[Marxism] Trump official who suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan now responsible for arms control issues

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, November 27, 2019
Trump official who suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan now 
responsible for arms control issues

By John Hudson

A former conservative talk radio host and naval intelligence officer who 
suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks 
now works on arms control issues at the State Department, according to 
two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.


Frank Wuco, a senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Arms 
Control, Verification and Compliance, came under scrutiny last year when 
his past comments involving the promotion of far-right conspiracy 
theories surfaced.


Some of those included debunked claims that former president Barack 
Obama was not born in the United States, former CIA director John 
Brennan converted to Islam, former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. 
had been a member of the Black Panthers and former Hillary Clinton aide 
Huma Abedin had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.


When a CNN investigation unearthed the remarks last year, Wuco was 
working at the Department of Homeland Security. A spokesman for the 
agency defended him at the time, saying the comments had “no bearing on 
his ability to perform his job for the American people.”


Now Wuco works at the State Department, though some arms control 
advocates have questioned his suitability for the area of arms control 
given his past remarks.


The State Department declined to comment.

During an exchange on the Dougherty Report radio show in 2016, Wuco was 
asked why the United States doesn’t turn Syria and Iran “into glass 
already.”


“I don’t think it’s been our policy really to just start nuking 
countries,” Wuco said. “I think if we were going to have done that, my 
preference would have been to have dropped a couple of low-yield 
tactical nuclear weapons over Afghanistan the day after 9/11 to send a 
definite message to the world that they had screwed up in a big way.”


Alexandra Bell, senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control 
and Non-Proliferation and a former Obama administration official, said 
the comments are troubling given the chal­lenges the department faces.


“Wuco’s bureau is busy dealing with the aftermath of the collapse of the 
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, emerging technologies that 
could upend long-standing theories on nuclear policy, the strategic 
threats posed by a militarizing China and the uncertain future of the 
New START accord,” she said. “It cannot afford distractions connected to 
a senior adviser who once casually mused about nuking Afghanistan.”


It is unclear when Wuco transitioned to the State Department from DHS, 
where he worked last year. One State Department official, who like 
others spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized 
to address the issue, said Wuco has been working at State since at least 
August.


Last week, a State Department social media account tweeted that Wuco 
traveled to Bucharest recently for meetings at Romania’s Ministry of 
National Defense.


President Trump himself raised the idea of “using nuclear” in 
Afghanistan, though he dismissed the possibility because “I’m not 
looking to kill 10 million people.”


Trump also promoted the false “birther” conspiracy that Obama was not 
born in the United States.


Wuco gave oxygen to the idea in August 2011 when he hosted Jerome Corsi, 
the author of “Where’s the Birth Certificate: The Case That Barack Obama 
Is Not Eligible to Be President,” on the Frank Wuco Radio Show.


Wuco said the book “laid it out in very significant detail, not just why 
it’s important that [Obama] present better credentials on his status as 
a natural-born citizen but a lot of the things that surrounded it, and 
where it is important as to the constitutionality of just being able to 
get your name on the ballot,” according to audio of the broadcast.


In 2013, Wuco brought on a former FBI agent, John Guandolo, and elevated 
the unsubstantiated claim that Brennan converted to Islam.


“According to contacts, friends of yours within the FBI, they were 
stationed with John Brennan in Saudi Arabia when Brennan was there. And 
at that time, Brennan converted to Islam,” Wuco said.


“If true, it sort of fits the pattern of a guy who seems to be really 
almost uncontrollably attracted to political winds shifting,” Wuco added.


In a 2013 broadcast of his show, Wuco said Holder was a Black Panther 
member in the 1970s despite no evidence that this is the case.


