf,’


In its “workforce optimization” initiative, IBM is taking a supply chain 
management approach to solving these problems, cataloging skill sets as 
human inventory and applying the same supply chain technology used for 
the company’s hardware to respond quickly to short-term needs and plan 
for long-term demands. This approach makes sense, says Bruce Richardson, 
chief research officer at AMR Research. “As happens in a supply chain, 
you can find you have too much of one ‘product’ and not enough of 
another in the labor chain,” he says.


'Transnational migration is a market, of course: labor supply (made up 
of migrants) fills the labor demand of employers. In a functioning 
marketplace, demand and supply meet and reach an agreement on price (in 
this case, wages, benefits and working conditions) within the guidelines 
of the law and other contexts, such as collective bargaining agreements.'


...employers’ recruitment of would-be migrants from other countries, 
unlike their use of undocumented workers already in the United States, 
creates a transnational network of labor intermediaries—the 'human 
supply chain'—whose operation undermines the rule of law in the 
workplace, benefiting U.S. companies by reducing labor costs while 
creating distributional harms for U.S. workers, and placing temporary 
migrant workers in situations of severe subordination. It identifies the 
human supply chain as a key structure of the global economy, a close 
analog to the more familiar product supply chains through which U.S. 
companies manufacture products abroad.


B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE

Apple Fresh is a (fictitious) apple cider maker in Washington State…. 
Like all employers, Apple Fresh is responsible for ensuring that its 
employees’ wages, benefits, and working conditions comport with legal 
and contractual minimums. It must also pay social-security premiums on 
its employees’ behalf and cover their unemployment and workers’ 
compensation insurance. … As part of its effort to meet those demands, 
Apple Fresh decides to outsource its apple pressing to one of several 
food processors in the market, Presser Inc., which can produce the cider 
more cheaply and efficiently. Once it signs a contract with Presser, 
Apple Fresh is released from responsibility for the social insurance and 
many of the working conditions of the workers who press its apples, 
because it is no longer their employer. Presser now bears those 
obligations. …


In year two of the contract, Presser decides to try to decrease turnover 
and increase its profit margin by using temporary migrant workers to 
staff its plant. Its owner had been contacted not long before by the 
U.S. agent of a labor-recruitment firm in Mexico City…


[Read rent-seeking intermediaries, including the types of 'outsourcing,' 
variously described in John Smith's Imperialism in the 21st Century]


… to discuss the advantages of contracting the firm to hire H-2B 
migrants, including lower costs and a steady supply of uncomplaining 
workers. Presser’s human-resources department calls the agent and asks 
him to begin the recruitment process. The agent in turn contacts the 
firm in Mexico City, which has sub-agents in a Mexican state 

[Marxism] Vermont--a Nurse's strike report and two books reviewed

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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first, the strike report:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/13/first-big-strike-since-janus-ruling-hits-vermont-streets/

now the books:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/13/vermont-can-it-happen-here/

-- 
Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
,
and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
 *
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[Marxism] Trump, Trade Wars, and the Class Struggle

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By ex-SWPer Ike Nahem.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/07/13/trump-trade-wars-and-the-class-struggle/
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[Marxism] The Dying Light | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The name Tony McKenna might ring a bell with CounterPunch readers since 
he has written a number of very informative articles here over the 
years, the most recent being one on “Trump, Obama and the Nature of 
Fascism”. When I learned that he had written a novel titled “The Dying 
Light”, I requested a review copy since I was curious to see if his 
fiction chops were as strong as his nonfiction’s.


Speaking for myself, I entertained hopes of writing fiction after I left 
the Trotskyist movement in 1978. It was only after reading the chapter 
in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”, where he describes the bathroom toiletries of 
Herzog’s former lover in intimate detail as a way of casting light on 
her psychologically, that I decided to stick to politics. If I lived to 
a thousand, I could not write as brilliantly as Bellow. By the same 
token, if he could have lived to a thousand, he would not be able to 
write anything but trash when it came to politics.


On one level, “The Dying Light” might be described as a historical novel 
since it is based on a little-known aspect of life in London in 1940, 
when many of its citizens began living in abandoned subway stations, or 
what they call the Tube, to protect themselves from German bombs. In a 
nod to the “Newsreels” of John Dos Passos’s great U.S.A. trilogy, 
McKenna includes an editorial from a faux newspaper called the 
Birchington Gazette:


	During the Blitz, when the bombing was at its most intense, hundreds of 
thousands of Londoners took shelter in the Underground. First realised 
as a temporary spontaneous measure, it was initially opposed by 
government who used the police to lock down tube stations. Nevertheless, 
large crowds pushed their w through, winning the right to occupy London 
subterranean levels.


