[Marxism] Quandary in South Sudan: Should It Lose Its Hard-Won Independence?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

(Article takes up the call for putting South Sudan under trusteeship, 
including from Columbia Marxist professor Mahmood Mamdani.)


NY Times, Jan. 24 2017
Quandary in South Sudan: Should It Lose Its Hard-Won Independence?
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Tens of thousands of civilians dead, countless children 
on the verge of starvation, millions of dollars stolen by officials, oil 
wells blown up, food aid hijacked and as many as 70 percent of women 
sheltering in camps raped — mostly by the nation’s soldiers and police 
officers.


Just a few years ago, South Sudan accomplished what seemed impossible: 
independence. Of all the quixotic rebel armies fighting for freedom in 
Africa, the South Sudanese actually won. Global powers, including the 
United States, rallied to their side, helping to create the world’s 
newest country in 2011, a supposed solution to decades of conflict and 
suffering.


South Sudanese celebrated at a ceremony marking the independence of 
their country in Juba in 2011. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
As international frustrations and worries grow, some momentum is growing 
for a proposal for outside powers to take over South Sudan and run it as 
a trusteeship until things calm down.


Several academics and prominent opposition figures support the idea, 
citing East Timor, Kosovo and Bosnia as places where, they say, it has 
worked, though of course there are plenty of cautionary tales where 
outside intervention failed, like Somalia and Iraq.


The Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani recently floated a plan in which the 
African Union would take the lead in setting up a transitional 
government for South Sudan. Ideally, Mr. Mamdani said, none of the 
current South Sudanese politicians who have helped drag their nation 
into civil war would be able to participate, and the trusteeship would 
last around six years, requiring United Nations support.


“The response to the crisis will need to be as extraordinary as the 
crisis,” he said.


But there is one not-so-little problem. Many South Sudanese might not go 
for it.


According to James Solomon Padiet, a lecturer at Juba University, most 
members of the nation’s largest ethnic group — the Dinka, who include 
South Sudan’s embattled president, Salva Kiir — are adamantly set 
against an international takeover. While smaller ethnic groups would 
welcome it, he said, the powerful Dinka see it as an affront to their 
sovereignty.


For that matter, so does Mr. Padiet, a soft-spoken scholar who is not a 
Dinka. He called trusteeship “offensive” because South Sudan has a 
potential crop of good leaders waiting in the wings who haven’t had a 
chance to rule. Still, Mr. Padiet conceded, the country desperately 
needs help.


“As we speak now,” he said, “South Sudan is at crossroads of 
disintegration or total fragility.”


Clashes have spread to new areas of the country, and ethnic-based 
militias are mobilizing in the bush. It’s all a staggering plunge from 
the country’s birth. I, along with hundreds of other journalists, was 
standing in a crowd that felt like a million people on July 9, 2011, the 
insanely hot day when South Sudan broke off from Sudan. The sense of 
pride, sacrifice, hope and jubilation will be hard to forget.


For decades, South Sudanese rebels had battled the better-armed, 
Arab-dominated central government of Sudan. They fought in malarial 
swamps and on sweltering savannas, incredibly hostile environments where 
it’s hard to survive, let alone wage a guerrilla war on a shoestring.


The South Sudanese had absorbed bombings and massacres. The Arabs stole 
their children and turned them into slaves. As a result, many South 
Sudanese were scattered across the four corners of the earth — the 
famous Lost Boys, but also many Lost Girls, ripped from their families 
and forced to flee to cold foreign places that they had never envisioned.


On independence day, South Sudan’s capital, Juba, partied until dawn. 
Lost Boys swigged White Bull (the local beer) next to hardened 
guerrillas bobbing their heads to reggae rap. All around us, there 
seemed to be a real appreciation of what had been achieved and what lay 
ahead. Most important, there was unity.


That crumbled quickly, undermined by old political rivalries, ethnic 
tension and a greed for South Sudan’s one main export: oil. The fault 
line was the most predictable one, the Dinka versus the Nuer. The two 
biggest ethnic groups had alternated between allies and enemies 
throughout South Sudan’s liberation wars.


Starting in December 2013, after a breakdown between their political 
leaders, who not so long ago had been hailed as heroes, Nuer 

[Marxism] Fwd: Uncle Tom’s Basement, or Life Among the Lowly

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

By Mark A. Lause

This past year, the Pew Research Center published a fascinating report 
headed: “For First Time in Modern Era, Living With Parents Edges Out 
Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds.”  The study shows 
32.1% of these young adults living in their parent’s house.  The Pew 
study itself minimizes the problem, because it’s not really clear how 
many of the additional 14% listed as living alone are renting over the 
garage or a sleeping room down the street while still boarding at home. 
Too, a certain portion of the 31.6% living with partners of their own 
may also be sharing a life in similarly blurred realities.  And the 22% 
in “other living arrangements”  include people living with “such as a 
grandparent, in-law or sibling.”


full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=13153
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Cuban Government Ignores People’s Struggle

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Certainly, it is notable that there were demonstrations in many countries, but 
apparently none in Cuba.
ken h


http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=123319
Similarly, while on January 20, racist and homophobic tycoon Donald Trump 
officially assumed his post as US president, those same young Cuban 
pro-government anti-capitalists had nothing to say at home on the island.

