Re: [Marxism] Goodbye to Leninism
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 Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 5:53 PM, Charlie via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: . . . Cuba survived independent of imperialism and took the socialist road because the Castro group and the Communists merged fairly soon after liberation. . . . You could argue that the July 26th movement's 'merger' with the USSR-connected Popular Socialist Party two-and-a-half years after the revolution was responsible for revolutionary Cuba's survival in the sense that this diplomatic bow to the Soviet Union was helpful in assuring continuing international aid and support from the Soviet bloc. But the July 26th movement leadership made sure to keep the PSP in a subordinate domestic political role through many years of rough relationships in a process of integration (as manifest in the Escalante case to which Louis refers) that eventuated in officially founding the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965. I think that it wasn't until after the first congress of the Communist Party of Cuba met in 1975 that the CCP, with the former PSP successfully integrated, functioned as the ruling government party. _ 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] Documentaries about Marx and 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 11/16/14 4:20 PM, Jeffrey Masko wrote: I've used /The American Ruling Class/ too as a performative documentary mode and it's worked well. Especially when looking at higher education as one of the ways we reproduce class structure in the U.S. One thing I would do differently is to put workers in the foreground. Lewis Lapham just didn't consider the need for putting them ahead of experts, no matter how qualified they were. I'd love to interview a radical subway worker et al. _ 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] Mexico: General strike planned over disappeared students amid new protests
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * A national strike for November 20 to protest the government’s ineffective investigation in the case of 43 missing Ayotzinapa students was announced on November 12 by the Mexican Inter-university Students Assembly, chaired by the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training School “Isidro Burgos”. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57794 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker _ 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] Mumia: Real threat not Ebola, but capitalist health care
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. * Consider this: when Duncan first entered Texas Presbyterian Hospital, he was interviewed by a screener, prescribed antibiotics, and sent home. The screener was, more likely than not, not a medically-trained health care professional but a receptionist, perhaps armed with a checklist to cover. Chances are, she was perhaps the lowest-paid staff, until one considers the janitorial workers. This business model, one followed by most institutions in the US, is now exposed as ineffective, dangerous and the least health-conscious. That was a business decision, driven by the bottom line, of money ― not life. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57801 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker _ 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] interesting take on the US political/social/cultural scene of the 1970s/80s
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 11/16/14 11:17 PM, Dennis Brasky via Marxism wrote: http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/thomas_frank_on_ronald_reagans_secret_tragedy_how_70s_and_80s_cynicism_poisoned_democrats_and_america/?source=newsletter Thomas Frank: Wait, what was that word you just used? Rick Perlstein: Sirocco. It’s a wind that knocks out everything in its path. So yeah. You take this free floating rage against authority of all kinds, and the government, and a reluctance of this new class of Democrats to take on concentrated economic power. You know, Gary Hart’s stock speech, he would excoriate “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” It was the worst possible thing to be. Thomas Frank: Why would a Democrat pick on Eleanor Roosevelt? Rick Perlsein: Because it was kind of seen as old fashioned. [There was] This post-scarcity idea that the economy was taking care of everybody, which it was in the early 1970s. The tragedy was, of course, that this rhetoric sort of beginning to pick up steam just as the economy was becoming increasingly unfair for working people. So you take these two factors and what emerges is a Democratic Party that’s superficially very strong, right, because they do very well in 1974, and of course they win the presidency in 1976. But they become strong at the expense of their historic appeal, which is to be the economic defenders of people seeking to enter and stay in the middle class. Thomas Frank: Yeah, of average people. And they’ve become the defenders of something very different. You know, it’s funny because now when people think back about Gary Hart I’m quite certain what they think is “liberal.” If anything, more liberal than Walter Mondale, the man he ran against [in 1984]. Rick Perlstein: Right, and Walter Mondale was coming out of this tradition of this guy, Hubert Humphrey, who really, now, to me, looks like a prophet without honor. He was held in contempt by the New Left because he stuck with — talking about Humphrey — the Vietnam War when he was running for president in 1968. Yep. That killed him. That’s what did him in. It killed him. And a lot of these post-New Deal Democrats, by the way, come out of the New Left and the New Left had this very problematic relationship with the labor movement, who were seen as sort of the Cold War consensus. Oh, good point. Gary Hart was a real New Leftist. I remember him well from the Denver SDS. He used to throw LSD parties where everybody got naked and danced to Janis Joplin records. The Denver SDS was the first to move in a Weatherman direction with Hart leading the charge. His first exemplary action against the pigs was to put some dog doody in a paper bag that he lit on fire outside a police station. When the cops stamped on the bag to put the fire out, they really got pissed. _ 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] more on US-China climate fraud
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. * Bill Onasch, a veteran fighter for linking labor and climate movements, has a wonderful dissection of the deal, including the essential point that calling it a step forward disarms us: http://kclabor.org/wordpress/?p=537 He includes a link to John Riddell's review of Klein's book, with this crucial point: The experience of twentieth century socialist revolutions, while troubled, is surely relevant to what we must now accomplish in the face of a systemic crisis of capitalism triggered by climate change. It is hard to see how the fossil fuel stranglehold can be broken without popular ownership and control over dominant industries. Speaking of that 20th century experience, don't miss this: http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article3644 _ 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] Goodbye to Leninism
