[Marxism] Russia’s Youth Found Rap. The Kremlin Is Worried.

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, May 22, 2019
Russia’s Youth Found Rap. The Kremlin Is Worried.
By Ivan Nechepurenko

TVER, Russia — On a recent Friday night, the rapper Big Baby Tape rushed 
onstage at a packed club in this ancient town near Moscow to launch a 
32-date tour.


The crowd, mostly teenagers, shouted his name ecstatically, jumping and 
bouncing off each other as the punchy, bass-heavy music began to play.


Just a year ago, Big Baby Tape was only known to rap aficionados. But in 
November, he released “Dragonborn,” his first studio album, posting it 
on social networks and streaming platforms. The album had only limited 
airplay on Russian radio, and no music videos were played on TV.


Still, it went platinum in three days. Tracks from “Dragonborn” were 
played more than 300 million times on VK, the main social network and 
streaming platform in Russia, and were on Apple Music’s chart for 
months. In an instant, the underdog rapper, also known as Yegor Rakitin, 
turned into a celebrity. Nowadays, he wears big sunglasses in public in 
an effort to avoid being recognized.


“I never invested any money in promotion,” said Big Baby Tape, who was 
born five days after Vladimir V. Putin became Russia’s president in 
1999. “Today, you can make good money from streaming online,” he added.


Only a few years ago, Big Baby Tape’s rise would not have been possible 
in Russia, where the pop music industry is heavily guarded by cultural 
officials loyal to the Kremlin. Veteran music producers acted as 
gatekeepers to TV appearances and radio stations, making sure the 
content didn’t rock the boat. Without TV and radio appearances, artists 
couldn’t fill big concert venues.


But, as elsewhere, the internet in Russia has become the dominant force 
in the music industry for young people, and that has changed the 
dynamic. In April, the number of paid subscribers to Yandex Music, one 
of Russia’s leading streaming platforms, reached 1.7 million, almost 
doubling in just a year. Together with nonpaying users, about 20 million 
use the service every month.


Helped by such outlets, a vibrant rap culture has flourished that is 
independent of the government and its preferred aesthetics and values. 
New stars have begun to appear, exploring subgenres and breaking taboos.


“Rappers didn’t try to bend to get on TV, which would mean purging all 
traces of drugs, expletives and all sexual comment from their texts,” 
said Andrei Nikitin, 40, editor of The Flow, a website that has followed 
the scene for years.


Rap has begun capturing the minds of young people in Russia just as 
those aged 24 and under are moving from being the group most supportive 
of Mr. Putin’s government to one that is increasingly critical of it, 
according to multiple polls.


The Kremlin seems to be worried. In 2018, dozens of concerts were 
canceled, and in November, the rapper Husky, also known as Dmitri 
Kuznetsov, was detained by the police in the city of Krasnodar after he 
tried to give an impromptu performance on top of a car after a gig he 
had been due to play was called off.


In December, Mr. Putin convened a meeting of the council that advises 
him on culture, and ordered his administration to develop a program that 
would increase the state’s role in pop music by introducing grants and 
by opening music studios around the country. The government said it 
would move to filter undesirable content on the internet, but so far has 
been unable to find an effective technical solution to do that.


“The impact of hip-hop has been massive,” said the rapper Oxxxymiron, 
34, a pioneer of independent hip-hop in Russia. He added that, “Through 
music, visual art, movies, dance, clothing styles and more, key values 
of hip-hop have spread through contemporary Russian culture.”


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podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.


“Russian youth are more cosmopolitan, more in tune with current western 
and worldwide trends, more accepting of other ethnicities and traditions 
and more aware of social and political issues across the pond,” said 
Oxxxymiron, also known as Miron Fyodorov. “This will inevitably change 
the way this generation feels about themselves, society, and the world.”


As recently as the 2000s, rap was still a niche genre in Russia. Hip-hop 
groups such as Kasta and CENTR toured across the vast country, but never 
broke into the mainstream. Media coverage tended to dismiss Russian rap 
as provincial, focusing instead on indie music that had very little 
following outside Moscow and St. Petersburg.


