Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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"Did Alex Jones ghost write this article? The lack of history here is
> astounding. Donald Trump did not rise out of the swamp last week. This is
> who he's been for his entire life. Obama has absolutely nothing to do with
> Trump's behavior, unless you want to blame him for Presidenting While
Black."

The fact that Donald Trump has been a racist all his life is distinct from
what possessed a significant chunk of the electorate to see him as a
suitable presidential candidate. Given that Alex Jones has almost
uncritically defended Donald Trump every step of the way -- hosting him on
his show for a bizarre ranting session where Alex Jones did his usual
schtick about pretending to be in contact with "Top Men," and rallying his
supporters to the RNC -- I don't see how one can blame the Alex Jones crowd
for this kind of rhetoric, attributing Trump to Obama.

Nonetheless, while I do hold Obama somewhat responsible for the direction
the country has gone in the last 8 years, the article is an overstatement.

The article itself focuses only on two policy items: refusing to prosecute
the Bush torture lawyers, and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The
former is largely a relic of the Bush administration, which does hold a
significant amount of the blame for openly embracing the status of a rogue
state, as the article suggests. Obama's role, then, is the fact that he
played into this rogue state behavior by not investigating and prosecuting.
The second item, extrajudicial assassinations of "terror" suspects, took
off under Obama, but this is itself an extension of Bush era policies. So
basically it sounds like the argument she is making is that Obama did not
do a good enough job reining in the guy before him. Not sure how much of
that is truly Obama's fault as opposed to simply being part of a slow and
creeping expansion of executive authority that predates him.

- Amith
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[Marxism] Letter from the US: Not just 'bad apples' — new report exposes police repression myths

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/62553
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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Oh,  and I forgot - Jill on Hill:
>
> She supported the Wall Street deregulations that lead to the financial
> meltdown and the economic misery that gives rise to demagogues like Donald
> Trump.
>

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] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 8/28/16 12:43 PM, Clay Claiborne wrote:
>
>> And as sadly typical of many "Left" articles that try to blame Trump on
>> Obama or Clinton
>>
>
> What in the world are you talking about? I haven't seen a single one
> except this.


Jill Stein in Jacobin:

> Donald Trump doesn’t stand alone. He’s part of a right-wing extremist
> movement that is getting traction now all around the world. This isn’t
> happening by accident. This is because of neoliberal policies —
> globalization, financialization, the trade agreements that empower
> unaccountable, abusive multinational corporations and throw working people
> under the bus.

These are the policies of the Clintons and the centrist Democratic Party.


These are the policies of capitalism. To target only the Clintons and the
centrist Democratic Party is to support the fascist Trump line on our
current problems.

I think the important point here is that neo-liberalism also creates the
conditions for a revolutionary movement. The alt-right is winning the
support of young whites at least in part, because the Green Party doesn't
even try to compete with the racists. They don't even acknowledge the
problem!

Trump is getting to be Trump because of the Left's failure to execute. This
shows that the corruption most visible around Syria, a "Left" worldview
corrupted by white supremacy, is probably the main issue holding back the
world revolutionary movement.

More, later...

Clay

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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[Marxism] British SWP 1950-99

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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A view from a former member:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/dead-ends-and-lost-opportunities-a-brief-history-of-the-socialist-workers-party-1950-1999/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Why the State Matters | Jacobin

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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Christian Parenti's article kind of reminds me of this article:

https://www.academia.edu/8316451/Ecologically_Dangerous_Patriotism


Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com
Learn or Review Basic Math

-Original Message- 
From: Louis Proyect via Marxism

Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2016 10:01 PM
To: Jim Farmelant
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: Why the State Matters | Jacobin

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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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hooch.net (Sponsored by Content.Ad)
14 Secrets MASH Producers Hid From Fans
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/57c389fd8d3319fc04e3st01duc
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Re: [Marxism] Eva Bartlett on Syria

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 8/28/16 7:10 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote:


http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/08/26/eva-bartlett-its-not-a-civil-war-this-is-a-war-on-syria/



Bartlett is one of the leading Baathist supporters along with Vanessa 
Beeley arguing that the White Helmets are the shock troops of "regime 
change" because they get written up in liberal magazines and newspapers 
as humanitarians rescuing people from bombed out buildings. Funny thing 
about that. It took George W. Bush 2 months to invade Iraq after the 
first speeches about WMD's were made. And here it is 5 years of 
Baathist, Iranian, Russian, Hizbollah and Afghan Shiite militias 
burning, bombing, gassing, raping and torturing Syrians, still no regime 
change. Maybe that has something to do with the Rand Corporation's 
advice to the Pentagon that the worst thing that could happen is the 
removal of Assad in 2012.


