Re: [Marxism] Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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In other words, they made the same mistake as the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Fri, May 15, 2020, 2:48 PM Chris Slee via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> There were reasons to protest, but the left certainly underestimated the
> danger that the army would use such protests as the pretext for a coup.
>
> Chris Slee
> 
> From: Marxism  on behalf of Louis
> Proyect via Marxism 
> Sent: Saturday, 16 May 2020 12:57:25 AM
> To: Chris Slee 
> Cc: Louis Proyect 
> Subject: [Marxism] Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families
> Pay the Price.
>
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>
> (The longer al-Sisi stays in office, the more foolish leftist protests
> against the Muslim Brotherhood government appears.)
>
> NY Times, May 15, 2020
> Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.
> By Declan Walsh
>
> CAIRO — When a popular Egyptian blogger shared gruesome video of a
> military officer severing the finger of an unidentified body and setting
> the body on fire, it was some of the most shocking footage to emerge
> from Sinai, where Egypt’s military has been battling Islamist militants
> in a hidden war.
>
> As an exiled dissident, Abdullah el-Sherif could afford to be bold
> enough to broadcast the video in March. But days later, security agents
> burst into the homes of his relatives in the seaside city of Alexandria
> and arrested his two brothers on terrorism charges.
>
> Now Mr. el-Sherif is in Qatar, safely beyond the reach of Egypt’s
> security forces, while his brothers languish at a maximum-security
> prison outside Cairo.
>
> The Egyptian government, which has stifled nearly all criticism at home,
> is now trying to silence critics abroad by jailing their family members
> in Egypt, human rights groups say. Since early last year, it has
> arrested the relatives of at least 15 dissidents in exile.
>
> Security agents have broken down front doors, confiscated money and
> passports, forced parents to denounce their children on television, and
> detained fathers and brothers, several of whom have been charged with
> terrorism and imprisoned.
>
> “It’s nothing less than collective punishment,” said Amr Magdi of Human
> Rights Watch, which since 2016 has documented raids on the families of
> 14 exiled dissidents. At least 20 relatives have been detained or
> prosecuted.
>
> Mr. el-Sherif, whose YouTube videos often amass two or three million
> views, said Egyptian officials told him that if he stopped his critical
> broadcasts, his brothers would be released.
>
> “I feel really bad,” he said. “I’ve lost my appetite. My mother and
> father call all the time, crying on the phone, asking me to quit. I
> don’t know what to do.”
>
> The head of Egypt’s State Information Service did not respond to a
> request for comment.
>
> Egypt’s rulers have long employed such tactics against the families of
> suspected drug traffickers and jihadists. But as President Abdel Fattah
> el-Sisi has cranked up the repression in recent years, he has broadened
> his focus to target the families of exiled dissidents, journalists and
> cultural figures.
>
> One recent case involved an exiled actor, Mohammed Shuman, who delivered
> an emotional appeal on Facebook from Turkey for the release of his
> brother and his son who, he said, had been jailed in retaliation for his
> role in a movie that highlighted police brutality.
>
> Inside Egypt, Mr. el-Sisi jailed opponents and largely subjugated the
> news media. His intelligence services have acquired stakes in the
> largest private TV networks, blocked over 500 websites and even censored
> the scripts of the highly popular TV serials that Egyptians are
> currently lapping up during the holy month of Ramadan.
>
> But his iron grip on Egyptian media may have inadvertently helped raise
> the profile of news outlets and bloggers based abroad.
>
> Egypt’s nominally independent private TV stations all offer similar,
> pro-state news and commentary. Talk show hosts seem to sing from the
> same hymn

[Marxism] Homs, a Divided Incarnation of Syria’s Unresolved Conflict - Contentious Politics in the Syrian Conflict: Opposition, Representation, and Resistance - Carnegie Middle East Center - Carnegie

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://carnegie-mec.org/2020/05/15/homs-divided-incarnation-of-syria-s-unresolved-conflict-pub-81804

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[Marxism] A Breakdown of the Controversy Surrounding Lin Manuel-Miranda

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://remezcla.com/features/culture/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton-in-puerto-rico-controversy/

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Re: [Marxism] Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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There were reasons to protest, but the left certainly underestimated the danger 
that the army would use such protests as the pretext for a coup.

Chris Slee

From: Marxism  on behalf of Louis Proyect 
via Marxism 
Sent: Saturday, 16 May 2020 12:57:25 AM
To: Chris Slee 
Cc: Louis Proyect 
Subject: [Marxism] Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay 
the Price.

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(The longer al-Sisi stays in office, the more foolish leftist protests
against the Muslim Brotherhood government appears.)

NY Times, May 15, 2020
Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.
By Declan Walsh

CAIRO — When a popular Egyptian blogger shared gruesome video of a
military officer severing the finger of an unidentified body and setting
the body on fire, it was some of the most shocking footage to emerge
from Sinai, where Egypt’s military has been battling Islamist militants
in a hidden war.

As an exiled dissident, Abdullah el-Sherif could afford to be bold
enough to broadcast the video in March. But days later, security agents
burst into the homes of his relatives in the seaside city of Alexandria
and arrested his two brothers on terrorism charges.

Now Mr. el-Sherif is in Qatar, safely beyond the reach of Egypt’s
security forces, while his brothers languish at a maximum-security
prison outside Cairo.

The Egyptian government, which has stifled nearly all criticism at home,
is now trying to silence critics abroad by jailing their family members
in Egypt, human rights groups say. Since early last year, it has
arrested the relatives of at least 15 dissidents in exile.

Security agents have broken down front doors, confiscated money and
passports, forced parents to denounce their children on television, and
detained fathers and brothers, several of whom have been charged with
terrorism and imprisoned.

“It’s nothing less than collective punishment,” said Amr Magdi of Human
Rights Watch, which since 2016 has documented raids on the families of
14 exiled dissidents. At least 20 relatives have been detained or
prosecuted.

Mr. el-Sherif, whose YouTube videos often amass two or three million
views, said Egyptian officials told him that if he stopped his critical
broadcasts, his brothers would be released.

“I feel really bad,” he said. “I’ve lost my appetite. My mother and
father call all the time, crying on the phone, asking me to quit. I
don’t know what to do.”

The head of Egypt’s State Information Service did not respond to a
request for comment.

Egypt’s rulers have long employed such tactics against the families of
suspected drug traffickers and jihadists. But as President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi has cranked up the repression in recent years, he has broadened
his focus to target the families of exiled dissidents, journalists and
cultural figures.

One recent case involved an exiled actor, Mohammed Shuman, who delivered
an emotional appeal on Facebook from Turkey for the release of his
brother and his son who, he said, had been jailed in retaliation for his
role in a movie that highlighted police brutality.

Inside Egypt, Mr. el-Sisi jailed opponents and largely subjugated the
news media. His intelligence services have acquired stakes in the
largest private TV networks, blocked over 500 websites and even censored
the scripts of the highly popular TV serials that Egyptians are
currently lapping up during the holy month of Ramadan.