A turning point came 

[Marxism] Edwin Drummond, 73, Who Turned Climbing Into Activism, Dies

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, May 22, 2019
Edwin Drummond, 73, Who Turned Climbing Into Activism, Dies
By Daniel E. Slotnik

Edwin Drummond, a mountaineer and poet who made international headlines 
by scaling landmarks like the Statue of Liberty as a form of protest, 
died on April 23 at a care facility in Oakland, Calif. He was 73.


His son, Haworth Ward-Drummond, said that the cause was pneumonia, and 
that Mr. Drummond had had Parkinson’s disease since 1994.


Mr. Drummond was already well known in climbing circles as a sort of 
alpine poet laureate before he decided, in the late 1970s, to use the 
talents he honed on European peaks and El Capitan in Yosemite National 
Park to draw attention to causes he considered important. He faced legal 
repercussions for climbing various buildings and monuments, which he saw 
as a small price to pay for battling injustice.


In 1978 he climbed Nelson’s Column in London with Colin Rowe, another 
mountaineer, to protest apartheid in South Africa; the next year he 
climbed Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to protest the incarceration of 
Elmer G. Pratt, a Black Panther who had been sentenced to life in prison 
in 1972 after he was convicted of killing a teacher. (Mr. Pratt spent 
years trying to prove that he had been framed before his conviction was 
vacated in 1997.)


Mr. Drummond climbed a third of the way up the Statue of Liberty with 
Stephen Rutherford, a younger climber, on May 10, 1980, also to draw 
attention to Mr. Pratt’s case. Once the two climbers had ascended, they 
opened a 25-foot-long banner that said, referring to Mr. Pratt by his 
Panther name: “Liberty was framed. Free Geronimo Pratt.”


The two men spent 24 hours nestled in the furls of Lady Liberty’s tunic, 
occasionally shouting answers to queries from reporters, then descended 
and surrendered to the authorities, who charged them with criminal 
trespass and damaging government property.


Park Service officials initially accused Mr. Drummond and Mr. Rutherford 
of doing so much damage to the statue with pitons and other climbing 
tools that $80,000 worth of repairs would be necessary. Mr. Drummond 
contended that he and Mr. Rutherford had used large rubber suction cups, 
not pitons, to anchor themselves to the statue’s thin copper skin.


Both men were released on bail, and the charges were reduced to 
misdemeanors — an indication that whatever damage they had caused was 
considerably less than the initial estimates.


For a climber of Mr. Drummond’s caliber, the side of a monument might as 
well have been a ladder. He soloed the Nose on El Capitan, the 
3,000-foot-tall sheer granite cliff that has bedeviled generations of 
climbers, in 1973, and he made challenging first ascents — that is, 
pioneering routes — in England, Wales and Northern Europe.


His most daring first ascent was the Arch Wall route up the Troll Wall 
in Norway, which he climbed in 1972 with Hugh Drummond (no relation). 
The route took them up the left side of the Troll Wall, the tallest 
vertical rock face in Europe at about 3,500 feet. The climb took 20 
days, during which they were buffeted by rain and snow, ran out of food 
and risked hypothermia and frostbite.


Mr. Drummond wrote about the Troll Wall climb in “Mirror Mirror,” an 
article first published in Ascent magazine in 1973. Like much of his 
writing about climbing, the article thrust readers into the exaltation, 
affliction, fear and occasional tedium of a long ascent.


In one passage he described his colleague’s foot, bloated after days of 
climbing: “It looked as though, during the night, someone had pumped 
Hugh’s foot up. His skin transparent as tracing paper, the foot was a 
mallet of flesh, the toes tiny buds.”


Much of Mr. Drummond’s poetry was connected to climbing. During some 
readings he cavorted on a 20-foot-tall metal tripod, which he called a 
“portable mountain.” His poetry and prose were compiled in several 
books, including the collection “A Dream of White Horses: Recollections 
of Life on the Rocks” (1987). The title refers to the name he gave one 
of his first ascents, on a seaside cliff in Wales.


