[Marxism] Youth lead movement against Mubarak
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 26, 2011 Egypt’s Young Seize Role of Key Opposition to Mubarak By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MICHAEL SLACKMAN For decades, Egypt’s authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak, played a clever game with his political opponents. He tolerated a tiny and toothless opposition of liberal intellectuals whose vain electoral campaigns created the facade of a democratic process. And he demonized the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as a group of violent extremists who posed a threat that he used to justify his police state. But this enduring and, many here say, all too comfortable relationship was upended this week by the emergence of an unpredictable third force, the leaderless tens of thousands of young Egyptians who turned out to demand an end to Mr. Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Now the older opponents are rushing to catch up. “It was the young people who took the initiative and set the date and decided to go,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Wednesday with some surprise during a telephone interview from his office in Vienna, shortly before rushing home to Cairo to join the revolt. Dr. ElBaradei, a Nobel prize winner, has been the public face of an effort to reinvigorate and unite Egypt’s fractious and ineffective opposition since he plunged into his home country’s politics nearly a year ago, and he said the youth movement had accomplished that on its own. “Young people are impatient,” he said. “Frankly, I didn’t think the people were ready.” But their readiness — tens of thousands have braved tear gas, rubber bullets and security police officers notorious for torture — has threatened to upstage or displace the traditional opposition groups. Many of the tiny, legally recognized political parties — more than 20 in total, with scarcely a parlor full of grass-roots supporters among them — are leaping to embrace the new movement for change but lack credibility with the young people in the street. Even the Muslim Brotherhood may have grown too protective of its own institutions and position to capitalize on the new youth movement, say some analysts and former members. The Brotherhood remains the organization in Egypt with the largest base of support outside the government, but it can no longer claim to be the only entity that can turn masses of people out into the streets. “The Brotherhood is no longer the most effective player in the political arena,” said Emad Shahin, an Egyptian scholar now at the University of Notre Dame. “If you look at the Tunisian uprising, it’s a youth uprising. It is the youth that knows how to use the media, Internet, Facebook, so there are other players now.” Dr. ElBaradei, for his part, has struggled for nearly a year to unite the opposition under his umbrella group, the National Association for Change. But some have mocked him as a globe-trotting dilettante who spends much of his time abroad instead of on the barricades. He has said in interviews that he never presented himself as a political savior, and that Egyptians would have to make their own revolution. Now, he said, the youth movement “will give them the self-confidence they needed, to know that the change will happen through you and not through one person — you are the driving force.” And Dr. ElBaradei argued that by upsetting the old relationship between Mr. Mubarak and the Brotherhood, the youth movement posed a new challenge to United States policy makers as well. “For years,” he said, “the West has bought Mr. Mubarak’s demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood lock, stock and barrel, the idea that the only alternative here are these demons called the Muslim Brotherhood who are the equivalent of Al Qaeda.” He added: “I am pretty sure that any freely and fairly elected government in Egypt will be a moderate one, but America is really pushing Egypt and pushing the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.” The roots of the uprising that filled Egypt’s streets this week arguably stretch back to before the Tunisian revolt, which many protesters cited as the catalyst. Almost three years ago, on April 6, 2008, the Egyptian government crushed a strike by a group of textile workers in the industrial city of Mahalla, and in response a group of young activists who connected through Facebook and other social networking Web sites formed the April 6th Youth Movement in solidarity with the strikers. Their early efforts to call a general strike were a bust. But over time their leaderless online network and others that sprang up around it — like the networks that helped propel the Tunisian revolution — were uniquely difficult for the Egyptian security police to pinpoint
[Marxism] ZNet, part of the establishment left?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Following yesterday's articles by Cohen/Solomon and Fletcher making the case implicitly for working in the DP, you have another fecal dropping written by Ted Glick who is a leading Demogreen. http://www.zcommunications.org/the-third-force-idea-by-ted-glick It occurs to me that a left-wing, class struggle, non-sectarian socialist website is absolutely necessary at this point. While Counterpunch has lots of interesting material, it is flawed by the preoccupations of Alexander Cockburn which includes a softness on the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. MRZine could have been that publication but unfortunately it is pretty much Yoshie Furuhashi's blog, with almost daily crosspostings from the Leveretts about how wonderful Ahmadinejad is. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Obama's Speech and America, Inc.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 1/26/11 4:47 PM, Dan DiMaggio wrote: Nomi Prins' on last night's State of the Union: Watching Obama deliver his State of the Union Speech last night, reminded me of all the rah-rah quarterly meetings that we had to attend as Managing Directors at Goldman, where senior management would remind us all of how great we were, and if there were any areas of competitive weakness relative to our adversaries at other banks, all we had to do was step up our game, innovate and globalize (or something like that.) I didn't watch the speech and hardly paid attention to the coverage but from what I've heard it reminds me of the talk that Columbia University president George Rupp gave to our department about 10 years ago. It was done with Powerpoint slides showing Columbia's assets and his projections about how the university would leapfrog its Ivy competitors and NYU. Obama has sopped up the worst of Goldman-Sachs and Columbia University, keeping in mind that you are starting at the bottom of the barrel to begin with. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Query on Tunisia
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == An old friend and squash partner is planning a trip to Tunisia to do some filming and writing. Does anybody have contacts there who speak English? Please contact me privately. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Philanthrocapitalism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.zcommunications.org/more-such-philanthrocapitalism-we-shall-be-utterly-undone-by-justin-podur Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Sacha Baron Cohen: what a dick
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.observer.com/2011/culture/sacha-baron-cohens-next-project-saddam-husseins-iraqi-dictator-novel Sacha Baron Cohen's Next Project? Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Dictator Novel By Nate Freeman January 20, 2011 | 7:17 p.m Paramount Pictures announced today that Sacha Baron Cohen has chosen a role that will complete the triad that he started with Borat and Bruno. What persona has he chosen to embody following a challenged Kazahkstani and a flamboyantly gay Austrian? You may be aware of a certain Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Among his less memorable accomplishments was the penning of a novel, entitled Zabibah and The King, in which the protagonist was an oppressive Iraqi ruler -- basically a stand-in for Saddam, only set in the 12th century. Sacha Baron Cohen is going to play that oppressive Iraqi ruler. The team from Borat and Bruno is directing, writing, and producing with Baron Cohen, and the film -- called The Dictator -- will be out May 2012. Highlight from the super-dry press release: The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. And the rest of it is below. HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Jan. 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Paramount Pictures announced today that Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy THE DICTATOR will be released worldwide on May 11, 2012. The studio also announced that Larry Charles (“Borat,” “Bruno”) has come aboard to direct. The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. It is inspired by the best selling novel “Zabibah and The King” by Saddam Hussein. Producing alongside Baron Cohen are Scott Rudin, Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, and David Mandel. The project marks the first collaboration for Rudin (“The Social Network,” “True Grit”) and Baron Cohen, while Berg, Schaffer and Mandel (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) join him as screenwriters on the movie. The movie is the latest collaboration between Baron Cohen and Charles, who previously worked together on “Borat” as well as “Bruno.” Dan Mazer (“Borat,” “Bruno”), Ant Hines (“Borat,” “Bruno”) and Peter Baynham (“Borat”) will serve as executive producers, reuniting the rest of the Academy Award®-nominated and Golden Globe winning “Borat” team. Todd Schulman (“Borat,” “Bruno”) is co-producing under Baron Cohen’s Four By Two Films banner. --- Big-time Hollywood Jews sent a strong message last year to artists protesting Israel: Don't mess with Tel Aviv. What's the buzz these days following the release of a sequel of sorts aimed at the West Bank Israeli settlement of Ariel? It's complicated. The fight in September 2009 was over the decision of the Toronto International Film Festival to spotlight Tel Aviv. More than 1,000 prominent filmmakers, actors and academics -- including Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Julie Christie and Alice Walker -- signed on to statement asserting that by showcasing movies from Tel Aviv, the festival, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine. In response, the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles put together a counter statement criticizing the protest and defending the film festival's focus on Tel Aviv. The pro-Israel statement was signed by a smaller but more prominent list of celebrities, including Jerry Seinfeld, Natalie Portman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lisa Kudrow, Jason Alexander and Lenny Kravitz. full: http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/culture.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=817:artists-fight-over-israel-boycottcatid=16:artandentertainmentItemid=817 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] David Gibbs replies to Marko Attila Hoare
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == David N. Gibbs Replies to Marko Atilla Hoare This posting is a follow-up on an extended debate that I have been having with Marko Atilla Hoare, on the breakup of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. For those interested in the full set of comments, you can find them here http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/david-gibbs-answers-marko-atilla-hoare/. This debate actually began on Modernityblog, but I have decided that Louis Proyect’s website is a much better venue for my comments. I thank Louis for allowing me to post on his website. Let me begin by noting that Hoare seems to have an obsessive interest in my 2009 book, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). Over the past two months, Hoare has written three lengthy attack reviews of my book on his own website, which (when printed out) run to some eighteen single-spaced pages; in addition to several dozen postings to Modernityblog, in debates that directly address my book. And he promises that there will be yet more attack reviews, to add to all this. One wonders if the man actually has a job, or if attacking me has become a full time endeavor. Either way, I am impressed by the sheer volume of his output. In what follows, I will make no pretense that I answer all of Hoare’s allegations, which I find impossible, given the huge quantity of his charges. What I will show however is that Hoare’s writings contain major and systematic errors of fact that would, in any normal situation, discredit him. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/david-gibbs-replies-to-marko-attila-hoare/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] CSPAN panel discussion included Marxmailer
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/DayWal A round table discussion [including Mark Lause] was held on Beverly Gage's book The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (Oxford University Press, USA, 2009). The book examines the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. The panelists considered Professor Gage's re-examination of the nature of class struggles, left-wing social movements, and violence and repression from the Gilded age to the immediate post-World War I years. Topics included connections made between the first Red Scare and the current war on terrorism. Professor Gage also commented on the discussion about her book, her first one. Professor Green chaired. This Book Roundtable on Beverly Gage’s The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror was a session of the 125th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held at the Hynes Convention Center. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Chicago in charge
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/01/hbc-90007944 A Country with Chicago in Charge By John R. MacArthur John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of the book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. This column originally appeared in the January 19, 2010 Providence Journal. Back in the summer of 2008, when Barack Obama was still the bright new hope of liberals, I found myself chastised for raining on the future president’s parade. My essential point — that an administration incubated and hatched in Chicago would never break with the autocratic, anti-reformist, reactionary traditions of the city’s Democratic machine — was unwelcome among Democrats desperate for a savior after eight dark years of Bush. Obama admirer John K. Wilson wrote in the Huffington Post, “I don’t understand why . . . [MacArthur needs] to viciously attack the most progressive candidate of a major political party in American history.” Moreover, my repetition of what Wilson termed “right-wing lies and smears” moved him to ask why the “left” had a “death wish for progressive politics.” Indeed, after I noted on a New York radio show that Goldman Sachs was Obama’s No. 1 corporate donor (in bundled contributions), a tearful woman caller accused me of being a “right-winger” sowing discord among Democrats. I figured it was pointless to respond directly to Wilson and his ilk. Obama worship was rampant, and few liberals wanted to hear such a pessimistic view of the power structure and funding of American political parties. But despite Wilson’s ignorance of American history and Chicago politics, I felt guilty about these desperate Democrats, and I sometimes wondered whether my critics didn’t have a point after all. Maybe I was being skeptical to the point of cynicism; maybe, as one leading liberal editor argued to me, the Chicago machine itself had changed, that Mayor Richard M. Daley was significantly different from his thuggish father, Richard J. Daley. Maybe Obama was in the machine, not of it, and would use its power in the cause of peace and good government. Now it seems I wasn’t skeptical enough. The appointment of the Chicago-trained liberal-baiter Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff confirmed my fundamental point that the machine’s political apparatus was moving to the White House, not some fresh-faced parvenu with an African name. I also correctly predicted that after the mid-term election, Obama would cave on extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. The over-$250,000-a-year crowd shoulders a big part of the Democrats’ fund-raising, directly and through K Street lobbyists, so the president may be relieved to give in to the GOP. But even I didn’t think that Chicago and the Democratic Party were so boss-ruled that Emanuel could simply be installed by the party leadership as mayor of the Second City, or that the machine could so easily send the current mayor’s brother, Bill, to replace Emanuel in the post. I thought, and wrote here, that the local Irish-Catholic barons would probably revolt against an outsider raised in the suburbs who was never a ward committeeman. That much democracy I would expect in a city that has rarely had self-government. Evidently, however, the fix is really in. Richard Daley and his brothers, Bill, John and Michael, apparently persuaded all the major potential Irish candidates — Tom Dart, Lisa Madigan and Ed Burke — not to challenge Emanuel in next month’s primary, leaving him the only white candidate and thus the favorite to succeed Richard Daley. Meanwhile, brother Bill, Rahm’s ally and Richie’s closest adviser, gets to be, in effect, deputy president without having got a single vote. Whether Bill ever wanted to occupy City Hall himself, he now seems to prefer the allure and power of Washington, where he served as Bill Clinton’s commerce secretary. Sadly, this is no ordinary story about intra-party politics; it’s a bad thing for America, liberal Democrats and organized labor, which is in its death throes. With Chicago in charge of the country, reform becomes all but impossible. Foolish things have been said about “pro-business” Bill Daley moving Obama “to the center,” as if the president remotely resembled a left-winger. Obama began in the center and has been moving right ever since. The main thing to understand is that Daley and Emanuel are all about self-interest, not the public interest. As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass puts it, “To the Daleys, the political center is Chicago, their ancestral home.” Nevertheless, there is a destructive ideological part of the Daley appointment and Emanuel’s ascent, despite their non-ideological devotion to power. Emanuel and Daley were two of the three principal Clinton lobbyists in the
[Marxism] A loveless presidency
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.usaction.org/site/apps/nlnet/mar04-rebuild-renew.html Chuck Loveless, Legislative Director, AFSCME: “Make no mistake: the Obama budget is real change – the change that Americans voted for in November. As we were during the economic recovery plan, AFSCME will be a leader in the fight to pass the Obama agenda. Our members make America happen. And America deserves nothing less.” --- NY Times January 20, 2011 Path Is Sought for States to Escape Debt Burdens By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH Policy makers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers. Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional hurdles because the states are considered sovereign. But proponents say some states are so burdened that the only feasible way out may be bankruptcy, giving Illinois, for example, the opportunity to do what General Motors did with the federal government’s aid. Beyond their short-term budget gaps, some states have deep structural problems, like insolvent pension funds, that are diverting money from essential public services like education and health care. Some members of Congress fear that it is just a matter of time before a state seeks a bailout, say bankruptcy lawyers who have been consulted by Congressional aides. Bankruptcy could permit a state to alter its contractual promises to retirees, which are often protected by state constitutions, and it could provide an alternative to a no-strings bailout. Along with retirees, however, investors in a state’s bonds could suffer, possibly ending up at the back of the line as unsecured creditors. “All of a sudden, there’s a whole new risk factor,” said Paul S. Maco, a partner at the firm Vinson Elkins who was head of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Municipal Securities during the Clinton administration. For now, the fear of destabilizing the municipal bond market with the words “state bankruptcy” has proponents in Congress going about their work on tiptoe. No draft bill is in circulation yet, and no member of Congress has come forward as a sponsor, although Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, asked the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, about the possiblity in a hearing this month. House Republicans, and Senators from both parties, have taken an interest in the issue, with nudging from bankruptcy lawyers and a former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, who could be a Republican presidential candidate. It would be difficult to get a bill through Congress, not only because of the constitutional questions and the complexities of bankruptcy law, but also because of fears that even talk of such a law could make the states’ problems worse. Lawmakers might decide to stop short of a full-blown bankruptcy proposal and establish instead some sort of oversight panel for distressed states, akin to the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which helped New York City during its fiscal crisis of 1975. Still, discussions about something as far-reaching as bankruptcy could give governors and others more leverage in bargaining with unionized public workers. “They are readying a massive assault on us,” said Charles M. Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “We’re taking this very seriously.” full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/business/economy/21bankruptcy.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Sins of South Beach
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I return to NYC tomorrow after a wonderful time in South Beach, especially the time spent with Alex Daoud, the author of the must-read Sins of South Beach. I plan to write a longer and more analytical review but this amazon.com review I wrote should be sufficient to persuade you to get your own copy. http://www.amazon.com/South-Corruption-Violence-Murder-Making/dp/1424310784/ If Sins of South Beach accomplished one and only one thing, namely to show how corruption works in politics, then author Alex Douad would have performed an enormous service to our country. There is hardly a week that passes by without someone like Tom DeLay being sentenced for money laundering. Americans really need to know how and why such a thing happens. As someone who spent 18 months in a federal prison for bribes taken while mayor of Miami Beach, Douad is uniquely positioned to describe his own sins and those who he came in contact with, including some of the area's most powerful politicians, real estate developers and bankers. Given the power of some of these individuals, it is something of a miracle that the book was ever published. It is also all the more remarkable given that it is likely the very first book ever written by a politician who has fallen from grace. In light of the state of American governance, this honest, insightful, courageous and beautifully written memoir is worth all the self-serving memoirs of public officials put together, including that of George W. Bush. But Sins of South Beach is more than this. It is also a spell-binding tale that is written with a experienced novelist's touch, one in which the reader can't wait to get to the next chapter to find out what happens to the tarnished hero Alex Daoud. Indeed, this is the kind of book that would have made me miss a subway stop in my hometown New York City. But here in South Beach, where I am vacationing, the same thing happened. I took the book down to the beach with me with the intention of spending two hours under the sun while getting the low-down on what was happening here in the roaring 80s. But I became so riveted by the action that I lost track of the time and got myself a good sunburn! Oh well, that's a small price to pay for getting immersed in such a gripping tale. As someone with a background in politics and law, Alex Daoud is a remarkably gifted writer. Sins of South Beach has a cinematic quality, evoking The Godfather in some ways as well as classic tales of an honest man seduced into doing wrong, like Double Indemnity or Body Heat. In Alex Daoud's case, the seducer was not a beautiful woman but a wealthy establishment in Miami Beach that bought and sold politicians like they were condominiums. Although the author is unsparing with himself, one cannot but note that the bribes he took harmed nobody except the rich men who were buying favors, and for whom such monies were almost pocket change. By comparison, Jack Abramoff hurt Indian tribes and non-unionized sweatshop workers in his quest to achieve wealth and power. It should be understood, however, that Alex Daoud does not try to whitewash his career here. Despite being mayor at a time when Miami Beach was making great strides forward as an art deco cultural center and a fabulous place to spend a vacation, the book is focused almost totally on his sins. They say that Catholics are great both at sinning and at confessing. When a Catholic (a Lebanese Catholic in Daoud's case) has a talent with the pen, such as St. Augustine's Confessions, the result can be a classic of literature. While it would be a bit much to compare Alex Daoud to St. Augustine, I can say with conviction that this is the finest memoir by a public official that I have ever read and a book that I will recommend to friends and associates for the rest of my life. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Reader comments on Immelt appointment article in NYT