Hundreds of spontaneous manifestations took place in various parts of the 
world, but none of them were Cuban. Perhaps the boys and girls of the UJC were 
trying on the ties and heels they would wear at the Dominican summit.
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Call to Create Jobs, or Else, Tests Trump’s Sway

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, Jan. 24 2017
Call to Create Jobs, or Else, Tests Trump’s Sway
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ALAN RAPPEPORT

President Trump summoned the titans of American business to the White 
House on Monday for what was billed as a “listening session,” but it was 
the new president who delivered the loudest message: Bring back domestic 
manufacturing jobs, or face punishing tariffs and other penalties.


The contrast between Mr. Trump’s talk and the actual behavior of 
corporate America, however, underscored the tectonic forces he was 
fighting in trying to put his blue-collar base back to work in a sector 
that has been shedding jobs for decades.


Many of the chief executives Mr. Trump met with have slashed domestic 
employment in recent years. What is more, their companies have 
frequently shut factories in the United States even as they have opened 
new ones overseas.


Mr. Trump said he would use tax policy, among other means, to deter 
companies from shifting work abroad. “A company that wants to fire all 
of its people in the United States and build some factory someplace 
else, then thinks that product is going to just flow across the border 
into the United States,” he said, “that’s just not going to happen.”


Union leaders also met with Mr. Trump on Monday afternoon, the same day 
that Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific 
Partnership trade agreement. While unions often ascribe the shift of 
manufacturing jobs abroad to “corporate greed,” the migration is a 
result of a more complex corporate calculus.


Wall Street is pushing industrial companies to increase earnings at a 
double-digit rate when the American economy is growing by only 2 
percent, and the quickest way to deliver higher profits is by reducing 
labor costs, whether through automation or by moving jobs to cheaper 
locales like Mexico or China.


In some cases, Gordon Gekko-like hedge fund managers are to blame, but 
much of the time, it is the drive for bigger returns on 401(k) accounts, 
pension plans and other retirement vehicles that depend on steadily 
rising corporate profits and, in turn, a buoyant stock market.


Just as significant is the desire by multinational corporations to go 
where the growth is, and many emerging-market economies, as well as 
China, are growing at more than twice the rate of the United States.


“Global capital doesn’t have a social conscience,” said Kevin W. Sharer, 
who teaches corporate strategy at Harvard Business School and served on 
the boards of 3M, Northrop Grumman and Chevron, in addition to running 
the biotech giant Amgen. “It will go where the returns are.”


A case in point is Dow Chemical, whose chief executive, Andrew N. 
Liveris, leads a panel on manufacturing that Mr. Trump created. Mr. 
Liveris was at the White House on Monday.


At the end of 2015, Dow employed 49,500 people, about half of them in 
the United States, nearly 5,000 fewer than it did at the end of 2012. 
During the same period, the number of domestic Dow manufacturing 
locations fell to 55, from 58, but increased by five in Latin America 
and Asia.


Not that Mr. Liveris is necessarily to blame — he and the company were 
targeted in 2014 by the activist investor Daniel S. Loeb, who called for 
splitting the company in two to bolster profits and for the ousting of 
Mr. Liveris. After a multiyear battle, Mr. Loeb essentially prevailed, 
and Mr. Liveris will exit Dow after it completes a merger with DuPont 
later this year, with a breakup to follow.


Dow is hardly the only company to reduce its head count in recent years. 
International Paper, whose chief executive also attended the White House 
meeting, had its work force in the United States fall to roughly 34,000 
in 2015, about 2,000 fewer than at the end of 2010.


The final piece of the manufacturing jobs puzzle is technology, said 
Bill George, who formerly ran Medtronic, a producer of pacemakers, 
stents and other medical devices, and who now teaches at Harvard 
Business School.


Mr. George noted that Ford Motor, which Mr. Trump has tangled with and 
whose chief executive was at the White House on Monday, employed a 
fraction of the workers it did two decades ago because its production 
lines were now highly automated.


Even boosters of the factory sector, like Scott Paul, president of the 
Alliance for American Manufacturing, an advocacy group, reacted 
cautiously to Mr. Trump’s initial approach Monday.