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. * Whatever the particulars of how it happened in Cuba, a revolution must get a Leninist party as soon as possible if it is to survive the inevitable counterrevolutionary assault. Building a party that is socialist in goal yet suffers illusions of relying on spontaneity (a pluralistic and transparent mass party) complicates the inevitable task of changeover at best, suffers the fate of Allende at worst. _ 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: Against football | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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. * I sent Louis a copy of my incomplete manuscript of a new book in which a large section reviews the history of football as part of the project of muscular Christianity to toughen up upper class white boys to be more suitable for the military, which is why for quite some time Harvard was the dominant football team. Teddy Roosevelt was a big part of this. After a while, so many players got injured and killed, that Teddy Roosevelt called a conference in the White House to change the rules a bit. Earlier, she had dismissed the injuries as a reasonable price to pay for the process of toughening up young men. On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu 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. * On 11/16/14 4:41 PM, Wythe Holt jr. wrote: Thanks for this good sense, Louis. Football -- which unfortunately I like to watch -- breeds violence and disregard of human health through its practices, through the devotion of all connected with the sport to violence and to hitting (the euphemism always used by football people for what they teach players to do to other players, usually as violently as possible), through its macho pseudo-manliness mantras and obedience systems. I hope that all of this about permanent injuries, concussions, and the (often sexual) violence wreaked upon family members and the young coming into the sport -- as you so rightly emphasize -- brings about the demise of this vicious and hurtful sport. Wythe The latest on all this. NY Times, Nov. 14 2014 Florida State Player Fled Crash but Got Only Traffic Tickets By MIKE McINTIRE and WALT BOGDANICH TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- In the early morning hours of Oct. 5, as this college town was celebrating another big football victory by Florida State University, a starting cornerback on the team drove his car into the path of an oncoming vehicle driven by a teenager returning home from a job at the Olive Garden. Both cars were totaled. But rather than remain at the scene as the law requires, the football player, P. J. Williams, left his wrecked vehicle in the street and fled into the darkness along with his two passengers, including Ronald Darby, the team's other starting cornerback. The Tallahassee police responded to the off-campus accident, eventually reaching out to the Florida State University police and the university's athletic department. By the next day, it was as if the hit and run had never happened. The New York Times looked into how the police handled the case, reviewing law enforcement records and interviewing witnesses, lawyers, the police and a university representative. The examination found that Mr. Williams, driving with a suspended license, had been given a break by the Tallahassee police, who initially labeled the accident a hit and run, a criminal act, but later decided to issue Mr. Williams only two traffic tickets. Afterward, the case did not show up in the city's public online database of police calls -- a technical error, the police said. A starting cornerback for the Florida State University football team left the scene of a collision on Oct. 5 but was not charged with a hit-and-run, an examination by The New York Times found. That contrasts with another case in the same area in the same month. Mr. Williams eventually returned to the scene. But Tallahassee officers did not test him for alcohol. Nor did their report indicate whether they asked if he had been drinking or why he had fled -- logical questions, since the accident occurred at 2:37 a.m. The report also minimized the impact of the crash on the driver of the other car, Ian Keith, by failing to indicate that his airbag had deployed -- an important detail, because Mr. Keith said in an interview that the airbag had cut and bruised his hands. The university police, who lacked jurisdiction, nevertheless sent two ranking officers -- including the shift commander -- to the scene. Yet they wrote no report about their actions that night. Florida State dismissed the role of its officers in the episode as too minor to require a report or to be entered into their own online police log, comparing it to an instance when campus officers responded to a baby opossum falling from a tree. The car accident, previously unreported by the news media, comes amid heightened national scrutiny of
[Marxism] Fwd: The Truth About Anonymous’s Activism | The Nation
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. * But like a Silicon Valley buzzword, “lulz” obscures more than it reveals, glossing troubling details with a rebel-chic sheen. The lulz originally did not speak to the pleasure of some abstract transgression, but the specific, cruel pleasure of a bully tormenting a helpless victim. Whitney Phillips, another scholar of Internet trolls, spent thousands of hours observing 4chan trolls and found that their victims had something in common. She found that “the vast majority of lulz are derived from targeting people of color (especially African-American), women, gay men and lesbians.” Many early Anonymous “raids” were nothing more than the distributed cyberstalking of young women until they fled the Internet. The trolls, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly white and male, between the ages of 18 and 30, according to Phillips. Consider also that the height of Anonymous’s trolling days was the height of the Web 2.0 boom, when the first blogging platforms and early social networks ushered in a flood of less-savvy Internet users who were less likely to be white male geeks. In its early days, Anonymous was a gang of white men who systematically terrorized minorities and women, with the often explicitly stated goal of driving them from an Internet the men had once totally dominated. http://www.thenation.com/article/190369/truth-about-anonymouss-activism# --- Weev was a member of Goatse Security (GoatSec), a small band of hackers that was part of the constellation of groups that were either part of Anonymous or “fellow travelers”. Considering the fact that Anonymous was not a membership organization as such, it is hard to pinpoint the various convergences between people like Weev and the