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sometimes I wonder if the NYT would be better off the readers wrote the paper and the idiot reporters were allowed to comment on what they wrote. Here's a comment by a reader on an article that had absolutely no information on GE's rotten record. --- I don't know, this guy sounds perfect for the Obama administration. I mean, his company, G.E., is listed as the 4th largest corporate prodocer of air pollution in the United States, and has dumped more toxic PCB's into our rivers than any company in history. From a profit standpoint, in the last 10 years or so, they have transformed into a financial firm, with over half of their revenue derived from financial services. Obama loves those guys. The Washington Post reported in December that G.E. was one of the primary corporate beneficiaries of taxpayer bailout money. Most people didn't know that at the time because the government tried to keep it secret. CNN reported that on $10.3 billion in pretax income, G.E. paid ZERO dollars in U.S. taxes in 2009. Jeffery Immelt's total compensation in 2009 was almost $10 million and Forbes ranked him as the 13th most powerful person in the world. Like I said, he sounds perfect. Change we can believe in. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Rammstein: heartbeat on the left?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I'm sure their hearts are in the right place, but that sort of personalized, culturalist viewpoint is a result of failing to engage the critique of political economy. Yeah, but they make kick-ass music. This is one of my favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLp63WBV-Ic Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Time/location for South Korea Consulate protest
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Monday, Jan. 24 460 Park Avenue, New York (between 58th and 59th) and the time is 5:30-7 PM. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Restating the propaganda of Iran's regime by a leftist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://revolutionaryfesenjan.blogspot.com/2011/01/whether-angry-arab-knows-it-or-not-hes_4365.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Just a Nut Job
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == You know, there are a number of things about this discussion that really disturb me 1) It seems to conjure the most dogmatic nastiness...insisting that anyone who doesn't agree with such-and-such obviously doesn't know or care anything about schizophrenia, etc. Well, I would say that anybody who blames Sarah Palin's crosshairs on Loughner doesn't know anything about schizophrenia. Sorry, but that's just my opinion. 2) The subjects of really questionable political importance, as far as I've seen. Well, that's not true. The media is burning up with discussion about Loughner's culpability, the Tea Party's, etc. We have an obligation to speak meaningfully about what happened. As Mason pointed out, Loughner asked Giffords about whether words have meaning, not why she is allowing Mexicans in to the USA. The left is bent on making it about the latter but that is a false assessment. In fact, even if Loughner did say it was about the Mexicans, I would still say that it was brain chemistry and not hate radio that is responsible. 3) We don't know about this case, really, do we? It's just guesswork based on what we're being told. Somebody wrote on my blog that Loughner was faking it in order to avoid the death penalty. That's guesswork of a sort, but fairly idiotic. My assessment is guesswork as well, but buttressed by school administrators, professors, and just about everybody who came in contact with Loughner for the past 5 years. The problem with the Loughner = Tea Party school is that it finds this information inconvenient. Typical in some ways of the way that the left operates unfortunately. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Christopher Trumbo, dead at 70
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Christopher Trumbo dies at 70; screen and TV writer whose father was blacklisted Trumbo, the son of Dalton Trumbo, wrote TV episodes for series such as 'Ironside,' 'Quincy, M.E.,' and 'Falcon Crest.' He was an expert on the blacklist and wrote a play, 'Trumbo: Red, White Blacklisted,' based on his father's letters. January 12, 2011|By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Christopher Trumbo, the screen and television writer son of Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted and imprisoned during the Red Scare as a member of the Hollywood 10, has died. He was 70. Trumbo died Saturday from complications of kidney cancer while in hospice care at his home in Ojai, said his sister, Mitzi Trumbo. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Chomsky's plea for Iranian prisoners
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Of course Chomsky entirely misses the point. No doubt these two (or three) were progressives or radicals (choose your own words) who have dedicated themselves to various good causes. However it is a FACT that there are many such people (some on this list) who have cheered on the Iranian Green movement and done their best to support its demand for the overthrow of the Iranian government. Are there SOME such people who might go a step further than simply advocating on behalf of the Greens on the Internet, or helping to make sure their Twitter feed doesn't go down, and actually who would actually work in collaboration with the U.S. government to help bring that about? It seems almost indisputable that there are. Are Josh, Shane, and Sarah such individuals? I have no freakin' idea, and certainly know of no evidence that they are. This is really crazy, Eli. The sort of stuff that alienates people from the PSL, even though I understand that you are only a sympathizer. You are making an amalgam between CIA agents, supporters of the overthrow of clerical rule in Iran, the Green movement--which is led by a faction of the clerical dictatorship, the hikers who were not even in Iran and god knows who else. What do you think that the hikers were trying to do? Dig a hole from Iraq to Iran so that CIA agents could smuggle Twitter accounts into the country? Or copies of Madeline Murray's atheist tracts? Sheesh. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A debate on Islamophobia
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.signandsight.com/features/2120.html Pascal Bruckner and the reality disconnect Pascal Bruckner wants to forbid the word 'Islamophobia'. What should be the next to go: Racism? Relativism? By Alan Posener The French writer Pascal Bruckner wants to forbid a word. Which sounds more like a typically German obsession. But for Bruckner, Islamophobia is one of those expressions which we dearly need to banish from our vocabulary. One asks oneself with some trepidation which other words we dearly need to get rid of: Right-wing populism? Racism? Relativism?But let that ride. Bruckner's essay has the advantage of stating the case against Islamophobia clearly and concisely and thus allowing those who – like myself – propose to hang on to the word until a better one comes along to answer in a similar clear and concise way. Let me present Bruckner's arguments in his own words: Iranian fundamentalists invented the word Islamophobia, formed in analogy to 'xenophobia', in the late seventies. The aim of this word is to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist. The argument that Islamists coined the phrase in order to portray any and all criticism of Islam as a symptom of illness (a phobia being an irrational fear), may be right or wrong. It is, however, irrelevant. Remember that the word Antisemitism was also coined by reactionaries who wanted to give their hatred of the Jews, inspired by Christian Antijudaism, a scientific gloss. In point of fact, the Antisemites never had anything against any other Semites (for instance Arabs), and their hatred was reserved for a people which (pace Thilo Sarrazin) was and is one of the world's most ethnically diverse. And yet we still use the expression today, and not only to characterize the ideology developed by its European inventors. For instance, few people today would hesitate to call Martin Luther an Antisemite, just because he knew nothing about race and genetics and therefore didn't call on pseudoscience to justify his murderous hatred of the Jews. (clip) Brucker's article: http://www.signandsight.com/features/2123.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Good reporting from NYT on Tunisia
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 18, 2011 Tunisia Unrest Stirs Passions Across North African Region By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK TUNIS — Passions unleashed by the revolution here continued to resonate across the region on Tuesday as a man in Cairo set himself ablaze, the latest apparent imitation of the self-immolation that set off the Tunisian uprising a month ago. On Monday, an Egyptian and a Mauritanian became the fifth and sixth North Africans to burn themselves. On Tuesday, security officials in Cairo said an Egyptian man, seemingly inspired by events in Tunisia, set himself on fire outside the prime minister’s office in the center of the Egyptian capital. Reuters said the man was a 40-year-old lawyer named Mohamed Farouk Hassan who shouted slogans against rising prices before setting himself alight. The man’s medical condition was not immediately clear. A day earlier, Abdo Abdel Moneim, a 50-year-old Egyptian restaurant owner, poured a gallon of gasoline over his head and set himself ablaze outside the Parliament building in downtown Cairo. Around the same time in Mauritania, Yacoub Ould Dahoud was setting fire to himself in his parked car near Parliament in Nouakchott. And on Sunday, Senouci Touat of Mostaganem, Algeria, 34 and unemployed, set himself on fire in his hometown, the fourth attempted self-immolation in his country since the Tunisian street revolt exploded in furious demonstrations in recent days. And while there were no immediate signs that their actions inspired widespread protests, as the victims all apparently intended, the immolations stood as gruesome testimony to the power of the Tunisian example. In Tunis, the fight was far from over. More than a thousand protesters swarmed once again onto the city’s main artery, Bourguiba Boulevard, in what they described as an effort to sustain their revolution, this time in a battle pitting the small group of recognized opposition leaders against the masses in the streets. Taking aim for the first time at the newly formed unity government, the protesters raged against the domination of the new cabinet by members of ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s ruling party. “Citizens and martyrs, the government is still the same,” they chanted. “We will protest, we will protest, until the government collapses!” The strains on the new cabinet seemed ever more apparent as, The Associated Press reported, at least three opposition ministers quit the new unity government on Tuesday, threatening the stability of Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi’s nascent coalition, even as he sought to defend it. In a radio interview, Mr. Ghannouchi insisted that ministers in the new government carried over from the former regime “have clean hands and great competence.” Speaking to the French Europe 1 broadcaster as he struggled to convince protesters in the streets that the unity cabinet would oversee a real transition after the bloodshed of the uprising, he promised on Tuesday that “all those who initiated this massacre, this carnage will be brought to justice.” He insisted that the army had not fired live rounds since a state of emergency was declared shortly before Mr. Ben Ali fled into exile in Saudi Arabia on Friday. “My first instruction to the security forces was to not fire on the population. You can use tear gas or rubber bullets. It is better to pay with our lives rather than create carnage.” “Today there is a new era of liberty which you can see on the television, in the street, a new spirit completely different from what prevailed in the past,” he said. But he declined to say whether the new government would seek to bring Mr. Ben Ali to trial, deflecting the question by blaming the self-enrichment of his entourage — an apparent reference to the former president’s wife and her relatives. “They will have a fair trial,” Mr. Ghannouchi said. “And if they are guilty, they will be brought to justice.” On the streets on Monday, protesters called for the complete eradication of the old ruling party, while complaining that outlawed parties like the once powerful Islamist groups or the Tunisian Communists — battle-scarred stalwarts of the long dissident fight against Mr. Ben Ali’s 23-year-rule — were still barred from participating. “Nothing has changed,” said Mohamed Cherni, 47, a teacher who said he had been tortured by Mr. Ben Ali’s police force. “It is still the same regime as before, and so we are going to keep fighting.” But it was not clear exactly who spoke for the street protesters, and the old guard of the opposition struggled to convince protesters that the new government would implant democracy while still maintaining basic order and governance. It was not going to be an easy task in a new government in which Mr. Ghannouchi, the prime minister,
[Marxism] Milton Rogovin, Photographer, Dies at 101
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 18, 2011 Milton Rogovin, Photographer, Dies at 101 By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO Milton Rogovin, an optometrist and persecuted leftist who took up photography as a way to champion the underprivileged and went on to become one of America’s most dedicated social documentarians, died on Tuesday at his home in Buffalo. He was 101. He died of natural causes, his son, Mark Rogovin, said. Mr. Rogovin chronicled the lives of the urban poor and working classes in Buffalo, Appalachia and elsewhere for more than 50 years. His direct photographic style in stark black and white evokes the socially minded work that Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks produced for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression. Today his entire archive resides in the Library of Congress. Mr. Rogovin (pronounced ruh-GO-vin) came to wide notice in 1962 after documenting storefront church services on Buffalo’s poor and predominantly African-American East Side. The images were published in Aperture magazine with an introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois, who described them as “astonishingly human and appealing.” He went on to photograph Buffalo’s impoverished Lower West Side and American Indians on reservations in the Buffalo area. He traveled to West Virginia and Kentucky to photograph miners, returning to Appalachia each summer with his wife, Anne Rogovin, into the early 1970s. In the ’60s he went to Chile at the invitation of the poet Pablo Neruda to photograph the landscape and the people. The two collaborated on a book, “Windows That Open Inward: Images of Chile.” In a 1976 review of a Rogovin show of photographs from Buffalo at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, the critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Mr. Rogovin in The New York Times: “He sees something else in the life of this neighborhood — ordinary pleasures and pastimes, relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business, celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of individuals’ existence.” Milton Rogovin was born on Dec. 30, 1909, in Brooklyn, the third of three sons of Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. His parents, Jacob Rogovin and the former Dora Shainhouse, operated a dry goods business, first in Manhattan on Park Avenue near 112th Street and later in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. After attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the young Mr. Rogovin graduated from Columbia University in 1931 with a degree in optometry; four months later, after the family had lost the store and its home to bankruptcy during the Depression, his father died of a heart attack. Working as an optometrist in Manhattan, Mr. Rogovin became increasingly distressed at the plight of the poor and unemployed — “the forgotten ones,” he called them — and increasingly involved in leftist political causes. “I was a product of the Great Depression, and what I saw and experienced myself made me politically active,” he said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times. He began attending classes sponsored by the Communist Party-run New York Workers School, began to read the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker and was introduced to the social-documentary photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. Mr. Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 and opened his own optometric office on Chippewa Street the next year, providing service to union workers. In 1942 he married Anne Snetsky before volunteering for the Army and serving for three years in England, where he worked as an optometrist. Also in 1942, he bought a camera. Returning to Buffalo after the war (his brother Sam, also an optometrist, managed the practice in his absence), Mr. Rogovin joined the local chapter of the Optical Workers Union and served as librarian for the Buffalo branch of the Communist Party. In 1957, with cold war anti-Communism rife in the United States, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee but refused to testify. Soon afterward, The Buffalo Evening News labeled him “Buffalo’s Number One Red,” and he and his family were ostracized. With his business all but ruined by the publicity, he began to fill time by taking pictures, focusing on Buffalo’s poor and dispossessed in the neighborhood around his practice while living on his wife’s salary as a teacher and being mentored by the photographer Minor White. His wife, a special education teacher, was a collaborator throughout his career and helped him organize his photographs until her death, in 2003. Mr. Rogovin’s photographs were typically naturalistic portraits of people he met on the street. “The first six months were very difficult,” he recalled in a 2003 interview,
[Marxism] Picket at Korean Consulate
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == - Original Message - From: Loren Goldner To: marxgr...@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 11:45 PM Subject: [marxgroup] Informational Picket at the Korean Consulate on Jan. 24 We will be participating in an informational picket at the New York Korean consulate on Monday Jan. 24, 5:30-700 PM. The League for the Revolutionary Party is co-sponsoring. Below is the leaflet that will be distributed, in English and Korean. A few of us will leaflet Koreatown (B'way and 32nd) for an hour or two beforehand. Try to be there. Loren INFORMATIONAL PICKET AT THE KOREAN CONSULATE Drop the Charges Against the Korean Labor Militants! Abolish the Korean National Security Law! Eight South Korean Labor Activists Face 5-7 Years in Prison We are organizing this informational picket line to express solidarity with 8 South Korean labor militants facing serious prison terms and due to be sentenced on this coming Thursday. On Dec. 3 of last year, the prosecutor in the Seoul Central District Court demanded prison terms of 5-7 years for Oh sei-chull and other members (Yang Hyo-sik, Yang Joon-seok, Choi Young-ik, Park Joon-seon, Jeong Won-hyun, Oh Min-gyu, and Nam-goong Won) of the Socialist Workers’ Alliance of Korea (SWLK), a revolutionary socialist group. These activists in the Korean working-class movement were indicted under South Korea’s notorious National Security Law (passed in 1948 and theoretically still stipulating the death penalty for “pro-North” activities). The eight militants of the SWLK, who as internationalists advocate working-class revolution in both Koreas, were accused of no specific crime except being socialists, but in reality the indictment resulted from their intervention in several strikes and movements going back to 2007. This is the first instance of such harsh repression under the National Security Law in many years. It occurs in the larger context of the hard-right turn (such as the smashing of the Ssangyong Motor Co. strike of 2009) of South Korean President Lee Myong Bak’s government since he took office in early 2008. (In fact, leaflets of the SWLK distributed during the Ssangyong strike were key evidence in the trial.) Prosecutors have attempted to indict members of the SWLK several times since 2008, and prior to December, the prosecutors’ case was thrown out of court each time. The sentencing will take place on this coming Thursday. Solidarity messages to the SWLK can be sent to: s...@jinbo.net League for the Revolutionary Party (lrpc...@earthlink.net) Insurgent Notes (edit...@insurgentnotes.com) Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Tunisia's revolution and the Islamists
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/01/tunisias-revolution-and-islamists.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dave: I will note that I said on your blog something to this effect - if the right wing discourse sometimes sounds schizophrenic this tells us something about the right wing but little about schizophrenia or schizophrenics. The confusion is over paranoid and paranoia. There is a paranoid style in American politics. Richard Hofstader wrote a book about this. It involves conspiracy theories, worries about government surveillance, etc. In the 1980s the militia movement obsessed about black helicopters. But paranoia schizophrenia is a mental illness. It stems mostly from inner voices telling the sick person that powerful forces are out to get him or her. In rare instances that person would use violence against innocent people during a psychotic break, as was the case with Loughner. If you want to see a fairly interesting film on the illness, I recommend A Beautiful Mind about the Nobel prize winning mathematician played by Russell Crowe. For the first third of the movie or so, you see him involved in skulduggery with Russian spies and the FBI, only to learn that this was all in his mind. The most inaccurate thing about the movie is its wide-scale recreation of visual hallucinations when schizophrenia is almost exclusively about aural hallucinations--accusatory voices mostly. If Loughner had shot a reactionary politician, there would not be the kind of knee-jerk reaction from MSNBC et al about the need for civility. Although it is not worth constructing hypothetical situations, I would remind comrades that Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace for pretty much the same reason that Loughner shot Giffords and other innocent people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Bremer After graduating from high school, from September 1970 Bremer briefly attended Milwaukee Area Technical College where he studied aerial photography, art, writing and psychology. He dropped out after just one semester in college, where he was recalled as a strange, aloof and argumentative[6] student who rarely talked to anybody.[7] Bremer got a job as a busboy at the Milwaukee Athletic Club in 1969. Although his employer said he was a very hard and dependable worker who kept himself to himself, in 1971, Bremer was demoted to kitchen work after customers complained that he talked to himself, and that he whistled and marched in tune with music played in the dining room.[8] Angered by his demotion, he complained to the program planner for the Milwaukee Commission on Community Relations. The complaint was investigated and dismissed. The planner wrote on November 8, Mr Bremer is a young man who is rather withdrawn. Appears to bottle up anger but will sometimes let it go. I assess him bordering on paranoid whilst at the same time, conscientious in doing his job at the Athletic club.[8] After this, Bremer quit his job at the Athletic club. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The rise and fall of Tunisia's Ceausescu
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/01/rise-and-fall-of-tunisias-ceausescu.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Richard Falk on Jewish identity