In the opening stanzas of “To Climb or Not To Climb,” the book’s first 
poem, Mr. Drummond compares struggling to climb to language:


If climbing is speaking a fluent body language,
yesterday was all Greek
to me …
Feet stuttered on doorsteps of granite:
a blank face.
Tongue-tied, my fingers
let me down, looking at the ground
as if I’d forgotten my name.

Edwin William Drummond was born on May 14, 1945, in Wolverhampton, 
England, to William and Madeline (Parton) Drummond. His father worked 
for the post office, and his mother was a domestic 

[Marxism] Neus Català, Dogged Anti-Fascist and Camp Survivor, Dies at 103

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, May 22, 2019
Neus Català, Dogged Anti-Fascist and Camp Survivor, Dies at 103
By Katharine Q. Seelye

In early 1939, when General Francisco Franco’s troops invaded Barcelona 
during the Spanish Civil War, Neus Català led 182 orphans in her charge 
out of the mayhem and across the snow-covered Pyrenees to safety in France.


It was just one episode in a lifetime of anti-fascist resistance that 
Ms. Català, who died on April 13 at 103, would demonstrate.


She then fought with the French Resistance against the Nazis but was 
captured by the Germans and deported to the Ravensbrück women’s 
concentration camp in northern Germany.


From Ravensbrück, Ms. Català was transferred to the Flossenbürg camp, 
where she was part of a forced labor group that quarried granite and 
sabotaged bullets and bombs while working in a munitions factory.


Long after the war was over, she tracked down other survivors of 
Ravensbrück, gathered their remembrances and published them in the book 
“Resistance and Deportation: 50 Testimonies of Spanish Women” (1984). 
The European press reported that at her death she had been the last 
living Spanish survivor of Ravensbrück.


“Neus Català dedicated her whole life to explaining the horror of what 
must never happen again,” Quim Torra, the president of Catalonia in 
Spain, said after her death. He said she had been “a clear voice for 
freedom and against barbarity.”


Neus Català (pronounced nay-OOS cat-a-LAH) was born on Oct. 6, 1915, in 
Els Guiamets, in Catalonia, and grew up there. Her father, Baltasar 
Català, was the town barber and also cultivated olives and grapes with 
the help of his wife, Rosa Palleja.


Neus began working in the fields at 14. During the grape harvest, she 
showed early signs of her willfulness, demanding equal pay for girls, 
which she succeeded in winning.


With the advent of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she became active with 
a Communist youth group in Catalonia and moved to Barcelona to study 
nursing, earning her degree in 1937. Her hope was to work in a hospital, 
but she was put in charge of an orphanage.


In early 1939, with Franco’s forces moving in, Ms. Català, at the age of 
23, rounded up the orphans and marched them over the Pyrenees. In 
France, she found shelter for them and helped place them in foster homes.


She soon put down roots in France, in the Dordogne region, and married 
Albert Roger, a French citizen. When Hitler invaded France in 1940, she 
and her husband became active in the French Resistance.


Ms. Català at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was captured by 
the Germans and sent there while working for the French resistance. 
Nearly 100,000 people died at the camp.


She and her husband helped captured Resistance fighters escape and gave 
them refuge. She would hide messages, falsified documents and even 
weapons under her head scarf or in baskets of vegetables and carry them 
by bicycle or bus through Nazi checkpoints.


And she was armed. “We women were not assistants,” she wrote in her 
memoir, “Testimony of a Survivor,” published in 2012, when she was 97. 
“We were fighters.”


The couple was exposed and arrested in 1943. Ms. Català was held and 
tortured in Limoges, and in 1944 deported to Ravensbrück; her husband 
was sent to another camp.


Ravensbrück was built for women but was no less lethal than other 
concentration camps. In all, more than 132,000 women and children were 
incarcerated there, with an estimated 92,000 of them dying by 
starvation, execution or illness.


At Flossenbürg, in Bavaria, where about 30,000 prisoners died, she 
worked in an arms factory.


“We used sabotage to produce about 10 million faulty bullets and 
thousands of unusable artillery shells,” she said in a 2013 interview 
with a Spanish trade union magazine. “We threw everything into the 
production line — flies, cockroaches, oil, our own spit.”