Then again, everybody knows that there are no bombed out buildings in 
Syria so the White Helmets have to be connected with the CIA, al Qaeda, 
Mossad, George Soros, MI-6, the Freemasons, et al.


I dealt with this madness here:

https://louisproyect.org/2016/06/20/jo-cox-the-white-helmets-and-the-baathist-amen-corner/
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Re: [Marxism] Eva Bartlett on Syria

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Aug 28, 2016, at 7:10 PM, Andrew Stewart via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/08/26/eva-bartlett-its-not-a-civil-war-this-is-a-war-on-syria/

There’s plenty in this cringe-worthy interview to scoff at — in fact, there’s 
little in the interview that doesn’t positively, eagerly cry out for ridicule — 
but the fact that Bartlett invokes a CNN story “from 2007 or 2008” praising 
Assad destroys any hint of credibility or even journalistic seriousness that 
might otherwise have been hanging in the air about her. Hell, it destroys it 
even on her own terms, since she spends much of the interview insisting that 
nothing the “mainstream / Western / corporate media” says can ever be trusted. 
A moron of note.
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[Marxism] Eva Bartlett on Syria

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/08/26/eva-bartlett-its-not-a-civil-war-this-is-a-war-on-syria/

-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Terry Burke, UNAC's reply, Syria, Russia

[Joseph Green via Marxism]

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Terry Burke exposes the apologists for the Assad dictatorship 
from DWV mailing list for August 27, 2106

 "U.S. Peace Activists Should Start Listening to Progressive Syrian Voices" 
by Terry Burke is an important article. It can be found at 
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19388/u.s.-peace-activists-arent-listening-to-
progressive-syrian-voices.

Burke exposes the horrendous support for the Syrian dictatorship of Bashar 
al-Assad by a large section of the left, such as "UNAC, ANSWER Coalition, 
Anti-War Committee Chicago, Minnesota Anti-War Committee, Veterans for Peace, 
Women Against Military Madness, Workers World Party, Freedom Road Socialist 
Organization and others". She shows how they abuse the idea of 
"anti-imperialism" by turning it into defense of the atrocities of the Ba'ath 
regime of the dictator al-Assad.

The devastation of Syria is not a minor event, but a Syrian nakba or 
catastrophe. One can no more wash one´s hands of what is being done to the 
Syrian people than one can ignore what has been done to the Palestinian 
people. The massacre in Syria is on an astonishing scale. Whatever the 
outcome of the Syrian civil war, it will leave scars on the Syrian people 
that will last for years, and it will effect not just the Middle East, but 
the world, for years to come.

Burke refers to the imperialist attitude of those who justify the al-Assad  
regime. She talks about the importance of listening to the Syrian activists, 
and she refers people to their writings on what has been going on in Syria. 
For example, there is the book "Burning Country" by Robin Yassin-Kassab and 
Leila Al-Shami. The book documents how a people who have been silenced for 
decades by the Ba´ath dictatorship began to take matters into their own 
hands, demonstrate, argue, organize committees, and resist -- defying the 
torture, repression, and mass murder by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

However, the support by a large section of the American left for the 
murderous regime of al-Assad is not just because they don´t listen to the 
Syrian people. UNAC, Workers´ World, the Party of Socialism and Liberation 
and others listen to certain people from other countries, but they often give 
credence to notorious dictators, rather than the democratic movement or the 
workers who have been silenced or the youth who have been repressed. This is 
a sign that something is very wrong with the orientation of much of the left. 
Something rotten has grown and grown over the years.