“I firmly believe that this is much of what motivates this man. As a 
college student in the 1970s, you do not join the Black Panther movement 
unless you 

[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Life and Death in Douma – Analysis of developments in Syria and elsewhere

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://secure-web.cisco.com/1eZWpn-hXXcD21VDjwH2okFOq0WUWutkL3R8fdjwNgJSRrzi2ofEYLKTioiO2Dw32UXuBir90vE1yar8MoQmFsSYqfM-V5lv-FzD_W3BtZYfEdw34NVD2YFXGcUkWbGTpBy3lEVbhHJVIq9o3mt9N6A6YT13XNzajQLMpBvNrGWBTIUIW5dVmnyJDu96cg0LKhRSm1LsZkc4HJI3oXKTic2-ISUJSCZUZu84oEQ6zGvUGC3yd328tMvAJH97DoxobqYXL1NaCOJFWHAW25-0Zj63yzoDjSiMhNEb-7pum8C2kMKMp6_LYxTYHf5vQbWige1sz3ITUkO58Nfd-6Hd4V-symBUo0UmiQXM7jXTf9m6oFwmDHKitsS5W3PUo8a2NvvwOLzt8lEv1BExNaT4UZg/https%3A%2F%2Fmagpie68.wordpress.com%2F2019%2F12%2F01%2Flife-and-death-in-douma%2F

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[Marxism] These Reporters Rely on Public Data, Rather Than Secret Sources

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times, Dec. 1, 2019
These Reporters Rely on Public Data, Rather Than Secret Sources
By Marc Tracy

LONDON — Leaked documents and interviews with whistle-blowing sources 
will always be a part of investigative journalism. But thanks to the 
rise of digital technology, and the easy availability of data that has 
gone with it, reporters have more ways to get stories than ever before.


“You can be on your couch in front of your computer and solve a mystery 
of a missile system downing a plane,” said Aliaume Leroy, a journalist 
who is part of the BBC’s Africa Eye team.


Internet sleuths who piece together stories from available data, a 
practice known as open-source journalism, have helped identify the white 
nationalists who assaulted counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.; 
unmask the Russian intelligence officers who the British government said 
tried to kill a fellow Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, 
England; and show that the suspects in the murder of the journalist 
Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul included associates of Saudi Arabia’s crown 
prince.


With its emphasis on raw facts, open-source journalism has an immediacy 
that is effective at a time when readers all along the ideological 
spectrum have become skeptical of the news media.


“If the BBC tells you they’ve got a source that proves this, the BBC is 
the middleman and the source is behind it — you can’t see it,” Mr. Leroy 
said. “But if you’ve got the visual evidence, there is no middleman. You 
connect directly to the evidence.”


The craft of building a story on publicly available data was part of 
journalism in the analog era, but it has come of age in recent years, 
with the ubiquity of smartphones and the expansion of social media.


The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the 
war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while 
caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an 
open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff 
members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill 
not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, 
but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave 
him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.


“It’s imagination and perseverance,” he said. “You look at a problem and 
say, ‘I know I need to do this thing. I know I have this range of tools 
I can apply to this.’”


Thanks to social media and camera-equipped smartphones, a great number 
of the world’s seven billion people cannot help documenting newsworthy 
events. Open-source journalists at Bellingcat and elsewhere try to track 
down that evidence and place it in context.


“It’s what humans do,” said Nick Waters, a Bellingcat investigator. 
“They are gregarious. They are addicted to social media, because social 
media platforms are designed to be addictive. And they like sharing 
their experiences.”


The site made a name for itself with its investigation of the downing of 
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, when the war 
between Russia-backed separatists and the Ukraine government was raging.


At the time, Bellingcat was a group of volunteers who collaborated 
mainly over a Slack channel. Relying on photographs of the crash site 
and Facebook updates, they identified the launcher used in the attack, 
reporting that it had been moved from Russia to rebel-held territory in 
Ukraine days before the missile was fired, killing all 298 passengers on 
board the jet.


A scene from the documentary “Bellingcat — Truth in a Post-Truth World.” 
Hans Pool, a Dutch film director, was inspired to make the film after 
reading about Bellingcat’s work on the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 
17 over Ukraine in 2014.Credit...Submarine Amsterdam
In June of this year, a Dutch-led international team of prosecutors 
indicted three men with ties to Russian military and intelligence 
agencies in the attack. Moscow has denied any involvement. The site 
produced a podcast this year detailing the story behind the story.