“It’s easy to get C.E.O.s to come in on the first day of his presidency 
and warn them they are on watch,” Mr. Paul said. “I believe a lot of the 
C.E.O.s in that room want do the right thing and create jobs in America, 

[Marxism] Charlie Liteky, 85, Dies; Returned Medal of Honor in Protest

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, Jan. 24 2017
Charlie Liteky, 85, Dies; Returned Medal of Honor in Protest
By SAM ROBERTS

Charlie Liteky, a former Army chaplain who received the Medal of Honor 
for bravery in Vietnam, only to return the medal two decades later as a 
protest of American foreign policy in Central America, died on Friday in 
San Francisco. He was 85.


His death was confirmed by a friend, Richard Olive, who said Mr. Liteky 
had suffered a stroke several weeks ago.


Mr. Liteky, who was a Roman Catholic priest when he was given the award, 
is believed to be the only one of nearly 3,500 recipients of the medal 
since the Civil War to have returned it in a demonstration of political 
dissent, Victoria Kueck, the operations director of the Congressional 
Medal of Honor Society, said on Monday.


He acted out of opposition to the Reagan administration’s support for 
Central American dictators accused of brutally suppressing leftist 
guerrillas.


In 1986, Mr. Liteky (pronounced LIT-key) left the medal in an envelope 
addressed to President Ronald Reagan at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 
Washington. He also renounced the lifetime tax-free monthly pension — 
then about $600, now about $1,300 — that went with it.


Mr. Liteky, who later served two federal prison terms for civil 
disobedience as a war protester, said he was motivated in his political 
dissent by the commitment that had inspired his bravery on the 
battlefield in Vietnam.


“The reason I do what I do now is basically the same,” he told The San 
Francisco Chronicle in 2000 as he faced a second prison sentence. “It’s 
to save lives.”


On Dec. 6, 1967, Mr. Liteky, the son of a career Navy petty officer, 
repeatedly neglected his own shrapnel wounds and, without a weapon, 
helmet or flak jacket, exposed himself to mortars, land mines and 
machine guns to rescue 23 wounded colleagues who had been ambushed by a 
Vietcong battalion. He evacuated the injured soldiers and administered 
last rites to the dying.


Before that firefight, Mr. Liteky had never been in combat.

He was one of three chaplains who earned the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. 
The other two were awarded posthumously.


Mr. Liteky once recalled that when he went to Vietnam, “I was 100 
percent behind going over there and putting those Communists in their 
place.”


“I had no problems with that,” he added. “I thought I was going there 
doing God’s work.”


After he volunteered for another six-month tour, Mr. Liteky returned 
home from the war as an Army captain. Troubled by the celibacy 
requirement, he left the priesthood in 1975.


In the late 1970s, he was introduced by Judy Balch, a former nun, to 
refugees from El Salvador, “teenagers, whose fathers had been killed and 
tortured,” he recalled. He evolved into a vigorous opponent of American 
support for right-wing factions there and in Nicaragua and Guatemala.


In 1983, he married Ms. Balch in San Francisco. She died last year. No 
immediate family members survive.


In 1986, Mr. Liteky mounted a debilitating 47-day hunger strike near the 
Capitol against American involvement in Nicaragua. He later served two 
terms for trespassing at the Army’s School of the Americas (now the 
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, 
Ga., which trains soldiers from Latin America.


He was sentenced to six months in federal prison in 1990 for squirting 
blood on portraits at the school, and to the maximum one year in 2000 
for a similar protest.


In 2002 and 2003, he visited Baghdad to protest the impending American 
invasion.


“I am in deep sympathy with all of those young men that are over there 
now doing what they think is their patriotic duty,” Mr. Liteky told NPR 
in 2004. “I think it is more of a patriotic duty of citizens of this 
country to stand up and say that this is wrong, that this is immoral.”


He had recently completed a memoir, “Renunciation,” which friends of his 
plan to publish this year.


Charles James Liteky was born in Washington on Feb. 14, 1931, to Charles 
Liteky and the former Gertrude Diggs. (His father had enlisted in the 
Navy when he was 15, lying about his age.)


He was raised mostly in Jacksonville, Fla., where he was a high school 
quarterback.


After attending the University of Florida for two years, he entered a 
seminary and was ordained a priest in 1960 as Angelo J. Liteky (the name 
under which he also received the medal) and joined the Missionary 
Servants of the Most Holy Trinity, a clerical organization based in 
Silver Spring, Md.


He volunteered as an Army chaplain in 1966 and served with the 199th 
Infantry Brigade.