But his iron grip on Egyptian media may have inadvertently helped raise
the profile of news outlets and bloggers based abroad.

Egypt’s nominally independent private TV stations all offer similar,
pro-state news and commentary. Talk show hosts seem to sing from the
same hymnal. News bulletins can have a whiff of Soviet-era control,
while government critics are branded as agents of the outlawed Muslim
Brotherhood, or stooges of rival Qatar.

When the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Morsi, died in June, every
Egyptian TV station led with the same 42-word bulletin, evidently
dictated by the security agencies.

Egyptian viewers, bored with the homogeneous programming or in search of
unfiltered news, are increasingly turning to foreign media as an
alternative.

In addition to YouTube channels like Mr. el-Sherif’s, there is anecdotal
evidence that many Egyptians quietly tune into opposition TV stations
like Turkey-base

[Marxism] Reviving the US CDC - The Lancet

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(The Lancet gets political.)

The Trump administration's further erosion of the CDC will harm global 
cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by 
defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health 
threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next 
inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House 
come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be 
guided by partisan politics.


full: 
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31140-5/fulltext


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[Marxism] Nakba Day

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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Today marks the commemoration of the dispossession of the Palestinian
people by Zionist forces.

Visualizing Palestine developed an interactive map project, "Palestine,
Today: Explore How The Nakba Transformed Palestine".

https://today.visualizingpalestine.org/
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[Marxism] The case for degrowth in a time of pandemic | openDemocracy

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The time is ripe for us to refocus on what really matters: not GDP, but 
the health and wellbeing of our people and our planet.


https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/case-degrowth-time-pandemic/

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[Marxism] Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Ever since the civil war began in Syria in early 2011, the left has 
largely ignored the social and economic circumstances that led to a 
conflict costing over a half-million deaths and the migration—internal 
and external—of half the population. The tendency was to see Syria as a 
piece on a global chessboard with “the axis of resistance” fending off 
attacks from the West. There was lip-service to the idea that Syrians 
had legitimate grievances against the government early on, but by the 
end of 2011, the “anti-imperialist” consensus was that the rebels were 
jihadists interested more in fighting unbelievers than inequality.


To my knowledge, the first attempt at an analysis of the internal class 
contradictions appeared in 2015. Long-time Syria scholar Raymond 
Hinnebusch and Tina Zintl edited a collection titled “Syria from Reform 
to Revolt: Volume 1: Political Economy and International Relations”. (A 
second volume never appeared.) I found this book invaluable in writing 
an article titled “The Economic Roots of the Syrian Revolution”. My goal 
was to demonstrate that a rural agrarian crisis provided the fuel for an 
uprising. An article by Myrian Ababsa provided statistics that revealed 
the depths of misery that led to the revolt. In 2009, 42 percent of 
Raqqa governorate suffered from anemia owing to a shortage of dairy 
products, vegetables, and fruit. Malnutrition among pregnant women and 
children under five doubled between 2007 and 2009. That was the cause of 
the conflict, not Saudi desire to impose shariah law on the country.


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2020/05/15/syria-from-national-independence-to-proxy-war/


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[Marxism] Amazon’s Showdown in France Tests Its Ability to Sidestep Labor

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, May 15, 2020
Amazon’s Showdown in France Tests Its Ability to Sidestep Labor
By Liz Alderman and Adam Satariano

PARIS — Workers at Amazon’s six mammoth French warehouses won some 
concessions from the company in late March: After hundreds of employees 
threatened to walk out unless the company better protected them from the 
coronavirus, the internet giant strengthened social distancing measures, 
provided masks and hand sanitizer and took employee temperatures.


But that was not enough for workers like Jean-François Bérot, who a few 
weeks later felt like his colleagues were still too close for comfort, 
putting themselves at risk to fulfill orders for items as trivial as 
nail polish.


“People kept coming to work feeling worried about being exposed to a 
mortal danger,” said Mr. Bérot, 50, who works at a warehouse south of Paris.


Unlike in the United States, where Amazon has spent years successfully 
beating back unionization efforts, Mr. Bérot could do something about 
it. He had a union behind him.


Mr. Bérot’s union successfully sued Amazon last month, in what has 
become the most prominent labor showdown the retailer has faced since 
the coronavirus outbreak. A French court ordered Amazon to stop 
delivering “nonessential” items as part of measures to protect worker 
health. The company responded by closing its French warehouses and 
putting 10,000 employees on paid furlough until at least Monday. On 
Wednesday, Amazon said it would include an independent expert in its 
review of virus protocols, a concession to unions.


The case, now headed to the French supreme court, tests Amazon’s ability 
to sidestep the demands of workers who are fulfilling the surge in 
orders the pandemic has produced for Amazon’s business. It is also 
emblematic of why Amazon, based in Seattle, has battled to keep unions 
out of the company, especially in the United States, its biggest market.


“The only way to push Amazon to action is through confrontation,” said 
Jean-François Bérot, a member of the Sud-Solidaires labor 
union.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times
Unions in the United States have made few inroads after years of 
campaigns. But in Europe, national labor laws require companies to deal 
with them, even if employees aren’t members. With more than 150,000 
deaths in Europe from the coronavirus, the groups are leveraging the 
crisis to reassert influence and press Amazon harder on workers’ rights.


“The only way to push Amazon to action is through confrontation,” Mr. 
Bérot said. “We’re working in conditions that pose a risk to our safety. 
Workers’ voices must be heard.”


Amazon defended its response to the virus, saying it had put in place 
more than 150 changes at its warehouses, including providing masks, 
temperature checks, hand sanitizer, increased time off and higher pay. 
It expects to have more than $4 billion of Covid-related expenses in the 
current quarter.


“We respect everyone’s right to express themselves, but object to the 
irresponsible actions of some labor groups who have spread 
misinformation and made false claims about Amazon during this crisis,” 
said Stuart Jackson, an Amazon spokesman. “The actions of a few people 
do not reflect the views of many — and do not always reflect reality.”


Amazon has not disclosed how many warehouse workers have contracted 
Covid-19 in Europe, but cases have been reported in France, Germany, 
Italy, Poland and Spain.


The disease has exposed long-simmering challenges Amazon has faced in 
the region. In Italy, it has resisted worker demands for years, 
including in 2017, when the company initially refused to attend a 
government-moderated negotiation with unions over conditions at a 
warehouse near Piacenza. In March, as the virus spread, Italian workers 
held an 11-day strike until the company added safety policies, including 
more time for employees to wash their hands during shifts and the 
creation of a health and safety committee.


In Germany, where workers sought stringent social distancing in 
warehouses, Amazon is entangled in a seven-year battle against one of 
the country’s largest unions, Ver.di, which has fought to negotiate a 
collective-bargaining agreement. Spanish unions, which also called for 
stronger antivirus measures, have gone on strike during busy holiday 
periods in recent years to demand higher wages.


