[Marxism] Fwd: Why the State Matters | Jacobin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Christian Parenti has some very odd ideas about the "developmental 
state" but this is still worth reading.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/developmentalism-neoliberalism-climate-change-hamilton/
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Business of Amateurs; At All Costs | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Two documentaries about the big business of amateur sports.

https://louisproyect.org/2016/08/25/the-business-of-amateurs-at-all-costs/
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[Marxism] Fwd: On Ben Norton’s career-changing metamorphosis | The Eternal Spring

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https://eternispring.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/on-ben-nortons-career-changing-metamorphosis/
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[Marxism] Something doesn't add up

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Vijay Prashad: "Syria’s government has shown that it is willing to come 
into a peace process."


full: http://www.alternet.org/world/syrian-war-children-dying

Syrian President Bashar Assad is sounding rather confident these days. 
In his first major address in the past two months, he promised that his 
troops will reclaim "every inch" of Syrian territory.


"We have no other choice but to be victorious," Assad told Syria's 
parliament on Tuesday. He also lashed out at rebels, blaming them for 
the failure of peace talks backed by the United Nations.


full: 
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/06/09/481284040/bashar-assads-defiance-points-to-a-syrian-peace-effort-in-tatters

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Re: [Marxism] MRZine retweets Partisan Girl

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 8:18 AM, Greg McDonald via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>  Lots of people are being taken in by this bullshit.


I am more and more becoming convince that the larger problem we face is
that lots of people find it very convenient to be taken in by the BS. That
was very clear in the Left's  response to the sarin massacre. Confusion ==
no need to act.

Clay Claiborne, Director
Vietnam: American Holocaust 
Linux Beach Productions
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 581-1536

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 
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Re: [Marxism] MRZine retweets Partisan Girl

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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Someone on FB called Syrian girl is claiming the photographer of the little
girl who was bombed is the same guy who beheaded the little boy...Yeah I
know, it wasn't a child. Lots of people are being taken in by this bullshit.

>
>
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[Marxism] The Real Crime Is What’s Not Done

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NY Times Op-Ed, August 24 2016
The Real Crime Is What’s Not Done
By CHASE MADAR

The latest criminal charges of public officials in the contamination of 
the Flint, Mich., water supply seem righteous. After so much government 
ineptitude with such hideous consequences — tens of thousands of Flint 
residents poisoned; elevated blood lead levels in nearly 5 percent of 
the city’s children, many with possibly irreversible brain damage — 
surely these criminal charges will bring, at long last, justice for Flint.


Not really. Though these sorts of charges fulfill an emotional need for 
retribution and are of great benefit to district attorneys on the make, 
they are seldom more than a mediagenic booby prize. Prosecutorial 
responses fill the void left when health and safety regulations succumb 
to corporate and political pressure.


Take the collapse at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that 
killed 29 miners in 2010. Flouting safety regulations was an integral 
part of the corporate culture of the mine’s owner, Massey Energy, and 
last year its chief executive, Donald L. Blankenship, was convicted of a 
misdemeanor carrying a one-year sentence. Although some portrayed this 
as a blow for social justice, it’s difficult to see how it had much 
impact on mine safety.


Far more significant was the West Virginia Legislature’s passage last 
year of the Creating Coal Jobs and Safety Act, the first statutory 
loosening of mine safety standards in state history. While on its 
deregulatory binge last year, the state almost entirely rolled back 
aboveground chemical-tank safety standards enacted in response to the 
Elk River contamination disaster of 2014 – which made the water of 
300,000 people undrinkable.


Prosecution and regulation are not mutually exclusive, but political 
energy and media attention are disproportionately expended by the lust 
for criminal punishment. Food safety is not assured by punishments like 
the 28-year sentence handed down last year to Stewart Parnell, former 
chief executive of the Peanut Corporation of America, for the lethal 
2008 salmonella outbreak stemming from his company’s contaminated 
warehouses. But the outbreak could have been prevented altogether if the 
company hadn’t been allowed to use a dodgy private inspection system. 
New Food and Drug Administration regulations under the Food Safety 
Modernization Act might be a potent safeguard against outbreaks if the 
rules can survive business-group lobbying and if the agency’s 
enforcement budget is adequate, unlike that of the Securities and 
Exchange Commission, which is getting squeezed as the Dodd-Frank Act 
expands its regulatory authority.