By the time the camp was liberated, in 1945, she was near death. “We 
were just skulls with eyes,” she told the magazine. “I was a bag of 
bones.” Her husband had died.


With Franco still in power in Spain, she went to the home of her 
parents, who by then had settled in France, as had roughly a 
half-million other self-exiled Spaniards.


She rebuilt her life and went on to marry Felix Sancho, a Spanish exile, 
and to have two children — a minor miracle considering the injections 
that women in Ravensbrück were given as part of medical “experiments” to 
make them stop menstruating so that they could not reproduce.


Furious that Franco had not been overthrown along with Hitler and 
Mussolini, Ms. Català resumed her anti-fascist work, acting as a 
messenger 

[Marxism] Game of Thrones and the Khaleesi of the Liberals | James Crossley | The Morning Star

2019-05-22 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/game-thrones-and-khaleesi-liberals


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[Marxism] A Jacobin/DSAer’s Red Herrings | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or 
important question, according to Wikipedia, which also states that the 
term was popularized in 1807 by English polemicist William Cobbett, who 
told a story of having used a kipper (a strong-smelling smoked fish) to 
divert hounds from chasing a hare. Cobbett was an early English radical 
who took up the cause of impoverished peasants falling prey to “rotten 
boroughs”, a form of gerrymandering that favored the rich. One imagines 
that red herrings were used widely in the interest of privilege back 
then but as a term it can now be used to describe any dodgy political 
argument such as those found in an article by Jacobin/DSAer Chris 
Maisano titled “Which Way to Socialism?”


full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/05/22/a-jacobin-dsaers-red-herrings/
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Re: [Marxism] Mozart: Rational revolutionary

2019-05-22 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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 Louis Proyect wrote

Their audience, then, knew what Da Ponte and Mozart were getting into. 
Joseph II was never going to tolerate explicit revolutionary language, 
and Da Ponte softened it considerably in devising his libretto. But 
Mozart deepened it again with his music, giving three dimensions to 
two-dimensional characters by granting them real-life emotional 
complexity. Instead of political force, they get emotional depth, and as 
real people, their fates once again acquire political force.


full: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/mozart-grace-notes/




 That was part of the genius and beauty of Mozart, who wrote his first
 symphony at age eight. Reminds me of the narrative, as I recall it
 from reading the book long ago, of coming back across France toward
 central Europe after the first World War on a train loaded with
 refugees, peasants who after fleeing the ravaging of their homelands
 were being forced back to their villages and countryside to a hopeless
 future, with their lands having been taken by the banks and rich
 landlords who profited from war. The narrator looks at the children of
 the refugees. Their eyes are bright and still full of hope and
 expectation, their demeanor full of activity and mischief. Then he
 looks at the returning peasants. Their eyes are dull and listless,
 their shoulders slumped and motionless, their cheeks hollowed and
 ashen. He writes: “What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor
 the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of
 Mozart murdered.”

And no change: they are murdering the Mozarts.


― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars 


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[Marxism] Syria: Heroic Rebel Fighters Wage Bold Counter-Attack

2019-05-22 Thread RKOB via Marxism

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*Syria: Heroic Rebel Fighters Wage Bold Counter-Attack*

*/International Solidarity with the Liberation Struggle of the Syrian 
People!/*


/By Michael Pröbsting, 22.05.2019/

https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/syria-heroic-rebel-fighters-wage-bold-counter-attack/

--
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
(Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net)
www.rkob.net
ak...@rkob.net
Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314



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[Marxism] The Economy Is Strong. So Why Do So Many Americans Still Feel at Risk?

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times Op-Ed, May 22, 2019
The Economy Is Strong. So Why Do So Many Americans Still Feel at Risk?
By Jacob S. Hacker

President Trump is running for re-election on the strength of the 
economy, and why not? The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in 
five decades. The stock market is booming. Overall economic growth has 
been steady.


There’s just one problem: Voters are not particularly enthused about it. 
Recent polls suggest a substantial majority of Americans feel the 
economy is working only for “those in power.”