The labor activism hasn’t stopped the company from dominating Europe’s 
online retail market.


In France, where the chief executive, Jeff Bezos, inaugurated the 
company’s fledgling website in 2000 with a glitzy Parisian bash 
featuring 11 party boats moored symbolically in front of t

[Marxism] The Pandemic Helped Topple Two Retailers. So Did Private Equity.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, May 15, 2020
The Pandemic Helped Topple Two Retailers. So Did Private Equity.
By Sapna Maheshwari and Vanessa Friedman

J. Crew and Neiman Marcus were each facing a host of issues before the 
coronavirus pandemic forced them to close their stores and eventually 
file for bankruptcy, including trouble adjusting to the rise of 
e-commerce and a lack of connection with a new generation of shoppers.


But they also shared one increasingly common problem for retailers in 
dire straits: an enormous debt burden — roughly $1.7 billion for J. Crew 
and almost $5 billion for Neiman Marcus — from leveraged buyouts led by 
private equity firms. Like many other retailers, J. Crew and Neiman over 
the past decade paid hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and 
fees to their new owners, when they needed to spend money to adapt to a 
shifting retail environment. And when the pandemic wiped out much of 
their sales, neither had anywhere to go for relief except court.


“Much of the difficulty that the retail sector is experiencing has been 
aggravated by private equity involvement,” said Elisabeth de Fontenay, a 
professor at the Duke University School of Law who specializes in 
corporate finance. “To keep up with everybody’s switch to online 
purchasing, there really needed to be some big capital investments and 
changes made, and because these companies were so debt strapped when 
acquired by private equity firms, they didn’t have capital to make these 
big shifts.”


The filings by J. Crew and Neiman Marcus followed a wave of retail 
bankruptcies in the past few years, and came as numerous chains, 
including J.C. Penney, teetered on the brink because of the pandemic.


In July, a report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive 
advocacy group in Brooklyn, said 10 of the 14 largest retail chain 
bankruptcies since 2012 involved companies that private equity firms had 
acquired.


Barneys New York went into liquidation in November, and Zac Posen, owned 
by Yucaipa Companies, closed the same month. In March 2019, the North 
American operation of the Italian brand Roberto Cavalli declared 
bankruptcy when its private equity owner, Clessidra, failed to sell its 
stake. In early April, the British department store chain Debenham’s 
filed for protection for the second time in less than a year.


“You need so much money to keep the stores open, so much money to keep 
the inventory flowing — an average department store will have 2,500 
brands — you need to invest in building, you need to invest in staffing, 
and most P.E. firms don’t want to make investment before they start 
seeing the return,” said Marigay McKee, founder of MM Luxe Consulting 
and a former president of Saks Fifth Avenue.


Private equity firms have been involved with retailers for decades. But 
the collapse of Toys “R” Us in 2017 put a spotlight on how major buyouts 
by the firms could go sideways. The chain had been burdened with $5 
billion in debt from a 2005 leveraged buyout by the private equity firms 
Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the real estate firm 
Vornado Realty Trust, and it did not have sufficient funds to invest in 
its stores and e-commerce business during a crucial period of growth for 
Amazon and Walmart.


It was eventually liquidated, and more than 30,000 workers were laid 
off. The workers were not paid severance — even as creditors, bankruptcy 
lawyers and consultants received payments — until they lobbied pension 
funds, which invest heavily in funds managed by private equity firms. 
The situation galvanized politicians and union activists and spurred 
public outrage.


J. Crew, which owns Madewell, and Neiman Marcus, which owns Bergdorf 
Goodman, have vowed to stay in business, but bankruptcies inevitably 
raise questions about what the future holds for employees, stores and 
vendors.


The bankruptcies have also shown how running retail companies requires a 
specific skill set, particularly when it comes to fashion.


Clothing is an almost entirely discretionary purchase, dependent not 
just on cycles within the economy but on consumer taste and the images 
of the brands themselves. Private equity funds often find themselves 
“seduced a little by the hypified names,” said Sandeep Dahiya, an 
associate professor of finance at Georgetown University.


Private equity has been flirting with fashion retail since at least 
1987, when the Bahrain-based Investcorp began buying shares in the 
beleaguered family-run Italian brand Gucci, turning the loss-making 
company around. It cashed out in an initial public offering in 1996, 
setting a model for the industry and paving the way for suc

[Marxism] When my fellow carpenters surprised me

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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This article is inspired by a discussion on my personal Facebook page. In
part, it's about whether US workers will rise up.

"So, here’s a little bit of personal history, a mistake that I made, that
maybe we all can learn from: In 1999, some 2000 SF Bay Area carpenters went
out on a five-day wildcat strike against a second-rate contract that was
forced down their throats by the union leadership. I won’t bore you with
all the details of how that came about. You can find them in this history
[see link in article] of that strike. It was one of the most exciting
political events I’ve ever had the privilege of participating in. But
here’s the thing:..."

I never thought that wildcat strike could happen! Read why
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/05/15/when-my-fellow-carpenters-surprised-me/

-- 
*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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Re: [Marxism] Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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Meh, I don't know. At the time the MB seemed to be quite cozy with the same
army that would depose them.

Obviously there is no comparison but the MB was, in my opinion, part of its
own downfall.