For example, this rot has been seen for years in the the Trotskyist groups 
who have given "military but not political support" to dictator after 
dictator, from Saddam Hussen to Muammar Qaddafi and who called repressive 
regimes deformed or degenerated "workers' states". It led the Workers´ World 
to see something anti-imperialist in the Taliban. It has been seen in the 
failure of much of the left -- whether Stalinist, Trotskyist, or one-time 
anti-imperialist -- to show any shame over allying with certain liberal 
imperialists who denigrate the struggle of oppressed peoples; the liberal 
imperialists do this in order to promote cooperation among the big powers, 
while UNAC and company do this out of the love for the particular 
dictatorships. It has come up with respect to mass movements in Syria, Libya, 
Hong Kong, the countries of the former USSR, and so on.

Burke sidesteps some things such as whether it is possible for the oppressed 
Syrian people to gain needed weapons other than by utilizing contradictions 
among the outside powers. Nevertheless, this article is an important 
contribution by Burke to the discussion of the situation in Syria, and it 
deserves a wide readership. It has already struck a sore point among the 
apologists of the Bashar dictatorship.

Stung by the exposure of their support for tyranny, the leadership of the 
United National Antiwar Coalition has tried to reply to Burke´s article: see 
http://nepajac.org/AWdefense.html. Proper leaders in the left movement would 
take seriously Burke´s remarks and seriously reconsider their stands. But 
that´s not UNAC´s way. Following the example of various repressive regimes 
around the world, the UNAC leadership wants critics to be isolated and 
denounced.

UNAC´s reply consists of a zealous defence of the Assad regime, and of one 
lie after another in order to discredit for the democratic movement. 
According to them, Burke´s opposition to the Assad regime is an "attack on 
the anti-war movement" and would logically have led "to support[ing] the US 
backed Contra forces in Nicaragua as "democratic and progressive forces." 
Geez, Burke was involved in the struggle 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump?s Thuggery | The Nation

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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More typical non-Marxist silliness from The Nation. Obama did cause the
rise of Trump. But he did this through his wretched austerity policies,
refusing to prosecute banksters, furthering the consolidation of the FIRE
sector's hold on the economy, and about a dozen more domestic policies.
Blaming international policy for the results of domestic policies is like
blaming spoiled apples for tainted orange juice. Really lazy
bait-and-switch here.

Message: 7
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2016 21:08:43 -0400
From: Louis Proyect 
To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition

Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for
Trump?s Thuggery | The Nation
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed



https://www.thenation.com/article/how-obama-helped-lay-
the-groundwork-for-trumps-thuggery/


-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Fwd: James Cronin, Nobel laureate who broke seemingly inviolable laws of subatomic particles, dies at 84 - The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/james-cronin-nobel-laureate-who-broke-seemingly-inviolable-laws-of-subatomic-particles-dies-at-84/2016/08/28/4f4cb70a-6c62-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: BRICS banking and the debate over sub-imperialism: Third World Quarterly: Vol 37, No 4

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Patrick Bond

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2015.1128816
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 8/28/16 12:43 PM, Clay Claiborne wrote:

And as sadly typical of many "Left" articles that try to blame Trump on
Obama or Clinton


What in the world are you talking about? I haven't seen a single one 
except this. Nearly the entire left views Trump as a total departure 
from American political traditions, understood as either DP liberalism 
or centrism (obviously) or RP conservatism in the National Review mold. 
He is seen as channeling either Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. I 
never posted any of those articles to Marxmail because they were so 
obvious and so widely available on Salon, Huffington Post and even the 
Nation. I posted the article because it was striking to see it in the 
Nation.


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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And as sadly typical of many "Left" articles that try to blame Trump on
Obama or Clinton, no mention is made of the white nationalism that is at
the core of Trump's "thuggery" - interesting choice of words to connect to
Obama.

I also liked this comment:

 Did Alex Jones ghost write this article? The lack of history here is
> astounding. Donald Trump did not rise out of the swamp last week. This is
> who he's been for his entire life. Obama has absolutely nothing to do with
> Trump's behavior, unless you want to blame him for Presidenting While Black.