network. His biggest hack was uncovering a flaw in ATT security that made the e-mail addresses of iPad users easily accessible. As a kind of black Kryptonite evil version of Abby Hoffman, Weev fancied himself as a joker, assuming the guise of Internet troll. When you come across the term in the film, it is important to note that this is not the same thing as, for example, a libertarian making himself a nuisance on Marxmail until he gets the boot. For Weev, trolling means harassing people mercilessly. A lot of Weev’s shtick is badmouthing “Kikes”, “fags” and “niggers”, behavior that the film puts the best positive spin on, as a form of ironic social commentary on hypocrisy. But there’s probably an aspect of this that the film neglected, no doubt a function of its general affinity for hactivism. While the film was obviously made some time ago, I wonder how director Weisman would have responded to Weev’s article this month on the neo-Nazi website “The Daily Stormer” titled “What I learned from my time in prison”. I’ve been a long-time critic of Judaism, black culture, immigration to Western nations, and the media’s constant stream of anti-white propaganda. Judge Wigenton was as black as they come. The prosecutor, Zach Intrater, was a Brooklyn Jew from an old money New York family. The trial was a sham…The whole time a yarmulke-covered audience of Jewry stared at me from the pews of the courtroom. My prosecutor invited his whole synagogue to spectate. Maybe there’s a joke there but I don’t get it. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/10/20/the-hacker-wars/ _ 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] Another milestone in the restoration of Chinese capitalism
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. * China took another major step today to restoring full-fledged capitalism, opening its Shanghai stock exchange to all foreign investors and allowing its own citizens to buy overseas assets on the Hong Kong bourse. Until now, the Chinese market was only open to a limited number of “qualified” foreign institutional investors - mainly the big US and European investment banks - who were assigned a quota limiting their collective share purchases. The quota system remains in place, as China gradually moves away from capital controls, but the scope and value of stocks available to foreigners have greatly increased, and restrictions on who can buy them - notably hedge funds eager to crack the China market - have been lifted. Today’s first day of trading saw foreign investors bidding up shares on the Shanghai market, but interest in foreign shares listed on the Hong Kong exchange by wealthy Chinese buyers was more muted. The greater flow of funds into Shanghai likely reflects the mainland’s greater growth potential as well as the anticipated steady appreciation of the yuan against foreign currencies. The Financial Times report below calls the program “one of the most significant developments in the opening of China’s financial markets in years.” * * * Hong Kong-Shanghai exchange deal sees money head north By Josh Noble in Hong Kong and Gabriel Wildau in Shanghai Financial Times November 17 2014 An equity trading scheme linking the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges had a lopsided start on Monday, with mainland investors showing little appetite for buying shares listed offshore. The Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect allows investors in both financial centres to buy equities in each other’s market, giving global hedge funds and retail investors direct access to China for the first time while offering domestic investors a new route to international assets. The pilot project is subject to both daily and aggregate limits on how much capital can cross in each direction. Each day global investors can put as much as Rmb13bn ($2.1bn) into Shanghai stocks, while wealthy mainland individuals can send up to Rmb10.5bn south into Hong Kong. International investors exhausted their daily quota by 2pm on Monday, having bought more than $1bn of stock during the pre-trade auction. Yet the southbound leg through which Chinese retail investors can trade in Hong Kong experienced tepid demand. At the close, mainland buyers had bought less than Rmb180m worth of Hong Kong shares, leaving more than 80 per cent of their daily quota untouched. “I think it’s fair to say that it’s not been a roaring success. It’s something that will be looked at critically,” said one Hong Kong-based equity market banker. “It will be monitored closely in the next couple of days, but it’s too early to hit the panic button.” Based on the first day, the aggregate quota of Rmb300bn for investing into China will be filled in 23 trading days. However, the southbound leg will require roughly 140 sessions to exhaust its limit of Rmb250bn. “For domestic investors who want buy Hong Kong shares, they already had ways to get around the restrictions and buy them. So there wasn’t much pent-up demand to begin with,” said a trader at a midsized brokerage in Shanghai. Some large foreign asset managers have taken a cautious approach to the opening of the Stock Connect, choosing to wait and watch how the early days go. The delay in clarification on a key capital gains tax issue also served to slow take-up among institutional investors. However, many hedge funds and retail investors have been clamouring to buy into the Shanghai market to exploit price gaps between the two exchanges, where dozens of companies maintain dual listings. The Stock Connect is one of the most significant developments in the opening of China’s financial markets in years, and could ultimately lead to mainland shares being added to global benchmark indices, such as those compiled by MSCI and FTSE. The start of the scheme caused choppy trading in Hong Kong. The Hang Seng index initially jumped, but finished the day down 1.2 per cent. The Shanghai market edged lower by 0.2 per cent. Some of the Shanghai-listed stocks by analysts tipped to benefit did see a rise, with spirits makerKweichow Moutai adding 1.8 per cent, automaker SAIC up 3.2 per cent, and Daqin Railway gaining 6.2 per cent. In Hong Kong, Mengniu Dairy was the biggest mover, with a 1.8 per cent rise. However, Hong Kong Exchanges Clearing shares sank 4.5 per cent. The bourse operator had been the top gainer in Hong Kong this year, rising more than 40 per cent
Re: [Marxism] Another milestone in the restoration of Chinese capitalism