On Fri, May 15, 2020, 8:18 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> *
>
> (The longer al-Sisi stays in office, the more foolish leftist protests
> against the Muslim Brotherhood government appears.)
>
> NY Times, May 15, 2020
> Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.
> By Declan Walsh
>
> CAIRO — When a popular Egyptian blogger shared gruesome video of a
> military officer severing the finger of an unidentified body and setting
> the body on fire, it was some of the most shocking footage to emerge
> from Sinai, where Egypt’s military has been battling Islamist militants
> in a hidden war.
>
> As an exiled dissident, Abdullah el-Sherif could afford to be bold
> enough to broadcast the video in March. But days later, security agents
> burst into the homes of his relatives in the seaside city of Alexandria
> and arrested his two brothers on terrorism charges.
>
> Now Mr. el-Sherif is in Qatar, safely beyond the reach of Egypt’s
> security forces, while his brothers languish at a maximum-security
> prison outside Cairo.
>
> The Egyptian government, which has stifled nearly all criticism at home,
> is now trying to silence critics abroad by jailing their family members
> in Egypt, human rights groups say. Since early last year, it has
> arrested the relatives of at least 15 dissidents in exile.
>
> Security agents have broken down front doors, confiscated money and
> passports, forced parents to denounce their children on television, and
> detained fathers and brothers, several of whom have been charged with
> terrorism and imprisoned.
>
> “It’s nothing less than collective punishment,” said Amr Magdi of Human
> Rights Watch, which since 2016 has documented raids on the families of
> 14 exiled dissidents. At least 20 relatives have been detained or
> prosecuted.
>
> Mr. el-Sherif, whose YouTube videos often amass two or three million
> views, said Egyptian officials told him that if he stopped his critical
> broadcasts, his brothers would be released.
>
> “I feel really bad,” he said. “I’ve lost my appetite. My mother and
> father call all the time, crying on the phone, asking me to quit. I
> don’t know what to do.”
>
> The head of Egypt’s State Information Service did not respond to a
> request for comment.
>
> Egypt’s rulers have long employed such tactics against the families of
> suspected drug traffickers and jihadists. But as President Abdel Fattah
> el-Sisi has cranked up the repression in recent years, he has broadened
> his focus to target the families of exiled dissidents, journalists and
> cultural figures.
>
> One recent case involved an exiled actor, Mohammed Shuman, who delivered
> an emotional appeal on Facebook from Turkey for the release of his
> brother and his son who, he said, had been jailed in retaliation for his
> role in a movie that highlighted police brutality.
>
> Inside Egypt, Mr. el-Sisi jailed opponents and largely subjugated the
> news media. His intelligence services have acquired stakes in the
> largest private TV networks, blocked over 500 websites and even censored
> the scripts of the highly popular TV serials that Egyptians are
> currently lapping up during the holy month of Ramadan.
>
> But his iron grip on Egyptian media may have inadvertently helped raise
> the profile of news outlets and bloggers based abroad.
>
> Egypt’s nominally independent private TV stations all offer similar,
> pro-state news and commentary. Talk show hosts seem to sing from the
> same hymnal. News bulletins can have a whiff of Soviet-era control,
> while government critics are branded as agents of the outlawed Muslim
> Brotherhood, or stooges of rival Qatar.
>
> When the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Morsi, died in June, every
> Egyptian TV station led with the same 42-word bulletin, evidently
> dictated by the security agencies.
>
> Egyptian viewers, bored with the homogeneous programming or in search of
> unfiltered news, are increasingly turning to foreign media as an
> alternative.
>
> In addition to YouTube channels like Mr. el-Sherif’s, there is anecdotal
> evidence that many Egyptians quietly tune int

[Marxism] Signs and exorcisms

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I don't think we are dealing with fascism right now but Trotsky's words 
really resonate:


Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not 
only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives 
alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A 
hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic 
power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio 
about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go 
to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s 
genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they 
possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to 
their feet fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have 
been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural 
excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now 
come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the 
undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm

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[Marxism] Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.

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(The longer al-Sisi stays in office, the more foolish leftist protests 
against the Muslim Brotherhood government appears.)


NY Times, May 15, 2020
Outside Egypt, Critics Speak Freely. Inside, Families Pay the Price.
By Declan Walsh

CAIRO — When a popular Egyptian blogger shared gruesome video of a 
military officer severing the finger of an unidentified body and setting 
the body on fire, it was some of the most shocking footage to emerge 
from Sinai, where Egypt’s military has been battling Islamist militants 
in a hidden war.


As an exiled dissident, Abdullah el-Sherif could afford to be bold 
enough to broadcast the video in March. But days later, security agents 
burst into the homes of his relatives in the seaside city of Alexandria 
and arrested his two brothers on terrorism charges.


Now Mr. el-Sherif is in Qatar, safely beyond the reach of Egypt’s 
security forces, while his brothers languish at a maximum-security 
prison outside Cairo.


The Egyptian government, which has stifled nearly all criticism at home, 
is now trying to silence critics abroad by jailing their family members 
in Egypt, human rights groups say. Since early last year, it has 
arrested the relatives of at least 15 dissidents in exile.


Security agents have broken down front doors, confiscated money and 
passports, forced parents to denounce their children on television, and 
detained fathers and brothers, several of whom have been charged with 
terrorism and imprisoned.


“It’s nothing less than collective punishment,” said Amr Magdi of Human 
Rights Watch, which since 2016 has documented raids on the families of 
14 exiled dissidents. At least 20 relatives have been detained or 
prosecuted.


Mr. el-Sherif, whose YouTube videos often amass two or three million 
views, said Egyptian officials told him that if he stopped his critical 
broadcasts, his brothers would be released.


“I feel really bad,” he said. “I’ve lost my appetite. My mother and 
father call all the time, crying on the phone, asking me to quit. I 
don’t know what to do.”


The head of Egypt’s State Information Service did not respond to a 
request for comment.


Egypt’s rulers have long employed such tactics against the families of 
suspected drug traffickers and jihadists. But as President Abdel Fattah 
el-Sisi has cranked up the repression in recent years, he has broadened 
his focus to target the families of exiled dissidents, journalists and 
cultural figures.


One recent case involved an exiled actor, Mohammed Shuman, who delivered 
an emotional appeal on Facebook from Turkey for the release of his 
brother and his son who, he said, had been jailed in retaliation for his 
role in a movie that highlighted police brutality.


Inside Egypt, Mr. el-Sisi jailed opponents and largely subjugated the 
news media. His intelligence services have acquired stakes in the 
largest private TV networks, blocked over 500 websites and even censored 
the scripts of the highly popular TV serials that Egyptians are 
currently lapping up during the holy month of Ramadan.


But his iron grip on Egyptian media may have inadvertently helped raise 
the profile of news outlets and bloggers based abroad.


Egypt’s nominally independent private TV stations all offer similar, 
pro-state news and commentary. Talk show hosts seem to sing from the 
same hymnal. News bulletins can have a whiff of Soviet-era control, 
while government critics are branded as agents of the outlawed Muslim 
Brotherhood, or stooges of rival Qatar.


When the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Morsi, died in June, every 
Egyptian TV station led with the same 42-word bulletin, evidently 
dictated by the security agencies.


Egyptian viewers, bored with the homogeneous programming or in search of 
unfiltered news, are increasingly turning to foreign media as an 
alternative.


In addition to YouTube channels like Mr. el-Sherif’s, there is anecdotal 
evidence that many Egyptians quietly tune into opposition TV stations 
like Turkey-based Mekameleen, which is sympathetic to the banned Muslim 
Brotherhood, and Al Sharq.


Billboards for Ramadan TV series along a highway in Cairo last month. 
Egypt censors those shows and exerts control over news programs on 
nominally private TV stations.Credit...Sima Diab for The New York Times
“The regime is handing a present to its Islamist opponents,” said 
Ezzedine C. Fishere, a lecturer on Middle East politics at Dartmouth 
College. “If all the TV channels say the same thing, and all the 
newspapers have the same headline, you need at least someone who is 
making a joke about the president or the regime. And they find it in 
these outlets.”


Like station

[Marxism] Ralph W. McGehee, Agent Who Exposed the C.I.A., Dies at 92

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NY Times, May 15, 2020
Ralph W. McGehee, Agent Who Exposed the C.I.A., Dies at 92
By Tim Weiner

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the 
coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.