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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[Marxism] The Co-Founder of n+1 Is ‘Against Everything’

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(N+1 is the Marxist journal I have been quarreling with about Syria.)

NY Times Sunday Book Review, August 28 2016
The Co-Founder of n+1 Is ‘Against Everything’
By DAPHNE MERKIN

AGAINST EVERYTHING
Essays
By Mark Greif
304 pp. Pantheon Books. $28.95.

We live in singularly unsubtle times, when presidential candidates shout 
invective instead of delivering talking points and Twitter posts 
privilege catchiness over nuance. Then again, ours has never been a 
culture to value the reflective life — unlike in France, say, where 
public intellectuals hold political positions, or England, where 
Oxbridge dons form an aristocracy of the mind. Except for a brief period 
during the last century, from the 1930s through the 1960s or so, when an 
active intelligentsia (even the word sounds dated) loosely known as the 
New York Intellectuals formed around a clutch of publications including 
Partisan Review, The Nation and Commentary, and critics like Lionel 
Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy had a say on matters 
literary and political, we tend to give short shrift to intellection for 
its own sake, regarding it as something best corralled off in the academy.


And indeed, for the last 20 years, instead of thinkers, we have seen the 
rise of pundits, those ubiquitous opiners on the news of the day who 
take the short view of necessity. This trend has been bucked by a 
handful of serious-minded magazines with a spectacularly small 
readership and by the occasional erudite voice in newspapers like this 
one. Sensing a gap in the discourse, a group of young, mostly 
­Harvard-educated writers started a publication called n+1 in 2004, 
which attempted to fill the void where Partisan Review and the like had 
once engaged in “the life of significant contention,” as Diana Trilling 
put it. Which brings us, happily, to the occasion of “Against 
Everything,” a new collection of essays by Mark Greif, an editor at n+1 
(where most of these pieces first appeared) and a frequent contributor 
since its inception on widely disparate themes.


“Against Everything” is a portrait of the egghead as a youngish man 
(Greif was born in 1975), trying the culture on for size, deeming it too 
saggy in some places and too constricting in others. Greif, who has a 
Ph.D. in American studies from Yale and is an associate professor at the 
New School, seems to have read everybody on everything: His writing is 
studded with references from Diogenes and William James to Stanley 
Cavell and Baudrillard to Anatole Broyard and Foreign Affairs. Unlike 
his earlier book, “The Age of the Crisis of Man,” which set out to trace 
American humanism and was unavailingly (sometimes ponderously) academic, 
this collection decodes subjects both Hi and Lo, from the meaning of 
life and the philosophy of contemporary warfare to the implications of 
rap and reality television. In a short preface, Greif (who grew up near 
Walden Pond) credits Thoreau with inspiring his approach to experience: 
“I taught myself to overturn, undo, deflate, rearrange, unthink and 
rethink.” His method of inquiry combines a kind of scholarly purism — 
what would our approach to x (nutrition, sex, exercise, punk rock, the 
police) be like if it didn’t come wadded with expectations and a 
codified system of mores? — and an endearing modesty. His sensibility 
wavers between the hopeful and the elegiac. “To wish to be against 
everything,” he observes, “is to want the world to be bigger than all of 
it, disposed to dissolve rules and compromises in a gallon or a drop, 
while an ocean of possibility rolls around us.”


“Against Exercise,” the book’s opening salvo, shows Greif at his 
contrarian, learned best, invoking the ancient Greeks and Hannah Arendt 
while questioning the distinction between private and public ­spaces. 
“Our gym . . . is the atomized space in which one does formerly private 
things, before others’ eyes, with the lonely solitude of a body acting 
as if it were still in private,” he writes. As will prove his wont, 
Greif tends to employ economic terms — “the desperate materialist 
gratifications of a hedonic society,” “fund of capital” — to make 
humanistic points. There is more than a whiff of the student Marxist in 
him, but instead of narrowing his view, this slightly censorious impulse 
lets him see things most of us prefer to overlook, including the 
anorexic delusion behind the pursuit of fitness: “The doctrine of 
thinness introduces a radical fantasy of exercise down to the bone. It 
admits the dream of a body unencumbered by any excess of corporeality.”