A big reason for this disconnect is that many Americans feel insecure. 
They may be doing well at the moment, but they fear that, however high 
they are on the economic ladder, a single bad step or bad event could 
cause them to slip. A booming economy hasn’t quieted these concerns, 
because insecurity remains a huge and growing problem in ways that 
voters and candidates instinctively get but the sunny job numbers 
largely hide.


Insecurity is the broad challenge that all 2020 presidential candidates 
must address — and it helps explain why Democrats are tripping over one 
another to present bold plans for universal health care, public 
retirement supplements, guaranteed jobs and a much higher minimum wage.


Even with unemployment at a 50-year low, the job market is failing to 
reach millions of potential workers. That’s because those who aren’t 
working or looking for work are left out of the unemployment statistics. 
And the number of such workers has been growing: When unemployment was 
last down near 3.5 percent, in 1969, virtually all men ages 25 to 54 
were in the work force. Today, the proportion is below 90 percent, the 
result of a long-term decline in work force participation that has hit 
men most severely, but has recently affected women, too.


Other rich countries haven’t seen this troubling fall, in part because 
they have policies that help workers find jobs, keep their skills 
up-to-date and balance work and family. Unfortunately, the United States 
hasn’t done much on any of these fronts. It once nearly led the world in 
levels of work force participation; now it’s toward the back of the pack.


This reversal has had many bad effects. It’s reduced the incentive to 
bid up wages, which used to be seen as the inevitable consequence of 
tight labor markets. It’s also made unemployment less and less useful as 
a measure of job security.


The basic problem is that most of the jobs offered today don’t provide 
the guarantees that workers once expected. This transformation is 
obvious in “gig economy” jobs like driving for Uber. But the gig economy 
is still pretty small; for most Americans, the problem is that their 
work has been gig-ified. Corporations used to pool major economic risks 
within their labor forces. They did so because they could — the 
pressures of financial markets and global competition were less 
constraining. And they did so because they thought they had to if labor 
unions were to remain satisfied. Now those risks are mostly on workers 
alone.


These changes aren’t unique to the United States. Yet they’re uniquely 
consequential because of how we safeguard economic security. The United 
States spends more on social benefits than any affluent country besides 
France once you take into account tax breaks and employer-sponsored 
benefits. But there is a big difference: We have a system that is 
premised on employers providing many of the benefits that governments 
elsewhere provide directly.


In the mid-20th century, American corporations came to be seen as 
mini-welfare states, providing workers not only with job security and 
continuous training but also with generous health benefits and a secure 
retirement income. That world is gone, and it’s not coming back.


In short, the implicit social contract that once bound employers, 
families and government has unraveled, and nothing has taken its place.


This unraveling has taken different forms in different areas. In 
metropolitan America, it’s seen in rising income volatility and the 
disconnect between wages and the skyrocketing costs of housing, health 
care and education. In rural and small-town America, the loss of 
productive employment looms larger. But what I’ve called the “great risk 
shift” is more or less universal for all Americans.


Which helps explain why ideas for tackling rising insecurity have broad 
appeal. At a recent town hall with Bernie Sanders on Fox News, the host 
thought he was setting a trap by asking audience members if they’d be 
willing to give up their employer-sponsored insurance for Medicare — and 
the audience cheered.


Universal health care 

[Marxism] Both Parents Are American. The U.S. Says Their Baby Isn’t.

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, May 22, 2019
Both Parents Are American. The U.S. Says Their Baby Isn’t.
By Sarah Mervosh

James Derek Mize is an American citizen, born and raised in the United 
States. His husband, who was born in Britain to an American mother, is a 
United States citizen, too.


But the couple’s infant daughter isn’t, according to the State Department.

She was born abroad to a surrogate, using a donor egg and sperm from her 
British-born father. Those distinct circumstances mean that, under a 
decades-old policy, she did not qualify for citizenship at birth, even 
though both her parents are American.


“It’s shocking,” said Mr. Mize, 38, a former lawyer who lives in Atlanta 
with his husband, Jonathan Gregg, a management consultant. The couple 
received a letter denying their daughter’s citizenship last month.