Ralph W. McGehee, a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency’s 
clandestine crusades in Vietnam who went to war against the C.I.A. 
itself, died May 2 at an assisted-living facility in Falmouth, Maine. He 
was 92.


The cause was Covid-19, his son, Dan McGehee, said.

Mr. McGehee’s 1983 memoir, “Deadly Deceits,” was a scathing critique, a 
chronicle of the C.I.A.’s Cold War covert operations in Southeast Asia 
and his dawning realization that the American cause in Vietnam was 
doomed. He recalled his epiphany: At the end of 1968, he sat drinking 
alone in a sparsely furnished villa outside Saigon, listening to a 
tragic pop song, “The End of the World,” as helicopter gunships circled 
overhead and B-52s dropped bombs in the distance.


“My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good 
intelligence officer to help my country fight the Communist scourge — 
what the hell had happened?” he wrote. “Why did we have to bomb the 
people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why 
did the C.I.A., my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the 
truth?” He struggled to answer those questions for the rest of his life.


After growing up on the South Side of Chicago, starring on Notre Dame’s 
undefeated college football teams from 1946 to 1949, failing a tryout 
with the Green Bay Packers, and working as a management trainee at 
Montgomery Ward, he received a telegram from out of the blue in January 
1952. It asked: Would you like to serve your country in an unusual way? 
Football players, given their brawn and affinity for teamwork, were 
prime candidates for paramilitary missions, in the eyes of the C.I.A.


The Korean War was at its height and the C.I.A., founded in 1947, was 
expanding exponentially, from 200 officers in the beginning to roughly 
15,000 in 1952, with some 50 overseas stations and a budget exceeding $5 
billion in today’s money. The agency searched frantically for Americans 
capable of conducting covert operations overseas.


Mr. McGehee made the grade. After training and indoctrination, the 
agency sent him out into the world. Serving over the years in Japan, the 
Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and South Vietnam, he confronted 
confounding problems: for example, a richly compensated foreign agent 
from Taiwan whose highly touted secret reports on Communist China were 
based on nothing but newspaper clippings. In northern Thailand, he 
worked on counterinsurgency operations with opium-smoking hill 
tribesmen, to little avail. He tried, with some success, to train the 
Thai national police to gather intelligence.


Mr. McGehee rose to the very middle of the C.I.A.’s ranks, and in 1968 
he landed in Saigon to work in liaison with the chief of the secret 
police. He then faced a spiritual crisis. The war was going badly for 
the United States, and as bad turned to worse, it shattered him. He 
questioned America’s role in the world, the C.I.A.’s role in Vietnam, 
his role in the C.I.A., and his very existence. He wrote that he had 
contemplated unfurling a banner reading “THE C.I.A. LIES” and then 
killing himself to protest the war.


By 1973, after he returned to headquarters, labeled a malcontent and 
relegated to a backwater desk, the agency confronted its own existential 
crisis. The wars of Watergate would breach the ramparts of its secrecy. 
Cold War skeletons tumbled from the closet: assassination plots, covert 
support for autocrats, spying on Americans. Presidents had approved such 
exploits in secret, but the C.I.A. was blamed and shamed. By the time he 
retired in 1977, Mr. McGehee was convinced that the agency was a 
malevolent force.



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[Marxism] E.P.A. Opts Against Limits on Water Contaminant Tied to Fetal Damage

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NY Times, May 15, 2020
E.P.A. Opts Against Limits on Water Contaminant Tied to Fetal Damage
By Lisa Friedman

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will not impose any limits on 
perchlorate, a toxic chemical compound that contaminates water and has 
been linked to fetal and infant brain damage, according to two 
Environmental Protection Agency staff members familiar with the decision.


The decision by Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the E.P.A., appears 
to defy a court order that required the agency to establish a safe 
drinking-water standard for the chemical by the end of June. The policy, 
which acknowledges that exposure to high levels of perchlorate can cause 
I.Q. damage but opts nevertheless not to limit it, could also set a 
precedent for the regulation of other chemicals, people familiar with 
the matter said.


The chemical — which is used in rocket fuel, among other applications — 
has been under study for more than a decade, but because contamination 
is widespread, regulations have been difficult.


In 2011, the Obama administration announced that it planned to regulate 
perchlorate for the first time, reversing a decision by the George W. 
Bush administration not to control it. But the Defense Department and 
military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have 
waged aggressive efforts to block controls, and the fight has dragged on.


According to the staff members, who asked not to be identified because 
they were not authorized to speak about agency decisions, the E.P.A. 
intends in the coming days to send a federal register notice to the 
White House for review that will declare it is “not in the public 
interest” to regulate the chemical.


Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that the 
agency had not yet made a final decision on perchlorate. “Any 
information that is shared or reported now would be premature, 
inappropriate and would be prejudging the formal rulemaking process,” 
she said.


Ms. Woods said the final rule would be sent to the Office of Management 
and Budget for interagency review, adding “the agency expects to 
complete this step shortly.” She did not answer questions about the 
court order.


Perchlorate can occur naturally, but high concentrations have been found 
in at least 26 states, often near military installations where it has 
been used as an additive in rocket fuel, making propellants more 
reliable. Research has shown that by interfering with the thyroid 
gland’s iodine uptake, perchlorate can stunt the production of hormones 
essential to the development of fetuses, infants and children.


The new policy will revoke the 2011 E.P.A. finding that perchlorate 
presents serious health risks to between 5 million and 16 million people 
and should be regulated. To justify doing so, the Trump administration 
will cite more recent analyses claiming concentrations of the chemical 
in water must be at higher levels than previously thought in order to be 
considered unsafe.


In addition, because states like California and Massachusetts regulated 
the chemical in the absence of federal action, the E.P.A. will say few 
public water systems now contain perchlorate at high levels, so the 
costs of nationwide monitoring would outweigh the benefits, the people 
who have viewed the rule said.


“The agency has determined that perchlorate does not occur with a 
frequency and at levels of public health concern, and that regulation of 
perchlorate does not present a meaningful opportunity for health risk 
reduction for persons served by public water systems,” the draft policy 
reads, according to the staff members.


In public comments, the Perchlorate Study Group, a coalition made up of 
aerospace contractors including Aerojet Rocketdyne, American Pacific 
Corporation, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, 
had strongly urged the E.P.A. to withdraw its 2011 determination because 
“perchlorate does not occur with a frequency and at levels of public 
health concern” in public water systems.


The decision is the latest in a string of Trump administration 
regulatory actions that weaken toxic chemical regulations, often against 
the advice of E.P.A.’s own experts, in ways favored by the chemical 
industry.


Last year the administration announced it would not ban chlorpyrifos, a 
widely used pesticide that its own experts linked to serious health 
problems in children. It also opted to restrict, rather than ban, 
asbestos, a known carcinogen, despite urging by E.P.A. scientists and 
lawyers to ban it outright like most other industrialized nations.