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == For me this rejection of tribalism takes two forms, one negative, the other positive. I do not feel exclusively Jewish. Also, even if I did, I would never claim the superiority of the Jewish religion over other religions. I have felt uncomfortable since childhood with biblical claims, often repeated in contemporary social settings, that Jews are the chosen people of God even if this is understood benevolently and temporally as a special destiny associated with doing justice rather than as a matter of societal achievement via wealth and professional success. As soon as exclusivity or superiority is claimed for any ethnic or religious fraction of the human whole, there is implicitly posited a belief in the inferiority of the other, which unconsciously and indirectly gives rise to the murderous mentality of warfare and gives a moral and religious edge to many forms of persecution, culminating in a variety of inquisitions. full: http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/on-jewish-identity/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Who Will Save Us From Obama's Pandering to the Right?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch January 18, 2011 Who Will Save Us From Obama's Pandering to the Right? Monica Lewinsky, Where Are You Now That We Need You ... Again? By ANDREW LEVINE Four and a half decades ago, Lyndon Johnson got reforms through Congress that put Barack Obama's to shame and that, unlike his, didn't reinforce the power of those who made them necessary. Johnson also inherited an unwinnable war that he escalated and made his own, just as Obama has done with George Bush's revenge-driven assault on Afghanistan. Johnson was fortunate only to have inherited one unwinnable and counter-productive war; Obama inherited two. With considerable disingenuousness, he did declare the combat phase of Bush's war of choice in Iraq over, but all he did was rebrand it. So much for the peace candidate and Nobel Laureate! He has also initiated or ratcheted up other, so far lesser, wars in such places as Yemen, Somalia, and the tribal regions of Pakistan; and the prospect of war in other oil-rich Islamic areas and with Iran continues. Since we nowadays run our wars with economic conscripts and mercenaries and on borrowed funds, and since many liberals are still determined to cut Obama limitless slack, public condemnation has been muted. It was different forty plus years ago. Then the Vietnam War was enough to do the Great Society in, and to make Lyndon Johnson a hated figure among those who would otherwise have praised his reforms. This is why it was not uncommon, back in the day, to see bumper stickers that read Lee Harvey Oswald, Where are You Now that We Need You? I was reminded of that slogan by the recent prattle about how extremists of both the left and the right are culpable for last week's massacre in Tucson. Not unexpectedly, figures on the right are leading the charge. Also, not unexpectedly, some liberal pundits trumpet a similar line. A conspicuous example is the objective Newsweek journalist Jonathan Alter, author of The Promise, a chronicle of Obama's first year in office. Appearing on the Brian Lehrer Show (on NPR, a slightly more up-market source than Newsweek for conventional wisdom and pro-regime propaganda), he argued for the left's culpability by citing a remark that appeared several weeks ago on The Daily Kos website. There, the blogger who goes by the name Boy Blue wrote that because of Gabrielle Gifford's support for Obama's compromise on taxes, she's dead to me. Could anyone familiar with the way people talk take that to be a call for Gifford's death? Maybe Alter has trouble with idiomatic turns of phrase. More likely, like other pro-regime propagandists and purveyors of conventional wisdom, he was grasping at straws. Even back in the LBJ days, when rhetoric on the left the real left, not The Daily Kos variety did get incendiary, and when there were bombings (never shootings), care was always taken to attack property, not people. Some Weather Underground militants blew themselves up making bombs. Otherwise, the white left was responsible for only one death a graduate student who happened unexpectedly, late at night, to be in a building on the University of Wisconsin campus that housed the nefarious Army Mathematics Research Center. The record of the black left was comparable, notwithstanding stupefying levels of police repression leveled against the Black Panther Party and other militant organizations. There was some violence, but it was almost always defensive and never terroristic. Contrast that with the violence stirred up by prominent figures on the right and in social movements associated with it, especially the anti-abortion movement. They've been at it for years and their incitements periodically bear fruit. Unless the Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was delusional and a Democratic Congresswoman just happened to be a convenient target, a story that has lately gained currency as Obama and others press for toning down the rhetoric and making nice, the events last week were just the latest episode. The Oswald bumper sticker was plainly not a call to assassinate LBJ; it was an expression of revulsion at the Vietnam War and of Johnson's role in it. After Bush and now Obama, we have become so inured to perpetual war that it is hard to imagine how much revulsion the Vietnam War generated. Still, the left, even the extreme left, even the folks (Obama's favorite word when he tries to seem folksy) whom Sarah Palin thinks he palled around with, were not violent in the way some people on the right are today. And, notwithstanding Obama's call for everyone to be more civil (read: for the right to be a tad less incendiary and for the left to be even more reluctant to stand up for itself), the left, or what is left of it, has long been civil to a fault. Obama's pandering to the right and
Re: [Marxism] Hochschild on Lumumba
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Not likely, Hochschild is from NYC and was an editor of Ramparts and then Mother Jones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Hochschild Actually, Adam is from that mining family. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Half-the-Way-Home/Adam-Hochschild/e/9780618439201 From the author of the best-selling King Leopold's Ghost, this haunting and deeply honest memoir tells of Adam Hochschild's conflicted relationship with his father, the head of a multinational mining corporation. The author lyrically evokes his privileged childhood on an Adirondack estate, a colorful uncle who was a pioneer aviator and fighter ace, and his first explorations of the larger world he encountered as he came of age in the tumultuous 1960s. But above all this is a story of a father and his only son and of the unexpected peace finally made between them. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Remmy Ongala, Tanzanian Musical Star, Dies at 63
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 16, 2011 Remmy Ongala, Tanzanian Musical Star, Dies at 63 By JON PARELES In 1990, as the AIDS epidemic was gathering strength in Africa, the Tanzanian songwriter, singer, guitarist and bandleader Remmy Ongala released an ebullient dance track called “Mambo Kwa Soksi” (“Things With Socks”). Its lyrics called for men to use condoms (“socks”) to prevent AIDS, and it stirred up controversy; Radio Tanzania refused to play it. But it became one of Mr. Ongala’s best-known songs in a career as Tanzania’s most beloved and influential musician, on and off the dance floor, with songs that had both a groove and a conscience. He sang serious thoughts about poverty, corruption, mortality, faith and Tanzanian pride, and he called his music “ubongo beat” — “ubongo” is Swahili for “brain.” Mr. Ongala died on Dec. 13 at his home in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. He was 63. His death was announced on the Web site of Real World Records, for which he recorded. No cause was specified. He was a superstar in East Africa, and in the 1980s and 1990s he reached European and American audiences with albums for Real World, a label founded by Peter Gabriel, and international tours that included many appearances at Mr. Gabriel’s Womad (World of Music and Dance) festivals. He jokingly called himself “sura mbaya” (“ugly face”), but fans gave him the honorific Doctor. Ramadhani Mtoro Ongala, nicknamed Remmy, was born in 1947 in what was then the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). His hometown, Kindu, is near the Tanzanian border. After both parents died, Mr. Ongala started working as a musician in his teens, playing drums and guitar in the Congolese style called soukous: dance music with intertwined guitar lines and an Afro-Cuban lilt. As he sang with bands in Zaire and Uganda, he was already writing songs with messages. In 1978 he moved to Dar Es Salaam and began performing with Orchestra Makassy, a band led by his uncle. With that band, he wrote his first hit single, “Sika Ya Kufa” (“The Day I Die”). Mr. Ongala is survived by his wife, Toni, an Englishwoman he married when she was teaching in Tanzania, and four children. When Orchestra Makassy relocated to Kenya, Mr. Ongala remained in Tanzania, joining and then leading Orchestre Super Matimila, named after the patron who bought the band its equipment. That group mingled soukous with Tanzanian and Kenyan elements. As Mr. Ongala’s popularity grew, his songs stayed forthright. At one point the government considered expelling him, but it later granted him Tanzanian citizenship, and a district of Dar Es Salaam was named after him. A British friend brought one of Mr. Ongala’s cassette recordings back to England, where organizers of the Womad festival heard and admired it. They first booked Mr. Ongala and Orchestre Super Matimila for the 1988 Womad Festival in Reading, England. Mr. Ongala began making studio albums in England for Real World, which released “Songs for the Poor Man” in 1989 and “Mambo” (a Swahili word for observations or comments) in 1992; both albums contained songs in English as well as in Swahili. During the 1990s Mr. Ongala and his band toured Africa, Europe and the United States. A stroke partly paralyzed Mr. Ongala in 2001, but he continued to perform as a singer from his wheelchair. In his last years he turned to gospel music. Following his mother’s wishes on the advice of her traditional healer, he never cut his hair during her lifetime. On her death he did cut it, then let it grown again until late in life, when he gave up secular music and cut off his locks. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Farewell to the Utterly Unique John Ross
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch January 17, 2011 All the Right Enemies Farewell to the Utterly Unique John Ross By FRANK BARDACKE John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again. The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of twenty, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army. Back on the streets of San Francisco eighteen months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition. When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19. In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics. During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers. He died this morning, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda. That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe. He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever. He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist—that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him. It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column. [John had a relationship lasting many years with CounterPunch, publishing hundreds of dispatches, with only trifling hiccups with the editors. AC/JSC.] He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they
Re: [Marxism] re : Why Tunisia's Revolution Is Islamist-Free
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi Dan Thankfully I don't moderate this list but given the nature of the situation I think it is silly to worry about the limit on posts. that rule exists for a different situation. We are discussing a revolution after all. That's exactly right. If comrades are at each others' throat, I will keep careful track of the number of posts. If they are posting useful information, even in the course of a debate, I will be more flexible. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] A government of national unity?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Louis Proyect unrepentantmarx...@gmail.com wrote: f you read between the lines, you will have no trouble figuring out that the Obama administration is trying to exploit the shootings in Arizona to bolster its political power Wouldn't it use anything and everything that ever happens (or doesn't) to bolster its political power? ML I don't think it is useful to have a discussion based on what I say in the one-sentence lead-in to an 800 word article. Comrades are invited to click the link and read the whole thing, which is much more about the rapprochement between Obama and McCain, the state of bank profits, etc. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Right on cue
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Am finding it difficult to find the time to write my article on Obama's government of national unity down here in sunny Florida, but today's Washington Post spurs me to carve out that time, given the title of this article: After Tucson, a thaw between Obama and McCain? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/15/AR2011011502270.html The key graf: The Arizona senator has moved to the right, along with his party, in the past four years. That makes true partnership with the president more difficult, given Obama's policies and leanings and the posture of the Democratic base. But both men have often preferred to look for ways to operate closer to the political center. Whether it is on immigration, energy or Afghanistan, the possibilities for greater cooperation between them seems to exist if the will is there to find some common ground. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Gaddafi shows his true colors
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Love this quote from the article: In his statement, broadcast last night on Libyan TV, Gaddafi said: Tunisia now lives in fear. Families could be raided and slaughtered in their bedrooms and the citizens in the street killed as if it was the Bolshevik or the American revolution. --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/16/muammar-gaddafi-condemns-tunisia-uprising Muammar Gaddafi condemns Tunisia uprising Libyan leader claims protesters led astray by WikiLeaks disclosures amid reports of unrest in Libya Muammar Gaddafi Muammar Gaddafi, an ally of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, said on Libyan TV that he was 'pained' by the fall of the Tunisian government. Photograph: Reuters The Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, has condemned the uprising in neighbouring Tunisia amid reports today of unrest on the streets of Libya. In a speech last night Gaddafi, an ally of the ousted president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, said he was pained by the fall of the Tunisian government. He claimed protesters had been led astray by WikiLeaks disclosures detailing the corruption in Ben Ali's family and his repressive regime. The leaked cables were written by ambassadors in order to create chaos, Deutsche Press-Agentur reported Gaddafi as saying. His remarks came as Tunisian politicians hold talks to form a unity government to help maintain a fragile calm two days after violent protests forced Ben Ali from office. Tanks were stationed around the capital, Tunis, and soldiers were guarding public buildings, but after a day of drive-by shootings and jailbreaks in which dozens of inmates were killed, residents said they were starting to feel more secure. Last night we surrounded our neighbourhood with roadblocks and had teams checking cars. Now we are in the process of lifting the roadblocks and getting life back to normal, said Imed, a resident of the city's Intilaka suburb. Gaddafi's comments reflect a nervousness among other long-serving Arab leaders that the uprising in Tunisia will embolden anti-government protests elsewhere in the region. There were reports today, backed up by video evidence, of protests in the Libyan city of al-Bayda, according to the Guardian's Middle East specialist Brian Whitaker, writing on his blog al-bab.com. Protesters clashed with police and attacked government offices, in a demonstration about housing conditions, according to an opposition website. Whitacker writes: We can expect to see many more incidents like this over the coming months in various Arab countries. Inspired by the Tunisian uprising, people are going to be more assertive about their grievances and start probing, to see how far they can push the authorities. In the light of Tunisia we can also expect a tendency, each time disturbances happen, to suggest (or hope) that they are the start of some new Arab revolution. The reality, though, is that almost all of them will quickly fizzle out or get crushed. In Egypt, a human rights activist, Hossam Bahgat, said the protests in Tunisia had encouraged those opposed to the regime of the long-time Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. I feel like we are a giant step closer to our own liberation, he said. What's significant about Tunisia is that literally days ago the regime seemed unshakable, and then eventually democracy prevailed without a single western state lifting a finger. Writing on Twitter, the Egyptian opposition leader and former chief UN weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei said: Violence in Tunisia now is a product of decades of repression. Regime in Egypt must understand that peaceful change is only way out. In his statement, broadcast last night on Libyan TV, Gaddafi said: Tunisia now lives in fear. Families could be raided and slaughtered in their bedrooms and the citizens in the street killed as if it was the Bolshevik or the American revolution. In attempt to placate protesters Ben Ali had pledged to stand down in 2014 before he decided to flee to Saudi Arabia. What is this for? To change Zine al-Abidine? Hasn't he told you he would step down after three years? Be patient for three years and your son stays alive, Gaddafi said. Gaddafi, who has been Libyan leader since 1969, urged Tunisia to adopt Libyan model of government. He said this model marks the final destination for the peoples' quest for democracy. If this is what the events [in Tunisia] are for, then it has to be made clear. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Judy Bonds, an Enemy of Mountaintop Coal Mining, Dies at 58
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == How Judy Bonds became an activist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2INVnhhSFeU NY Times January 15, 2011 Judy Bonds, an Enemy of Mountaintop Coal Mining, Dies at 58 By DENNIS HEVESI Ankle deep in the stream by the house where his coal-mining family had lived for generations, Judy Bonds’s 6-year-old grandson, Andrew, scooped up fistfuls of dead fish one day back in 1996. “What’s wrong with these fish?” he asked. “I knew something was very, very wrong,” Ms. Bonds told Sierra magazine in 2003. “So I began to open my eyes and pay attention.” Ms. Bonds soon discovered that the fish had been poisoned by debris from the mines in the mountains above the West Virginia hollow where her family had lived since early last century. Within six years, she and her Marfork Hollow neighbors had to abandon their homes. That day in the stream, Ms. Bonds found her mission. Since then, thousands of people — neighbors, environmental activists, politicians, mining company officials, industry regulators and crowds at the rallies she organized — have heard from the short, round-faced woman known as the godmother of the movement to stop mountaintop-removal coal mining. Ms. Bonds died of cancer — it had spread from her lungs — on Jan. 3 in Charleston, W.Va., at age 58, said Vernon Haltom, who leads the Coal River Mountain Watch, an advocacy group. He and Ms. Bonds had been its co-directors since 2007. Based in a former post office in Whitesville, W.Va., the organization is dedicated to banning the mining process by which mountaintops are blasted off to expose coal seams, with tons of loose rock cascading into adjacent valleys and carbon dioxide billowing into the atmosphere. The tumbling rock — called valley fills — clogs streams and rivers and leaches chemicals, previously sealed underground, into water systems. “There are many things we ought to do to deal with climate change,” James E. Hansen, a climatologist at NASA and Columbia University, said Thursday, “but stopping mountaintop-removal is the place to start. Coal contributes the most carbon dioxide of any energy source.” Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun and prevents it from escaping the atmosphere. In 2001, three years after she joined Coal River Mountain Watch as a volunteer, Ms. Bonds became the organization’s $12,000-a-year outreach director, a position she accepted after working as a waitress, then manager, at a Pizza Hut while a single mother. In her new job, she began staging protest rallies, testifying at regulatory hearings, filing lawsuits, picketing mining company stockholders’ meetings, organizing letter-writing campaigns. A primary target was the Massey Energy Company, which owned the mines around Marfork Hollow and other Appalachian communities. Last April, an explosion at the Massey Company’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., killed 29 miners in what was the nation’s worst mining disaster in 40 years. “She became the voice for communities around the country fighting mountaintop-removal,” Mr. Haltom said of Ms. Bonds. “She spoke to audiences of one person to 6,000.” One of her standard lines was, “Stop poisoning our babies.” In 2003 Ms. Bonds received the Goldman Environmental Prize, an annual $150,000 prize that goes to unrecognized “grass-roots environmental heroes.” “Her dedication and success as an activist and organizer have made her one of the nation’s leading community activists confronting an industry practice that has been called ‘strip mining on steroids,’ ” the Goldman Foundation said. For years, Ms. Bonds had envisioned a “thousand-hillbilly march” in Washington. That wish was fulfilled last September, when about 2,000 people joined what was called the Appalachia Rising, leading to the arrest of about 100 protesters outside the White House. But by then she was too ill to join the march. Julia (she preferred to be called Judy) Belle Thompson was born on Aug. 27, 1952, one of nine children of Oliver and Sarah Thompson. Her father stopped working in the mines at 65 and soon died of black lung disease. Besides her grandson, she is survived by her daughter, Lisa Henderson; two brothers, Ernie and Paul; and three sisters, Wanda Webb, Marilyn Thompson and Jamie Adkins. Danger came with Ms. Bonds’s activism: phone threats, insults, physical attacks. “She was walking right behind me when she got belted by a burly miner’s wife,” said Dr. Hansen, who in June 2009 joined a march at Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, W.Va., to protest its proximity to a coal-processing silo and a slurry dam, parts of a 2,000-acre mountaintop-removal site. “She fought to get a safe new school for the kids,” Mr. Haltom said. “In the old one, the kids breathe coal dust in class.” But last April, he continued, “everything came
[Marxism] Israel dreads democracy in Arab world