Our prosecutorial response tends to be reactive. Volkswagen will pay at 
least $15 billion for cheating on emissions tests on its diesel 
vehicles, and may face criminal charges. The tiny research center that 
caught the discrepancy is now facing cuts to its $1.5 million annual budget.


A well-enforced regulatory regime lacks the TV-movie narrative arc of a 
criminal trial. But none of these crimes could have been committed if 
the government had been doing its job properly.


“Every mine safety regulation we have was written in blood,” said Mike 
Caputo, the minority whip in the West Virginia House of Delegates and a 
vice president of the United Mine Workers of America, who worked 20 
years in his state’s coal fields. “These regulations would never have 
passed if some miner hadn’t died, and for the government to take them 
away is a slap in the face.”


With regulatory structures in willful disrepair, the corporate world has 
become one more sphere colonized by the police and prosecutors. But even 
as progressives have begun to question the overuse of criminal law 
elsewhere, its encroachments into the white-collar world are generally 
cheered: Finally, a chance to stick it to “crime in the suites”!


Criminal law, however, turns out to be a lot better at catching the 
small, sad fish of middle management than the sharks of industry and 
finance. Go to the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” webpage for white-collar crime 
and what leaps out is how many on the list are nonwhite and how petty 
their swindles are.


As for the Flint charges — nine officials face them now — no one can 
doubt that they shine a helpful media spotlight on Michigan’s attorney 
general, Bill Schuette, a Republican with a widely reported eye on the 
governor’s mansion in 2018. Nothing in Mr. Schuette’s long career in 
politics indicates that he would try to resolve the infrastructural 
crisis of Flint and Michigan’s Flints-in-waiting with major public 
investment in infrastructure and a 

[Marxism] Fwd: Vermont’s Cautionary Tale | Jacobin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The Vermont Progressive Party must choose between challenging the 
two-party system and being absorbed by the Democrats.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/vermont-progressives-vpp-sanders-democrats-independent/
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[Marxism] Occupying the Prairie: Tensions Rise as Tribes Move to Block a Pipeline

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, August 24 2016
Occupying the Prairie: Tensions Rise as Tribes Move to Block a Pipeline
By JACK HEALY

NEAR CANNON BALL, N.D. — Horseback riders, their faces streaked in 
yellow and black paint, led the procession out of their tepee-dotted 
camp. Two hundred people followed, making their daily walk a mile up a 
rural highway to a patch of prairie grass and excavated dirt that has 
become a new kind of battlefield, between a pipeline and American 
Indians who say it will threaten water supplies and sacred lands.


The Texas-based company building the Dakota Access pipeline, Energy 
Transfer Partners, calls the project a major step toward the United 
States’ weaning itself off foreign oil. The company says the nearly 
1,170-mile buried pipeline will infuse millions of dollars into local 
economies and is safer than trucks and train cars that can topple and 
spill and crash and burn.


But the people who stood at the gates of a construction site where crews 
had been building an access road toward the pipeline viewed the project 
as a wounding intrusion onto lands where generations of their ancestors 
hunted bison, gathered water and were born and buried, long before 
treaties and fences stamped a different order onto the Plains.


People have been gathering since April, but as hundreds more poured in 
over the past two weeks, confrontations began rising among protesters, 
sheriff’s officers and construction workers with the pipeline company. 
Local officials are struggling to handle hundreds of demonstrators 
filling the roads to protest and camp out in once-empty grassland about 
an hour south of Bismarck, the state capital.


More than 20 people have been arrested on charges including disorderly 
conduct and trespassing onto the construction site. The pipeline company 
says it was forced to shut down construction this month after protesters 
threatened its workers and threw bottles and rocks at contractors’ vehicles.


Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier of Morton County, who has led the law 
enforcement response, said at a news conference that he had received 
reports of weapons and gunshots around the demonstration, and that 
protesters were getting ready to throw pipe bombs at a line of officers 
standing between a rally and the construction site.


Leaders from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose reservation lies just 
south of the pipeline’s path, say the protests are peaceful. Weapons, 
drugs and alcohol are prohibited from the protest camp. Children march 
in the daily demonstrations. The leaders believed the reports of pipe 
bombs were a misinterpretation of their calls for demonstrators to get 
out their wooden chanupa pipes — which have deep spiritual importance — 
and pass them through the crowd.


The conflict may reach a crucial moment on Wednesday in a federal court 
hearing. The tribe has sued to block the pipeline and plans to ask a 
judge in Washington to effectively halt construction.


The pipeline runs overwhelmingly along private land, but where it 
crosses bodies of water, federal rules come into play and federal 
approvals are required.


The tribe says the pipeline’s route under the Missouri River near here 
could threaten its water supplies if the pipeline leaks or breaks, and 
it says the United States Army Corps of Engineers failed to do proper 
cultural and historical reviews before granting federal approvals for 
the pipeline.


“This is our homeland,” said Phyllis Young, a member of the Standing 
Rock Sioux. “We are Dakota. Dakota means friend or ally. Dakota Access 
has taken our name.”


In legal filings, the corps rejects those claims. It says it consulted 
extensively with tribes, including the Standing Rock Sioux, and it says 
that tribe has failed to describe specific cultural sites that would be 
damaged by the pipeline. Energy Transfer Partners says it has the 
necessary state and federal permits and hopes to finish construction by 
the end of the year. The pipeline’s route starts in the Bakken oil 
fields of western North Dakota and ends in Illinois.


With the fate of the land here and this $3.7 billion project in the air, 
people here have decided to take action. They are occupying the prairie.


Echoing protests against the now-scuttled Keystone XL pipeline, 
environmental activists and other tribes from the Dakotas, the rest of 
the Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest have been arriving to camp in 
the open fields and protest near the parcel where the pipeline company 
has secured an agreement with the landowner to build.


The protesters sleep in tents and tepees, cook food in open-air kitchens 
and share stories and strategies around evening 

[Marxism] Graduate Students Clear Hurdle in Effort to Form Union

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, August 24 2016
Graduate Students Clear Hurdle in Effort to Form Union
By NOAM SCHEIBER

Punctuating a string of Obama-era moves to shore up labor rights and 
expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled 
Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at 
private universities have a federally backed right to unionize.


The case arose from a petition filed by a group of graduate students at 
Columbia University, who are seeking to win recognition for a union that 
will allow them a say over such issues as the quality of their health 
insurance and the timeliness of stipend payments.


Echoing longstanding complaints from blue-collar workers that they have 
become replaceable cogs in a globalized economic machine, the effort 
reflects a growing view among more highly educated employees in recent 
decades that they, too, are at the mercy of faceless organizations and 
are not being treated like professionals and aspiring professionals 
whose opinions are worthy of respect.


“What we’re fundamentally concerned about isn’t really money,” said Paul 
R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the 
organizing efforts. “It’s a question of power and democracy in a space 
in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That’s 
what we’re most concerned about.”


Columbia and other universities that weighed in with the board before 
the ruling argued that collective bargaining would lead to a more 
adversarial relationship between students and the university that would 
undermine its educational purpose.


The decision reverses a 2004 ruling by the board involving graduate 
student assistants at Brown University. The ruling held that the 
assistants could not be considered employees because they “are primarily 
students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship 
with their university.”


The current board disagreed, arguing that Columbia students could be 
deemed employees if they perform and are compensated for work that the 
university oversees, even if their relationship was substantially broader.


The three Democratic members of the board made up the majority; the lone 
Republican member dissented. A fifth spot on the board has been vacant 
since last year.