According to his official medal citation, 

[Marxism] Columbia Unearths Its Ties to Slavery

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, Jan. 24 2017
Columbia Unearths Its Ties to Slavery
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

In 1755 a New York City newspaper carried an account of the swearing-in 
of the governors of the newly founded King’s College, which later grew 
into Columbia University. At the bottom of the page ran an advertisement 
for a rather different occasion: the sale of “TWO likely Negro Boys, and 
a Girl.”


The ad would have raised few eyebrows at King’s, where many of the 
college’s early presidents, trustees, donors and students owned slaves. 
But now it’s the opening example in a new report detailing Columbia’s 
historical ties to slavery.


The report, to be released by the university on Tuesday as part of a new 
website, offers no dramatic revelations akin to that of the sale of 272 
slaves in 1838 that helped keep Georgetown University afloat and that 
has raised a contentious debate about reparations today. But it 
illuminates the many ways that the institution of human bondage seeped 
into the financial, intellectual and social life of the university, and 
of the North as a whole.


“People still associate slavery with the South, but it was also a 
Northern phenomenon,” Eric Foner, the Columbia historian who wrote the 
report, said in an interview. “This is a very, very neglected piece of 
our own institution’s history, and of New York City’s history, that 
deserves to be better known.”


A 1755 advertisement in The New-York Gazette, or The Weekly Post-Boy, 
offering three slaves for sale. Credit via Columbia University
“Every institution should know its history, the bad and the good,” he 
said. “It’s hard to grasp just how profoundly our contemporary society 
is still affected by what has happened over the past two or three 
centuries.”


Awareness of the ties between slavery and Northern universities has 
waxed and waned over time. The issue first came to the fore in 2001, 
when scholars associated with a unionization campaign at Yale issued a 
report challenging what they considered the university’s one-sided 
celebration of its abolitionist past.


In 2002 Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown, drew headlines with her 
call for an investigation of that university’s connections at a moment 
when a major reparations lawsuit against banks and insurance companies 
was making its way (ultimately unsuccessfully) through federal courts.


The political charge surrounding the issue then receded, only to come 
roaring back in recent years, thanks to student activism and the broader 
Black Lives Matter movement. Harvard, which installed a plaque last 
spring honoring four enslaved people who worked on campus in the 1700s, 
plans to hold a conference on universities and slavery in March. 
Princeton has commissioned seven plays based on its research into its 
ties with slavery, which will be released in the fall.


“This has become almost a national movement,” said Sven Beckert, a 
historian at Harvard who led an undergraduate research seminar on 
Harvard and slavery in 2007. “There is now more of a realization that 
these issues are in some ways still with us, and that to move forward we 
need to come to terms with our past.”


The Columbia report had its origins in 2013, when Mr. Bollinger read 
about Craig Steven Wilder’s book “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the 
Troubled History of America’s Universities.”


He and Mr. Foner invited Mr. Wilder to speak on campus and began 
discussing the possibility of an undergraduate research seminar to 
investigate Columbia’s ties further. The report draws on research from 
that seminar, taught by Mr. Foner in 2015 and, last year, by Thai Jones, 
a curator in Columbia’s rare-book-and-manuscript library.


While the story the report tells is complex, the bottom line is blunt. 
“From the outset,” it declares, “slavery was intertwined with the life 
of the college.”


The university, while it does not itself appear to have owned slaves, 
both benefited from slavery-related fortunes and actively helped 
increase them.


A 1779 audit by Augustus Van Horne, the college’s treasurer (and a slave 
owner), showed that the endowment often lent money to alumni and other 
prominent New Yorkers at below-market rates, thus “helping subsidize the 
mercantile and other business activities of men who profited from slavery.”


New York passed a gradual-abolition law in 1799, but some people 
connected with King’s, the report notes, continued to own slaves. 
Benjamin Moore, its president, owned two in 1810, according to the census.


While information on individual slaves was difficult to find, the 
website includes a brief section on one named Joe, who came to Kings in 
1773 with John Parke 

[Marxism] Many Arrested Inauguration Day Protesters

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

We are on the side of the demonstrators of both January 20th and the 21st.
But I think it is fair to ask, which were the more effective demonstrations.
There is no doubt in my mind that the actions of the 21st were much more 
powerful.
ken h
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Call to Create Jobs, or Else, Tests Trump’s Sway

[wytheholt--- via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

There can be no clearer statement that capitalism is about profits first and 
foremost, and public welfare and national "needs" and anything else come in a 
very distant second.  And the writer(s) do not seem to be the slightest 
self-conscious about this.  Thanks, Louis.  Wythe


 Louis Proyect via Marxism  wrote: 
>   POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, Jan. 24 2017
Call to Create Jobs, or Else, Tests Trump’s Sway
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and ALAN RAPPEPORT

President Trump summoned the titans of American business to the White 
House on Monday for what was billed as a “listening session,” but it was 
the new president who delivered the loudest message: Bring back domestic 
manufacturing jobs, or face punishing tariffs and other penalties.