“This is all of a piece,” said Rena Steinzo

[Marxism] Months After Louisville Police Kill Woman in Her Home, Governor Calls for Review

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NY Times, May 15, 2020
Months After Louisville Police Kill Woman in Her Home, Governor Calls 
for Review

By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Two months after Louisville police officers fatally shot a woman as they 
raided her home, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said on Wednesday that 
local, state and federal prosecutors should review the police 
investigation into the shooting.


Officers killed the woman, Breonna Taylor, 26, just after midnight on 
March 13 during a confrontation in which her boyfriend shot an officer 
in the leg, the Louisville police said. But only recently has nationwide 
attention been drawn to the case. Neither Ms. Taylor nor her boyfriend 
was a target of the police investigation that led to the drug raid.


Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, filed a lawsuit in late April 
against three officers with the Louisville Metro Police Department, 
accusing them of wrongfully causing her daughter’s death.


Among the lawyers representing Ms. Palmer is Benjamin Crump, who also 
represents the family of Ahmaud Arbery, whose February shooting death in 
Georgia led to murder charges against two men last week.


On Wednesday, Governor Beshear called reports about Ms. Taylor’s death 
“troubling” and said the public deserved to know everything about the 
March raid. He asked the state attorney general, the local prosecutor 
and the federal prosecutor assigned to the region to review the results 
of the Louisville police’s initial investigation “to ensure justice is 
done at a time when many are concerned that justice is not blind.”


The Louisville police, who declined to comment for this article, have 
said little about the raid since a news conference on the day it happened.


The Louisville Courier-Journal reported this week that the police had 
been targeting two men who they believed were selling drugs out of a 
house more than 10 miles from Ms. Taylor’s apartment. However, a judge 
had signed a warrant allowing officers to search Ms. Taylor’s home — and 
to enter without warning — in part because a detective said one of the 
men had used Ms. Taylor’s apartment to receive a package.


In the lawsuit, Ms. Palmer’s lawyers say that the man had already been 
apprehended before police officers entered Ms. Taylor’s home.


“They executed this innocent woman because they botched the search 
warrant execution,” Mr. Crump said in an interview. “They had the main 
person that they were trying to get in their custody, so why use a 
battering ram to bust her door down and then go in there and execute her?”


Mr. Crump said that while there were many differences between the cases 
of Mr. Arbery and Ms. Taylor, both of whom were black, they were 
connected by the fact that neither case immediately attracted widespread 
attention, despite the efforts of local activists and family members.


Ms. Palmer has said that her daughter, who worked as an emergency 
medical technician at local hospitals, had planned to become a nurse and 
buy a house, and that she had stayed out of trouble.


“I’m not sure that they understand what they took from my family,” Ms. 
Palmer told The Courier-Journal, referring to the police.


At a news conference hours after the raid, Chief Steve Conrad of the 
Louisville police said the officers involved had not been wearing body 
cameras. Lt. Ted Eidem, who leads the agency’s Public Integrity Unit, 
said the officers had announced their presence and knocked on the door 
before forcing entry.


A police spokeswoman told The Courier-Journal this week that the 
investigation into the shooting was continuing and that the police had 
disclosed everything they could at the original news conference.


The police have said that they returned fire after Ms. Taylor’s 
boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot an officer in the leg. He later 
surrendered and has been charged with the attempted murder of a police 
officer.


Mr. Walker’s lawyer, Rob Eggert, has said that Mr. Walker did not know 
that the people entering the apartment were police officers, and that he 
fired one shot.


Mr. Crump said that neighbors had not heard the police officers announce 
themselves, and that Mr. Walker thought the officers — who he said were 
in unmarked cars and plain clothes — were intruders. He said Mr. Walker 
had called 911, believing that he and Ms. Taylor, who had been in bed 
together, “were in significant, imminent danger.”


The lawyers for Ms. Taylor’s mother said that Mr. Walker was licensed to 
have a gun and that the police officers had fired at least 20 shots into 
the apartment and a neighboring home.


Although whether the Louisville police knocked before entering is 
disputed, the use of “

[Marxism] World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way | US news | The Guardian

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/15/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-world-leaders

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[Marxism] Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

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LRB, Vol. 42 No. 10 · 21 May 2020
A Great Wall to Batter Down
by Adom Getachew

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
by Priyamvada Gopal.
Verso, 607 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 78478 412 6

On​ 3 february 1960, Harold Macmillan ended a four-week tour of the 
African continent with a speech to the South African parliament in which 
he described the rise of anticolonial nationalism as the ‘wind of 
change’. He had tried out the phrase on an audience in Ghana a few weeks 
earlier, and it was soon taken up as a metaphor for decolonisation: 17 
states gained independence in 1960, the ‘year of Africa’. Macmillan used 
his speech to signal Britain’s growing diplomatic and political distance 
from South Africa, which had obvious implications for British settler 
colonies like Rhodesia. While it was Britain’s ‘earnest desire’, he 
said, to give South Africa, a fellow member of the Commonwealth, its 
‘support and encouragement’, ‘some aspects of your policies ... make it 
impossible for us do this.’ ‘Our policy,’ he added, quoting a speech 
made by his foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to the United Nations a few 
months earlier, ‘is non-racial.’


Macmillan attempted to soften the blow. The rise of national 
consciousness wasn’t a repudiation of South Africa or of Britain. On the 
contrary, the wind of change was only the latest of ‘the processes which 
gave birth to the nation-states of Europe’. In fact, ‘the first of the 
African nationalists’ had been the Afrikaner and British founders of the 
Union of South Africa in 1910. It was, he assured South African MPs, as 
exemplars of Western civilisation that ‘you and we and the other nations 
of the Western world are ultimately responsible’ for the continent’s 
revolt against colonial rule.


No matter how carefully Macmillan chose his words, the ruling National 
Party recognised this as a sudden and outright betrayal of their cause. 
His account, however, was in keeping with ways of thinking about the end 
of empire that had been gaining ground in Europe for decades. The term 
‘decolonisation’ was first used during the French conquest of Algeria in 
the 19th century, and as the historian Stuart Ward has shown, was widely 
adopted after the First World War by European intellectuals as they 
reckoned with imperial decline. From their perspective, decolonisation 
was the natural telos of empire, and the rise of a post-imperial world 
order would represent not its defeat but its finest achievement.