Throughout the book’s first section, Greif turns the quotidian world 
over like a 

[Marxism] Imagine Your Substitute Teacher Is Nicholson Baker. For These Kids, He Was.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Baker is the author of the revisionist "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of 
WWII". I had the same reaction as his after just 4 days of teaching 5th 
grade in Harlem back in 1968: “I felt drained, numb, brain-dead.”)


NY Times Sunday Book Review, August 28 2016
Imagine Your Substitute Teacher Is Nicholson Baker. For These Kids, He Was.
By GARRET KEIZER

SUBSTITUTE
Going to School With a Thousand Kids
By Nicholson Baker
719 pp. Blue Rider Press. $30.

In talks to teachers, I have sometimes invited them to imagine the 
brighter lights of history taking on their jobs. Picture Gandhi with a 
study hall, I’ll say, or Churchill teaching seventh grade. Failed 
schoolmasters like Thoreau and Wittgenstein further support my point, 
which is how lost even the most gifted person can become in a classroom 
full of needy kids.


With the publication of Nicholson Baker’s “Substitute,” a meticulously 
detailed account of his 28 days working as a K-12 substitute teacher in 
a Maine public school district, I have a new name to add to the list. 
Baker, too, is often lost — “sick with shame” one day, a “hopeless 
jackass” another — but he doesn’t always fail. Neither does this book, 
whose laudable if elusive aim is to show “what life in classrooms” is 
“really like.”


At first glance, Baker’s day-by-day narrative seems to have as much to 
do with education as his erotic novels have to do with sex. You wouldn’t 
give “Vox” to an extraterrestrial curious to know what earthlings mean 
by making whoopee, and you wouldn’t give “Substitute” to an 
undergraduate curious to know what it means to teach. The prophylactics 
are just too thick: in “Vox,” the phone; in “Substitute,” the phoniness 
implicit in the phrase “substitute teaching.”


Baker surely knows this. “It was easy for me to be ‘cool’ by making a 
few mildly subversive references,” he says at one point, “but they” — 
teachers — “had to keep a lid on the lunacy day after day.” He could 
have gone further. His fleeting encounters with “a thousand kids” do not 
enable him to see any of them grow, or fail to grow. He writes no lesson 
plans, takes home no papers to correct. Unlike virtually every adult he 
encounters, he does not (we assume) need the job. Nor is he ever in much 
danger of losing it. The classes in his charge frequently degenerate 
into lesser versions of a cafeteria’s “full ­riot-gear fluffernutter 
death-metal maelstrom,” but he is called back to sub again and again. As 
for his “mildly subversive references” — consisting mostly of jabs at 
the value of what he has been asked to teach — they affect his paycheck 
to about the same degree as belittling John McCain’s war record affected 
Donald Trump.


The lives of teachers are not so much Baker’s concern, however, as the 
burdens of backpack-laden kids. The constant barking of the P.A. system, 
the successful completion of work sheets as the seeming “aim of life,” 
children overwhelmed by tasks they have no idea how to do, children 
­overmedicated to the point of hallucination (one on so much Paxil that 
he’s hearing voices in his head), a class of third graders expected to 
address their routine problems (“I have to go to the bathroom, but 
somebody is already out and it’s an emergency”) by using a scanner app 
on their almighty iPads — Baker puts it all in our face. He also 
includes some delightful encounters — with a charming boy who loves 
riddles, for example — but they only add poignancy to a question Baker 
poses to one of his ­students: “Is it an engine of oppression, school?”


He leaves the answer to us. For such a long book, Baker makes few 
recommendations, most of them modest enough — shorter days, less 
homework, more attention to foundational knowledge (including how to 
spell). As a rule he’s on firmer ground when he questions sequence than 
when he balks at scope. His remarks on the folly of “prematurely forcing 
kindergarten kids to write” would get a thumbs up from anyone with a 
5-year-old or a heart. On the other hand, when he suggests to a science 
class that terms of taxonomy are deliberately obscure and probably 
useless, the reader wonders whether he’s joking. He isn’t. On his last 
page and out of earshot of any students, he tells us: “There are no key 
terms. There are no themes, no thesis sentences. There are no main 
ideas.” This would make a fine epigraph for a postmodernist novel; I’m 
not sure it makes the best credo for equipping a young person to read it.