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. * I recall reading this back on '01. So it was only a matter of time. Chinese Censors Shut Down Marxist Journal Critical of Jiang By ERIK ECKHOLM Published: August 16, 2001 - EMAI - PRI http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/world/chinese-censors-shut-down-marxist-journal-critical-of-jiang.html?pagewanted=print http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=gotoopznpage=www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/daypos=Frame4Asn2=72270860/53be7632sn1=2c606cad/efa07d18camp=FoxSearchlight_AT2014-1911129-Novad=11.13_WILD_120x60-PlayingDec3goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2EhowWilditwas%2Ecom Censors have shut down a small but influential Marxist journal for attacking President Jiang Zemin's plan to bring capitalists into the Communist Party, a sign that Mr. Jiang will brook little dissent from any quarter as he tries to cement his place in the pantheon of great leaders. The closing in recent weeks of ''Pursuit of Truth,'' was Mr. Jiang's most open move yet against hard-line Marxists, many of them elderly revolutionary veterans, who question his plan to broaden a party that by its Constitution is the ''vanguard of the working class.'' Late next year, Mr. Jiang is expected to give up his post as general secretary of the Communist Party and, in 2003, his term as president of China expires. As the transition approaches, party insiders say, Mr. Jiang is trying both to define his place in history and to adapt the increasingly clumsy methods of Communism to a world of social and technological complexity. On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Marv Gandall via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu 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. * China took another major step today to restoring full-fledged capitalism, opening its Shanghai stock exchange to all foreign investors and allowing its own citizens to buy overseas assets on the Hong Kong bourse. Until now, the Chinese market was only open to a limited number of “qualified” foreign institutional investors - mainly the big US and European investment banks - who were assigned a quota limiting their collective share purchases. The quota system remains in place, as China gradually moves away from capital controls, but the scope and value of stocks available to foreigners have greatly increased, and restrictions on who can buy them - notably hedge funds eager to crack the China market - have been lifted. Today’s first day of trading saw foreign investors bidding up shares on the Shanghai market, but interest in foreign shares listed on the Hong Kong exchange by wealthy Chinese buyers was more muted. The greater flow of funds into Shanghai likely reflects the mainland’s greater growth potential as well as the anticipated steady appreciation of the yuan against foreign currencies. The Financial Times report below calls the program “one of the most significant developments in the opening of China’s financial markets in years.” * * * Hong Kong-Shanghai exchange deal sees money head north By Josh Noble in Hong Kong and Gabriel Wildau in Shanghai Financial Times November 17 2014 An equity trading scheme linking the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges had a lopsided start on Monday, with mainland investors showing little appetite for buying shares listed offshore. The Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect allows investors in both financial centres to buy equities in each other’s market, giving global hedge funds and retail investors direct access to China for the first time while offering domestic investors a new route to international assets. The pilot project is subject to both daily and aggregate limits on how much capital can cross in each direction. Each day global investors can put as much as Rmb13bn ($2.1bn) into Shanghai stocks, while wealthy mainland individuals can send up to Rmb10.5bn south into Hong Kong. International investors exhausted their daily quota by 2pm on Monday, having bought more than $1bn of stock during the pre-trade auction. Yet the southbound leg through which Chinese retail investors can trade in Hong Kong experienced tepid demand. At the close, mainland buyers had bought less than Rmb180m worth of Hong Kong shares, leaving more than 80 per cent of their daily quota untouched. “I think it’s fair to say that it’s not been a roaring success. It’s something that will be looked at critically,” said one Hong
Re: [Marxism] Another milestone in the restoration of Chinese capitalism
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 Nov 17, 2014, at 1:15 PM, Marv Gandall via Marxism wrote: China took another major step today to restoring full-fledged capitalism, opening its Shanghai stock exchange to all foreign investors and allowing its own citizens to buy overseas assets on the Hong Kong bourse. What restoration? China has been capitalist for a long time, and since 1949 its form of capitalism has been monopoly state capitalism in Stalinist mode (ie., state capitalism calling itself socialism). And since the Deng reforms it has moved steadily into convergence with its non-socialist Western homologue, state monopoly capitalism. Shane Mage scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying attention to _ 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: Transgender Pioneer Leslie Feinberg of Stone Butch Blues Has Died | Advocate.com
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * One of Workers World's greatest spokespeople. http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2014/11/17/transgender-pioneer-leslie-feinberg-stone-butch-blues-has-died _ 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] Continent of the Islamic a State.
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.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/continent-of-the-islamic-state/article6605368.ece Vijay. Sent from Planet Earth (maybe) _ 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: Tomas Young, Army Veteran, Dies at 34; Critic of Iraq War in Film | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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://louisproyect.org/2014/11/17/tomas-young-army-veteran-dies-at-34-critic-of-iraq-war-in-film/ _ 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] Health Law Turns Obama and Insurers Into Allies
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, Nov. 17 2014 Health Law Turns Obama and Insurers Into Allies By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON — With the health insurance marketplace now open for a second year, President Obama will be depending more than ever on the insurance companies that five years ago he accused of padding profits and canceling coverage for the sick. Those same insurers have long viewed government as an unreliable business partner that imposed taxes, fees and countless regulations and had the power to cut payment rates and cap profit margins. But since the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010, the relationship between the Obama administration and insurers has evolved into a powerful, mutually beneficial partnership that has been a boon to the nation’s largest private health plans and led to a profitable surge in their Medicaid enrollment. Reaching businesses like Bagel Grove in Utica, N.Y., is a priority for the new health care law. video Health Care at the Bagel ShopNOV. 