“We’re both Americans; we’re married,” Mr. Mize said. “We just found it 
really hard to believe that we could have a child that wouldn’t be able 
to be in our country.”


Their case illustrates the latest complication facing some families who 
use assisted reproductive technology, like surrogacy and in vitro 
fertilization, to have children. For years the techniques have set off 
provocative legal and ethical debates about what defines parenthood. 
Immigration and citizenship are the latest frontier in those debates.


At issue is a State Department policy, based on immigration law, that 
requires a child born abroad to have a biological connection to an 
American parent in order to receive citizenship at birth. That is 
generally not a problem when couples have babies the traditional way, 
but can prove tricky when only one spouse is the genetic parent.


The policy has come under intense scrutiny in recent months amid 
lawsuits arguing that the State Department discriminates against 
same-sex couples and their children by failing to recognize their 
marriages. Under the policy, the department classifies certain children 
born through assisted reproductive technology as “out of wedlock,” which 
triggers a higher bar for citizenship, even if the parents are legally 
married.


In one instance, a married Israeli-American gay couple had twin sons in 
Canada using sperm from each of the fathers. The biological son of the 
American received citizenship, but his brother, the biological son of 
the Israeli, did not. In February, a federal judge sided with the 
couple, calling the State Department’s interpretation of the immigration 
law “strained.” The department is appealing.


The government is also fighting a similar suit from a lesbian couple in 
London, who did not use a surrogate. One is American and one is Italian. 
They took turns conceiving and carrying their two children. Only the 
child born to the American mother was granted citizenship. Last week, a 
federal judge allowed the case to proceed, calling the family’s 
predicament “terrible” and “outrageous.”


Though the policy predates the Trump administration, the president’s 
opponents have seized upon it. On Friday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of 
California, the Democratic leader of the House, called it “an 
unconscionable attack on American families.”


The State Department, which has emphasized that the policy applies to 
opposite-sex and same-sex couples alike, declined to comment, citing 
pending litigation.


1950s law, 21st-century families

The focus on a biological connection dates to the Immigration and 
Nationality Act of 1952, well before the advent of modern reproductive 
technology and the legal recognition of same-sex relationships.


The State Department’s policy on assisted reproductive technology, first 
drafted in the late 1990s, is based on an interpretation of that law, 
which includes language that children are “born” of their parents and 
mentions a “blood relationship” in certain cases.


The rules for passing down citizenship are meant to ensure that children 
born abroad have a sufficient connection to the United States.


“Proof of the biological connection is necessary so that the born-abroad 
citizenship route is not susceptible to fraud by people claiming they 
are children of United States citizens when, in fact, they are not,” 
said John C. Eastman, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a 
conservative think tank in California.


The interpretation has led the State Department to regard births from 
assisted reproductive technology as “out of wedlock,” if the source of 
the sperm and the egg do not match married parents. Such a designation 
comes with extra requirements for transmitting citizenship, including 
showing that a biological parent is an American citizen who has spent at 
least five 

[Marxism] They Grow the Nation’s Food, but They Can’t Drink the Water

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, May 22, 2019
They Grow the Nation’s Food, but They Can’t Drink the Water
By Jose A. Del Real

EAST OROSI, Calif. — Water is a currency in California, and the 
low-income farmworkers who pick the Central Valley’s crops know it 
better than anyone. They labor in the region’s endless orchards, made 
possible by sophisticated irrigation systems, but at home their faucets 
spew toxic water tainted by arsenic and fertilizer chemicals.


“Clean water flows toward power and money,” said Susana De Anda, a 
longtime water-rights organizer in the region. She is the daughter of 
lechugueros who worked in lettuce fields and helped make California one 
of the agricultural capitals of the world. “Homes, schools and clinics 
are supposed to be the safest places to go. But not in our world.”


As she spoke, Ms. De Anda drove through several towns where tainted 
water is a fact of life, here in the state’s agricultural center. In the 
foreground, along State Route 201, were miles of lush orange groves and 
dairy farms. Spotted out the passenger window of her silver Toyota was 
Stone Corral Elementary in the town of Seville, where century-old pipes 
contaminate the tap water with soil and bacteria. The school depends on 
grant money to pay for bottled water for students.