Hans Pool, a Dutch film director, was inspired to make a documentary 
about Bellingcat after its reporting on the crash. “It was about a house 
father in his spare time doing research on the internet,” Mr. Pool said. 
“I was wondering, ‘What is this?’” His documentary, “Truth in a 
Post-Truth World,” recently won an International Emmy Award.


Bellingcat alumni, as well as formerly amateur open-source 
investigators, have found jobs at established news organizations 
including The New York Times, whose Visual Investigations unit 
incorporates open-source 

[Marxism] Re; Iran protests and VICE report

2019-12-01 Thread Ron Jacobs via Marxism
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this one sounds like she's a monarchist
Sara @saraghavamian

pro-israeli
Mike Verified account
 @*Doranimated*


this guy sounds pro-Israeli

Hananya Naftali  @*HananyaNaftali*


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Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark

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[Marxism] Will the Gig Economy Prevail?

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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LRB, Vol. 41 No. 23 · 5 December 2019
What counts as work?
Katrina Forrester

Will the Gig Economy Prevail? by Colin Crouch
Polity, 140 pp, £9.99, February, ISBN 978 1 5095 3244 5

Employment contracts are by their nature asymmetrical. Although in 
principle contracts are made between two free and equal parties, when an 
employee signs one they enter into an unequal relationship. Work can be 
a source of identity, a prerequisite for social inclusion, and a marker 
of status and independence; historically, the employment contract has 
been contrasted with slavery, bondage and other forms of servitude. But 
workers’ movements have long argued that waged labour in general implies 
a kind of wage-slavery: it dominates as well as exploits. At the very 
least, it sets up a hierarchical relationship: having a job means being 
under the authority of an employer. Struggles for better working 
conditions – for proper remuneration, trade union representation, 
protection against discrimination, the right to time off for leisure, 
parenting or sickness – aim to mitigate the essential inequity of the 
employment contract and limit the power of the boss.


According to the sociologist Colin Crouch, the gig economy provides a 
new way of concealing employers’ authority. People who work for such 
online platforms as Uber, Lyft and Deliveroo are classed not as 
employees but as self-employed. They are supposedly flexible 
entrepreneurs, free to choose when they work, how they work and who they 
work for. In practice, this isn’t the case. Unlike performers in the 
entertainment industry (which gives the ‘gig’ economy its name), most 
gig workers don’t work for an array of organisations but depend for 
their pay on just one or two huge companies. The gig worker doesn’t 
really have much in common with the ideal of the entrepreneur – there is 
little room in their jobs for creativity, change or innovation – except 
that gig workers also take a lot of risks: they have no benefits, 
holiday or sick pay, and they are vulnerable to the whims of their 
customers. In many countries, gig workers (or ‘independent contractors’) 
have none of the rights that make the asymmetry of the employment 
contract bearable: no overtime, no breaks, no protection from sexual 
harassment or redundancy pay. They don’t have the right to belong to a 
union, or to organise one, and they aren’t entitled to the minimum wage. 
Most aren’t autonomous, independent free agents, or students, 
part-timers or retirees supplementing their income; rather, they are 
people who need to do gig work simply to get by.


What is new about the gig economy isn’t that it gives workers 
flexibility and independence, but that it gives employers something they 
have otherwise found difficult to attain: workers who are not, 
technically, their employees but who are nonetheless subject to their 
discipline and subordinate to their authority. The dystopian promise of 
the gig economy is that it will create an army of precarious workers for 
whose welfare employers take no responsibility. Its emergence has been 
welcomed by neoliberal thinkers, policymakers and firms who see it as 
progress in their efforts to transform the way work is organised.