4, 2014 The insurers in turn have provided crucial support to Mr. Obama in court battles over the health care law, including a case now before the Supreme Court challenging the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low- and moderate-income consumers. Last fall, a unit of one of the nation’s largest insurers, UnitedHealth Group, helped the administration repair the HealthCare.gov website after it crashed in the opening days of enrollment. “Insurers and the government have developed a symbiotic relationship, nurtured by tens of billions of dollars that flow from the federal Treasury to insurers each year,” said Michael F. Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. The relationship is expected only to deepen as the two sides grow more intertwined. “These companies all look at government programs as growth markets,” said Michael J. Tuffin, former executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main lobby for the industry. “There will be nearly $2 trillion of subsidized coverage through insurance exchanges and Medicaid over the next 10 years. These are pragmatic companies. They will follow the customer.” So much money is at stake that insurers may soon be on a collision course with the Republican majority in the new Congress. Insurers, often aligned with Republicans in the past, have built their business plans around the 2010 law and will strenuously resist Republican efforts to dismantle it. Since Mr. Obama signed the law in March 2010, share prices for four of the major insurance companies — Aetna, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth — have more than doubled, while the Standard Poor’s 500-stock index has increased about 70 percent. Whatever Republicans do, over the next three months — the enrollment period — consumers will hear the same messages from insurance companies and the government urging them to sign up for health plans sold on the exchanges. Federal law requires most Americans to have coverage, insurers provide it, and the government subsidizes it. “We are in this together,” Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, told insurers at a recent conference in Washington. “You have been our partners,” and for that, he said, “we are very grateful.” Despite Mr. Obama’s denunciations of private insurers in 2009, it became inevitable that they would have a central role in expanding coverage under the Affordable Care Act later that year when Congress ruled out a government-run health plan — the “public option” that liberal Democrats had favored. But friction between insurers and the Obama administration continued into 2013 as the industry bristled at stringent rules imposed on carriers in the name of consumer protection. A turning point in the relationship came last fall, after the chaotic debut of HealthCare.gov, when insurers waived enrollment deadlines and helped the White House fix the dysfunctional website. Now insurers say government business is growing much faster than the market for commercial employer-sponsored coverage. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 170 million people will have coverage through Medicare, Medicaid and the insurance exchanges by 2023, an increase of about 50 percent from 2013. By contrast, the number of people with employer-based coverage is expected to rise just 2 percent, to 159 million. In addition, the Affordable Care Act has engendered growth in the role of private insurers in Medicaid. The law expanded eligibility for Medicaid, and most of the new beneficiaries receive care from private health plans under contracts
Re: [Marxism] [Pen-l] [lbo-talk] Another milestone in the restoration of Chinese capitalism
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 Nov 17, 2014, at 1:42 PM, Shane Mage shm...@pipeline.com wrote: On Nov 17, 2014, at 1:15 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: China took another major step today to restoring full-fledged capitalism, opening its Shanghai stock exchange to all foreign investors and allowing its own citizens to buy overseas assets on the Hong Kong bourse. What restoration? China has been capitalist for a long time, and since 1949 its form of capitalism has been monopoly state capitalism in Stalinist mode (ie., state capitalism calling itself socialism). And since the Deng reforms it has moved steadily into convergence with its non-socialist Western homologue, state monopoly capitalism. Shane Mage Well, let's set that polemic aside and agree that it's been restoring the system of private ownership in finance and manufacturing which prevailed in China prior to 1949, albeit on a much larger and more advanced scale. it's now become a major economic power in its own right, exporting capital and acquiring foreign assets which were beyond its reach as a wholly dependent and exploited semi-colony of the imperialist powers prior to the Chinese Revolution. _ 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] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] RE: Fwd: Against football | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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. * Football was a path of upward mobility for my grandfather. He was reared in utter if genteel poverty in the 1870s and 1880s. He began playing football at college, as he was able to eke out two years at Virginia Military Institute in the early 1890s, paid for largely by a grandmother who thought he (and his brother) had the most promise of any of her many grandchildren and saved up a bit of money (giving all she had to the two brothers, and not to her other grandchildren) to help with the amounts that my grandfather and his brother earned in various jobs. I think he was 19 or 20 when he first got to college. He was the star of their team and the alumni paid for a 5th semester for him, so he could play football. Back home, he organized (with his brother) what we would today call a semipro football team, the Hampton Athletic Club (he was from Hampton, VA), and for several years they played football against other semipro teams but also against college squads such as Princeton and Un iversity of North Carolina. Football helped him to overcome the stigma he felt from being poverty-stricken, it made him many friends, and was something he treasured the rest of his long life. Wythe From: Marxism marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu on behalf of michael perelman via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Sent: Monday, November 17, 2014 10:17 AM To: Wythe Holt jr. Subject: Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Against football | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist 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. * I sent Louis a copy of my incomplete manuscript of a new book in which a large section reviews the history of football as part of the project of muscular Christianity to toughen up upper class white boys to be more suitable for the military, which is why for quite some time Harvard was the dominant football team. Teddy Roosevelt was a big part of this. After a while, so many players got injured and killed, that Teddy Roosevelt called a conference in the White House to change the rules a bit. Earlier, she had dismissed