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/3926.aspx Israel dreading a democratic Arab world Saleh Naami in Gaza, Saturday 15 Jan 2011 The Israeli deputy PM expresses his concern over the democratisation of the Arab world, following the dissolution of the Tunisian leadership The fall of Tunisia’s regime headed by Zine El Abidine Ben Alican have serious repercussions, said Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom. In an interview on Israeli radio Friday night, Shalom said that he comes from a family of Tunisian immigrants. “I fear that we now stand before a new and very critical phase in the Arab world. If the current Tunisian regime collapses, it will not affect Israel’s present national security in a significant way,” he said. “But we can, however, assume that these developments would set a precedent that could be repeated in other countries, possibly affecting directly the stability of our system.” Shalom added that if regimes neighbouring the Israeli state were replaced by democratic systems, Israeli national security might significantly be threatened. The new systems would defend or adopt agendas that are inherently opposed to Israeli national security, he said. The deputy indicated that Israel and most of the Arab regimes have a common interest in fighting what he referred to as “Islamic fundamentalism” and its “radical” organisations which threaten Israel. This threat, he added, is the reason behind much of the direct and indirect intelligence and security coordination between Israel and the Arab regimes. Shalom emphasised that a democratic Arab world would end this present allegiance, because a democratic system would be governed by a public generally opposed to Israel. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sander: his madness drove him in that direction,* implying that only the mad are interested in 9/11 Truth. That's not what I meant at all. Loughner was also drawn to Herman Hesse's Siddhartha and The Communist Manifesto. My basic point is that there is nothing consistent about his ideology and that it is wrong to stigmatize him as a rightwinger in the same way we would describe Timothy McVeigh. All in all, the left has fucked up by making such an error, a function undoubtedly of its general ignorance about schizophrenia, an illness that affects some 24 million people worldwide. Mostly, schizophrenics are invisible to the general population, known only to most New Yorkers as the disheveled homeless people talking to themselves on the street. I can't blame Fidel Castro for making an amalgam between Jared Loughner and Timothy McVeigh, but for people on Marxmail to blather on about this young man in clear innocence of the facts about this disease is really quite off-putting. I have yet to see a single post that makes a distinction between having nutty conspiracist ideas and a disease based on brain chemistry. Sad, really. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A vulnerable planet
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times Sunday Book Review January 14, 2011 Delicate Planet By DOMINIQUE BROWNING THE VIEW FROM LAZY POINT A Natural Year in an Unnatural World By Carl Safina Illustrated. 401 pp. A John Macrae Book / Henry Holt Company. $32. This has been a dismal year for the health of our planet. Evidence of human-caused catastrophe mounts daily with grim reports from sea, sky and land: disappearing species, the collapse of fisheries, deforestation, the shrinking ozone layer, higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, oceanic dead zones, warming temperatures, extreme weather, rising sea levels, depleted aquifers, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost. We have already crossed into an unimaginable new epoch, but we seem unable to unite behind efforts to change, or even slow, our disastrous course. Why are we in such denial? Carl Safina’s ambitious new book, “The View From Lazy Point,” is a series of field reports entwined with a loving meditation on the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. The story he tells is “partly about a kind of heartbreak for a world that remains so vitally unaware of how imperiled it is.” But it’s also about how, despite the gloomy reports, “the world still sings.” Safina’s account of “a natural year in an unnatural world” can be harrowing, but its impassioned, informed urgency is also filled with hope, joy and love. It’s possible only to hint here at the ground Safina explores in his travels, and his spiritual journeys are even more wide-ranging. He begins at home, in a small house barely clinging to the dunes of Long Island near Montauk Point. “It’s a good spot,” he writes, “in which to wake up” — a wonderful way to judge a place. Safina’s blood pulses to the fluid rhythms of coastal life. He’s a fisherman as well as a naturalist, attuned to the ocean’s “great caldron of vitality,” and he and his dog make a habit of walking the beach every morning to see what’s turned up on the tides. With him we see the herring gulls, terns and ospreys wheeling through the air, the fish thrashing in the shallows. Lazy Point is the place Safina leaves behind when he travels to far-flung locations around the globe. Yet everywhere he goes, he reminds us how close to home we always are, how the consequences of our actions affect places — and creatures — most of us will never see. He cites dozens of examples. The scales of herring, which are in decline because of overfishing, give lipstick and nail polish their pearly shimmer. Pesticides, metals and estrogens in human wastewater disrupt the development of amphibians, which are among the most vulnerable vertebrates on the planet. Toxic chemical flame retardants from furniture, carpet pads and foam cushions turn up in the flesh of polar bears — and the breast milk of American mothers. The excess carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the air is absorbed by the vast oceans, whose increasing acid levels are destroying crucial organisms in its food chain. Safina visits the Caribbean island of Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela, because it’s meant to be the best place in the region to see healthy coral reefs — which “may be the most beautiful natural system on Earth” — yet even there he reports a decline in the parrotfish that scrape the coral clean of suffocating seaweed. More encouragingly, in Alaska, where salmon are thriving, Safina explores nature’s resilience, citing what “may be the world’s best example of managing valuable wildlife to the benefit of regional jobs and prosperity.” And in Svalbard, an archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole, Safina looks in on the Noah’s Ark of plants, the Global Seed Vault, where over 300,000 samples are stored in hope of preserving agricultural diversity in the face of severe climate change. Sadly, none of this is exactly news. Almost every place Safina visits, from Alaska to Antarctica, has figured in other books. Fine journalists like Joseph J. Romm (“Straight Up”), Elizabeth Kolbert (“Field Notes From a Catastrophe”), Bill McKibben (“Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet”), Fen Montaigne (“Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica”), Alanna Mitchell (“Seasick: Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth”) have sent up warning flares from far poles, deep seas and our own backyards. But from year to year the picture becomes clearer, the research more finely detailed, the news more dire. And that news bears repeating because it’s of the utmost urgency — and because we haven’t listened very carefully, much less responded. Safina’s prose is graceful and engaging, always on the alert for enhancing detail, whether it’s pointing out the trash strewn in the yards of a frigid Arctic town or the whale bones (“like felled trunks”) blanketing a beach in Antarctica or
[Marxism] Swans Release: January 17, 2011
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Welcome to Swans Commentary http://www.swans.com/ January 17, 2011 *** Many thanks to Richard Brand, Dean Parisian, Roger Baker, Nicole Montalette, Colin Royle, and Michael Daly for their generous financial contributions. A neat way to begin the year... Let's hope that donations keep coming regularly so that we do not have to once again kneel on our knees and beg for help come October. Real work ought to deserve real pay. *** # # # # # Note from the Editors: The beginning of 2011 has been enough to make an apocalyptic eschatologist giddy -- from massive flooding in Australia to mudslides in Brazil and paralyzing snow in the U.S. and Europe, to the political upheaval in Africa, and the Tucson, Arizona, shootings that shocked the nation (once again replacing never again with yet again) and inspired the US representatives to forestall their full-frontal assault on health care reform for a week out of respect for a fallen comrade. Touching. Looking westward from Africa, Femi Akomolafe contemplates how otherwise thinking beings can create a path of destruction, from the pollution of the environment to obscene military spending in a world with so many people in need. Meanwhile, Gilles d'Aymery turns his sights to Africa, providing an accessible examination of the roots of the Ivory Coast electoral stand-off and the Tunisian riots. Looking back at Kosovo, long since purged from our collective conscience, Gregory Elich provides a shocking report of organ trafficking uncovered during a two-year investigation into Kosovo leadership's organized criminal activities. And turning inward in the West, Charles Marowitz considers the divided political landscape, the brazenly obstructionist attitude on the right, and the potential for an American version of Easter Rising. Politics and the arts share a long tradition, and the science fiction genre is no exception. Paul Buhle reviews It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Harris, and examines this remarkable left-wing SciFi writer whose prose is still highly relevant for the gloomy reality of our present. Cliff Connor takes us to the theatre to see Amy Herzog's After The Revolution, adding that one doesn't have to have been a revolutionary to appreciate it -- though it might help. Peter Byrne shares an autobiographical story of his childhood in Chicago and his early lessons in American racism -- a timely tale in light of the recent debate over the revisionist whitewashing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Byrne's story illustrates that you can censor the N-word, but that does not erase racism... On a musical note, Isidor Saslav celebrates the extraordinary Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the sensational Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez. In the poetry corner, Guido Monte and Claudine Giovannoni conclude the verses of lament of a prisoner, -- a metaphor of our usual life, and Maxwell Clark considers social relations, asking WTF is contextual spelling? As always, we close with your letters, including an appreciation from former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck. # # # # # All the articles and the Letters to the Editor can be freely accessed from Swans front page. Please go to: http://www.swans.com/ You can also access our past issues at: http://www.swans.com/library/past_issues/past_issues.html And you have access to almost 15 years of archives by date, author, and subject at: http://www.swans.com/library/archives.html Remember, what's free to you is not to us! To help our work financially please visit http://www.swans.com/about/donate.html # # # # # Swans (aka Swans Commentary), ISSN: 1554-4915, is a bi-weekly non- commercial ad-free Web-only magazine which provides original content to its readers. We encourage pulp publications to republish Swans Work in print format. Please contact the publisher at aymery AT ix.netcom.com. Please, do not repost Swans Work on the Web and other mailing lists: Hypertext links to any pages of Swans.com are authorized; however, republication of any part of this site, inlining, mirroring, and framing are expressly prohibited. (You are receiving this E-mail notification for you have expressed your interest in Swans and the work of its team. If you wish not to receive these short notifications, simply reply to this E-mail (delete the content) and enter the word REMOVE in the subject line.) Cordially, Gilles d'Aymery -- Swans Hungry man, reach for the book: It is a weapon. B. Brecht Delete Prev | Delete Next Move to: Send list submissions to:
Re: [Marxism] readings on US support for death squads in Angola, Mozambique in 1980s
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Comrades, I recently asked for and received wonderful suggestions for readings on US policy in Central America in the 1980s - thank you. Can anyone recommend books or articles on US support to Savimbi/UNITA in Angola and to the terrorist RENAMO in Mozambique during those years? Thanks again Dennis In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story John Stockwell Replica Books, 1997 - 285 pages Focusing on the Angola paramilitary program of 1975-76 in which he played a leading role, a former CIA officer provides glimpses of the agency's clandestine operations Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Liberals don't like this color revolution
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/nlpblog/fulltext/the_political_economy_of_democracy_promotion/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Tucson witch-hunt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times Op-Ed January 14, 2011 The Tucson Witch Hunt By CHARLES M. BLOW Tragedy in Tucson. Six Dead. Democratic congresswoman shot in the head at rally. Immediately after the news broke, the air became thick with conjecture, speculation and innuendo. There was a giddy, almost punch-drunk excitement on the left. The prophecy had been fulfilled: “words have consequences.” And now, the right’s rhetorical chickens had finally come home to roost. The dots were too close and the temptation to connect them too strong. The target was a Democratic congresswoman. There was the map of her district in the cross hairs. There were her own prescient worries about overheated rhetoric. Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right. “I saw Goody Proctor with the devil! Oh, I mean Jared Lee Loughner! Yes him. With the devil!” The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting. (In fact, a couple of people who said they knew him have described him as either apolitical or “quite liberal.”) The picture emerging is of a sad and lonely soul slowly, and publicly, slipping into insanity. I have written about violent rhetoric before, and I’m convinced that it’s poisonous to our politics, that the preponderance of it comes from the right, and that it has the potential to manifest in massacres like the one in Tucson. But I also know that potential, possibility and even plausibility are not proof. The American people know it, too. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday, 42 percent of those asked said that political rhetoric was not a factor at all in the shooting, 22 percent said that it was a minor factor and 20 percent said that it was a major factor. Furthermore, most agreed that focusing on conservative rhetoric as a link in the shooting was “not a legitimate point but mostly an attempt to use the tragedy to make conservatives look bad.” And nearly an equal number of people said that Republicans, the Tea Party and Democrats had all “gone too far in using inflammatory language” to criticize their opponents. Great. So the left overreacts and overreaches and it only accomplishes two things: fostering sympathy for its opponents and nurturing a false equivalence within the body politic. Well done, Democrats. Now we’ve settled into the by-any-means-necessary argument: anything that gets us to focus on the rhetoric and tamp it down is a good thing. But a wrong in the service of righteousness is no less wrong, no less corrosive, no less a menace to the very righteousness it’s meant to support. You can’t claim the higher ground in a pit of quicksand. Concocting connections to advance an argument actually weakens it. The argument for tonal moderation has been done a tremendous disservice by those who sought to score political points in the absence of proof. • I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chb...@nytimes.com. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Tucson witch-hunt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Through the last two election cycles, people started carrying firearms to political rallies. Was this even imaginable after the assassinations in the 1960s? My question is how did carrying a gun to an event like this become acceptable. This wasn't the work of a lone schizophrenic. ML Those are questions worth pursuing but on a scale of 1 to 10, they rate about a 3. Later today I plan to write something about what is in store for the USA in the last 2 years of the Obama administration. Just as Dubya took advantage of 9/11 to launch a war against Iraq, Obama will try to use Tucson as a way to forge a government of national unity to press forward with the dismantling of what's left of the safety net. His radio address today should give some inkling of where he is going: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/15/weekly-address-president-obama-we-are-democrats-or-republicans-we-are-am While we cant escape our grief for those weve lost, we carry on now, mindful of those truths. We carry on because we have to. After all, this is still a time of great challenges for us to solve. Weve got to grow jobs faster, and forge a stronger, more competitive economy. Weve got to shore up our budget, and bring down our deficits. Weve got to keep our people safe, and see to it that the American Dream remains vibrant and alive for our children and grandchildren. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Tucson witch-hunt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Usually, the government concentration of more power and the suspension of more human rights requires a foreign threat, so I doubt Tucson will be as marketable a justification as 9/11but I'll certainly be glad to consider your argument on it... ML I didn't say that there will be a crackdown on human rights. I said that there would be an attack on the welfare state fundamentals, including social security and medicare. Obama is a very slick politician. That is why, unlike Paul Krugman, MSNBC and others, he is not stigmatizing the Republican right. Basically he is trying to unite with them against the American people. In order to push ahead with this alliance, he needs to blunt the attacks from the left--like Krugman on occasion, Bob Herbert and any other MSNBC host that has a grain of integrity. Not to speak of people like Bernie Sanders. So this civility and anti-hate speech mood works very much in his favor. Even though nobody could ever accuse Sanders of hate speech, you still have pressure on him and any other liberal Democrat to get behind the president, whatever the scoundrel has up his sleeve. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Paul Street on Loughner
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/jared_loughner_and_the_paranoid_style/ Jared Loughner and the Paranoid Style First published: 15 January, 2011 by Alex Doherty , Paul Street Paul Street is an independent policy researcher, journalist, historian, and speaker. He is the author of several books, including ‘Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11’ and most recently ‘The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power’. He spoke to NLPs Alex Doherty on the political meaning of the recent killings in Tuscon, Arizona. Q: In the wake of the killings in Tuscon the tea party and their fellow travelers have been attacked for their lack of civility and for constant use of military metaphors regarding their opponents in the Democratic Party. Is civility really the key issue here? A: No, it isn’t. Citizens have no special obligation to be gracious and polite – to show “good manners” on the model of an aristocratic tea party – toward politicians and each other in a democracy. Real civic democracy often involves rugged and passionate conflict. Egos get bruised. Harsh words are exchanged. Unpleasant truths are spoken to and against power, often in justifiably angry tones. On military metaphors, they are nothing new. Factions and parties and activists have spoke of rallying troops, winnings battles, waging wars, targeting opponents, raising campaign (finance) “war chests” and the like – making militarized political analogies and metaphors – since the beginning. (clip) The elite call for civility generally reflects and expresses the “better sort’s” fear of “the rabble’s” “populist rage” – of the non-affluent majority’s legitimate popular anger. And ordinary people get understandably irate and “uncivil” when “representative democracy” translates into too much representation for powerful corporations and financial interests and little if any real democracy for the people. That translation is deeply entrenched in the U.S., where, as the American philosopher John Dewey noted a century ago, “politics is the shadow cast on society by business.” U.S. policy now seems more captive than ever to the closet dictatorship of money. Lots of regular people are reasonably outraged by that. As the left liberal commentator William Greider put in (in a column titled “Obama Asked us to Speak, but is he Listening?”) in the spring of 2009: “People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the [economic] catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Woods on Tunisia
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A very good summary with the expected boilerplate about the need for a revolutionary party. http://www.marxist.com/insurrection-tunisia-future-of-arab-revolution.htm Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == But Jared, a curious teenager who at times could be intellectually intimidating, stood out because of his passionate opinions about government and his obsession with dreams. He became intrigued by antigovernment conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were perpetrated by the government and that the countrys central banking system was enslaving its citizens. His anger would well up at the sight of President George W. Bush, or in discussing what he considered to be the nefarious designs of government. I think he feels the people should be able to govern themselves, said Ms. Figueroa, his former girlfriend. We didnt need a higher authority. Breanna Castle, 21, another friend from junior and senior high school, agreed. He was all about less government and less America, she said, adding, He thought it was full of conspiracies and that the government censored the Internet and banned certain books from being read by us. Among the books that he would later cite as his favorites: Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Also: Peter Pan. And there was that fascination with dreams. Ms. Castle acknowledged that in high school, she too developed an interest in analyzing her dreams. But Jareds interest was much deeper. It started off with dream interpretation, but then he delved into the idea of accessing different parts of your mind and trying to control your entire brain at all times, she said. He was troubled that we only use part of our brain, and he thought that he could unlock his entire brain through lucid dreaming. With lucid dreaming, the dreamer supposedly becomes aware that he or she is dreaming and then is able to control those dreams. George Osler IV, the father of one of Jareds former friends, said his son explained the notion to him this way: You can fly. You can experience all kinds of things that you cant experience in reality. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16loughner.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Doug Henwood: Against Civility
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://lbo-news.com/2011/01/15/radio-commentary-january-15-2011/ Against civility The horrendous shootings in Tuscon have certainly inspired a lot of drivel from the commentariat. They were heartbreaking, but please lets not draw stupid conclusions from them. Perhaps most annoying has been the call for a return to civility. Well, no, I dont feel like being civil. I like being rude. The problem with the rudeness in American political discourse is that its often so stupid, not that its so rude. The idea that politics can be civil is a fantasy for elite technocrats and the well-heeled. Im reminded of something that Adolph Reed once said to me, characterizing a mutual acquaintance as the kind of person who thinks that if you could just all the smart people together on Marthas Vineyard, they could solve all our social problems. Obviously they couldnt. Margaret Atwood once wrote that politics is about power: whos got it, who wants it, how it operates; in a word, whos allowed to do what to whom, who gets what from whom, who gets away with it and how. Theres no way that could be rendered civil. The field of politics is constituted by vast differences in interests and preferences. Much of the time, we dont talk about those things directly or explicitly. We talk about them in caricature or euphemism, or take it out on scapegoats. Some of the so-called left, such as it is, is using Obamas speech in Tuscon the other day as an excuse for rediscovering their crush on Obama. On The Nations website, always a rich source for high-mindedness, John Nichols wrote this (Dont Tone It Down, Tone It Up: Make Debate Worthy of Those We Have Lost): It has been said that Obama strives for a post-partisan balance. But this was Obama speaking as a pre-partisan, as an idealist recalling a more innocent America and imagining that some of that innocence might be renewed as shocked and heartbroken citizens seek to heal not just a community but a nation that is too harsh, too cruel, too divided . [F]or a few minutes on Wednesday night, we dared with our president to answer cynicism with idealism, to answer tragedy with hope, to answer division as one nation, indivisible. Really, John, when was this nation ever innocent? When we were trading in slaves and killing Indians? What act of healing will make this nation less divided? The rich and powerful have a lot of money and might and theyre not going to give it up easily. Elsewhere on The Nation website, Ari Berman actually used the phrase better angels to characterize the press rhetorical targets (In Arizona, Obama Appeals to Our Better Angels). (Uh-oh, I said targets.) This reminded me of Alexander Cockburns great characterization of the role of the mainstream pundit: to fire volley after volley of cliché into the densely packed prejudices of his readers. But clearly its not just the mainstream punditso to alternapundits. Its not just that these stock phrases grate on the earstheir use is a symptom that their speaker evading some complexities. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == To clarify for those not blessed with residency in the American heartland, not liking Dubya doesn't mean anything vis-a-vis the teabaggers. A lot of them think George W. Bush was a closet fancy-pants corporate Republican. A lot of them also distrust the official tale about 9/11, as I've pointed out many times to the truthers on this list. ML You're missing the point, Mark. There is no coherency to Loughner's thinking, as the favorable reference to the Communist Manifesto would indicate, not to speak of lucid dreaming. While my next article will focus mainly on Obama's calculations, I will make the point that Loughner's schizophrenia was manifest FIVE years ago long before Palin was a factor in American politics. The left has the causality all wrong on Loughner. He was not sparked into action because of all the conspiratorial ideology that surrounded him. Instead his madness drove him in that direction, but once he began moving in that direction his understanding of what he read--from Mein Kampf to the CM--was mediated by a short-circuited brain. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner was a truther who hated George W. Bush