‘Standard employment’ is the formal name given to a non-temporary, 
full-time job secured by a contract. Today, the share of ‘non-standard 
employment’ in the labour market is growing. There are many kinds of 
non-standard and informal work, from self-employment to the unstable, 
unregulated and illegal work of the shadow economy. It takes different 
forms in different countries. In the UK, on-call contracts (whereby 
workers are on standby and can be called in to work at any time, even 
for short stints) and zero-hours contracts (whereby employers aren’t 
obliged to guarantee even a minimum number of working hours) are 
popular: an estimated 900,000 people worked under such arrangements in 
2017. Across Europe, too, there has been an increase in ‘marginal jobs’ 
and in the use of contracts that expire before workers acquire full 
rights, like Germany’s ‘minijobs’ and ‘midijobs’ (which provide short 
hours and low pay, but are enough to disqualify workers from claiming 
unemployment benefits). At the same time, in advanced economies, the 
rights of ‘standard employees’ have been steadily eroded. Insecurity is 
the general condition of modern work.


*

Historically speaking, standard employment has been the norm only 
briefly, and only in certain places. Until the ‘industrious revolution’ 
of the 18th century, work was piecemeal. People worked where they lived, 
on the farm or at home: in the ‘putting-out system’ – 

[Marxism] Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff—A Western Tale of ,America in Crisis

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 19, 2019 ISSUE
Another Great Yesterday
Adam Hochschild

Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff—A Western Tale of
America in Crisis
by Anthony McCann
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00

No Man’s Land
a PBS Independent Lens documentary film directed by David Byars

The late Ryszard Kapuściński coined a striking term to describe those 
susceptible to demagoguery. They were believers, he said, in the Great 
Yesterday. In the last few years we’ve seen inflammatory strongmen, from 
Viktor Orbán to Narendra Modi to Donald Trump, evoking visions of Great 
Yesterdays, from a Greater Hungary to an India without Muslims to an 
America without immigrants of color. Besides their shaky connection with 
actual history, such Great Yesterdays have several features in common. 
One, hinted if not spelled out, is that everyone who enjoyed that golden 
era in the past was of the same ethnicity or religion. Another is that 
the Great Yesterday was destroyed by malevolent outsiders. And finally, 
in traversing the arduous path toward its restoration, the faithful are 
enduring a martyrdom that will be rewarded.


All these elements were part of the Oregon standoff in early 2016, when 
a small group of militants bristling with semi-automatic rifles occupied 
the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney 
County, Oregon, and for forty days defied the federal government to 
evict them. The leaders included the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, two 
sons of a Nevada ranching family that two years earlier had staged an 
armed confrontation with the authorities over their father Cliven’s 
refusal to pay fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. They had 
other grievances as well, but the most fervent belief of the Bundys and 
their followers was that the federal government has no constitutional 
right to own vast tracts of land, as it does throughout the Far West. 
Instead, the land should be given to the states, which would surely turn 
it over to deserving, cowboy-booted folk like themselves. The Great 
Yesterday thus restored would be the homestead era, when hardy pioneers 
tamed the arid countryside and hardy prospectors staked claims, all 
without interference from far-off Washington, D.C.


Anthony McCann is a poet, and Shadowlands, his first nonfiction book, is 
the most substantial account to date of the Oregon standoff. It’s a 
curious mix of lyricism and trenchant portrayals of the occupation and 
the trials that followed, along with abundant meditation—sometimes 
intriguing, sometimes overly convoluted—on what it all means. He 
assumes, though, that readers already know the basic story. After 
gradually introducing a huge array of participants and observers, he 
gives no reminders of who they are when we meet them later, and provides 
no index, timeline, or cast-of-characters list to help us keep track of 
them. Near the end of the book, for instance, the patriarch Cliven 
Bundy, who did not take part in the standoff, is with much ado released 
from jail, but you have to go riffling back nearly two hundred pages to 
be reminded why he was there in the first place.


David Byars’s PBS film, No Man’s Land, also covers the standoff, but in 
a bare-bones style that is the opposite of McCann’s quirky commentary. 
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting visual counterpart to the book, for it 
includes a number of the scenes McCann writes about. Byars’s camera work 
gives you a sense of these determined true believers stalking about in 
pistol belts and leather vests in their snowbound citadel.