the injuries as a reasonable price to pay for the process of toughening up young men. On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu 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. * On 11/16/14 4:41 PM, Wythe Holt jr. wrote: Thanks for this good sense, Louis. Football -- which unfortunately I like to watch -- breeds violence and disregard of human health through its practices, through the devotion of all connected with the sport to violence and to hitting (the euphemism always used by football people for what they teach players to do to other players, usually as violently as possible), through its macho pseudo-manliness mantras and obedience systems. I hope that all of this about permanent injuries, concussions, and the (often sexual) violence wreaked upon family members and the young coming into the sport -- as you so rightly emphasize -- brings about the demise of this vicious and hurtful sport. Wythe The latest on all this. NY Times, Nov. 14 2014 Florida State Player Fled Crash but Got Only Traffic Tickets By MIKE McINTIRE and WALT BOGDANICH TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- In the early morning hours of Oct. 5, as this college town was celebrating another big football victory by Florida State University, a starting cornerback on the team drove his car into the path of an oncoming vehicle driven by a teenager returning home from a job at the Olive Garden. Both cars were totaled. But rather than remain at the scene as the law requires, the football player, P. J. Williams, left his wrecked vehicle in the street and fled into the darkness along with his two passengers, including Ronald Darby, the team's other starting cornerback. The Tallahassee police responded to the off-campus accident, eventually reaching out to the Florida State University police and the university's athletic department. By the next day, it was as if the hit and run had never happened. The New York Times looked into how the police handled the
[Marxism] Fwd: Against football | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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 11/17/14 6:30 PM, Wythe Holt jr. via Marxism wrote: Football was a path of upward mobility for my grandfather. He was reared in utter if genteel poverty in the 1870s and 1880s. He began playing football at college, as he was able to eke out two years at Virginia Military Institute in the early 1890s, paid for largely by a grandmother who thought he (and his brother) had the most promise of any of her many grandchildren and saved up a bit of money (giving all she had to the two brothers, and not to her other grandchildren) to help with the amounts that my grandfather and his brother earned in various jobs. I think he was 19 or 20 when he first got to college. He was the star of their team and the alumni paid for a 5th semester for him, so he could play football. Back home, he organized (with his brother) what we would today call a semipro football team, the Hampton Athletic Club (he was from Hampton, VA), and for several years they played football against other semipro teams but also against college squads such as Prince to n and University of North Carolina. Football helped him to overcome the stigma he felt from being poverty-stricken, it made him many friends, and was something he treasured the rest of his long life. Wythe I know that Wythe is too modest to talk about his own background but at the risk of making him blush, I would urge comrades to check this out: WYTHE HOLT by Morton Horwitz∗ It is a great pleasure to be asked to celebrate the distinguished career of Wythe Holt. I have known Wythe for over thirty years. We became friends during his year as a Law and Humanities Fellow at Harvard in 1975-76. The young Wythe already displayed that extraordinary combination of, on one hand, passionate outrage at injustice and empathy for society’s underdogs and outsiders, and, on the other, a sweetness and gentleness of spirit that made it a privilege to be his friend. Wythe’s academic career expressed his moral and political commit- ments, much of it during a time in Alabama when it took real moral courage to identify openly with Marxism or to advocate progressive positions on questions involving race or class. Wythe began his teaching career in 1966 during George Wallace’s first term as governor of Alabama and three years after Wallace’s notorious “stand at the schoolhouse door” speech shouting defiance against Brown v. Board of Education. During Wythe’s first twenty-one years at Alabama, Wallace, his wife, or one of his close supporters, occupied the governor’s mansion. I never heard Wythe complain about being isolated or marginalized, though for many years he surely encountered real pressure to conform. He stood firm and found his community where he could—among sympathetic Alabama faculty and students when he could and among legal historians and members of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies when he could not. Ultimately, I suspect, it was his commitment to scholarship that sustained him through those many years as an outlier. Wythe’s most fertile scholarly period was during the 1980s, a time when a physically stricken Wallace continued to dominate state politics, while returning to the less rabid racial politics of his pre-demagogic days. full: http://www.law.ua.edu/pubs/lrarticles/Volume%2058/Issue%205/Horwitz.pdf _ 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] How does capitalism survive?
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. * Given just how clapped out the system is, it's survival is pretty remarkable. Every day there are examples of the craziness of an economy ruled by 'the market' instead of conscious human planning. Yet, still the system lingers. How? Why? Join the discussion at: http://rdln.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/how-capitalism-survives-opening-a-discussion/ 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] NZ imperialism under the cover of 'honest broker'
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. * One of the ways NZ imperialism, as a rather small variety of the beast, pursues its interests globally is by pretending to be an 'honest broker'. This is the form of its 'boutique imperialism', to borrow a term from Tom O'Lincoln's work on the Australian variety of the beast. This 'honest broker' rubbish is made easier by the fact that the NZ left is not only overwhelmingly liberal but also overwhelmingly nationalist. They *want* NZ to play an honest broker role. I've stuck up on article on Redline that was written 17 years ago about how the NZ elite's 'honest broker' pretence helps it in the Asia-Pacific region in the post-Cold War world. Although 17 years old, it is highly relevant to what NZ does today. See: http://rdln.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/new-zealand-honest-broker-of-the-pacific/ Comments on the article would be great too! 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] The US and China: a deal to save the planet - or wreck it?