Baker rightly perceives the detrimental hands of “educational theorists” 
and corporate opportunists (a grossly biased resource on nuclear power 
is included in one of his teaching packets) in creating 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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I liked these comments:

>  The whole bashing of Obama as being on Trumps level makes me want to
> puke out here in the Pacific. Yuk.


 This country has indulged in the murder and genocide of innocents since
> its beginning. I suggest you do some reading before you try to make
> President Obama responsible for this country's attitude towards killing and
> the lack of consequence for doing so.


Blaming Clinton [and Obama] for the ills of imperialism is Trump propaganda
now being parroted by many voices on the Left.

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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[Marxism] Today’s Inequality Could Easily Become Tomorrow’s Catastrophe

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Schiller is the author of 'Irrational Exuberance")

NY Times, August 28 2016
Today’s Inequality Could Easily Become Tomorrow’s Catastrophe
Economic View
By ROBERT J. SHILLER

Economic inequality is already a concern, but it could become a 
nightmare in the decades ahead, and I fear that we are not well equipped 
to deal with it.


Truly extreme gaps in income and wealth could arise from many causes. 
Consider just a few: Innovations in robotics and artificial 
intelligence, which are already making many jobs uncompetitive, could 
lead us into a world in which basic work with decent pay becomes 
impossible to find. An environmental disaster like global warming, 
pollution or disease could sharply reduce the ability of people of 
ordinary means to live in specific regions or entire countries.


Future wars using ever more highly destructive technology, including 
chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, could devastate 
vast populations. And it’s not out of the question that dire political 
changes, like the rise of racist or otherwise exclusionary social 
structures, could have terribly damaging consequences for less 
privileged people.


Of course, I dearly hope none of these things ever happen. But even if 
they are unlikely, as part of our progress to a better world, we should 
be thinking now of how we might address them.


The current presidential campaigns in the United States have not really 
touched on long-range issues like these. The campaigns have instead been 
focused primarily on short-term concerns, and on issues facing people of 
middle income instead of those in extreme poverty.


The private sector isn’t helping much, either. It has not gone very far 
in developing insurance or hedging markets to protect against these 
risks. That raises an important question: Can we depend on the 
benevolence of society to compensate and care for those who would lose 
out if dire events actually happened?


One way to judge the likely outcome is to look at what has happened in 
the past. In their new book “Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal 
Fairness in the United States and Europe” (Princeton 2016), Kenneth 
Scheve of Stanford and David Stasavage of New York University looked at 
20 countries over two centuries to see how societies have responded to 
the less fortunate. Their primary finding may seem disheartening: Taxes 
on the rich generally have not gone up when inequality and economic 
hardship have increased.


Instead, they found that taxes tend to rise when warfare increases, 
largely “because war mobilization changed beliefs about tax fairness.” 
These tax changes were generally aimed at ensuring national survival, 
not correcting economic inequalities.


Professor Scheve and Professor Stasavage found that democratic countries 
have not consistently embraced more redistributive tax policies, and 
most people do not vote strictly in their narrow self-interest. As the 
right to vote broadened through the centuries, for example, and people 
without property began to vote, they did not consistently act to tax the 
rich. These findings run counter to a popular narrative. Recall that in 
2012, Mitt Romney said that in a democracy, a candidate who offers tax 
breaks to the less well-off at the expense of the rich will win mass 
support “no matter what.” That claim does not appear to be supported by 
the historical record.


Instead, it appears that, for better or for worse, the majority of 
people share simple notions of entitlement and fairness. Professor 
Scheve, Professor Stasavage and their colleagues found that in 2014, 
when people in the United States were asked what marginal tax rates they 
would “most like to see” on family incomes of $375,000, the median 
answer was 30 percent, with the bulk of answers ranging from 20 percent 
to 40 percent. (The federal marginal tax rate for that income is 33 
percent.)