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Most likely, he found them to be verbal irritants he used to shock, impress and get attention from his peers. No, Mark. I was just playing a kind of shock jock game in 1960 when I joined the YAF to scandalize my JFK worshipping classmates in high school. Or Charles Bukowski telling his classmates in 1938 that he admired Hitler. Loughner was somewhere else entirely. He was in an alternate universe as he frequently expressed. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Good guest post by Kevin Ovenden on Lenin's Tomb
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/01/fall-of-ben-ali.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Excellent blog from Tunisia
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://methalif.blogspot.com/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Apropos of Zhao LIang's Crime and Punishment
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/14/china-police-chief-dies-custody Chinese police chief's widow alleges torture after he dies in custody After the sudden death of Xie Zhigang, rights group says forced confessions are rampant in China despite new rules Within a day of his detention, Xie Zhigang was dead. His interrogators had called the emergency services because he had no appetite. He died in hospital, where doctors recorded the cause as a sudden heart attack. His widow said his body told a more complicated story. There were bruises all over his body, and deep scars on his wrist and ankles. Five of his ribs were broken, said Wang Li, who alleges that he died due to torture. In a country that has seen repeated scandals over deaths in custody and forced confessions, two things about Xie's case stand out. First, the death in Benxi city, Liaoning, in December came months after China introduced new rules designed to reduce the use of torture in investigations. Second, Xie, who had been detained on suspicion of corruption, was a local police chief. Forced confessions are rampant, said Phelim Kine, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. That a security official who fell foul of the authorities might end up being a victim of the same treatment really is not surprising. This is the template for investigating crimes. No one knows how many such cases happen in China each year. A report from the ministry of public security said 1,800 police officers were suspended for torture in 2009. In a survey conducted three years earlier, 70% of prisoners said fellow detainees they knew had made forced confessions. Teng Biao, a Beijing-based lawyer, said. There is no annual official data on how many people are actually involved and I believe even if there is, the number wouldn't be true. I can say that it is involved in most cases to some extent ... Among my cases and those of my lawyer friends we always come across this. The worst abuses have made waves in state media and among the public. Last March, police in a town in central Henan province were sacked after the death of a man arrested for theft. The Chongqing Evening News said officers told them he died suddenly while drinking hot water. The dead man's family said his nipples had been cut off, his genitals slashed and his skull fractured. It has been the futility of such tactics – as highlighted by the cases of She Xianglin and Zhao Zuohai – that has helped to galvanise opinion. Both men served lengthy sentences after admitting murders, only for their alleged victims to reappear. Both said they were beaten into confessions. Those miscarriages of justice were in part responsible for new rules introduced last year against the use of evidence obtained by torture. But although they are backed by the five main agencies involved in criminal procedures, they have yet to pass into national law. In effect they are internal guidelines, and victims will not be able to use them to challenge abusive police in the courts. Experts say they demonstrate a welcome consensus at the top on the need for action, but implementation by those lower down will be another matter. In the criminal procedure law it says clearly that torture and forced confession is prohibited. But the reality is, the people who do this, prosecutors, the police... they are not punished for doing this, said Teng. The ultimate reason [this still happens] is that there is no independent judicial system and there are no checks and balances on public power. Other factors might be easier to resolve. Investigators are usually poorly trained, poorly paid and under pressure to achieve results. In major cases they are expected to meet a deadline, and failure can lose them a bonus or promotion. Suspects have no right to a lawyer when they are detained until they are arrested formally. By then, most confessions have been made. An experiment by researchers in Beijing found that guaranteeing access to lawyers from the start almost totally eradicated torture. Simply telling security officers what to do seems to have little effect. Since 2006, recording all interrogations of officials has been mandatory. Yet when Xie's family asked for the tape of his interview, prosecutors said they had not recorded it because they were not asking in-depth questions, reported China Youth Daily, which broke the story. Ban Yue, Benxi's foreign affairs officer, told the newspaper that the city was taking the case very seriously and that the results of Xie's autopsy would be published by the end of the month. City prosecutors said queries should be referred to the provincial office, where the Guardian's calls rang unanswered. Additional research by Lin Yi Send list
[Marxism] Article on the PRD and the EZLN in Mexico
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Don't know if this was mentioned here, but this is a very good article: http://links.org.au/node/2095 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Lawyer At Firm Aiding Assange's Accusers Okayed CIA Rendition
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=236:partner-at-firm-counseling-assanges-accusers-helped-in-cia-torture-renditioncatid=44Itemid=28 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner's last close friend said that he ignored TV and talk radio
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Marvin Gandall: Loughner deliberately targeted Giffords, the widely-publicized metaphorical target of white Republicans in Arizona, and there is enough his ramblings which evoke right-wing themes, to suggest that his evidently schizophrenic behaviour can't entirely be disassociated from the social and political climate which nurtured it. No, there is not enough in his ramblings. His obsession with grammar, logic, reality, etc., telling a math professor that 8 is really 16, telling a poetry professor that babies were suicide bombers, stating that the trees were orange is psychotic and has no connection to the Tea Party. The guy was out to lunch, as just about everybody who knew him states. There are people who kill because they overdosed on hate radio. He was not one of them. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Loughner's descent
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Washington Post Thursday, January 13, 2011; 12:00 AM Friends, teachers tell of Loughner's descent into world of fantasy By Amy Gardner, David A. Fahrenthold and Marc Fisher He played late-night marathon games of Monopoly with his buddies. He went with friends on family vacations. He would hang with pals at IHOP on Fridays. He had a girlfriend. He laughed and he loved and he knew things - about jazz, cars, fantasy games. And then Jared Loughner slipped into a world of fantasy that was no online game. Slowly but steadily, his intelligence warped into a distorted, disconnected series of obsessions. He developed an illogical fascination with logic. Math, grammar, logic - the systems civilization has developed to make sense of the world became the means through which he expressed the confusion and pain in his increasingly lost mind. Many teenagers try on different identities, experiment with new friends, and explore intellectual and emotional frontiers. Friends say Loughner's sophomore year was a whirlwind of change. He left behind his passion of the past few years - he stopped playing sax. He found a new love - his first real girlfriend. He lost that love, changed his look, switched friends, discovered new interests and seemed to drift off into a world of ideas that friends found odd, irrational, disturbing. What Montanaro calls Loughner's mental downfall seemed to start after his breakup with the girlfriend, who did not respond to a request for an interview. Until that relationship blossomed, Loughner actually had many friends, Montanaro said. Jared really became an outcast, he said. We allowed him around us for a while, but he started acting nutty. His friends changed from people like us to more drug-oriented people. After high school, Loughner again shifted passions. He cut his hair short, switched from hip-hop to heavy-metal, and wore metal band T-shirts. He spent a lot of time at the home of his friend Zachary Osler, sometimes staying the night. One night when Loughner was not there, his parents came looking for him, saying that Jared had run away from home. Osler told the parents that their son was at a motel, said Osler's father, George. By this time, Loughner had a growing fascination with dreams and alternative realities. He believed in lucid or conscious dreaming, the idea that you could consciously enter your own dream and change the path of its characters. He loved the 2001 movie Waking Life, in which a young man walks in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity. Loughner focused all his energy into understanding the mystery of man's existence on Earth, George Osler said. He was desperately trying to escape from all the chaos and suffering in his world. Loughner's favorite writer was Philip K. Dick, whose science-fiction tales travel a mystical path in which omnipotent governments and businesses are the bad guys and the average man is often lost in an identity-shattering swirl of paranoia, schizophrenia and questions about whether the universe and the individual are real or part of some vast conspiracy. Two years ago, Loughner texted his old friend Zach Osler: I don't want to be your friend anymore. What Jared did was wrong, said Roxanne Osler, Zach's mother, referring to his alleged shootings. But . . . I feel bad for the kid. . . . I wish people would have taken a better notice of him and gotten him help. He had friends, but then all of a sudden . . . he had nobody, and that's not a nice place to be. In the past year or so, the crumbling of what was once Loughner was clear to anyone who bothered to look. Teachers, fellow students, even the anonymous e-buddies who substituted for the real friends he had lost - many suspected mental illness and said so, to one another, to Loughner, even to people who might have taken action. But no one did. A student in Loughner's math class at Pima Community College usually sat near the classroom door for fear that he might turn violent, said her professor, Ben McGahee. The student recently moved out of her home and the new occupant left this note on the door Wednesday: Both my husband and I had an experience where someone resembling the shooter came to our property and spent some time with a bit of a strange face-off between us. This person gave me the creeps and gave my husband the creeps. She declined to comment further. Within minutes of the start of McGahee's eight-week course on algebra last June, he knew Loughner would be a problem. Loughner, who had already failed the same course, called the remedial class a scam and the teacher a fraud. Asked to quiet down, Loughner calmly replied, How can you deny math and not accept math? The next day, McGahee sent Loughner to see a school counselor, Delisa
Re: [Marxism] Loughner's last close friend said that he ignored TV and talk radio
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Marvin Gandall: Loughner did not overdose on talk radio, but he reportedly did frequent internet sites like Above Top Secret and Zeitgeist which see 9/11, the financial crisis, and other contemporary political issues as conspiracies hatched at the highest levels of government and Wall Street. The conspiracist subculture, which draws a higher proportion of paranoid and otherwise disturbed individuals, combines tropes common to both right and left in contradictory, incoherent, and fantastical ways. The documentary film Zeitgeist is not really Tea Party fare. In fact, mostly sounds like the sort of thing that would be sent out as a premium during a WBAI fund drive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist:_The_Movie The film opens with animated abstract visualizations, film and stock footage, a cartoon and audio quotes about spirituality, followed by clips of war, explosions, and the September 11 attacks. This is followed by the film's title screen. The film's introduction ends with a portion of the late comedian George Carlin's monologue on religion accompanied by an animated cartoon. Part I, entitled The Greatest Story Ever Sold, questions religions as being god-given stories, arguing that the Christian religion specifically is mainly derived from other religions, astronomical facts, astrological myths and traditions, which in turn were derived from or shared elements with others. In furtherance of the Jesus myth hypothesis, this part argues that the historical Jesus is a literary and astrological hybrid, nurtured politically. The 9/11 attacks are the subject of Part II of the film. Part II, entitled All the World's a Stage, uses integral footage of several 9/11 conspiracy theory films to claim that the September 11 attacks were either orchestrated or allowed to happen by elements within the United States government in order to generate mass fear, initiate and justify the War on Terror, provide a pretext for the curtailment of civil liberties, and produce economic gain. These claims include that the US government had advance knowledge about the attacks, the response of the military deliberately let the planes reach their targets, and the World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7 underwent a controlled demolition. In a March 17, 2009 New York Times article, Alan Feuer reported that Peter Joseph had indicated that he had moved away from his opinion on whether the September 11 attacks were an inside job perpetrated by the U.S. government.[7] Peter Joseph later stated that his stance on 9/11 had not changed.[11] The United States Government's income tax is claimed to be unconstitutional. Part III, entitled Don't Mind the Men Behind the Curtain, argues that three wars of the United States during the twentieth century were waged purely for economic gain by what the film refers to as international bankers. The film alleges that certain events were engineered as excuses to enter into war including the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Same thing with abovetopsecret.com: AboveTopSecret.com is the Internet's largest and most popular discussion board community dedicated to the intelligent exchange of ideas and debate on a wide range of alternative topics such as conspiracies, UFO's, paranormal, secret societies, political scandals, new world order, terrorism, and dozens of related topics with a diverse mix of users from all over the world. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Crime and Punishment; Petition
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Opening today for a one week engagement at Anthology Film Archives in New York City are two documentaries by Zhao Liang who works in an austere cinéma vérité style but who leaves no doubt about where his sympathies lie, namely with China’s poor. Despite being filmed with the cooperation of Chinese police, “Crime and Punishment” is just the opposite of “Cops”, the long-running Fox TV reality show that depicts different police departments around the United States as a kind of grown-up boy scouts with guns. The border guards in Liang’s documentary, who are a kind of militia operating under the PLA’s authority, beat and humiliate their prisoners in the police station as if it was part of their job description. Of note is the fact that Liang was all on his own during the filming, an incredible accomplishment given the standard crew of 20 or more in most documentaries made in the West. Perhaps working on his own allowed the cops to drop their guard, or—more likely—they didn’t really care if they were shown as sadists. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/crime-and-punishment-petition/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Insanity Defense
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I am not sure if Richard Fidler read what I wrote here the other day, but I feel compelled to repeat it since he questions whether the insanity plea can still be used in American courts. It was originally sent to the list nearly 7 years ago. Today's NY Times reports on a controversial death penalty case in Texas: NY Times, February 4, 2004 Insanity Issue Lingers as Texas Execution Is Set By RALPH BLUMENTHAL In one of the more extraordinary cases in the nation's leading death penalty state, a murder defendant with a long history of mental illness who fired his lawyers and argued his own insanity defense in a cowboy outfit is scheduled to be executed on Thursday. The condemned man, Scott Louis Panetti, 45, is to die by lethal injection unless the governor or the courts intervene. In 1992, Mr. Panetti, who was then 34 and had been hospitalized 14 times for mental illness, smashed his way into the home of his estranged wife and, with her and their young daughter watching, shot her parents to death. At his trial in 1995, Mr. Panetti dressed in a Tom Mix hat and cowboy garb, rambled incoherently and tried to subpoena Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy and Anne Bancroft. He went into trances, nodded off, and gestured threateningly at jurors. (clip) The National Mental Health Association, based in Alexandria, Va., called Tuesday on the governor to commute Mr. Panetti's sentence to life imprisonment, saying Mr. Panetti has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and there is evidence to suggest that he was psychotic at the time of his crime. In addition, the group said his mental illness hindered his ability to aid in his own defense. At a news conference in Austin on Tuesday, representatives of the Texas Defender Service, a private nonprofit law firm representing indigent capital defendants, called on Mr. Perry for a 30-day reprieve to allow a review of the case. Allowing a schizophrenic in a cowboy costume to represent himself in a death penalty case gives new meaning to the term `frontier justice,' said Jim Marcus, executive director of the defender service. Given the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' history of tolerance for defense lawyers who sleep or use drugs and alcohol throughout death penalty trials, however, its laissez-faire approach is hardly surprising, he said. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/national/04EXEC.html === Years from now, when socialist historians examine the dead carcass of US capitalism, they will pay special attention to the growing barbarism of the penal system in the late 20th century. While most attention will obviously be focused on the reintroduction of the death penalty and a racist judicial system that incarcerates minorities disproportionately, there will also have to be a close look at the tendency to treat mentally ill people as common criminals. For all practical purposes, the insanity defense is a thing of the past. It was first introduced in Great Britain in the 1830s, a time of child labor and other cruelties that figure large in the novels of Charles Dickens. The insanity defense was first used in the case of an 1843 assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Robert Peel by a psychotic individual named Daniel M'Naghten. When a physician testified that M'Naghten was insane, the prosecution agreed to stop the case and the defendant was declared insane despite protests from Queen Victoria and the House of Lords. The M'Naghten Rule can be simply described as a right and wrong test. The jury must answer two questions: (1) did the defendant know what he was doing when he committed the crime?; or (2) did the defendant understand that his actions were wrong? When psychotic individuals were on trial without a prior history of hospitalization, it was somewhat more difficult to find them not guilty by reason of insanity. Nowadays, the fact that Scott Louis Panetti was in mental hospitals 14 times previous to the murder of his in-laws had no effect on the trial. So what happened? In a word, John Hinckley. After Hinckley was found not guilty by insanity of his assassination attempt on the beloved reactionary US President, committees of the House and Senate held hearings regarding use of the insanity defense within a month of the verdict. Within three years of Hinckley's acquittal, Congress and half of the states enacted laws limiting use of the defense and one state, Utah, abolished the defense outright. In 1986 Utah was joined by Montana and Idaho, two other frontier justice states. Congress passed revisions in the defense embodied in the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which reads: It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the
Re: [Marxism] The Insanity Defense
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == However, I suspect, without checking, that the defense is often invoked by defense counsel in situations such as one that arouses such interest on this list. Watch what arguments Loughner's lawyers raise in his trial. A successful defense on those grounds -- not legally barred (yet) in Arizona, could make new law in the good old USA. Perhaps, given your insistence that he is simply insane and not motivated in any way politically, you could help rally support for his defense. He is certainly going to need it, the poor bugger. Richard Richard, his lawyer hopes to use his disability to keep him from being executed. That is the best she can hope for. Before Hinckley, someone like Loughner would have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and put into a mental institution. Now I cannot say that a reactionary state like Arizona might have not had its own barbarian laws prior to Hinckley but it should have. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Why Loughner shot Giffords
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Richard Seymour: It does matter, actually. This 'rhetoric' is part of the political mobilization of business-based groups to prevent the Democratic base from achieving moderately social democratic policies like decent healthcare, etc. Forcing the Right into retreat would leave the Left in a better place to apply pressure to the administration, which is otherwise going to come exclusively from the Right. Frankly, you're missing a huge open goal here: this should be the end of the Tea Party as a mainstream political movement. They should be finished, and the Left should be chucking dirt on the grave. How depressing to read this. It is obviously Richard's attempt to superimpose his party's turn toward Labour on the American political landscape. That is why I try to avoid commenting on the internal politics of other countries at all costs. Of course, Richard should feel free to dispense advice from afar. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Is Nietzsche at fault? Or maybe the dictionary...