The contrast between Mr. Trump’s talk and the actual behavior of 
corporate America, however, underscored the tectonic forces he was 
fighting in trying to put his blue-collar base back to work in a sector 
that has been shedding jobs for decades.

Many of the chief executives Mr. Trump met with have slashed domestic 
employment in recent years. What is more, their companies have 
frequently shut factories in the United States even as they have opened 
new ones overseas.

Mr. Trump said he would use tax policy, among other means, to deter 
companies from shifting work abroad. “A company that wants to fire all 
of its people in the United States and build some factory someplace 
else, then thinks that product is going to just flow across the border 
into the United States,” he said, “that’s just not going to happen.”

Union leaders also met with Mr. Trump on Monday afternoon, the same day 
that Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific 
Partnership trade agreement. While unions often ascribe the shift of 
manufacturing jobs abroad to “corporate greed,” the migration is a 
result of a more complex corporate calculus.

Wall Street is pushing industrial companies to increase earnings at a 
double-digit rate when the American economy is growing by only 2 
percent, and the quickest way to deliver higher profits is by reducing 
labor costs, whether through automation or by moving jobs to cheaper 
locales like Mexico or China.

In some cases, Gordon Gekko-like hedge fund managers are to blame, but 
much of the time, it is the drive for bigger returns on 401(k) accounts, 
pension plans and other retirement vehicles that depend on steadily 
rising corporate profits and, in turn, a buoyant stock market.

Just as significant is the desire by multinational corporations to go 
where the growth is, and many emerging-market economies, as well as 
China, are growing at more than twice the rate of the United States.

“Global capital doesn’t have a social conscience,” said Kevin W. Sharer, 
who teaches corporate strategy at Harvard Business School and served on 
the boards of 3M, Northrop Grumman and Chevron, in addition to running 
the biotech giant Amgen. “It will go where the returns are.”

A case in point is Dow Chemical, whose chief executive, Andrew N. 
Liveris, leads a panel on manufacturing that Mr. Trump created. Mr. 
Liveris was at the White House on Monday.

At the end of 2015, Dow employed 49,500 people, about half of them in 
the United States, nearly 5,000 fewer than it did at the end of 2012. 
During the same period, the number of domestic Dow manufacturing 
locations fell to 55, from 58, but increased by five in Latin America 
and Asia.

Not that Mr. Liveris is necessarily to blame — he and the company were 
targeted in 2014 by the activist investor Daniel S. Loeb, who called for 
splitting the company in two to bolster profits and for the ousting of 
Mr. Liveris. After a multiyear battle, Mr. Loeb essentially prevailed, 
and Mr. Liveris will exit Dow after it completes a merger with DuPont 
later this year, with a breakup to follow.

Dow is hardly the only company to reduce its head count in recent years. 
International Paper, whose chief executive also attended the White House 
meeting, had its work force in the United States fall to roughly 34,000 
in 2015, about 2,000 fewer than at the end of 2010.

The final piece of the manufacturing jobs puzzle is technology, said 
Bill George, who formerly ran Medtronic, a producer of pacemakers, 
stents and other medical devices, and who now teaches at Harvard 
Business School.

Re: [Marxism] President Elect Trump

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 1/24/17 12:12 AM, Anthony Boynton via Marxism wrote:


Wow! What a weird week, what a weird time in history. Makes me think of my
old pal, Zippy. he reminds me of the new president of the United States

[image: Image result for zippy the pinhead]


I am still having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that Trump 
brought a claque of his supporters to the meeting he had with the CIA to 
provide applause for him like a bunch of trained seals. I have been 
politically tuned in since 1965 when the war in Vietnam woke me from my 
existentialist/mystic/post-beatnik/pot-smoking slumber but I have never 
seen anything quite like this.


_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Trump Revives Keystone Pipeline Rejected by Obama

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

NY Times, Jan. 24 2017
Trump Revives Keystone Pipeline Rejected by Obama
By PETER BAKER and CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — President Trump moved assertively on Tuesday to resurrect a 
pipeline in the Dakotas that had become a major flashpoint for Native 
Americans, while reviving the Keystone XL pipeline, which had stirred 
years of debate over the balance between energy needs and environmental 
concerns.


The actions were the latest to dismantle Obama era policies. The former 
president rejected the proposed 1,179-mile Keystone pipeline in 2015, 
arguing that it would undercut American leadership in curbing reliance 
on carbon energy to address a warming climate.