This is consistent with my own survey results, which focused on 
inheritance taxes. In 1990, Maxim Boycko, then with a Moscow think tank, 
the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, and I asked 
both New Yorkers and Muscovites: “In your opinion, what inheritance tax 
rate for really wealthy people do you think we should have?” The average 
answers in the two cities were virtually identical: 37 percent in New 
York, 39 percent in Moscow. Taxing around a third of wealth, more or 
less, seemed fair to people. And perhaps it is reasonable, in the 
abstract, yet what will we do in the future if this degree of taxation 
won’t produce enough revenue to meaningfully help the very poor as well 
as the sagging middle class?


Along with nine other 

Re: [Marxism] ‘No One Is Safe’: Zimbabwe Threatens to Seize Farms of Party Defectors

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Aug 28, 2016, at 11:20 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> (So much for the benefits of BRICS.)



Soldiers, police reportedly join Zim protests
National 28.8.2016 12:12 pm
African News Agency-CAJ News

Zimbabwe seems on the verge of a revolt by uniformed forces amid reports that 
some unpaid rank and file members have joined mass protests demanding the 
resignation of President Robert Mugabe and his administration.

The defence force leaders are credited with keeping Mugabe in power since 
independence in 1980 but ordinary officers are frustrated by failure to pay 
their salaries, for the umpteenth time, sparking an unprecedented move to 
protest.

Officers speaking to CAJ News on condition of anonymity expressed solidarity 
with the protesting masses, pointing out they also were not exempt from the 
economic crisis besetting the country.


More: 
http://www.citizen.co.za/1267228/soldiers-police-reportedly-join-zim-protests/ 


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[Marxism] ‘No One Is Safe’: Zimbabwe Threatens to Seize Farms of Party Defectors

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(So much for the benefits of BRICS.)

NY Times, August 28 2016
‘No One Is Safe’: Zimbabwe Threatens to Seize Farms of Party Defectors
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

BINDURA, Zimbabwe — Dozens of angry young men jumped off a truck in 
front of Agrippah Mutambara’s gate, shouting obscenities and threatening 
to seize his 530-acre farm in the name of Zimbabwe’s president. They 
tried to scale the fence, scattering only when he raised and cocked his gun.


Zimbabwe made international headlines when it started seizing 
white-owned farms in 2000. But Mr. Mutambara is not a white farmer. Far 
from it, he is a hero of this country’s war of liberation who served as 
Zimbabwe’s ambassador to three nations over two decades.


But when he defected from President Robert Mugabe’s party to join the 
opposition a few months ago, he immediately put his farm at risk.


“When it was happening to the whites, we thought we were redressing 
colonial wrongs,” said Mr. Mutambara, 64, who got his farm after it had 
been seized from a white farmer. “But now we realize it’s also coming 
back to us. It’s also haunting us.”


Zimbabwe is suffering one of its worst economic crises in years. Banks 
have run out of cash. The government is struggling to pay its workers. 
Public protests, including one in July that shut down the capital and a 
united show of force by the nation’s biggest opposition figures on 
Friday, have rattled Mr. Mugabe’s government.


Desperately seeking loans, Zimbabwean officials have visited Washington 
and European capitals in recent months, swallowing years of resentment 
toward the West to promise economic and political reforms, including 
ending the tortured pattern of farm seizures. Even Mr. Mugabe, now 92 
years old and increasingly frail, has pledged to compensate white farmers.


But despite the promises, prized farms are at the center of heated 
political infighting in Zimbabwe. As the battle to succeed Mr. Mugabe 
intensifies, dozens of political figures who have fallen out of favor, 
like Mr. Mutambara, are facing the seizure of their farms. With the 
economy in peril and the governing party split in a scramble for power, 
land is being used as a vital tool in the struggle for control.


“No one is safe,” said Temba Mliswa, 44, who was the chairman of the 
party’s chapter in Mashonaland West Province before his expulsion from 
the party in 2014.


Mr. Mliswa got a 2,000-acre farm belonging to a white Zimbabwean in 
2005. When he took possession, Mr. Mliswa said, police officers beat the 
white farmer and his workers.