Today, more than 300 public water systems in California serve unsafe 
drinking water, according to public compliance data compiled by the 
California State Water Resources Control Board. It is a slow-motion 
public health crisis that leaves more than one million Californians 
exposed to unsafe water each year, according to public health officials.


Though water contamination is a problem up and down the state, the 
failing systems are most heavily concentrated in small towns and 
unincorporated communities in the Central and Salinas Valleys, the key 
centers of California agriculture. About half of all failing water 
systems are in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, in the southern 
section of the broader Central Valley, said Ellen Hanak, the director of 
the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California.


Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a tax of about $140 million on urban 
water districts and the agriculture industry to pay for redevelopment in 
districts serving unsafe water. That money would come in addition to 
$168 million he has allocated toward water infrastructure improvements 
from a bond proposition passed last year.


Some have bristled at the proposed tax, given already high tax rates in 
the state and a budget surplus of more than $21 billion. The Association 
of California Water Agencies — whose members provide an estimated 90 
percent of water distributed in the state — has spoken out against the 
governor’s proposed solution, arguing it would affect the cost of living 
in already-expensive California.


“There’s agreement with everyone involved in policy that there is a 
problem and it needs to be solved,” said Cindy Tuck, the group’s deputy 
executive director for government relations. But, “we think it doesn’t 
make sense to tax a resource that is essential.”


State Senator Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat representing the Fresno area, 
whose district is severely affected by tainted water, said she would 
like to see more money allocated for infrastructure spending, but 
believes a tax on water is a nonstarter. Last week, the 
Democratic-controlled State Senate budget subcommittee voted against the 
governor’s proposed water tax, in favor of recommending funding from the 
state’s general fund. The Legislature is expected to work out the 
details as part of broader budget negotiations, which will come for a 
vote in June.


But the debate in Sacramento feels far away in East Orosi, a farmworker 
community of about 500 nestled along the foot of the Sierra Nevada that 
is surrounded by fields of oranges. There, residents complain of 
conditions that resemble the developing world, not the richest state in 
the nation. Fears of nitrate exposure in the tap water — which numerous 
studies have linked to an increased risk of infant death, and at high 
levels, an elevated risk of cancer in adults — compound other difficult 
realities like faraway grocery stores and doctors, grueling work 
conditions, and a lack of political clout.


Veronica Corrales, the president of the East Orosi water board, wonders 
why more people are not outraged that, in 2019, people living in a state 
as wealthy as California lack such a fundamental necessity.


“Everyone is saying ‘America First,’ but what about us?” she said.

Many factors have led to the groundwater contamination reflected in the 
state’s data, but public 

[Marxism] Labor should fight attacks on women and on abortion rights

2019-05-22 Thread John Reimann via Marxism
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"The new laws against abortion rights are an attack on women, first and
foremost, but on all working class people also. That’s because they
represent the increased power of the far right, as organized through the
Christian fanatics. While they threaten to throw working class women back
to the dark ages of coat hangers. We say “working class” women, because the
rich will always find a way to obtain abortions safely. But these attacks
will not stop here. This far right will use this to escalate their attacks
on the rights of people of color, on immigrants, and on workers as a whole.

Nor is the strategy of fighting these attacks through the courts likely to
succeed"

Read entire article here:
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2019/05/22/labor-should-fight-attack-on-women-and-abortion-rights/

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*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
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[Marxism] Macron in Libya | Richard Seymour on Patreon

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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However, like many of the above, Sarkozy suddenly switched gears in 
2011. He became a militant advocate of the humanitarian bombing of 
Libya, to pilot the rebels to power. It was clear that he was covering 
his tracks. In 2012, the extraordinary investigative website, Mediapart, 
alleged that Sarkozy had backed Gaddafi in exchange for financial 
support for his presidential bid, approved as early as 2005. Now, 
Sarkozy has been arrested on those same charges, as notes kept by 
Libya's oil minister at the time show Sarkozy funding his 2007 election 
campaign with $8 million from Libyan coffers. Given that Sarkozy was a 
leading player in the drive to war in Libya, despatching his 
gaffeur-in-chief Bernard-Henry Lévy to conduct freelance diplomacy with 
the rebels.