Mr. Trump signed a document clearing the way for the government to 
reconsider the pipeline as well as another expediting the Dakota Access 
pipeline from North and South Dakota to Illinois.


The decisions came a day after Mr. Trump formally abandoned the 
Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious, 12-nation trade pact negotiated 
by Mr. Obama. In his opening days in office, Mr. Trump has also signed 
an order that begins to unravel Mr. Obama’s health care program, 
reversed the former president’s policies on abortion and housing, and 
ordered a freeze of any pending regulations left behind by the departing 
administration.


As proposed by TransCanada, a Canadian firm, the Keystone pipeline would 
carry 800,000 barrels a day from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf 
Coast. Republicans and some Democrats argued that the project would 
create jobs and expand energy resources, while environmentalists said it 
would encourage a form of oil extraction that produces more gases that 
warm the planet than normal petroleum.


Studies showed that the pipeline would not have a momentous impact on 
jobs or the environment, but both sides made it into a symbolic test 
case of American willingness to promote energy production or curb its 
appetites to heal the planet. Torn by competing policy imperatives and 
conflicting politics, Mr. Obama delayed a decision for years before 
finally rejecting the pipeline shortly before an international 
conference in Paris to forge a global climate change agreement.


“Keystone has never been a significant issue from an environmental point 
of view in substance, only in symbol,” said David Goldwyn, an energy 
market analyst and a former head of the State Department’s energy bureau 
in the Obama administration. Regarding the pipeline’s effect on the 
nation’s broader energy market, Mr. Goldwyn said: “One additional 
pipeline? It’s useful. It’s not indispensable.”


But it was a symbol Mr. Trump found important enough to seize on early 
in his presidency. He signed an executive memorandum inviting 
TransCanada “to promptly resubmit its application to the Department of 
State for a presidential permit” for the pipeline, although the document 
did not guarantee approval.


Terry Cunha, a spokeswoman from TransCanada, said in an email on Monday 
that the company remained “fully committed” to building the project, 
although she declined to discuss the project’s next steps.


The Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota became the focus of protests 
when the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe objected to its construction less 
than a mile from its reservation. The tribe and its allies won victory 
last month when the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would look 
for alternative routes for the $3.7 billion pipeline instead of allowing 
it to be drilled under a dammed section of the Missouri River.


Mr. Trump signed an executive memorandum directing the Army “to review 
and approve in an expedited manner” the pipeline, “to the extent 
permitted by law and as warranted.” In his session with reporters, he 
added, “Again, subject to terms and conditions to be negotiated by us.”


Mr. Trump owned stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the company that is 
building the Dakota Access pipeline, according to his most recent filing 
with the Federal Election Commission. Last month, a spokesman for Mr. 
Trump said he sold all of his stock in June, but there is no way of 
verifying that sale, and Mr. Trump has not provided documentation of it.


Critics denounced Mr. Trump’s decisions. “Donald Trump has been in 
office for four days and he’s already proving to be the dangerous threat 
to our climate we feared he would be,” said Michael Brune, executive 
director of the Sierra Club.


Environmental activists vowed to keep fighting the projects. “This is 
not a done deal,” Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, the group that led 
the protests against the Keystone pipeline, said in a statement. “The 
last time around, TransCanada was so 

[Marxism] Rich Trumpka

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

http://www.aflcio.org/Press-Room/Press-Releases/Dakota-Access-Pipeline-Provides-High-Quality-Jobs

Dakota Access Pipeline Provides High-Quality Jobs

September 15, 2016
Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka regarding the Dakota 
Access Pipeline:


The AFL-CIO supports pipeline construction as part of a comprehensive 
energy policy that creates jobs, makes the United States more 
competitive and addresses the threat of climate change. Pipelines are 
less costly, more reliable and less energy intensive than other forms of 
transporting fuels, and pipeline construction and maintenance provides 
quality jobs to tens of thousands of skilled workers.


---

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/us/politics/keystone-dakota-pipeline-trump.html

Trump Revives Keystone Pipeline Rejected by Obama
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Many Arrested Inauguration Day Protesters Will Face Felony Rioting Charges, Prosecutors Say « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth

[Thomas via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Narodnaya Volya didn't work out so well either.