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 is an appalling deal writes Jonathan Neale. Let's look at the numbers. The US has agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 28% below 2005 levels by 2030. But 2005 was the highest year ever for US emissions. They have already declined 10% in 8 years. Obama is promising that they will decline another 18% in 15 years. China has agreed to reach peak emissions by 2030. Chinese economic growth has been running 10% a year. If that growth continued, Chinese emissions in 2030 would be four times what they are now. But economic growth will not continue at that level, and there will be some progress in energy efficiency. Still, this is a promise to roughly double Chinese emissions by 2030. http://enpassant.com.au/2014/11/18/the-us-and-china-a-deal-to-save-the-planet-or-to-wreck-it/ _ 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] China-US deal more likely to wreck planet than save it
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. * United States President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping of China have signed a bilateral climate agreement. Much of the US and British media, and many US Democrats, have hailed the deal as a key step forward. Many US Republicans have attacked it as going much too far. Anything the Republicans attack has to be good. Right? No. In fact it is an appalling deal. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57804 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker _ 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] Dr. Irving Peress, Target of McCarthy Crusade, Dies at 97
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, Nov. 18 2014 Dr. Irving Peress, Target of McCarthy Crusade, Dies at 97 By SAM ROBERTS Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade had reached a fever pitch in 1954 when Irving Peress, a New York dentist who had been drafted into the Army, became the beneficiary of a seemingly routine promotion from captain to major. What followed was anything but routine. Dr. Peress was branded a Communist, and his promotion — unsought by him, a reluctant warrior from the start — became a Cold War battle cry, spurred a nationally televised congressional investigation and all but ended McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign and political career. The chant “Who promoted Peress?” rumbled across America and ultimately claimed the jobs of several top Army officials, cost Dr. Peress much of his private dental practice in Queens and even drove his wife, Elaine, to resign under pressure as editor of the Parent-Teachers Association bulletin at Public School 49 in Middle Village, Queens. A resident of Queens since 1958, he died at his home in Queens on Thursday at 97, his son, Jeffrey, said on Sunday. Dr. Peress found himself in McCarthy’s cross hairs as the senator, a Republican from Wisconsin, was waging a relentless campaign to root out suspected Communists from the government. In the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, he attacked Army officials for allowing Julius Rosenberg to penetrate the Signal Corps. Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were convicted as Soviet spies and executed in 1953. McCarthy contended that Dr. Peress’s promotion had been directed by a “silent master who decreed special treatment for Communists.” Dr. Peress, he said, represented “the key to the deliberate Communist infiltration of our armed forces.” McCarthy called him a “Fifth Amendment Communist.” Dr. Peress (pronounced PEH-ress) invoked the Fifth Amendment dozens of times at a Senate subcommittee hearing after a New York City policewoman swore that he and his wife were Communists and had attended a leadership class run by the party. Dr. Peress did testify that he would oppose any group that sought a violent or unconstitutional overthrow of the government. He quoted the Book of Psalms: “His mischief shall return upon his own head and his violence shall come down upon his own pate.” He also said that anyone, even a senator, who equated the invoking of constitutional privileges against incrimination with automatic guilt was himself guilty of subversion. McCarthy, as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, accused the Army of coddling Dr. Peress. He said it had promoted him despite questions about his loyalty; had acceded to his request not to be assigned to Japan; and had allowed him to be honorably discharged despite McCarthy’s demand that he be court-martialed. In fact, Dr. Peress’s promotion to major, along with hundreds of others, was considered largely automatic under legislation passed by Congress, and the change in assignment, forwarded by the Red Cross, was granted because his wife and young daughter were ill. As for the honorable discharge, the Army argued that invoking the Fifth Amendment was not sufficient grounds for military prosecution. The senator’s bluster during the hearings, his denunciation of Brig. Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker as “unfit” to wear his uniform, and his pressuring the Army for preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a draftee who was an associate of the McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn, finally prompted a showdown with the White House and, later that year, McCarthy’s censure by the Senate. Had Dr. Peress, in fact, been a Communist? “Not when I was in the Army, not for one minute,” he replied in a 2005 interview with The New York Times, the first time he and his wife talked about the case and its consequences. And before that? “I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “Nothing can accrue to it.” “I never advocated the violent overthrow of the government,” he offered. “I’m far from a Marxist scholar,” he said, “but from my skimming of Marx, it was always reasonable, appropriate: democratic control by people of their own destinies and in control of the means of production. It’s so utopian and mythological, it’s hard to conceive. Who would be against it? And what the Soviet Union was on its way to was enough to convince me.” Why not just say that to the committee, he was asked, instead of invoking the Fifth Amendment? “The next thing is, ‘Name names,’ ” he said. “That’s the follow-up question. I have a constitutional right not to tell you. Even Oliver North took
[Marxism] Fwd: University of Illinois Sued Over Salaita Emails | The Academe Blog
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[Marxism] Fwd: CCR Client Steven Salaita Speaking Tour in NY/NJ Nov 17-20 | Center for Constitutional Rights
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[Marxism] Japan recession, Europe stagnation cast pall over global economic outlook
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. * Washington Post, Nov. 18 2014 Japan recession, Europe stagnation cast pall over global economic outlook By Lori Montgomery and Griff Witte A sharp slowdown in Asia and stagnation in Europe are putting the global economy at risk of a prolonged slump, economists say, marked in places by sky-high unemployment, sluggish wage growth and some of the worst economic conditions in decades. On Monday, Japan said it had entered its fourth recession in six years — this one despite aggressive efforts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to boost growth. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron warned that the world’s economy could be headed toward another disaster. “Six years on from the financial crash that brought the world to its knees, red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy,” Cameron wrote Monday in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Two of the world’s economic powerhouses — Europe and Japan — are failing to bolster global growth, and their economies appear to be getting worse. With an unemployment rate of 11.5 percent, the euro zone is experiencing conditions that some economists say echo the Great Depression. Emerging markets, which helped lift the world out of the ugly downturn that followed the 2008 financial crisis, are also lagging. Russia and Brazil have been dogged by recession, and China’s double-digit growth has slowed rapidly as the country has matured and a speculative real estate bubble has let out air. China is “the thousand-pound gorilla in the emerging world and a big, big question mark,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at the consulting firm IHS. Conditions differ markedly from the financial meltdown of 2008 that sparked a worldwide crisis. “It’s not like the world is leveraged up and ready to plunge back into the abyss,” said Jay Bryson, a global economist at Wells Fargo. “The challenges today are a lot different.” For the United States, the developments have raised few concerns. The U.S. economy is growing at a solid pace of 3 percent per year, and falling gasoline prices have pumped roughly $80 billion into American wallets. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 13 points Monday, and the Standard Poor’s 500-stock index edged toward a record high as lucrative mergers at home obscured bad news abroad. Still, exports represent 13 percent of the U.S. economy and have slumped a bit, the first sign that sustained weakness abroad could limit the American recovery. Economists said stagnation and political paralysis in Europe are perhaps the most worrisome features on the global landscape. In the Guardian, Cameron described the euro zone as “teetering on the brink of a possible third recession, with high unemployment, falling growth and the real risk of falling prices too.” Add in stalled trade talks, conflict in the Middle East, fighting in eastern Ukraine and the alarming spread of the Ebola virus, Cameron warned, and the world is functioning against “a dangerous backdrop of instability and uncertainty.” Cameron’s bleak prognosis came at the end of the Group of 20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, where leaders of the world’s biggest economies struggled with strategies for kick-starting growth. Similarly negative pronouncements have echoed from other sources in recent days, particularly in relation to Europe. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, told reporters in London last week that “a specter is now haunting Europe — the specter of economic stagnation.” International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has warned of “the risk of a new mediocre” in Europe, with low growth, low inflation, high unemployment and high debt. On Monday, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi presented European lawmakers with a list of policy recommendations to stimulate growth, arguing that monetary policy alone cannot solve the problem. Draghi said that “2015 needs to be the year when all actors in the euro area — governments and European institutions alike — will deploy a consistent common strategy to bring our economies back on track.” Leaders in Europe and the United States have urged Germany — Europe’s largest economy, teetering on the edge of recession itself — to boost public spending. But German leaders continue to insist that other struggling euro-zone countries need to restructure their economies first. Europe is hardly the only sick patient. Government figures released Monday in Japan showed the world’s third-largest economy shrinking for the second quarter in a row, with gross domestic product falling by 1.6 percent. The report stunned
[Marxism] Moderate Syrian rebels say they’re advancing on Damascus from south
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. * McClatchy Press, Nov. 17 2014 Moderate Syrian rebels say they’re advancing on Damascus from south BY MOUSAB ALHAMADEE ISTANBUL — Rebel groups based in southern Syria are advancing on the western suburbs of Damascus and warning they might soon enter the capital, a development that’s in sharp contrast to the grim reports from northern Syria, where moderate rebels have suffered setbacks from the government and radical Islamists. The advance by the so-called Southern Front also stands apart from the situation in the north because moderate rebels still appear to be the dominant opposition force in the south, eclipsing al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, in planning and executing military advances. Further, Southern Front commanders credit airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition with helping their cause, primarily by keeping Islamic State fighters from moving against them. “If it weren’t for the coalition strikes, Daash would have reached our areas,” Abul Majd, a spokesman for the Southern Front, told McClatchy via Skype, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Thanks to these strikes, we are focusing now on the regime, our main enemy.” In contrast, commanders in the north have complained that they’ve benefited little from the strikes on the Islamic State, and they even accuse the United States of undercutting support for the rebels with airstrikes aimed at Nusra and the so-called Khorasan Group, which the U.S. says consists of al Qaida members plotting attacks on Western targets from Syria. On Friday, another Southern Front leader, Gen. Assad al Zubi, told Damascus residents via opposition Orient TV that the day of the “big victory” is close. In his statement, he warned that the government was likely to crack down hard as rebel forces drew near and Damascus residents should expect to receive instructions in the coming days, in the form of pamphlets distributed by civil activists working with the rebels. Zubi’s statement came as as estimated 38,000 rebel fighters, including 54 different brigades that fight under the Free Syrian Army name, have achieved their most significant victories since the Southern Front was announced last February. Just four months after the Southern Front was established, its fighters began seizing strategic hills in northwest Daraa province, an advance that undercut government positions in the south, which already was one of the most militarized areas in Syria because of its proximity to the Israeli border. Last week, the rebels seized the city of Sheikh Miskin in northern Daraa, 50 miles south of Damascus but just five miles from Izraa, which is considered the government’s first defensive line to protect the capital. Rebels are fighting now to take another strategic town, Delli. Capturing that town would cut the Damascus-Daraa highway and sever the supply route between Izraa and a major government military base. With the highway cut, bases in the towns of al Sanamain and Dael would be isolated, “making it easier to attack the bases separately,” Abul Majd said. Further west, rebels also are fighting to capture Tal Afa, a strategic hill whose seizure would pave the way for them to move on the city of Kanaker, which lies about 25 miles from the capital and is considered the first of Damascus’ western suburbs. Rebel fighters say they now are only six miles from Kanaker. Closing on the capital is hardly a sure thing, however. The government has major army divisions in the area, though rebels say they hope that morale is low among government troops and they’ll flee when rebel forces arrive. Abul Majd said Southern Front fighters were receiving assistance from the United States and other countries. “We are getting TOW missiles and different kinds of heavy ammunition. We are a major partner in the international coalition against terrorism,” he said. The Southern Front has long been viewed as one of the more disciplined of the moderate rebel organizations and one that’s relatively free of influence from Islamist- and al Qaida-affiliated groups – something that’s hampered U.S. assistance in the north, where extremist influence is such that moderate rebel groups are in danger of eradication. In the south, moderate rebels, relying on family ties, have been able to keep the Islamic State from penetrating and the Nusra Front has never become a dominant player. Gen. Ibrahim al Jibbawi, a Southern Front commander, said during a recent interview in Istanbul that al Qaida-affiliated fighters numbered about 3,000 and there were also a few hundred fighters from two Islamist groups, Ahrar al