Within a few weeks of giving his speech, Macmillan was sounding a more 
cautious note. The ‘wind of change’, he said on 16 March, was ‘not the 
same thing as a howling tempest which will blow away the whole of the 
new developing civilisation. We must, at all costs, avoid that.’ A few 
days later, at Sharpeville in South Africa, police opened fire on 
protesters against the pass laws, which restricted freedom of movement; 
69 people were killed. A state of emergency was declared and mass 
arrests followed. When Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, addressed the 
UN in September 1960, he singled out South Africa’s ‘policy of racial 
discrimination and persecution which in its essential inhumanity 
surpassed even the brutality of the Nazis’. In South Africa, as in the 
rest of the continent, Nkrumah concluded, ‘the true solution lies in the 
application of one principle, namely, the right of a people to rule 
themselves.’ By the end of the year, postcolonial states had enshrined 
the right to self-determination in UN Resolution 1514. Britain 
abstained. The following year, in the face of an emerging international 
consensus on racial equality and self-determination led by former Asian 
and African colonies, South Africa was forced out of the Commonwealth. 
Decolonisation, as Nkrumah saw it, was no mere wind, but a ‘hurricane of 
change’ that was ‘razing to the ground the many bastions of colonialism’.


A ‘wind of change’, a ‘howling tempest’, a ‘hurricane’: each of these 
metaphors represents a distinct position in the politics of 
decolonisation, but they are alike in reiterating a ‘rise and fall’ 
narrative of empire, in which chaos suddenly overthrows order. That is 
‘misleading’, Priyamvada Gopal argues in Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial 
Resistance and British Dissent, because it suggests that there had been 
‘a long period of stability followed by a sudden end’. Gopal surveys the 
hundred-year period between the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857 and the 
British suppression of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, tracking the 
rebellions and revolts that shook the empire, and in doing so uncovers a 
pattern: the demands of colonial subjects, sh

[Marxism] The Prophet of the Far Right | Boston Review

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Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a 
favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so 
many on the left as well?


http://bostonreview.net/arts-society/martin-gelin-prophet-far-right

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[Marxism] Joe Biden mixes up number of jobs lost, coronavirus deaths

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https://nypost.com/2020/05/15/joe-biden-mixes-up-number-of-jobs-lost-coronavirus-deaths/

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[Marxism] Rupert Beale · Short Cuts: How to Block Spike · LRB 21 May 2020

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The​ official death toll in the UK from Covid-19 – more than thirty 
thousand – is now the highest in Europe. It is the result of choices 
made at the beginning of the UK’s response to the pandemic. This is not 
necessarily to apportion blame: at the beginning of March, all choices 
seemed bad. The trolley problem, as posed by Philippa Foot in 1967, 
imagines the driver of a runaway tram who ‘can only steer from one 
narrow track onto another; five men are working on one track and one man 
on the other.’ This simple utilitarian problem becomes more challenging 
when you change the factors. Could you justify saving your mother at the 
expense of two people you’d never met? Intention, duty, relationships, 
societal consequences: all such things complicate the moral question. 
The epidemiological variation on the trolley problem would be something 
like: ‘With the most accurate models we have, what is our best course of 
action to minimise the statistically expected, age-adjusted, all-cause 
mortality?’


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/rupert-beale/short-cuts

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[Marxism] El Diego: the Two Lives of Maradona - CounterPunch.org

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By Tony McKenna

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/15/el-diego-the-two-lives-of-maradona/

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[Marxism] Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

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LRB, Vol. 42 No. 10 · 21 May 2020
The Corrupt Bargain
by Eric Foner

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?
by Alexander Keyssar.
Harvard, 544 pp., £28.95, May, 978 0 674 66015 1

Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral 
College

by Jesse Wegman.
St Martin’s Press, 304 pp., $24.50, March, 978 1 250 22197 1

Every​ four years Americans wake up to the fact that a president can be 
elected despite receiving fewer votes than another candidate. Until 2000 
the electorate couldn’t be blamed for being unaware of this possibility, 
because it hadn’t happened since 1888. But twenty years ago George W. 
Bush squeaked into office with a five vote majority in the electoral 
college even though Al Gore outpolled him by half a million votes. Then 
in 2016 Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than 
Donald Trump but still lost by a substantial margin – 304 to 227 – among 
the electors. Ask a man or woman in the street why this system of 
electing a president was adopted and how it works and you will almost 
certainly draw a blank. It’s complicated, but the main point to bear in 
mind is that the president is elected indirectly. To be sure, on 
election day Americans think they’re casting a ballot for their 
preferred candidate. But, technically, what they’re doing is voting for 
electors pledged to support that candidate. The electors vote a month or 
so later and in almost all cases cast their ballots for the candidate 
who carried their state. No matter who won the national popular vote, 
they have the final say.


The United States prides itself on providing a global model of 
democratic government. But of the nearly two hundred sovereign states 
that make up the United Nations it is difficult to think of a single one 
that elects its chief executive as Americans do. Even countries with 
constitutions explicitly modelled on the US one have not thought the 
electoral college worthy of emulation. Liberia, established as a 
settlement for manumitted slaves, closely followed the American example, 
but opted for direct election of the president ‘by the people’. The 
post-World War Two constitutions of West Germany and Japan, their 
drafting strongly influenced by the American occupying authorities, did 
not adopt the system. The electoral college (an odd name for an 
institution whose members only assemble once every four years, in the 
fifty state capitals) certainly makes the US exceptional.


How the president should be elected was one of the most divisive issues 
to confront the constitutional convention of 1787. The delegates agreed 
that the new nation must be a republic, which ruled out a hereditary 
head of state. Some favoured selection by the legislature, the method 
used in parliamentary systems, but others feared this would make the 
president dependent on Congress. The most democratic option, of course, 
was election by the people (or at least the minority of the population 
eligible to vote in each state, generally white men with property), but 
most of the framers believed that unrestrained democracy was as 
dangerous as tyranny. Placing prominent men of ‘discernment’ between the 
electorate and the final outcome, Alexander Hamilton insisted, would 
hold popular passions in check and prevent a demagogue, perhaps beholden 
to a foreign government, rising to power. James Madison had a more 
self-interested objection to popular election. The political power of 
the South, where slaves made up 40 per cent or more of the population, 
had hugely increased, thanks to a clause adding three-fifths of the 
slave population to the number of free inhabitants when allocating on 
the basis of population the seats given to each state in the House of 
Representatives. Since the slave population would have no impact on the 
outcome, warned Madison, a Virginia slaveowner, a popular vote for 
president would deprive the South of ‘influence in the election on the 
score of the Negroes’.


The electoral college system was adopted shortly before the convention’s 
deliberations ended, and has remained almost unchanged ever since. Each 
state was given the right to choose electors by a method it determined 
(which ended up meaning either selection by the state legislature, or by 
popular vote). The number of electors in each state was equivalent to 
that state’s delegation in Congress – two senators plus however many 
members it had in the House of Representatives. The candidate who 
received a majority of the electoral vote would become president and the 
candidate who came second would become vice president. If no one won a 
majority, the House, with each st

[Marxism] The Sickness in Our Food Supply | by Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books

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By Michael Pollan

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover 
who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic 
represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare 
vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone 
undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food 
system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that 
threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those 
in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty 
of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile 
it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not 
misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not 
limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on 
our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food 
chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us 
more vulnerable to Covid-19.


https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/covid-19-sickness-food-supply/

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[Marxism] NY TImes Op-Ed: Cities Are Safe Places to Live, Even in a Pandemic

[Alan Ginsberg via Marxism]

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(by the former Health Commissioner of New York City)

It’s a mistake to blame density for the spread of the coronavirus.