But last year, Mr. Mliswa said, hundreds of youths sent by the party 
invaded the farm again, destroying property and beating his workers. 
They eventually left, but one of Mr. Mugabe’s ministers recently held a 
rally in which he threatened to take Mr. Mliswa’s farm unless he stopped 
criticizing the president’s party.


“They use the land to control you,” Mr. Mliswa said.

Zimbabwe’s political uncertainty has weakened the economy, already hit 
hard by a severe drought and a fall in global commodity prices. People 
have been hoarding cash — Zimbabwe adopted the American dollar in 2009 — 
and taking it out of the country, leaving bank A.T.M.s empty.


Mr. Mugabe’s “Look East” campaign, which focused on attracting China as 
a counterweight to Western influence, has suffered from China’s economic 
slowdown and recent disagreements over economic policy, though 
billboards still laud China as Zimbabwe’s “all-weather friend.”


With few other options left, Mr. Mugabe’s government has turned to the 
International Monetary Fund, an organization he vilified in the past as 
an instrument of colonial domination.


In talks with the fund, the government has agreed to reforms in the hope 
that it will qualify for loans for the first time since 1999. The fund 
has sent positive signals about government steps in areas like curbing 
the size of the public work force and cleaning up the banking sector.


“The reforms are in our interest, and not in order to please anybody,” 
said Patrick Chinamasa, the finance minister. “Whether the I.M.F. is 
there or not, we have to do reforms in order to restore confidence in 
our economy.”


But significant hurdles remain. The Zimbabwean government must clear 
$1.8 billion it owes to the I.M.F., the World Bank and the African 
Development Bank. It must also persuade the I.M.F., where a skeptical 
United States holds the most votes, that it is committed to change.


And of all the potential reforms, perhaps none is as sensitive as land.

Resolving the issue is central to reviving the country’s economy and 
re-establishing ties, virtually frozen for nearly a 

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: How Obama Helped Lay the Groundwork for Trump’s Thuggery | The Nation

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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>
>  Moral complacency in the face of brutality can all too easily
> degenerate into full-blown corruption,
>

This is choice coming from the Nation given their support for Assad &
Putin, 2 who have exampled thuggery rule better than Obama. Which is why
Trump, like the Nation, points to them approvingly.  Also because the
Nations long support for these characters has also indirectly aided the
rise of Daesh and the Syria refugees that Trump is using as its main
issues.

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

Read my blogs at the Linux Beach 


On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 6:08 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
>
>
> https://www.thenation.com/article/how-obama-helped-lay-the-
> groundwork-for-trumps-thuggery/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Jill Stein’s fairy-tale candidacy - The Washington Post

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 6:40 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

>
> When a powerful newspaper writes an editorial attacking your candidacy,
> you must be doing something right.
>
> Then Donald Trump must be doing a lot of things right because WaPo really
doesn't like him. Personally, this sounds like "anti-imperialist" logic to
me. If the WaPo or US gov'r opposes no need to look further, we're for it!


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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[Marxism] Fwd: America's Syria SNAFU: Pentagon's Militias fight Turkey & CIA's Militias

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Cole is kind of a jerk on Syria but this piece should make it obvious 
that binary geopolitical analyses of the civil war are inadequate.


http://www.juancole.com/2016/08/americas-pentagons-militias.html
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Re: [Marxism] Jill Stein’s fairy-tale candidacy - The Washington Post

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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I didn't see the WaPo neoliberals whack Stein on her student loan 
forgiveness strategy, which she told Cuomo on CNN would be the most 
important vote-harvester (for 43 million debtors) as kids get back to 
college next week. Are they conceding its logic? The /WSJ/ seems to 
indicate a logic to student debt cancellation:


http://www.wsj.com/articles/writing-off-student-loans-is-only-a-matter-of-time-1471303339

But I haven't heard anything about progressive economists coming in to 
support this excellent strategy. Who is behind it?


Cheers,
Patrick

On 2016/08/27 03:40 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:


When a powerful newspaper writes an editorial attacking your 
candidacy, you must be doing something right.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jill-steins-fairy-tale-candidacy/2016/08/25/3bf8ba1a-6b08-11e6-99bf-f0cf3a6449a6_story.html\ 



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