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 11, 2011 Police Say They Visited Tucson Suspect’s Home Even Before Rampage By JO BECKER, KIRK JOHNSON and SERGE F. KOVALESKI This article is by Jo Becker, Kirk Johnson and Serge F. Kovaleski. TUCSON — The police were sent to the home where Jared L. Loughner lived with his family on more than one occasion before the attack here on Saturday that left a congresswoman fighting for her life and six others dead, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said on Tuesday. A spokesman, Jason Ogan, said the details of the calls were being reviewed by legal counsel and would be released as soon as the review was complete. He said he did not know what the calls were about — they could possibly have been minor, even trivial matters — or whether they involved Jared Loughner or another member of the household. A friend of Mr. Loughner’s also said in an interview on Tuesday that Mr. Loughner, 22, was skilled with a gun — as early as high school — and had talked about a philosophy of fostering chaos. The news of police involvement with the Loughners suggests that county sheriff’s deputies were at least familiar with the family, even if the reason for their visits was unclear as of Tuesday night. The account by Mr. Loughner’s friend, a rare extended interview with someone close to Mr. Loughner in recent years, added some details to the emerging portrait of the suspect and his family. “He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos, and that is probably why he did the shooting, along with the fact he was sick in the head,” said Zane Gutierrez, 21, who was living in a trailer outside Tucson and met Mr. Loughner sometimes to shoot at cans for target practice. The Loughner family released a statement on Tuesday, its first since the attacks, expressing — in a six-line document handed to reporters outside their house — sorrow for the losses experienced by the victims and their families. “It may not make any difference, but we wish that we could change the heinous events of Saturday,” the statement said. “There are no words that can possibly express how we feel. We wish that there were, so we could make you feel better.” The new details from Mr. Gutierrez about Mr. Loughner — including his philosophy of anarchy and his expertise with a handgun, suggest that the earliest signs of behavior that may have ultimately led to the attacks started several years ago. Mr. Gutierrez said his friend had become obsessed with the meaning of dreams and their importance. He talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Will To Power” and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing. And every day, his friend said, Mr. Loughner would get up and write in his dream journal, recording the world he experienced in sleep and its possible meanings. “Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.” And that dream world, his friend said, could be downright strange. “He would ask me constantly, ‘Do you see that blue tree over there?’ He would admit to seeing the sky as orange and the grass as blue,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “Normal people don’t talk about that stuff.” He added that Mr. Loughner “used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.” As his behavior grew more puzzling to his friends, he was getting better with a pistol. Starting in high school, Mr. Loughner honed his marksmanship with a 9-millimeter pistol, the same caliber weapon used in the attack Saturday, until he became proficient at handling the weapon and firing it quickly. “If he had a gun pointed at me, there is nothing I could do because he would make it count,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “He was quick.” He also said that Mr. Loughner had increasing trouble interacting in social settings — during one party, for instance, Mr. Loughner retreated upstairs alone to a room and was found reading a dictionary. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Loughner a textbook case paranoid schizophrenic
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.salon.com/news/jared_loughner/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/01/11/jared_loughner_paranoid_schizophrenia_and_why Tuesday, Jan 11, 2011 20:01 ET Loughner a textbook case paranoid schizophrenic A respected psychiatrist explains why talk of political rhetoric is a red herring, and where responsibility lies By Sarah Hepola It wasn't long after news of the Tucson, Ariz., tragedy broke that the words paranoid schizophrenic entered the conversation. Armchair psychiatrists across the country looked at Jared Loughner -- 22, history of antisocial behavior, with a cache of rambling YouTube videos on government mind control -- and diagnosed him. But is there any truth to this? And if so, how does it help make sense of his horrific actions? To try and untangle the influences that might lead one lone gunman to fire his Glock at a political rally, we turned to Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, respected psychiatrist and one of the foremost experts on paranoid schizophrenics. Torrey has written several books on the mental illness, including the bestselling classic Surviving Schizophrenia. He is founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia, a national nonprofit for the mentally ill. Q: Quite early in the news cycle, the media more or less diagnosed Jared Loughner as paranoid schizophrenic. Do you think that's accurate? A: He's a textbook case. Most psychiatrists will tell you they need to examine a patient before diagnosing him, but this guy has all of the symptoms. He has the right age of onset. He has a deteriorating social course, as they say in the [DSM], social and occupational dysfunction. He has delusions, and they're pretty strange. It's common for schizophrenics to think people are trying to control their mind, but thinking the government is trying to control your grammar -- I've never heard that before. The real tip-off is the markedly disorganized speech, which you see in the rambling videos. This is the kind of disorganized speech that you virtually never get in any other condition. It's what we call pathognomonic of schizophrenia. That is, when you hear that symptom, it's schizophrenia until proven otherwise. He's also got the affective flattening of emotion, which you see in that mug shot. Q: Let's talk about that mug shot, because it's pretty striking. This guy is getting booked on six murders. Why is he smiling? A: That's pretty bizarre, and that's something a person with schizophrenia will do, because their emotions are disconnected from what's going on. When you tell a schizophrenic your mother died, they might smile instead of cry. Early on, I wondered: Are we jumping to conclusions with this guy's diagnosis? But you're the expert, and you're saying you feel pretty confident. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I will call it a duck until somebody tells me it's really a chicken in disguise. Is there any chance it's not schizophrenia? Sure, but I'll give you 100 to 1 odds. Q: I was struck by his obsession with lucid dreaming. A: When someone comes in and talks about lucid dreaming, drugs are the first thing I wonder about. But with schizophrenia, you can get almost anything that's weird like that. In itself, it didn't stand out to me. Q: And there was some evidence of drug use with Loughner. It sounds like he was smoking marijuana, and then got off of it. Did anything stand out to you about that part of the story? A: Certainly anyone in his age group using substances is not unusual. We do commonly find that when people have schizophrenia or bipolar they tend to increase substance abuse. I don't know if he's hearing voices, but what I see frequently is young kids hearing voices, and they start using acid or PCP because then they can explain why they're hearing voices. It's a way to avoid the reality that, hey, I'm getting sick. Q: We have a strong correlation in our minds between schizophrenia and dangerous behavior. What is the real connection between this mental illness and violence? A: There is a very small number of people with schizophrenia who are, indeed, dangerous and do things like this. It's very important to emphasize that the vast majority of people with this disease are not dangerous, and there are certain predictors in terms of who will be dangerous. Past history of violence, substance abuse, both of which are predictors for non-schizophrenics, too. But I've followed schizophrenia for 30 years, and I have never seen one of these high-profile homicides where the fellow hasn't been off his medication when he did it. Being off medication is a clear risk factor for people who have a past history. Then there are certain kinds of symptoms as well. Thinking people are controlling your mind will increase the risk of violence, also having what we call
Re: [Marxism] Why Loughner shot Giffords
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Richard Seymour: Lastly, just to get the record straight, you do *not* avoid commenting on the internal politics of other countries at all costs. Well, you can check my blog and you will find absolutely nothing on the British elections. I have no business telling British leftists how to vote. But you will certainly find me sticking my nose into how the British left *organizes* itself. My views on this matter are totally detached from politics as such. I advocate a break with sectarianism whatever the month or year. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Why Loughner shot Giffords
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Some interesting letters to the NY Times, contesting an article by the conservative scum bag David Brooks, who suggests that Loughner's rampage had nothing to do with politics: January 11, 2011 Well, this is also the viewpoint of the psychiatrist who was interviewed by Salon.com. Let me repeat what he said: Q: We've heard a lot of debate about how heated political rhetoric might have led to this. What do you think about that? A: I think it's a red herring. We have seen these kinds of things in periods with relative peace in the political environment, we've seen it in turbulent times. I think it's unrelated, frankly. The only reason we're talking about this today is that he killed six people rather than one person and that one of the people he shot is a congresswoman. These are not uncommon events. People like this man, with likely untreated schizophrenia, are responsible for about 10 percent of the homicides in the United States. That means about 1,600 homicides a year. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] 131 online postings from Loughner--none political
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576075851892478080.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] nt Sarah Palin's Crosshairs ... and Obama's
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch January 12, 2011 All Killings are Tragic, But Numbers Count Sarah Palin's Crosshairs ... and Obama's By JOHN V. WALSH It was a coincidence but an enlightening one. As I heard of Sarah Palin’s cartoon crosshairs trained on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and other politicians along with Barack Obama’s condemnation of violence, I happened to be tuning into a TV documentary on Wikileaks. There, 30 minutes into the video, I found myself staring into real crosshairs - not the cartoon version on Palin’s Facebook page. These were from the videos of the helicopter gunship, mowing down civilians in cold blood, including reporters from Reuters in the Wikileaks release “Collateral Murder.” Those who have seen this, far too few since it did not get saturation coverage of the type reserved for the murders in Tucson, remember the cold-blooded killings of innocents who received no warning and no request to surrender. They were gunned down in cold blood along with the good Samaritan Iraqis who tried to rescue one of the wounded lying in a giant pool of his own blood and take him to a hospital. These would be rescuers were also gunned down – along with their children who happened to be with them in their van. [See Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPunch report here last April.] So let us compare the real-life cross hairs trained on these innocents to the cartoon crosshairs of the dimwit Sarah Palin, puppet of the neocons. One set of crosshairs is figurative hyperbole equivalent to the cry of Obama in his campaign, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” But the other in the Wikileaks video is cold blooded, calculated murder. And although that murder occurred on Bush’s “watch,” the same murders continue today under Obama’s direction– not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan and Pakistan - and not just with helicopter gunships but with drones and bombers killing hundreds, if not thousands by now two years into the peace presidency of the Messiah. These are the forces of mass murder which Obama dispatches to the Central Asian killing fields each day. Is this man no less a war criminal than Bush/Cheney? I wonder what goes through the minds of the Democrat Party activists as they avert their gaze from the real crosshairs about which they say so little to the cartoon ones. The Dems seem to be a latter day version of The Fantastiks’s Luisa. Not to defend the dimwit Sarah Palin who has parlayed her looks and pzazz into a useful tool for the neocons. But who is worse – the phony peace president Obama or the silly, powerless Palin? Or are the deaths of defenseless civilians at Obama’s hands to be overlooked because they are poor Asians and helpless Muslims, instead of a Congresswoman? Obama fits neatly into the central theme of Andrew Bacevich’s book “Washington Rules.” The book’s most important message is that the foreign policy of the U.S. Empire is marked by continuity. A new beginning is not heralded by each presidency as the “progressives,” who can see no farther than the next election, would argue. Rather as Bacevich shows and Chomsky and others, among them Libertarians and consitent Paleocons, have argued for decades, the policy and imperatives of U.S. foreign policy endure from one President to the next. Those who seek refuge in the next savior to win the peace, at least as long as he is readily anointed without strife by one of the major parties, are bound to be sorely disappointed. Sarah Palin and her dismal cartoons are the outpourings of an idiot useful to the champions of Empire. But the real gold dirt for them is Obama, a pol who can co-opt the forces for peace and lead us ever deeper into killing fields where the dead, maimed and displaced can scarcely be counted. Which is worse? John V. Walsh can be reached at john.end...@gmail.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Why won't Obama meet with the left?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Counterpunch January 12, 2011 An Open Letter to the President Why Won't Obama Meet With the Left? By RALPH NADER Dear President Obama: The sentiments expressed in this letter may have more meaning more for you now that the results of the mid-term elections are clear. You have seen what can happen when a number of your supporters lose their enthusiasm and stay home or do not actively participate as volunteers. In your first two years, you have developed a wide asymmetry between your association with Big Business executives and the leaders of national civic and labor groups whose members are in the tens of millions. You have met repeatedly at the White House and other locales with corporate officials, spoken to their gatherings and even traveled abroad with them to promote their exports. Recently on your trip to India with a covey of business leaders, you vigorously touted their products, some by brand name (Boeing and Harley-Davidson's expensive motorcycles). Your traveling companions could not have been more gratified as you legitimized their view that WTO trade rules were a net plus for employment in the United States as well as India. Imagine—the President as business agent. Contrast this close relationship with profit-making firms, many subsidized by the taxpayers in various ways, and probed for health, safety or economic violations by regulatory agencies, with your refusal to openly and regularly address the large non-profit civic groups. Before your inauguration, I wrote requesting that you do what Jimmy Carter did just after his election when he addressed and interacted with nearly one thousand civic leaders at a Washington hotel. They addressed a broad array of issues: environment, food, labor, energy, consumer, equality for women, civil rights-civil liberties and other endeavors for a better society. It was a grand and productive occasion. You know that the civic groups—often called the Independent Sector—employ many thousands of people around the country often on shoestring budgets with no profits in mind. They work for health, safety, economic and environmental well being, for living wages and access to justice, for peace and the rule of law in domestic and foreign policy. Yet you as President do not adequately attach your cachet in their favor and give them the visibility that you give commercial businesses. Strange! For profits and jobs, yes I'm coming says the President. For justice and jobs, no I'm not coming says the President. It is time to associate yourself with civil society, name some with approbation as you have done with companies, express your support for the expansion of their budgets and activities, in short, identify with them. Please note that when you invite the CEOs of Aetna and Pfizer numerous times to the White House and cut deals not exactly in the patients' best interest, while you decline to invite old friends and mentors on these health insurance and health care subjects like Dr. Quentin Young in Chicago, people are perplexed and communicate their displeasure via their networks. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that on February 7, you will cross Lafayette Park from the White House to the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, his longtime political nemesis… What about walking next door and visiting your political friends at the headquarters of the AFL-CIO whose member unions represent millions of working Americans? You can discuss with Richard Trumka, a former coal miner and the new president of the AFL-CIO, your campaign promises in 2008. Repeatedly you said to the American people that you supported the card check and a federal minimum wage of $9.50 in 2011. The 1968 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation would be about $10 today. (The federal minimum wage is now $7.25) Moving up the minimum wage to nearly what it was back in 1968, in purchasing power, would increase consumer demand by over $200 billion a year. Isn't that what this economy needs right now, not to mention the boon it would be to long deprived, underpaid workers and their families? After all, businesses of all sizes have received a variety of substantial tax breaks during this windfall period of a stagnant federal minimum wage. Isn't it time for some equity for the people? On a related note, over a year ago, Mr. Mike Kelleher, the man in charge of letters written to you, said he would get back to me about your policy on replying to letters that deal with substantive matters, whether under your signature or the signature of your assistants and department heads. I have not heard from Mr. Kelleher. Let me give you an example. Months ago I wrote to inform you that several prominent environmental and energy groups, such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the
[Marxism] Frank Marshall Davis's warning to Barack Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Youre going to college to get educated. Youre going there to get trained. Theyll train you to want you dont need. Theyll train you to manipulate words so they dont mean anything anymore. Theyll train you so good, youll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/frank-marshall-daviss-warning-to-barack-obama/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Frank Marshall Davis's warning to Barack Obama CORRECTION
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Youre going to college to get educated. Youre going there to get trained. Theyll train you to want you dont need. Theyll train you to manipulate words so they dont mean anything anymore. Theyll train you so good, youll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/frank-marshall-daviss-warning-to-barack-obama/ That should be Youre going to college NOT to get educated. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Why Loughner shot Giffords
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == gee, I thought that's was what I was saying? although now that I think about it, Hitler could have had mental problems and been a serious political actor at the same time, like Nixon was. Cod, you apparently don't have any close relatives who suffered from schizophrenia. Schizophrenics are extremely disabled and are fortunate enough to hold down only the most menial jobs. The overwhelming majority, however, are on permanent disability. Watch this to understand the disease: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moP_e-gx5hk Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner's last close friend said that he ignored TV and talk radio
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == While there is no clear indication that Loughner was directly influenced by right-wing ideology - it still remains to be seen whether he was or wasn't - there seems little doubt, based on his emails and the testimony of those who knew him, that his rage, confusion, incoherence, virulent misogyny, attraction to guns and the military, dark suicidal thoughts, and immersion in a white community feeling itself under threat from an alien race(s), all fit the profile of the authoritarian personality described by Adorno and others which is typically attracted to right wing causes. I don't believe anyone has gone so far as to describe him as schizophrenic. Well, I describe him as schizophrenic based on the evidence. So does the psychiatrist interviewed in Salon.com. I think people have to think less in terms of Adorno than the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Diagnostic Criteria for Schizophrenia A. Characteristic symptoms: Two (or more) of the following, each present for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated): * delusions * hallucinations * disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence) * grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior * negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia, or avolition Note: Only one Criterion A symptom is required if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts, or two or more voices conversing with each other. B. Social/occupational dysfunction: For a significant portion of the time since the onset of the disturbance, one or more major areas of functioning such as work, interpersonal relations, or self-care are markedly below the level achieved prior to the onset (or when the onset is in childhood or adolescence, failure to achieve expected level of interpersonal, academic, or occupational achievement). Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] More evidence of Loughner's insanity
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == How many times did comrades remind us of Loughner's anti-abortion views, as if he had something in common with the Catholic right? This article clarifies things: After an incident in February in which Mr. Loughner blurted out during a poetry class that dynamite ought to be attached to babies, a campus police officer wrote: “I suggested they keep an eye on him and call us if anything else developed that concerned them.” Mr. Loughner explained the remark matter of factly. “He said that the class had been talking about abortion, which made him think of death, which made him think of suicide bombers, which made him think of babies as suicide bombers,” wrote Aubrey Conover, a campus administrator. I would say that anybody who thinks that Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin inspired him to go on a killing spree is as nuts as him. NY Times January 12, 2011 College Reports Detail Suspect’s Odd Acts By MARC LACEY TUCSON — Officials at Pima Community College, where Jared L. Loughner attended, believed that he might be under the influence of drugs or mentally ill after bizarre classroom disruptions in which he unnerved instructors and fellow students, including one time he insisted that the number 6 was actually the number 18, according to internal reports on the college’s interactions with Mr. Loughner. A campus officer wrote in one report last September, six days before Mr. Loughner would be suspended, that he and a fellow officer thought “there might be a mental health concern involved with Loughner.” In 51 pages of confidential police documents released by the college on Wednesday, various instructors, students and others described Mr. Loughner as “creepy,” “very hostile,” “suspicious” and someone who had a ”dark personality.” He sang to himself in the library. He spoke out of turn. And, in an act that the college finally decided merited his suspension, he made a bizarre posting on YouTube in which he linked the college to genocide and the torture of students. “This is my genocide school,” the narrator on the video said. At another point, he described the school as “one of the biggest scams in America.” “We are examining the torture of students,” the narrator said. In an apparent reference to one of the incidents in which police were called to deal with Mr. Loughner’s disruptive behavior in class, he wrote: “I haven’t forgotten the teacher who gave me a B for freedom of speech.” After an incident in February in which Mr. Loughner blurted out during a poetry class that dynamite ought to be attached to babies, a campus police officer wrote: “I suggested they keep an eye on him and call us if anything else developed that concerned them.” Mr. Loughner explained the remark matter of factly. “He said that the class had been talking about abortion, which made him think of death, which made him think of suicide bombers, which made him think of babies as suicide bombers,” wrote Aubrey Conover, a campus administrator. After a discussion, Mr. Conover said, Mr. Loughner said he would not say anything in class. After following up with the instructor, Mr. Conover said he continued to act bizarre but there had been no further interruptions. On another occasion, Mr. Loughner told a biology teacher that it did not matter what he put down on his test because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the First Amendment enabled him to write whatever he wanted. As for his remark that he did not have to go along with his instructor’s view that the number 6 was actually the number 18, a counselor, Delisa Sidall, wrote: “I reminded him that a complaint was made that he was disruptive in class and he said, ‘I was not disruptive, I was only asking questions that related to math.’ I asked him to tell me the question he asked. He said, ‘My instructor said he called a number 6 and I said I call it 18.’ He also asked the instructor to explain, ‘How can you deny math instead of accept it?’” When campus police visited the Loughner residence on Sept. 29 to deliver a notice of suspension, his bizarre activity continued, the papers said. “While inside the garage, I spoke with Jared, who held a constant trance of staring as I narrated the past events that had transpired,” an officer wrote. After remaining silent, Mr. Loughner blurted out: “I realize now that this is all a scam.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner's last close friend said that he ignored TV and talk radio
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mark Lause: I spent time myself tutoring schizophrenics in a half-way house, and found them often very volatile. Gaining any real trust on any level was hard to achieve and remarkably easy to lose. But if we're all agreed that Loughner is a disturbed person, the agreement takes us no closer to understanding why he would turn to violence in a certain time and space and circumstance I would say that if there was a shred of evidence connecting him with the Tea Party, then I would say that could go along with the schema constructed by Gary Younge, Tom Hayden, Paul Krugman and Lenin's Tomb. But I would say that people who are leaning in that direction better step back from the precipice unless they want to appear foolish. This latest item I posted from the NYT that clarified his anti-abortion views is a wake-up call: He said that the class had been talking about abortion, which made him think of death, which made him think of suicide bombers, which made him think of babies as suicide bombers. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Loughner's last close friend said that he ignored TV and talk radio