	The occupation, however, swiftly grew something more than a temporary 
means of escaping bombs. Rather, it became a way of life. People set up 
home in the spaces beneath the city. The social research organisation 
Mass Observation describes how “for the first time in many hundreds of 
years…civilized families conducted the whole of their leisure and 
domestic lives in full view of each other. Most of these people were not 
merely sheltering in the tubes; they were living there.


Using this premise, McKenna tells the story of children who have taken 
over an abandoned station that a child named Georgie calls Ruritania. He 
has a very active imagination just like the author.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/07/13/the-dying-light/
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[Marxism] Netanyahu Says Putin Agreed to Restrain Iran in Syria - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Mr. Assad, while an avowed enemy of Israel, has taken pains to avoid a 
battle with Israel and has maintained the truce that has held since 1974.


“We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime,” Mr. Netanyahu said, 
according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “For 40 years, not a single 
bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/middleeast/syria-israel-putin-netanyahu.html

---

Ceasefire Magazine: In your opinion what is really at stake in what’s 
unravelling in Syria at the moment, and what does it mean for the 
broader region?


Noam Chomsky: Well, Syria is descending into suicide. It’s a horror 
story and getting worse and worse. There’s no bright spot on the 
horizon. What will probably happen, if this continues, is that Syria 
will be partitioned into probably three regions; a Kurdish region – 
which is already forming – that could pull out and join in some fashion 
the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe with some kind of deal with 
Turkey.


If the US and Israel wanted to assist the rebels – which they do not – 
they can do it, even without military intervention. For example, if 
Israel were to mobilise forces on the Golan Heights (of course, it’s the 
Syrian Golan heights, but by now the world more or less tolerates or 
accepts Israel’s illegal occupation,) If they would just do that, It 
would compel Assad to move forces to the South which would relieve 
pressure against the rebels. But there’s no hint even of that. They’re 
also not giving humanitarian aid to the huge number of suffering 
refugees, not doing all kinds of simple things that they could do.


https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/noam-chomsky-syria-descends-suicide-israel-enjoying-spectacle/
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[Marxism] How a Tycoon and Pence Friend Helped 2 Ranchers Get Pardons

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Besides the oil tycoon, the Hammonds had other supporters: 
https://themilitant.com/2016/8005/800502.html)


NY Times, July 13, 2018
How a Tycoon and Pence Friend Helped 2 Ranchers Get Pardons
By Julie Turkewitz

DENVER — When President Trump pardoned two cattlemen from the high 
desert of Oregon this week, both convicted of setting fires on federal 
land, even their lawyer was mystified as to how the case got the 
attention of the White House.


“I don’t know the machinations of how it happened,” said Lawrence 
Matasar, a Portland lawyer who has represented the ranchers — Dwight L. 
Hammond, and his son, Steven D. Hammond. “This was not the standard 
process.”


Mr. Matasar, it seems, was unaware of the exact reach of Forrest Lucas, 
an Indiana oil products tycoon and friend of Vice President Mike Pence.


Mr. Lucas, a self-made multimillionaire with a sprawling empire that 
includes a ranch, an oil products company, several motor sports series, 
a television network, a film-production company and a well-funded 
activist and lobbying group with an anti-regulation, pro-rancher bent, 
has known the vice president for years.


With his wife, Mr. Lucas has donated more than $100,000 to Mr. Pence’s 
campaigns. Among other encounters, Mr. Pence recently joined him in a 
lavish suite at the home of the Indianapolis Colts football team: Lucas 
Oil Stadium. (Mr. Lucas, who likes to affix his name to most of his 
enterprises, has a $121.5 million deal to place his brand at the Colts’ 
front door).


The two had discussed a range of issues over the years, so when Mr. 
Lucas mentioned the Hammonds, Mr. Pence listened.


“We’re very lucky that my boss has been friends with the vice 
president,” said David Duquette, a close aide to Mr. Lucas who works for 
Protect the Harvest, the magnate’s lobbying and activist group. “That 
makes it easier for us to get our issues looked at.”


Mr. Lucas was not the only one to push for the release of the Hammonds, 
whose five-year sentences inflamed long-simmering tensions over federal 
land management in the West and inspired a weekslong armed occupation of 
a wildlife refuge in 2016, led by the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy.


Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, has dedicated 
significant time to the Hammonds’ cause. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke 
had reportedly said he would discuss the matter with the president.


But the involvement of Mr. Lucas demonstrates how Mr. Trump appears to 
be mostly bypassing the traditional process of taking clemency 
recommendations from the Justice Department and is instead blessing the 
wishes of the well-connected.


About 10,000 applications for clemency sit with the Justice Department.

While other presidents have also gone ahead of Justice officials to 
pardon apparent allies, they have often waited until their final days in 
office to do so. Mr. Trump, by comparison, has issued high-profile 
pardons early and comparatively often — seemingly unconcerned by the 
appearance of leaning his ears toward those at the top.


Mr. Lucas, 76, founded Protect the Harvest, the activist group, to 
support ranchers, farmers and animal owners who oppose “radical groups” 
that seek to “pass laws or enact regulations that would restrict our 
rights, limit our freedoms, and hinder our access to safe, affordable food.”


The way Mr. Duquette tells it, Mr. Lucas got involved with the Hammond 
case around 2015.


The oil magnate mentioned the case to Mr. Pence, who was at the time the 
governor of Indiana. Then the governor became the vice president. Mr. 
Lucas mentioned the case again, and the vice president declared “he 
wanted to see it, he wanted his chief counsel to look at it,” Mr. 
Duquette said.


“We’ve been making the request since he’s been in office. Every time we 
get a chance to talk to him.”


Mr. Pence’s staff examined the case, Mr. Duquette said, and then it 
moved to the president’s office.


Soon afterward, Mr. Trump signed a pardon, the Hammonds were released, 
and on Wednesday, Mr. Lucas sent his private jet to pick the pair up 
from a California prison.


An aide to Mr. Pence gave a slightly different version of events, saying 
the vice president learned the details of the Hammond case from 
Representative Walden, “agreed it deserved consideration,” and suggested 
that the congressman take it to the president.


The aide, who declined to be identified, would not comment on whether 
Mr. Lucas influenced that decision.


Slipping out of the Lucas plane on Wednesday, the Hammonds stepped onto 
the airfield in Burns, Ore., by their ranch, to a crowd of supporters 
and reporters. Allies on horseback watched, flying 

[Marxism] Getting concrete about AOC and the Democrats | SocialistWorker.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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In this ongoing public exchange (good for them) by ISO members, one 
member urges the group to consider the merits of Eric Blanc's "dirty 
break" article in Jacobin that refers to the left running in DP and RP 
primaries a century ago.


https://socialistworker.org/2018/07/12/getting-concrete-about-aoc-and-the-democrats

I wrote a critique of Blanc's article here:

https://louisproyect.org/2017/12/05/can-socialism-be-advanced-by-running-in-democratic-party-primaries-a-reply-to-eric-blanc/
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[Marxism] Poles apart: the bitter conflict over a nation’s communist history | News | The Guardian

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/13/poles-apart-the-bitter-conflict-over-a-nations-history-poland-monuments-communism-soviet-union
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[Marxism] ZCommunications » The Open Veins of Nicaragua

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-open-veins-of-nicaragua/
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[Marxism] Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership: Many challenges, “no easy ride”

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.polity.org.za/article/cyril-ramaphosas-leadership-many-challenges-no-easy-ride-2018-06-25/searchString:raymond
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[Marxism] [UCE] The Global Trade War has Begun

[RKOB via Marxism]

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*The Global Trade War has Begun*

*/What is its Meaning and what should be the Response of Socialists?/*

/by Michael Pröbsting
/

https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-global-trade-war-has-begun/


//

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[Marxism] STRAYS: "a living graphic novel" on effects of alienation and austerity

[Daniel Lindvall via Marxism]

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STRAYS is an interesting and ambitious first feature film from British director 
Barnaby Miller, made through rotoscoping (animating over live action footage) 
and displaying Brechtian influences:

S|T|R|A|Y|S , described by its makers as “a 
living graphic novel,” portrays a cross section of contemporary Londoners 
dealing with the effects of financial crisis and austerity. The characters are 
at once individuals and social types – banker, minimum wage worker, 
businessman, petit bourgeouis entrepreneur, et cetera. They relate to each 
other through the microcosm of the local pub as well as through a web of 
relations; family ties, old friendships, romantic entanglements, job relations, 
all of which are deeply affected, and often strained beyond breaking point, by 
economic pressures and insecurity.

http://filmint.nu/?p=25160
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