Highly educated workers in other fields have also chafed at a growing 
sense of their own powerlessness. Recent law school graduates have 
lamented their rising debt and declining prospects for landing a law 
firm job. Many medical interns and residents have unionized in recent 
years, while a group of doctors at a medical center in Oregon formed a 
union of hospitalists in 2014.


Heather Appel, the communications director for the Committee of Interns 
and Residents, which is affiliated with the Service Employees 
International Union and represents some 14,000 residents, interns and 
fellows nationwide, attributed the activity in part to the doctors’ lost 
sense of autonomy and to growing job insecurity amid a trend of hospital 
mergers.


At the same time, the Obama administration and its appointees have taken 
numerous steps to protect workers and bolster their rights in recent 
years, from lifting the minimum wage for workers employed by federal 
contractors to new rules that lower workers’ exposure to dangerous 
silica dust.


Some of these efforts have touched professionals as well, such as a 
requirement that financial advisers who handle workers’ retirement 
accounts must act in their best interests, and expansion of the number 
of employees who are automatically eligible for time-and-a-half overtime 
pay, which affected many postdoctoral researchers.


Many universities opposed the overtime rule, arguing, as with 
unionization, that it would change their relationship with their 
students and young scholars.


Despite the overall trend, the administration and its appointees have 
not been categorically sympathetic to labor. Last year, the labor board 
dismissed a petition by football players at Northwestern University who 
had argued that they were employees and sought to unionize.


Graduate students at a number of public universities already have the 
right to organize under state laws.


Caroline A. Adelman, a spokeswoman for Columbia, said that “Columbia — 
along with many of our peer institutions — disagrees with this outcome 
because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty 
members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as 
between employer and employee.”


Money does not appear to be a central issue between the students and the 
Columbia administration, which has already raised 

[Marxism] MRZine retweets Partisan Girl

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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You'd think I'd be inured at this point to the idiocy that is 
disseminated from this sad, decrepit, rightwing website but every so 
often I can only step back and gape at the spectacle.


From the Baathist propaganda machine you can see article after article 
"exposing" the photo of Omran Daqneesh, the young boy from East Aleppo 
who is sitting in an ambulance covered with dust and blood. Some say the 
whole thing was staged, especially since Mahmoud Raslan, the man who 
took the photo, was seen in another photo with members of the Zinki 
militia. This was the group whose members beheaded a member of a 
Baathist militia that they had captured. At the time I commented that it 
was wrong to kill captive fighters either by a bullet or by an axe. This 
one atrocity was singled out by the Baathists while thousands of rebels 
or even peaceful opponents of the dictatorship get tortured to death in 
Assad's prisons.


In any case, Raslan has denied being a member of Zinki and describes 
himself as a photographer with the Aleppo Information Center and an 
al-Jazeera free-lancer. Whatever the truth on this, it seems absurd that 
someone would go through the trouble to stage this picture as if it were 
a false flag operation intended to provoke "regime change". After five 
years of atrocities, isn't it clear that Obama could care less about 
what is happening in East Aleppo, especially with reports that F-16s 
have now pounded the rebels?


So what do we get from the feckless Furuhashi? A bunch of retweets in 
sync with the propaganda offensive, including one from the Partisan 
Girl, a Baathist propagandist named Maram Susli who lives in Australia. 
This tireless apologist for Baathist atrocities is a frequent guest on 
Alex Jones's Infowars radio show, the conspiracy theorist who backs 
Donald Trump as part of the alt-right movement. Here is Susli on a Jones 
show with the heading "Syrian Girl: Alex Jones Woke Me Up!".


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBFI_fVNlhc

Before she began making appearances on Infowars, she premiered on the 
Youtube channel of 108Morris108, another conspiracy theorist convinced 
of Jewish world domination and a “Jewish goal to mix all the races.”


I never would have dreamed 10 years ago when Furuhashi was on Marxmail, 
PEN-L and LBO-Talk that she would be passing along anything associated 
with Partisangirl. I suppose there is a lesson in all this but I am 
afraid it would take training in abnormal psychology to do it justice.



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