T


-Original Message-
>From: Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>Sent: Jan 22, 2017 3:34 PM
>To: Thomas F Barton 
>Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Many Arrested Inauguration Day Protesters Will Face 
>Felony Rioting Charges, Prosecutors Say « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth
>

>Black bloc tactics now have very high risks for the perpetually low payoff.
>
>http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2017/01/21/many-inauguration-day-protesters-will-face-felony-rioting-charges-prosecutors-say/
>_
>

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] New on Redline: NZ Labour supports US warmongering plus a whole lot more

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Daphna Whitmore on NZ Labour Party leader Andrew Little's support for US
warmongering:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/labour-supports-us-warmongering/

Connect to podcast interview with Tony Norfield on modern imperialism, the
global financial system, problems with the term 'neoliberlaism' and much
more. . .:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/tony-norfield-on-the-global-financial-system-why-neoliberalism-is-a-misleading-term-and-much-more/

Me from 1998 on political correctness and social control:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/from-the-vaults-political-correctness-and-social-control/

Phil
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: The Styrofoam Presidency | by Masha Gessen | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

In his small-mindedness and lack of aspiration, Trump curiously 
resembles Putin, though the origins of the two men’s stubborn mediocrity 
could not be more different. Aspiration should not be confused with 
ambition—both men want to be ever more powerful and wealthier, but 
neither wants to be or even appear better. (One way in which Putin 
continuously reasserts his lack of aspiration is by making crude jokes 
at the most inappropriate times—as when, during a joint appearance with 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in 
2013, he compared EU monetary policy to a wedding night: “No matter what 
you do, the result will the same,” his way of lightly covering up the 
“you get fucked” punchline. Watch this video to see the German 
chancellor cringe.


full: 
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/24/styrofoam-presidency-trump-aesthetics/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Home | Columbia University and Slavery

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot - The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Trump turned on the television to see a jarring juxtaposition — massive 
demonstrations around the globe protesting his day-old presidency and 
footage of the sparser crowd at his inauguration, with large patches of 
white empty space on the Mall.


As his press secretary, Sean Spicer, was still unpacking boxes in his 
spacious new West Wing office, Trump grew increasingly and visibly enraged.


Pundits were dissing his turnout. The National Park Service had 
retweeted a photo unfavorably comparing the size of his inauguration 
crowd with the one that attended Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony in 
2009. A journalist had misreported that Trump had removed the bust of 
Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. And celebrities at the 
protests were denouncing the new commander in chief — Madonna even 
referenced “blowing up the White House.”


Trump’s advisers suggested that he could push back in a simple tweet. 
Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a Trump confidant and the chairman of the 
Presidential Inaugural Committee, offered to deliver a statement 
addressing the crowd size.


White House press secretary's inauguration claims, annotated  Play Video2:01
During a briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer accused 
members of the press on Saturday of “deliberately false” inaugural 
coverage. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
But Trump was adamant, aides said. Over the objections of his aides and 
advisers — who urged him to focus on policy and the broader goals of his 
presidency — the new president issued a decree: He wanted a fiery public 
response, and he wanted it to come from his press secretary.


Spicer’s resulting statement — delivered in an extended shout and 
brimming with falsehoods — underscores the extent to which the 
turbulence and competing factions that were a hallmark of Trump’s 
campaign have been transported to the White House.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-first-days-inside-trumps-white-house-fury-tumult-and-a-reboot/2017/01/23/7ceef1b0-e191-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Beware the zombies | Michael Roberts Blog

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

This confirms what I argued in a recent debate on the role of 
profitability.  The huge profits gained since the end of the Great 
Recession have been mostly confined to the large companies: “just a few 
mega companies hold most of the cash while thousands of small and medium 
enterprises (SMEs) hold little cash and much more debt.  Indeed, a 
minority are really ‘zombie’ firms just raising enough profit to service 
their debt.”


It is easy to see why there are so many zombies.  Despite the relative 
recovery of headline profitability in many economies in the 
credit-fuelled boom from 2002 to 2006, many small to medium-sized 
companies did not see an improvement in profitability.  Instead they 
racked up higher debt through bank loans.  The Great Recession caused a 
collapse in profits and even after 2009, profitability improved little 
for these companies while debt remained high. But the zombie companies 
have struggled on because interest rates were so low and banks would not 
foreclose.  This scenario has been found in the extreme in Italy where 
‘non-performing’ bank loans have reached 20% of GDP.


full: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/beware-the-zombies/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Syria And The Antiwar Movement | Countercurrents

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Like all civil wars, it is hard to obtain accurate information about the 
Syrian civil war. However, the facts do show that: (1) the primary 
battle in Syria is between the regime and the rebellion; other actors, 
notablyISIS are responsible for only a small fraction of the deaths in 
Syria, and (2) although both the Assad regime and the rebellion receive 
foreign support, the battle between them is asymmetric; the Assad regime 
has all the apparatus of state power on its side – a centralized army, 
planes and artillery – and has benefited from direct intervention by its 
allies, primarily Russia and Iran. One key illustration of the asymmetry 
is air power which is used exclusively bythe Assad regime and its 
allies, and is responsible for a large part of the destruction. It is 
noteworthy that air power is responsible not only for direct civilian 
deaths, but also indirect ones through, for instance the systematic 
destruction of hospitals.