By Mary T. Bassett

Dr. Bassett directs the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard.

May 15, 2020

The image of cities as caldrons of contagion is a very old one. In the 19th
century, rapid urbanization was accompanied by literal squalor and waves of
often lethal communicable disease. Life expectancy declined during the
Industrial Revolution as cities’ populations surged.

But in recent years, U.S. cities could boast that the so-called urban
penalty had been reversed. “If you want to live longer and healthier than
the average American, then come to New York City,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg
declared. This advantage continued with his successor, Bill de Blasio.

New York had an average life expectancy roughly 2.5 years longer than the
nation’s in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. This
is good news, since most of humanity lives in cities, and in the United
States, over half of the population lives in cities of one million
residents or more.

And then the coronavirus arrived, and New York became a hot spot for
Covid-19 cases and deaths. As stay-at-home advisories rolled out, many
wealthy city residents fled to country houses, beaches and boats.

Connecting the dots between population density and viral transmission seems
simple logic. New York, with a population of 8.6 million, is the only
American megacity. It is also the U.S. center of the pandemic.

But everything we know so far about the coronavirus tells us that blaming
density for disease is misguided.

New York City Health Department data indicate that Manhattan, the borough
with the highest population density, was not the hardest hit. Deaths are
concentrated in the less dense, more diverse outer boroughs. Citywide,
black and Latino residents are experiencing mortality rates that are twice
those of white city dwellers.

Then there is the rest of the world. While the coronavirus first exploded
in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, many “hyperdense” cities in Asia have been
able to contain their outbreaks. The virus appeared in Singapore (5.6
million residents), Seoul (9.8 million), Hong Kong (7.5 million) and Tokyo
(9.3 million), cities close in size to New York, but with much lower
recorded deaths.

California and Hawaii have the highest population density of the states —
but not the highest Covid-19 mortality rates. Albany, Ga., with a
population under 80,000, has among the highest case rates in the United
States (many related to attending a funeral).

Cities, large and dense by definition, do not inevitably support explosive
viral transmission. But factors that do seem to explain clusters of
Covid-19 deaths in the United States are household crowding, poverty,
racialized economic segregation and participation in the work force. The
patterns of Covid-19 by neighborhood in New York City track historical
redlining that some 80 years ago established a legacy of racial residential
segregation.

Population density is not the same as household overcrowding. The U.S.
census defines crowding as more than one person per room, excluding the
kitchen and bathroom. That means a one-bedroom apartment occupied by four
people is crowded. In 2013, the Bronx had New York City’s highest
percentage of crowded households (12.4 percent), followed by Brooklyn (10.3
percent) and Queens (9.3 percent). Manhattan and Staten Island had 5.4
percent and 3.4 percent crowding. (Nationally, 2 percent of people live in
crowded households.)

Why are there so many crowded households in New York, including in its less
densely populated neighborhoods? The answer is simple: the high cost of
housing. High rents are also a principal driver of homelessness, which
during this epidemic has proved deadly. Covid-19 has shown how risky
crowded settings like homeless shelters, jails, detention centers and
nursing homes can be.

It is no surprise that public health and urban planning have common roots
and missions, because the quality and availability of housing, public
transportation and green spaces are so tied to health. But as we think
about the blueprint and design of cities, it is also critically important
to consider the lived experience of individuals and how they navigate their
urban space.

Imagine a low-wage worker, who holds two jobs to support her family and pay
the rent, who has to work during this pandemic because her job is
“essential,” who works when sick because she has no sick leave. She travels
on a crowded bus, puts off medical care because she lacks insurance, and
then returns to an apartment crammed with young children

[Marxism] Review of Kevin Peter Hand, 'Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space'

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Scott McLemee explores Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths 
of Space by Kevin Peter Hand.


https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/05/15/review-kevin-peter-hand-alien-oceans-search-life-depths-space

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Re: [Marxism] Financial Times accounting of inner workings of Trump administration

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 5/15/20 8:00 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:



This is the best accounting I have seen of the history of the Trump
administration's dealing with the crisis. Among other things, it explains
that Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, is a religious fanatic. It also
reports what many of us suspected: That Trump kept testing down so as not
to spook the stock market. A few quoted:

https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed



This might be behind a paywall. I posted the text yesterday:

https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2020-May/296071.html


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[Marxism] Workingman's Blues (COVID 19 Version)

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2020/05/workingmans-blues-covid-19-version.html

-- 
Check out my newest books* Trumpism: Winter in America

(PDF version only), **Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
,
and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
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[Marxism] Financial Times accounting of inner workings of Trump administration

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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This is the best accounting I have seen of the history of the Trump
administration's dealing with the crisis. Among other things, it explains
that Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, is a religious fanatic. It also
reports what many of us suspected: That Trump kept testing down so as not
to spook the stock market. A few quoted:

“Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering
too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it,”
says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. “That advice
worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He
thinks they always exaggerate.”

“The way to keep your job is to out-loyal everyone else, which means you
have to tolerate quackery,” says Anthony Scaramucci, an estranged former
Trump adviser, who was briefly his White House head of communications. “You
have to flatter him in public and flatter him in private. Above all, you
must never make him feel ignorant.”

A former senior Trump official says: “People turn into wusses around Trump.
If you stand up to him, you’ll never get back in. What you see in public is
what you get in private. He is exactly the same.”

“We used to think of America as the world’s leading power, not as the
epicentre of disease,” says Fullilove, who is an ardent pro-American. “We
increasingly feel caught between a reckless China and a feckless America
that no longer seems to care about its allies.”*

Yet without exception, everyone I interviewed, including the most ardent
Trump loyalists, made a similar point to Conway. Trump is deaf to advice,
said one. He is his own worst enemy, said another. He only listens to
family, said a third. He is mentally imbalanced, said a fourth. America, in
other words, should brace itself for a turbulent six months ahead – with no
assurance of a safe landing.

https://www.ft.com/content/97dc7de6-940b-11ea-abcd-371e24b679ed
-- 
*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] End Game for Green Utopia - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Manuel Garcia Jr.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/15/end-game-for-green-utopia/

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[Marxism] Enemy in the Mirror by Holly Case | Poetry Foundation

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Heiner Müller—poet, playwright, and informant—embodied the divisions of 
postwar Germany.


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/153403/enemy-in-the-mirror

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[Marxism] Missing farm workers in pandemic times: Is it really “the virus’s fault”? The view from Italy | Lefteast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/missing-farm-workers-in-pandemic-times-is-it-really-the-virus-fault-the-view-from-italy%ef%bb%bf/

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