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mark Lause: I don't think anybody has actually suggested that Loughner was part of a secret tea party cabal, did they? Admittedly, I've not followed this discussion that closely What I am talking about is communications, either in print or electronic, that expressed an affinity with the Tea Party. Not membership. Or corroboration from his friends that he was a birther or something like that. I think that efforts to turn his ruminations on grammar and currency into evidence that he was a Sarah Palin follower are far outweighed by the sheer lunacy of his overall observed behavior. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Should anarchists or deep ecologists be blamed for the Unabomber?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Do anarchists and ecologists routinely engage in the kind of barbarism that the US Right does? Is there a tradition of countersubversive expurgatory violence among anarchists and ecologists? You are missing the point. The mass media went on the offensive against deep ecologists and Black radicalism in the aftermath of the Colin Ferguson and the Ted Kaczynski killings. If we blame the hate speech of the Tea Party for Loughner, why not blame deep ecologists as well? After all, some of them--as Furedi's people pointed out--believed the world would be better off if the human race disappeared. In terms of barbarism, you also have to engage with how ordinary people who are not part of the left engage with radical activism. For example, deep ecologists have set fire to research facilities at Michigan State University. What if an innocent worker had been killed in the blaze, as happened in Athens? Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Why Loughner shot Giffords
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Tierney, who's also 22, recalls Loughner complaining about a Giffords event he attended during that period. He's unsure whether it was the same one mentioned in the charges—Loughner might have gone to some other rallies, he says—but Tierney notes it was a significant moment for Loughner: He told me that she opened up the floor for questions and he asked a question. The question was, 'What is government if words have no meaning?' He said, 'Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question.' Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her. Giffords' answer, whatever it was, didn't satisfy Loughner. He said, 'Can you believe it, they wouldn't answer my question,' and I told him, 'Dude, no one's going to answer that,' Tierney recalls. Ever since that, he thought she was fake, he had something against her. full: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message?page=1 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Why Loughner shot Giffords
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Let's be honest, Louis, you don't know anything. About this, I mean. You don't know the difference between Malcolm X and the Tea Party, and you damned sure don't know why Jared Lee Loughner attempted the assassination of Gifford (as well as killing numerous others). Your strategy so far is to latch on to any bit of gossip that will enable you to write it off as a simple case of a man gone bad, ignore everything else of relevance. What gossip are you talking about? That the school demanded that he be examined by a psychiatrist? Or that his causus belli with Giffords was her inability to answer the question about the power of words to his satisfaction? Let's put it this way. These types of incidents are endemic to American society. We live in a very violent state that is permanently at war. When people go postal, it is a reflection of the society that they are living in undoubtedly. Someone like Loughner could easily have killed his classmates at Pima Community College rather than Giffords and the people standing on line to talk to her. He was psychotic but also reflected the broader social forces that surrounded him, as I stated in my article. This obsession with the Tea Party is something that is off the mark in my view, although understandable. However, we are not dealing with the kind of cause-and-effect that existed in the right to life movement and abortion doctors being assassinated. Loughner's reading list, his Youtube videos, the reactions that classmates and teachers had to him indicate that we were dealing with someone like John Hinckley, not Timothy McVeigh. I know that I have made these points before but will make them this one last time. It's a good book, well written, thoroughly researched, and far more incisive than most of the bullshit that you get about these killings - whether from it's emanating from the perspective of reactionary moralism or liberal individualism. You should perhaps read it instead of simmering with resentment. Eh? Chin up, there's a chap. Simmering resentment? Detached amusement is more like it. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Loughner Grew More Paranoid in Last Year, Friend Says
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 11, 2011 Loughner Grew More Paranoid in Last Year, Friend Says By SERGE F. KOVALESKI, MARC LACEY AND TIMOTHY WILLIAMS Jared L. Loughner’s behavior had become increasingly erratic over the last year, underscored by his fear that two of his closest friends were planning to kill him, one of those friends said Tuesday. “He did not have many friends,” said Zane Gutierrez, 21, who met Mr. Loughner in high school. “We stopped talking to him in March of 2010. He started getting weird.” Mr. Loughner has been charged with opening fire at a Tucson supermarket on Saturday as Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, was meeting constituents. Six people were killed in the shooting and 14 were injured, including Ms. Giffords, the apparent main target of the attack. Mr. Gutierrez’s descriptions of Mr. Loughner’s behavior provide new insight into his mental state. Mr. Loughner’s parents were expected to make their first public comments since the shooting on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Gutierrez said Mr. Loughner would call me at 2 a.m. and ask, “Are you hanging out in front of the house, stalking me?” “He started to get really paranoid, and said he did not want to see us anymore and did not trust us,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “He thought we were plotting to kill him or steal his car or something,” Mr. Gutierrez added. “It got worse over time.” Mr. Gutierrez said Mr. Loughner had mentioned Ms. Giffords only once, saying that he had been unhappy with how she had responded to a question he asked at a public appearance about the nature of government. Mr. Gutierrez said Mr. Loughner had shown little interest in politics. “He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos, and that is probably why he did the shooting, along with the fact he was sick in the head,” he said. Mr. Gutierrez said one of their favorite activities was to shoot cans in the desert. “He was a damn great shot,” he said, adding: “If he had a gun pointed at me, there is nothing I could do because he would make it count. He was quick with a gun.” “I go to a psychiatrist, and he should have been seeing one back in high school,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “He had the most incredible thoughts, but he could not handle them.” (snip) Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The right to bear arms
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In the context of American politics, what do comrades here understand that position to be? I know of only one group that has ever made a point of discussing this issue and that is the Spartacist League. I first learned about this position in the SWP shortly after I joined in 1967. It was most often put forward as a defense of the Panthers' right to protest carrying arms. But in all honesty, I doubt that the success of a future socialist revolution in the USA rests on the right of a worker to own a hunting rifle. My guess is that revolutionary soldiers and sailors will make the difference just as they did in 1917. There is a serious problem with out-of-control automatic weapons and we have to take cognizance of this even if we stick to our hoary traditions. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Jim Devine on over-accumulation
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (from pen-l) For those interested, I've posted chapter 4 of my 1980 Ph.D. UC-Berkeley dissertation on-line. It concerns the tendency toward the over-accumulation of fixed capital under capitalism, based in the Marxian tradition. It's at http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/papers.htm. Search for the word over-investment. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A proposal to Michael Moore about a film project
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Before Moore takes on any new projects, he should work on a new conclusion on Capitalism, a love story that gets rid of that idiotic love poem to Obama.) The Chronicle of Higher Education Review January 9, 2011 An Open Letter to Michael Moore Fahrenheit Higher Ed 1 By David Yaffe Have I got a movie for you! As best I can tell, you're not working on one right now. You see, I have been following your career ever since I watched Roger Me (1989) in high school. I never forgot your inimitable depiction of late capitalism's collapse in Flint, Michigan. I remember how agonizing it must have been for you to see your hometown turn into a third-world country and to realize that the dream of earning a living wage as a factory worker was over. These days the only road to the middle class goes through college. (Remember when bourgeois was a bad word?) So here I am in The Chronicle of Higher Education, read by university administrators and department chairs, and anyone else who swipes a copy from the faculty lounge. That means that right now my pitch to you is hitting the desks of the people who actually run universities. Faced with shrinking revenue, they have been forced to slash expenses. There is no shortage of people writing books and op-eds—in these pages and elsewhere—about how to save the university. But their efforts don't usually get much attention beyond the ivory tower. That is where you come in, Michael. You made the top-grossing documentary of all time (Fahrenheit 9/11). When you pull out a bullhorn, even if people don't change their politics, they cannot help but listen. And when it comes to the ills of higher education, people need to listen. Consider that when I graduated from high school in 1991, I could have gone to the University of Texas at Austin for around $1,500 (the annual in-state tuition). Today, not quite 20 years later, in-state tuition at Austin is nearly $9,000. Instead I was offered a generous scholarship by Sarah Lawrence College. Tuition, room, and board at that time seemed unbelievably extravagant: $23,150 (including the dorm and meal plan). What a difference a few decades make. My dear alma mater now costs almost $57,000. If tuition continues to increase at this rate, by the time I expect my son to graduate from college, in 2031, four years of a private-college education without financial aid could cost a cool half-million dollars. But enough about me. This is a crisis that affects every American trying to make a decent living or pursue a coveted career. As I recently read in The New York Times Book Review: The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830-billion, recently surpassed total national credit-card debt. That is hardly news for readers of The Chronicle, or for most people in higher education. The reality is so ever-present to us that it drones on like white noise. The air is full of our cries, but habit is a great deadener. That's from Waiting for Godot. We are waiting for someone, or something. Michael, we are waiting for you. The university system is rife with inequities that need to be publicly exposed. Most egregious is the exploitation of part-time, adjunct faculty members, who are often dedicated, passionate professionals who work for low wages, with no stability. But I also encourage you to take your cameras outside the campus gates. Remember the middle-class people you saw disappear in Flint? Their descendants who strive to get a college degree—and a shot at the middle class—might face student-loan debt in six figures. Mike—can I call you Mike?—people mistake you for an all-out leftist, but you are really more of a moralist. And you always knew how to tell a good story. People sympathize with your populism (though I could never quite buy into your conspiracy theories). You're skilled at identifying the sickness, despite advocating some rather dubious cures. That said, the solutions on offer from many university insiders and editorial writers are also way off the mark. Those people call for abolishing tenure without seeming to give a thought to the fragility of academic freedom. (A college professor could live with the stability of, say, a print journalist—a splendid idea!) When it comes to the fate of academic freedom, don't count me in for fostering such a radical change. So, Mike, remember when you tried to track down Roger Smith? Charlton Heston? George W. Bush? Executives at Goldman Sachs? Well, the world did not change, but the combined gross of your films is staggering. More important, you made people think twice about the financial,
[Marxism] Patton Oswalt riffs on Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/08/patton-oswalt-interview_n_806228.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] SPLC research query
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sometime last year there was an exchange on marxmail regarding the SPLC and Morris Dees. I was rereading some of it because an FB friend was posting SPLC material regarding the assassination in Tuscon. Specifically, someone here wrote that the SPLC was working for the ADL, Mossad, and the FBI. Does anyone have any substantive evidence to support these assertions? Sure, you can find hundreds of testimonies to this effect on the Internet. Just stick to racist, nativist, militia, white supremacist, anti-semitic and similar web sites and blogs and you'll have everything you need. Joaquín I think Greg is mashing things together. The ADL definitely works with the Mossad and the FBI. The Southern Poverty Law Center does not have these sorts of connections. The main complaint is that is ineffective: May 15-17, 2009 CounterPunch Diary King of the Hate Business By ALEXANDER COCKBURN What is the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center doing now? Hes saying that the election of a black president proves his point. Hate is on the rise! Send money! Without skipping a beat, the mailshot moguls, who year after year make money selling the notion theres been a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, have used the election of a black president to say that, yes, hate is on the rise and America ready to burst apart at the seams, with millions of extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, another salesman of the Christian menace, ripely endowed with millions to battle the legions of the cross. Ever since 1971 US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harpers, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein pointed out, the SPLC was the wealthiest civil rights group in America, with $120 million in assets. As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLCs president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the centers vast asset portfolio. The 990 non profit tax record for the SPLC indicates that the assets fell by about $50 million last year, meaning that like almost all non profits the SPLC took a bath in the stock crash. So what was thr end result of all that relentless hoarding down the year, as people of modest means, scared by Dees, sent him their contributions. Were they put to good use? It doesnt seem so. They vanished in an electronic blip. But where are the haters? That hardy old stand-by, the KKK, despite the SPLCs predictable howls about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten and depleted troupe, at least 10 per cent of them on the government payroll as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book Race Traitor, there isnt a public school in any county in the USA that doesnt represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered by the KKK, just as there arent many such schools that probably havent been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLCs tolerance programs. What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance? Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new threats and for the same reason: its their staple. The SPLCs latest Year in Hate report claims that in 2008 the number of hate groups rose to 926, up 4 per cent from 2007, and 54 per cent since 2000. The SPLC doesnt measure the number of members in the groups, meaning they probably missed me. Change that total to 927. Im a hate group, meaning in Dees-speak, one with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, starting with Dick Cheney. I love to dream of him being water-boarded, subjected to loops of Schonberg played at top volume, locked up naked in a meat locker. But the nations haters are mostly like me, enjoying their (increasingly circumscribed) constitutionally guaranteed right to hate, solitary, disorganized, prone
Re: [Marxism] Thoughts on Arizona
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I think it's hard to take the issue of mental health out of the social context. Essentially, disturbed people don't usually take action with guns. The context made that much more permissible and acceptable than otherwise would have been the case. And the target was not random. ML Yes, one person with a serious mental illness attacked a DP politician after 2 years of vitriol across the AM radio dial, Fox News, the Murdoch press and thousands of maddened websites and blogs. That tells me that this act was rather unique. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Thoughts on Arizona
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In fact, how can a young white person - even one as disturbed as Laughner, perhaps especially as disturbed as Loughner - not be influenced by the racism which pervades that community, racist bigotry which virulently expressed itself in the recent congressional campaign against Giffords, peculiarly singled out by Palin and her followers who can't or won't distinguish between conservative and liberal Democrats? Let's be clear about something. This shooting is being used to promote the kind of civility that the Obama administration seeks, one in which the differences between the Republicans and Democrats would be papered over in the national interest. It is just a variant on the scary Tea Party rhetoric that is used to stampede people into voting for Democrats. Just tonight, Chris Matthews made a point about the extreme left and the extreme right jeopardizing democracy, governance, etc. It is the same crap that Jon Stewart promotes. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The end of the imperialist epoch
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In the past few centuries, what was once the European and then American periphery became the core of the world economy. Now, the economies that became the periphery are re-emerging as the core. This is transforming the entire world. What this means for us all will be the subject of next weeks column. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/072c87e6-1841-11e0-88c9-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1ASEnH9A3 Wolf is a plagiarist. In that world economy/system, we can observe the development of underdevelopment here and there, then and now. Much of Latin America and Africa are still underdeveloping. However, now we can also observe that Great Britain is also underdeveloping. We noted that my son Miguel already observed that in 1978, before Margaret Thacher took over as Prime Minister! Miguel and maybe Mrs. Thacher did not see it for lack of sufficient world systemic hindsight, but in fact we can observe Britain underdeveloping already since the beginning of The Great Depression in 1873. How so? Well even with the benefit of Wallerstein's modern-world- system perspective, we can now see that some sectors, regions, countries and their economies not only move up, but also move down in their relative and even absolute positions within the world economy and system as a whole. Britain began its decline over a century ago, when its pride of place began to be taken by Germany and North America. They fought two world wars - or one long war from 1914 to 1945 - to dispute who would take Britain's place. Alas for some, today their place in the sun is also being displaced by the Rising Sun in East Asia. One of the theses of this book is that these developments should come as no surprise, because parts of East Asia already were at the center of the world economy/system until about 1800. In historical terms, The Rise of the West came late and was brief! So one of the [early] purposes of the present book was to show first that there already was an ongoing world economy before the Europeans had much to do and say in it. There were two naturally derivative points: One was to show that Asia, and especially China and India, but also Southeast Asia and West Asia, were more active and the first three also more important to this world economy than Europe was until about 1800. The other derivative point is that therefore it is completely counter-factual and anti-historic to claim what historians already knew that Europe built a world around itself. It did not; it used its American money to buy itself a ticket on the Asian train. However, this historical fact has still other far-reaching implications, both for history and for social theory based on historical understanding. full: http://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/gunder/prefreor.htm Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Marx at a book signing, speaks on crisis
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/01/8220-crisis-interview-theory Diss capital by Paul Mason Published 06 January 2011 Karl Marx, in London for a book signing, stumbles off the Eurostar and straight into an interview with Paul Mason at a café in King’s Cross. How does the credit crunch fit with the guru’s theory of crisis? I chose St Pancras to impress him, but he is not impressed. Stumbling off the Eurostar, he barely notices the architecture and thumbs his BlackBerry when I point out the champagne bar. I've prepared this whole historical decompression briefing for him: the match girls' strike, the petrol engine, cinema, Lenin, the Warsaw Pact, the John Betjeman statue. But he stops me short: I know, I know all about it. You think we don't have Wikipedia up there? “You see everything? “Better than you! We see it without sensuous historical experience. It's like watching a slow-motion car crash. Just wait till you get there: it will restore your faith in the objective forces of history. I explain that I want to ask about the credit crunch, how it fits with his theory of crisis - “I've got an hour and then I'm doing a book signing . . . “Which book? I joke. He laughs: as we all learned in the 1980s, there is more than one volume of Marx's Capital, and more than one theory of crisis therein. So which one fits the events since the Lehman Brothers crash? “OK. Crisis 101, he begins. We've grabbed a table at a Starbucks on Euston Road and he's let me buy him a double espresso. “In the book, what I say is that the possibility of crisis is there right from the moment you separate sale from purchase. Once you've got a society based on money and commodities you can have a situation where there's enough produce to go around - enough Fairtrade coffee, iPods, Prada overcoats (he is wearing a Prada overcoat) - but not enough money for people to buy it. “So the commodity is the root of all evil? “It makes crisis possible, is all. So what has caused this one? “In the book I never actually got around to a synthetic crisis theory so, as you know, 'ze Marxists' - he does inverted commas with his fingers - had to scrabble around in my notebooks to concoct one. “So you don't have a synthetic theory of the credit crunch? “There is one, but you have to remember that the book was written at a certain level of abstraction . . . “OK, I press him. There are three recognised causes of crisis in Marxist economics: underconsumption, disproportionality and overproduction. Do you buy that, at least? He looks glazed, impatient. I've seen this look in the eyes of the other celebrity profs and hedge-funders who predicted the 2008 credit crunch and have now shot to fame. He retorts: OK, but you have got to think of them as layers; they're not competing explanations. They work at different levels of abstraction, like biology, chemistry and physics. So what's the physics? What's the root cause of this crisis? I push my digital voice recorder closer to him. All three, he laughs. That's why it's a whopper. Let's start with the debt issue. Why do you think they were shovelling cheap credit into the hands of poor African Americans and Hispanics who could never pay it back? Low wages, I answer. Precisely. They held down the real wages of the working class during a boom. Unheard of since before the 1936-49 war. So the underconsumption theory is still valid? Pah! He rocks in his seat with frustration. Have you actually read Volume II? I fidget. There was a student occupation going on when I was trying to read it. And I was in a rock band. I settle on the assertion that I skim-read it 30 years ago. He pulls out his iPad and reads: 'It is sheer redundancy to say that crises are produced by the lack of paying consumption or paying consumers . . . When people say the working class does not receive enough of its own product and that the evil would be dispelled immediately once it received a greater share, all one can say is that crises are invariably preceded by periods in which wages in general rise . . .' Volume II. And your point is? “I still stand by that. The anarchists had this theory about underconsumption. I had a lot of fun with them, up there, later when Henry Ford borrowed it, and then Oswald Mosley. And then Keynes. You can't solve a crisis with higher wages. Crisis is born out of the contradictions of profit and production. He's animated now. Are we going to be talking about algebra soon? I joke. He nods. I go and get two more espressos. “Here's why all the people going around saying, 'Marx was right' are just a bunch of schlimazels. He starts finger-jabbing, point by point: Look at the global rate of profit. Is it high or low? High. Wrong. Corporate profits are high, I protest. “But
[Marxism] Another prophet of China's eventual hegemonic rise
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/giovanni-arrighis-vico-marxism/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Party and Class in Revolutionary Crises
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == It's nice to see the relatively obscure Paul Levi mentioned favorably in an English-language publication like this. It seems to me that there is a lot of lessons to be learned, especially concerning the course today for a structure like DIE LINKE. And it's maybe also useful considering the constant theme of Lenin vs. Zionevite Leninism on this list. Anyway, here's the link: http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/3119 Party and Class in Revolutionary Crises â Charlie Post The German Revolution, 1917-1923 By Pierre Broue Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2006, xvii +991, $50 paper. Lenin Rediscovered: What is to Be Done? in Context By Lars H. Lih Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2008, xvii + 867 pages, $50 paper. I wrote all about Levi et al a decade ago: http://www.columbia.edu/%7Elnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm And followed up with a discussion of Broue here: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/history-of-the-marxist-internationals-part-3-the-comintern/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Jobless recovery