https://www.patreon.com/posts/macron-in-libya-27043203
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[Marxism] Cancel Kyle | Richard Seymour on Patreon

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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However, what made the show's cruelty all the more pointed, all the more 
toxic, was its class hatred. There is absolutely no surprise in the fact 
that Kyle was a Sun columnist, that his first self-justifying book, 
peppered with class spite, was given the Littlejohn-indebted title, I'm 
Only Being Honest, and that his second was given the equally shopworn, 
You Couldn't Make it Up. Nor that Kyle hates the welfare state, reviles 
"benefit scroungers", and lined up with Osbornite austerity. Apart from 
the fact that the show benefited from a palpable lack of social care, 
otherwise it would have no guests, it was a daytime diorama of suburban 
nightmares: tattooed unemployed fuck-ups, deadbeat dads, drug addicted 
mothers.


https://www.patreon.com/posts/cancel-kyle-26903030
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[Marxism] The Revolutionary Communist Party, Living Marxism and the road to free speech absolutism | Hatful of History

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/the-revolutionary-communist-party-living-marxism-and-the-road-to-free-speech-absolutism/
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[Marxism] Internal emails reveal how the chemical lobby fights regulation | US news | The Guardian

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/22/internal-emails-reveal-how-the-chemical-lobby-fights-regulation
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[Marxism] Ben Carson confuses home foreclosures for cookies as a Democratic congresswoman exposes his embarrassing ignorance – Alternet.org

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Idiocracy rules.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/ben-carson-confuses-home-foreclosures-for-cookies-as-a-democratic-congresswoman-exposes-his-embarrassing-ignorance/
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[Marxism] Mozart: Rational revolutionary

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Beaumarchais made The Marriage of Figaro with stock characters but gave 
them depth through the force of their challenge to the existing order. 
He has Figaro say: “Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they 
make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put 
yourself to the trouble of being born – nothing more! For the rest – a 
very ordinary man!” Later in the passage, Figaro asks “Pourquoi ces 
choses et non pas d’autres? – Why these things and not others?” a line 
that resonated in revolutionary France. Napoleon thought the play 
forecast the revolution. And Beaumarchais’s revolutionary credentials 
were impeccable — he ran arms to the American revolution, still in 
progress as the play was being written, and barely over when it was 
first produced in 1784. The Mozart and Da Ponte collaboration followed 
on that first production with amazing speed, going up almost exactly two 
years later, on May 1, 1786. Their audience, then, knew what Da Ponte 
and Mozart were getting into. Joseph II was never going to tolerate 
explicit revolutionary language, and Da Ponte softened it considerably 
in devising his libretto. But Mozart deepened it again with his music, 
giving three dimensions to two-dimensional characters by granting them 
real-life emotional complexity.  Instead of political force, they get 
emotional depth, and as real people, their fates once again acquire 
political force.



full: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/mozart-grace-notes/
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[Marxism] The Socialist Manifesto by Bhaskar Sunkara makes a pretty uninspiring case for trashing capitalism.

2019-05-22 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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A liberal doesn't like Sunkara's book.

https://slate.com/business/2019/05/socialist-manifesto-bhaskar-sunkara-socialism-bernie-sanders.html
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[Marxism] Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You: the gig economy as agony, not freedom | Dennis Broe | Culture Matters

2019-05-22 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/films/item/3060-ken-loach-s-sorry-we-missed-you-the-gig-economy-not-as-freedom-but-as-agony


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[Marxism] [VIDEO] Syria: Defend Idlib against the Butchers Assad and Putin!

2019-05-22 Thread RKOB via Marxism

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*[VIDEO] Syria: Defend Idlib against the Butchers Assad and Putin!*

/Statement of Michael Pröbsting/

https://www.thecommunists.net/multimedia-1/syria-defend-idlib-against-the-butchers-assad-and-putin/

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