Therefore, it is safe to conclude that although there are atrocities 
committed by both sides, the Assad regime is responsible for the vast 
majority of civilian deaths and displacement. According to the Syrian 
Network for Human Rights, the regime is responsible for over 90% of 
civilian deaths, whereas ISIS is responsible for less than 1.5% of the 
civilian deaths.


full: 
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/01/11/syria-and-the-antiwar-movement/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Is atomic theory the most important idea in human history? | Aeon Essays

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



https://aeon.co/essays/is-atomic-theory-the-most-important-idea-in-human-history
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Trump to al-Sisi: Syria's al-Assad is a Brave, steadfast Man

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



http://www.juancole.com/2017/01/trump-syrias-steadfast.html
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Brains From Which the Alt-Right Sprang

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Brains From Which the Alt-Right Sprang
By Marc Parry JANUARY 22, 2017

The "alt-right" did not come out of nowhere. The racist movement’s 
founders, like Richard B. Spencer and Jared Taylor, built on ideas 
concocted, in some cases, by academics. "There’s an entire intellectual 
inheritance, produced in university classrooms and research facilities, 
that led us to this moment," says Heidi Beirich, an expert on extremism 
at the Southern Poverty Law Center.


Those intellectual roots are at the heart of a forthcoming study by 
Thomas J. Main, a professor at Baruch College’s Austin W. Marxe School 
of Public and International Affairs. Main, a self-described moderate 
conservative, formerly served as managing editor of Irving Kristol’s 
journal The Public Interest, a platform of neoconservative thought. His 
book promises to be one of the first to attempt a 
political-science-based analysis of the alt-right, which he has called 
the "first new philosophical competitor to liberalism, broadly defined, 
since the fall of Communism." The following interview has been edited 
and condensed.


Can you tell me about your project?

It’s looking at the alt-right as a political and ideological phenomenon. 
There are several prongs to that investigation. One is looking at the 
digital and web presence of the alt-right, with the idea of trying to 
get a sense as to whether it has reached a point where it can actually 
have some kind of influence on American political culture. And then I’m 
doing this intellectual genealogy — where they came out of. And then I’m 
also looking in detail at some of their arguments. They’ve got this 
whole philosophy of what they call "race realism" — what other people 
would call scientific racism.


Who are some of the most important intellectual influences on the alt-right?

I don’t know if I could point to one or two figures that were so 
important. For instance, if you look at the libertarian movement, you 
would point to people like maybe F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises as 
intellectual progenitors. I don’t know that there’s anybody quite at 
that kind of level with the alt-right.


An intellectual trickle-down process dilutes and simplifies the ideas of 
academic theorists. You have to think about the alt-right as being the 
latest incarnation of what used to be called, back in the early ’60s, 
right-wing extremism. What I mean by that is everybody to the right of, 
let’s say, National Review. The conscious policy of Bill Buckley was to 
throw out everybody from the conservative movement who was in any way 
unrespectable. Over time, the conservative movement started to penetrate 
the political center. Part of that manifestation was the growth of 
neoconservatism, and the phenomenon of critics of the Great Society, and 
critics of the New Left, moving rightward. So, between pushing out the 
extreme right, and bringing in some of the moderate left, the 
conservative movement took a couple of steps toward the mainstream of 
American political culture.


If you fast-forward now to the ’80s, the so-called right-wing extremists 
are now known as paleoconservatives, because they don’t like the fact 
that the movement has moved somewhat to the left. And they especially 
hate the neoconservatives, whom they see as corrupting the movement. So 
the question was how to take the conservative movement back.


Whose ideas shaped that response?

One person who was very influential here was a writer by the name of 
Kevin B. MacDonald, who was a psychologist at California State 
University at Long Beach. In 1994 he wrote a book, A People That Shall 
Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Praeger 
Publishers). He revived the strain of anti-Semitism on the right by 
making a Darwinian analysis of Jews. He argued that Jewish culture — and 
in particular the fact that they had a married clergy — resulted in 
boosting the average IQ of Jews, because the smartest people, unlike in 
the Catholic Church, didn’t take themselves out of the gene pool. Jews 
were analyzed as a subspecies invading a new ecological niche. And part 
of the Jewish evolutionary strategy was that Jews do better if the host 
society is pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic.


Also you had a guy by the name of Michael Levin, who was a philosophy 
professor at City College here in the City University of New York. In 
the late ’80s, early ’90s, he started developing a racialist theory. He 
suggested that, gee, maybe we should have separate subway cars for black 
young men because they’re more likely to commit crimes. And he delivered 
a series of speeches along those lines, which created