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Eye-opening paragraphs from this article: Desmond Lachman, a former managing director at Salomon Smith Barney who now serves as a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy center, sees corporate leaders reshaping their worlds. “Corporations are taking huge advantage of the slack in the labor market — they are in a very strong position and workers are in a very weak position,” he said. “They are using that bargaining power to cut benefits and wages, and to shorten hours.” That strategy, Mr. Lachman said, serves corporate and shareholder imperatives, but “very much jeopardizes our chances of experiencing a real recovery.” --- NY Times January 8, 2011 Profits are Booming. Why Aren’t Jobs? By MICHAEL POWELL To gaze upon the world of American corporations is to see a sunny place of terrific profits and princely bonuses. American businesses reported that third-quarter profits in 2010 rose at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed. Staring at such balance sheets, you might almost forget that much of the nation lives under slate-gray fiscal skies, a place of 9.4 percent unemployment and record levels of foreclosures and indebtedness. And therein lies the enduring mystery of this Great Recession and Not So Great Recovery: Why have corporate profits (and that market thermometer, the Dow) spiked even as 15 million Americans remain mired in unemployment, a number without precedent since the Great Depression? Employment tends to lag a touch behind profit growth, but history offers few parallels to what is happening today. “Usually the business cycle is a rising-and-falling, all-boats-together phenomenon,” noted J. Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in the Clinton Treasury Department. “It’s quite a puzzle when you have this disjunction between profits on the one hand and unemployment.” A search for answers leads in several directions. The bulls’ explanation, heard with more frequency these days, has the virtue of being straightforward: corporate profits are the economy’s pressure cooker, building and building toward an explosive burst that will lead to much hiring next year. The December jobs numbers suggest that that moment has yet to arrive, as the nation added just 103,000 jobs, or less than the number needed to keep pace with population growth. The leisure industry and hospitals accounted for 83,000 jobs; large corporations added a tiny fraction. Consumers appear to have put a toe or two back into the water, as holiday spending rose (although it fell short of analysts’ forecasts) and families began to replace the ailing refrigerator or the aging minivan. Car sales are rising. But relatively few economists, even those who see signs of an improving economy, sound particularly buoyant, a concern shared by liberals and conservatives alike. Jobless recoveries followed on the heels of the last two recessions, but neither prefigured the depth of the trouble this time. After the 1990-91 recession, it took 23 months to add back the jobs lost. After the 2001 recession, it took 38 months. (And it’s worth keeping in mind that one of the great housing and credit bubbles in American history fed that hiring; no economist expects that to repeat itself). At the current rate, the economy will need 72 to 90 months to recapture the jobs lost during the Great Recession. And that does not account for the five million jobs needed to keep pace with a growing population. None of this has slowed the unprecedented rise in corporate profits. The reasons are many. More so than in the past, many American-based corporations earn a great portion of their profits overseas. And thanks to porous tax laws, these companies return fewer of those profits to American shores than in the past. “The big American companies are really global,” said Robert Reich, former labor secretary for President Clinton. “They can show big profits from foreign sales. G.M. is making more Buicks overseas than in the United States. There’s no special pop for the United States worker.” Key corporate sectors, too, have undergone a Darwinian pruning during the last three years. In the financial arena, a few hyperprofitable firms now stand where many more once stood. “If you’re Goldman and Morgan Chase, and you once had to compete against Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, well, of course it’s easier now to show a profit,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner of Westwood Capital L.L.C., an investment banking firm. “If you have a modest reduction in expenses, and an industry
[Marxism] Now what was that about convergence?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 9, 2011 Vietnam Confronts Economic Quagmire By THOMAS FULLER HO CHI MINH CITY — The New Year’s decorations are coming down in this frenetic city, replaced by hammer and sickle flags that flutter near luxury boutiques competing for access to the wallets of the newly rich. Ho Chi Minh City, the seemingly irrepressible bastion of Vietnamese capitalism, is dutifully marking the start on Tuesday of the Communist Party’s National Congress, an event that comes every five years and is meant to chart the future course of a country that has witnessed an economic miracle in recent decades. But this time, things are different. In a region where governments are swollen with foreign currency reserves and inflation remains relatively tame, Vietnam is an island of economic instability. The country’s economy is still growing at 7 percent, but double-digit price increases for food and other essentials are punishing the working class. The Vietnamese currency is consistently falling below the official exchange rates, creating a thriving black market for gold and dollars. And Vinashin, one of the country’s largest state-owned companies, is all but insolvent, brought down by debts that are the equivalent of more than 4 percent of the country’s total output. “We are on the edge — there’s not a lot of room for mistakes,” said Le Anh Tuan, head of research at Dragon Capital, an investment company here. “The Vietnam story will depend much on how much the government understands the root of the problem and can fix it.” The problems, say many businesspeople and economists, are rooted in its hybrid system, the odd mix of Adam Smith economics and Karl Marx politics that the country shares with other former planned economies like China and Laos. For years, the government touted its vast network of state-run companies as the vanguard of the economy, large conglomerates that the Communist Party could use to steer the country toward prosperity. The scandal involving Vinashin, the deeply indebted state company, has shown the shortcomings of relying so heavily on government-owned enterprises, which Mr. Tuan calls the “cancer” of the economy. From its core mission of building ships, Vinashin expanded into about 450 different businesses that it failed to make profitable and was ill suited to manage, including spas, motorcycle assembly and real estate. On the brink of bankruptcy with $4.5 billion in debts, the company is now in effect being bailed out by the government: It has been exempted from paying taxes this year and will be given interest-free loans, according to Vietnamese news media reports. Vietnam has fought off many external threats in its history — wars, colonial oppression — but the Vietnamese are looking inward for the roots of their current woes. “This crisis comes from the inside,” said Nyugen Thi Mai Thanh, the general director of Ree Corp., a large engineering firm that specializes in air-conditioning. “State investment is not efficient.” The Vietnamese economy appears to be divided between plodding and profligate government-owned companies — the legacy of the country’s communist heritage — and the cutthroat private sector, which is expanding rapidly and profitably. As a measure of their inefficiency, Vietnamese state-owned companies use 40 percent of the capital invested in the country but produce only 25 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The reach of the state-owned companies, even after several waves of privatizations, remains impressive. It would be easy for a consumer here to spend an entire day doing business with the government: paying a mobile phone bill, depositing a check at the bank, shopping at a local supermarket, filling up a car with gas and lunching at a fancy hotel. State-owned companies are prevalent in all those businesses. Economists say the opaque way in which the government has handled the Vinashin meltdown and the lack of consistency among the top economic officials have eroded confidence in the currency and the market in general. The stock market has been among the worst-performing in Asia for the past three years. Masato Miyazaki, the head of Asian operations for the International Monetary Fund, put aside diplomatic language last month when he publicly told the government it needed to change its “style of policy conduct.” Economists and businesspeople here are watching the Communist Party meeting to see whether state-run companies will be coddled or given sink-or-swim discipline. “Until now, we haven’t seen many cases of the government letting them die,” said Ms. Thanh of Ree Corp. “Sometimes you have to make an example.” Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who is seeking support for another term at the party meeting, has been quoted in the
[Marxism] Obama irks Robert Reich
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 7, 2011 Obama the Centrist Irks a Liberal Lion By MICHAEL POWELL BERKELEY, Calif. — So how would he grade President Obama’s economic policies, and the new team put in place this week? Though Robert B. Reich, the former labor secretary, endorsed Mr. Obama and has traveled to the White House to provide economic counsel, he offers a smile that looks unmistakably pained. “We have a remarkably anemic recovery; it’s paper-thin,” Mr. Reich says. “In the narrowest, tactical terms, in sheer dollars committed to programs, Obama’s done pretty well, and his favorability ratings are better than those of the Democratic Party.” Then he sweeps his hands far apart in his sun-filled warren of an office at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you widen the lens, the public is being sold a big lie — that our problems owe to unions and the size of government and not to fraud and deregulation and vast concentration of wealth. Obama’s failure is that he won’t challenge this Republican narrative, and give people a story that helps them connect the dots and understand where we’re going.” Mr. Reich, 64, is one of several prominent liberal economists who despair of what they say is this president’s political caution, and his unwillingness to duel with an emboldened Republican Party. Faced with a Republican majority in the House, Mr. Obama this week appointed Gene Sperling, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, as director of his National Economic Council, and William M. Daley, a centrist politician turned banking executive, as his chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a member of the Third Way, a group that counsels deficit reduction, more tax cuts and perhaps trimming Social Security. Mr. Reich is not pleased by the president’s message of late. “By freezing federal salaries, by talking about deficits, by extending the Bush tax cuts, he’s legitimizing a Republican narrative,” Mr. Reich says. “Why won’t he tell the alternative story? For three decades we’ve cut taxes on the wealthy while real wages stood still.” Mr. Obama’s liberal economics critics include Nobel Prize winners, Paul R. Krugman, the Princeton professor and columnist for The New York Times, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Columbia professor who served as chairman of Mr. Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a professor at M.I.T., once advised liberals to stop blaming Mr. Obama’s advisers for pushing policies too friendly to Wall Street — the president makes those decisions. Mr. Reich served as labor secretary for President Clinton, and in his latest book “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future” he applauds Mr. Obama for deft work in preventing the economy from toppling into a Depression. But the president demanded too little of the bankers he saved, Mr. Reich says, and he conflated a rising stock market and soaring corporate profits with an improving economy. The majority of Americans, who derive much of their wealth from their homes rather than the stock market, are falling far behind the top 1 percent, who took in 23 percent of the nation’s income in 2007. That inequality, he says, is at the heart of America’s malaise. “Obama had a chance to reboot the bailout,” he says. “He could have said to the bankers, ‘If you want more, you’ve got to put a cap on salaries, you’ve got to agree to modify X number of mortgages.’ ” Mr. Reich sees a parallel with his former boss, Mr. Clinton, and draws no comfort from the comparison. Confronted with a muscular Republican majority in the House in 1994, Mr. Clinton mastered triangulation, which is to say he sailed into a sea neither Republican nor Democratic. It was a strategic masterstroke, but he threw overboard some liberal founding stones. “I found myself truly impressed by how quickly Clinton moved to the putative center,” says Mr. Reich, a touch archly. Mr. Reich sees President Obama taking a similar tack. This argument drives the president and his advisers to distraction. To survive in a Washington where Republicans and Democrats are on nearly permanent war footing with one another, the president’s advisers say, requires an agility little understood by those on the outside. They point to health care and financial reform, to extended unemployment benefits and to the stimulus bills (which liberal economists criticized as too small) that let city and state governments avoid tens of thousands of layoffs. They will put their accounting up against that of their critics. (Congressional Republicans are split between those who have described Mr. Obama as a liberal, or a dangerous radical, or, more exotically, a Kenyan-style socialist). Mr. Reich says he knows careful compromise is the daily bread
[Marxism] Innocent Palestinian murdered in his bed
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times January 7, 2011 Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian, 65, in His Bedroom By ISABEL KERSHNER HEBRON, West Bank — Israeli soldiers shot and killed an unarmed 65-year-old Palestinian man in his bedroom in this tense city early Friday, in what appeared to be a case of mistaken identity. The man’s wife said he was sleeping and she was praying when soldiers burst into the apartment before dawn, entered the bedroom and immediately opened fire. Afterward they asked her for his identity card. She gave her account a few hours later, standing next to the bed, whose mattress, sheets and pillows were soaked in blood. The headboard, an adjacent wardrobe and the ceiling were also spattered with blood and bits of what appeared to be brain matter. The Israeli military expressed regret but offered no explanation beyond saying that it had been carrying out an arrest operation. It said the West Bank division commander had been ordered to carry out a speedy investigation, with conclusions to be presented as early as next week. The soldiers were apparently looking for the dead man’s nephew, a Hamas militant who was one of six released from a Palestinian Authority prison on Thursday. He was staying in an apartment on the floor below the slain man’s and was rearrested by the Israeli military soon after the killing. Four of the other released militants were arrested by the Israelis overnight as well. Friday’s killing was the third death in the West Bank in a week for which the Palestinians blamed the Israelis. Coming after a period of relative calm, the deaths have added to fears of an escalation at a time when Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are stalled. After noon prayers on Friday, the alleyways around the man’s home seethed as hundreds escorted the body from a nearby mosque for burial, chanting, “In blood and spirit, we will redeem you, O martyr!” Initial reports on Israeli radio suggested that the slain man, Omar al-Qawasmeh, may have run at the soldiers, but the blood soaking the bed and dotting the walls seemed to belie that. His wife, Subhiya Awad al-Qawasmeh, said that the soldiers fired at her husband’s head and upper body. She said they thought he was the nephew, Wael Bitar. “They came to kill Wael,” she said. The killing also heightened tensions between the authority, which the West backs, and Hamas, its militant Islamist rival. Hamas accused the Palestinian Authority of collaborating with Israel in the case and bearing joint responsibility for the man’s death. The authority has been reining in Hamas activists and militants in the West Bank since the Islamist group, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, seized full control of Gaza a year later. There, Hamas has detained loyalists of Fatah, the dominant party of the authority. In this case, the authority had just released Mr. Bitar and five others who had been on a hunger strike. The Israeli military said that Mr. Bitar was the assistant of the man who planned a suicide bombing in the southern Israeli town of Dimona in February 2008, in which an Israeli woman was killed. The military also said that Mr. Bitar planned several other suicide attacks that were thwarted, and that he had been arrested by Palestinian forces in September 2008. Mr. Bitar’s wife, Sanaa, said he had been on a hunger strike for 43 days to protest his continued detention without charge or trial. She said that a Palestinian Authority court had ordered his release a while ago. She, too, blamed the Palestinian Authority for Mr. Qawasmeh’s death. Palestinian officials in the West Bank said such statements only served to remove responsibility from Israel, and suggested that the six had been kept in Palestinian custody for their own safety. Gen. Adnan Damiri, a spokesman for the Palestinian security forces, said that the authority had made it clear before their release that Hamas would have to bear responsibility for protecting them from Israeli forces, according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa. The other recent deaths include the case of a Palestinian woman, 36, who died last Saturday after inhaling tear gas on the sidelines of a protest the day before in the West Bank, according to her family and Palestinian medical officials. Initially, Israeli military officials anonymously raised questions about whether those accounts were fabricated; Friday brought the first official comment. The army commander in the West Bank, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon, was quoted by Haaretz as saying the woman probably died not from tear gas but from other medical “complications, combined with problems in the medical care she received at the Palestinian hospital.” On Sunday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man as he approached a checkpoint in the northern
[Marxism] Bob Herbert tells it like it is
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times Op-Ed January 7, 2011 Misery With Plenty of Company By BOB HERBERT Consider the extremes. President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country. (They flourish even when they’re hard at work destroying the economy.) Meanwhile, we hear not a word — not so much as a peep — about the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought. The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don’t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population. How do you imagine a family of four would live if its annual income was $11,000 or less? During a conversation I had this week with Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a longtime expert on issues related to poverty, he pointed out that the number of people in that tragically dismal category has grown to more than 17 million. These are the folks trying to make it on incomes below half of the official poverty line, which is $22,000 annually for a family of four. No one talks about these families and individuals living in extreme poverty. Certainly not the Republicans who were having a dandy time this week deliberately misreading the Constitution and promising budget cuts and other initiatives that will hurt the poor even more. If you’re still having trouble deciding whose side the Republicans are on, just keep in mind that the House G.O.P. bigwig Darrell Issa sent a letter to 150 businesses, trade groups and think tanks asking them to spell out which federal regulations they dislike the most. These are lifeguards on the side of the sharks. Scared to death of being outdone, President Obama and his sidekicks climbed into their spiffy new G.O.P. costumes and promised in humiliatingly abject tones to shower the business world with whatever government largess they could lay their hands on. The first order of business (pun intended) was the announcement that William Daley, the Chicago wheeler-dealer and former Clinton administration official who landed a fat gig at JPMorgan Chase, would become the president’s chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a loud critic of recent financial regulatory reforms and has been obsessed with getting Democrats to be more subservient to business. The poor, who have been hurt more than anyone else in this recession, don’t stand a heartbeat’s chance in this political environment. The movers and shakers in government don’t even give a thought to being on the side of the angels anymore — they’re on the side of the millionaires and billionaires. Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor. Are we doing anything about this? No. Our government officials, from the president on down, are too busy kissing the bejeweled fingers of the megarich. Professor Edelman broke the poor into two categories: the new poor, who have lost jobs and homes and otherwise been clobbered by the recession; and the old poor, who in many cases had previously been working, sometimes sporadically or part time, at jobs that didn’t pay much. Many of those low-paying jobs have since vanished and the old poor have just been crushed. “There is this astonishing number of people all the way down there at the bottom that we just don’t talk about,” Mr. Edelman said, “and they’re in very big trouble.” Welfare, even for the poorest of the poor, is not much help. More than 17 million people may be living in extreme poverty, but welfare, for most of the people who need it, was “reformed” right out of existence. TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is what welfare is called now, helps far fewer people than welfare used to, even though the poor have been laid low by the worst economy since the Depression. Hardly anyone cares. Hardly anyone even notices. With the tax cuts for the rich saved and William Daley coming on board, the atmosphere is being readied for Obama Co. to tap the fat cats for the zillions necessary for next year’s re-election run. And that, of course, is the only thing that really matters. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at:
[Marxism] Defend Korean workers
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == So if you are on any listservs, please post. Thanks Urgent Appeal: Eight South Korean Labor Activists Face 4-7 Years in Prison On Dec. 3 of last year, the prosecutor in the Seoul Central District Court demanded prison terms of 5-7 years for Oh sei-chull and other members (Yang Hyo-seok, Yang Joon-seok, Choi Young-ik, Park Joon-seon, Jeong Won-hyung, and Oh Min-gyu) of the Socialist Workers’ Alliance of Korea (SWLK), a revolutionary socialist group. These activists in the Korean working-class movement were indicted under South Korea’s notorious National Security Law (passed in 1948 and theoretically still stipulating the death penalty for “pro-North” activities). The eight militants of the SWLK, who as internationalists advocate working-class revolution in both Koreas, were accused of no specific crime except being socialists, but in reality the indictment resulted from their intervention in several strikes and movements going back to 2007. This is the first instance of such harsh repression under the National Security Law in many years. It occurs in the larger context of the hard-right turn (such as the smashing of the Ssangyong Motor Co. strike of 2009) of South Korean President Lee Myong Bak’s government since he took office in early 2008. (In fact, leaflets of the SWLK distributed during the Ssangyong strike were key evidence in the trial.) Prosecutors have attempted to indict members of the SWLK several times since 2008, and prior to December, the prosecutors’ case was thrown out of court each time. It is not impossible that a barrage of e-mail protests to Judge Hyung Doo Kim of the Seoul Central District Court will help reduce or obviate the pending sentences altogether, when final sentencing will take place on Jan. 27. Let Judge Kim know your feelings in your own words about this crackdown on “thought crime” by writing to s...@jinbo.net The e-mails must be received by 06:00 AM on Monday January 17th 2011 (Seoul time), so that the SWLK’s lawyer can forward them to Judge Kim prior to sentencing. Please distribute this appeal as widely as possible. Messages in languages other than English are welcome. Loren Goldner For further details on this case, contact me at lrgold...@gmail.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Some readers' comments on Bob Herbert's op-ed piece
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == “… Darrell Issa sent a letter to 150 businesses, trade groups and think tanks asking them to spell out which federal regulations they dislike the most. These are lifeguards on the side of the sharks.” No matter which party grasps the power, the working majority remain powerless while the capitalist minority rules the world. It is of no use to blame one party on the misfortune and misery of the people and hope the other party would come to people’s help. No any party will do any good. They are as corrupt as any henchman of the capital can be. Even if the Democrats had taken power of the Capital’s House, nothing would have changed as far as the political corruption, economic monopoly and social regression are concerned. The question is how to convince capital itself that the current mainstream and orthodox political economic policy is not only wrong and detrimental to the working majority but also harmful to the dictatorship of the bourgeois minority. Capital has taken it for granted that even though the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression in the 1930s, recovery has never been far away, time is on their side and patience will pay off. Its trusting to luck ideas keep a blear-eye in front of the danger ahead. Ever since China surrendered three decades, the Soviet Union folded two decades ago, and all-out confrontation ceased, capital started its barefaced onslaught on the working people of the world with candid exploitation and oppression as though there would be no tomorrow. Representative Democracy and profit sharing have died. Global discontentment among the working majority is never higher because of unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, poverty and austerity. Capital as a hegemony is about to slip downward from its power peak. Global overproduction relative to working people’s affordable demand has been the real cause of the economic crisis. Overproduction comes about from fierce competitions and cost reduction. Automation has made matter worse than better through reducing work force or underemployment or both. The 21th century Innovation is all cost-saving enterprise, especially on human capital. Global accumulation of capital, on the other hand, reaches it new high and entraps into the mire of over-accumulation that overproduction engendered over the past three decades. The profitable investment outlets other than the speculative financial bubble-prone money ports like housing and stock markets become so much rare that lack of outlets has forced capital to invest overseas en mass leading to deindustrialization on a global scale. A permanent global unemployment calamity has arrived and it has been hardly fleeting at all. For some similar viewpoints, see http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/1 Now as though that were not enough, overseas low-cost investment outlets in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere face either inflation or over-investment and unemployment as well. Capital, which looked as invincible as only yesterday, has been on tenterhooks almost daily by crises. Overseas investments may do down the drain if China’s economy falls. Due to housing overproduction, housing crisis rivals the Great Depression. Housing price in 2010 dropped $1.7 trillion over last year when it shed $1 trillion or at a falling rate of 63% and a total drop of $9 trillion since 2006. “The U.S. housing market is now down around 25 percent from its peak in 2006. (During the Great Depression, home prices fell 25.9 percent in five years.) Housing bubbles are now bursting in China, France, Spain, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, and many other regions.” (December 29, 2010, “Underneath the Happy Talk, Is This As Bad as the Great Depression?”) http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com... Due to over-accumulation of capital, “Indeed, top economists such as Anna Schwartz, James Galbraith, Nouriel Roubini and others have pointed out that while banks faced a liquidity crisis during the Great Depression, today they are wholly insolvent. Insolvency is much more severe than a shortage of liquidity.” “So many Americans have been jobless for so long that the government is changing how it records long-term unemployment. ‘Citing what it calls an unprecedented rise in long-term unemployment, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), beginning Saturday, will raise from two years to five years the upper limit on how long someone can be listed as having been jobless.’ “The two-year limit has been used for 33 years.” (See the above URL) Darrell Issa, William Daley, Barak Obama and their ilk - the right-wingers - now put on their tax cut hawk facemasks, shift the financial burden of tax cut on social programs and scoop more lucre for their masters and themselves. The strategic plan of their class
Re: [Marxism] Arizona congresswoman assassinated
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The assassin seems to be a Tea-Party lunatic type. See his farewell YouTube message: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHoaZaLbqB4 Congresswoman Giffords was one of 20 Dem. candidates identified by Sarah Palin during the last election singled out to be defeated. I believe there was election propaganda circulated showing them with gun-sight targets over their heads. Giffords narrowly beat the Tea-Party candidate. We really don't know about the provenance of this. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Black Agenda responds to Ishmael Reed
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/ishmael-reed-amiri-baraka-and-black-radical-dilemma My own take: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/black-pundits-rally-around-the-president/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