The Oregon standoff caught the public imagination because, in a country 
where tens of millions of people blame sinister bureaucrats in 
Washington for all their problems, here were bold rebels who seized an 
actual piece of federal property. No matter that it was a few low 
buildings in a place hardly anyone had heard of, whose name might be 
translated as the Bad Luck Refuge. And no matter that the Bundy brothers 
had no long-range plan, no specific demands. They were not political 
organizers but producers of political theater.


The theater was effective because it evoked other occupations, from the 
Native American takeover of the Wounded Knee battle site in 1973 to the 
seizure of Massachusetts courthouses by disgruntled Revolutionary War 
veterans in Shays’ Rebellion of 1786–1787. The Malheur occupiers 
frequently flew the rattlesnake “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of that earlier 
era. The film shows one supporter in a pickup truck flying the 
Confederate flag, and one of the occupiers told McCann he felt akin to 
the Bonus Marchers, World War I veterans who converged on 

Re: [Marxism] The Mafia as the Capitalist Avant Garde: On Scorsese and The Irishman

2019-12-01 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Louis Project wrote

http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/irishman

I watched this yesterday. This is a good review, except that it and all 
the reviews I've seen so far miss what is to me a crucial point,//that 
could and should have been extended as major in the plot line of the 
film (along with the connections to "higher-ups" and the relationships 
between corporate, political and mob crime) - maybe was more adequately 
dealt with in the book, I don't know - - that The Irishman , depicted in 
the first frames as shooting a couple of helpless, unarmed Italian POWs 
in cold blood and casually walking away, is simply following orders, 
convenient to the "higher-ups." This follows throughout the film. He is 
a guy conditioned by his war experience to simply follow orders, from 
"higher ups," without question and without feeling. And walk away, 
except for the largely unexplored but ubiquitous PTSD. And reject 
religious expiation because he can feel no remorse; except for his 
daughters, his nuclear "family," and the Mafia, his extended family. To 
one of his daughters, his explanation is simply and lamely that he was 
protecting them because "there's lots of bad guys out there."


In the beginning of the film this aspect of following orders without 
question as extending from Sheeran's military conditioning should have 
been emphasized, drawn out and alluded to frequently. Thereby the 
millions who will watch this star-studded, Academy award-prone high 
point of Scorsese's career would have had the point saturated within 
them as they reflect on the message.


This message could also bring home the US's increasing dependence on 
raw, remote, technologically driven military weapons, peddled to 
dictators and proxy ruling families and rained indiscriminately by the 
US military on whole populations foreign and soon probably domestic, to 
preserve threatened US hegemony in consequence of the waning of legitimacy.


The message underplayed, that the military takes draftees and the poor 
and uneducated, teaches them to hate other hapless people and then 
teaches them to kill those people, without conscious feeling beyond 
hatred of the other, calls to mind the footage made notorious by Chelsea 
Manning and Julian Assange of the helicopter-borne US military war 
criminals mowing down unarmed, clueless Arabs, with pure loathing and 
with complete official impunity. And like the "soldier of the King" Lord 
Jeffrey Amherst, "looking around for more when they were through." And 
finding their more in the rescuers and children in the van, who come to 
haul away the dead bodies.


That's where we seem headed, increasingly. This is a Roy Cohn world, 
unbridled. We've certainly been there all along and not just with Trump, 
but never before with the intensity, lethality and potentially 
devastating consequences we face now.


As I recall, in the discussion among the principals following the film, 
Scorsese alludes to the effects of The Irishman's WW2 experience as a 
major element, but he seems to have decided to dismiss it, largely 
because I gather the major actors were so well-known to the audience, 
and he couldn't extend the anti-aging technology back to do any detailed 
treatment of that period or plausibly use a younger version of the 
iconic De Niro, played by a younger actor./

/
I think, given the possibilities available and obvious, eliding this 
element is a major flaw of the film which could have greatly amplified 
its power./

//
/From the review:

"The Irishman is the mob film for the era of Trump, not to mention 
Netanyahu, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and the many other “world leaders” with 
unhidden connections to the criminal (not so) underworld.


Like Buffalino, he dies alone, with no family but the church.

The previous films were about the Mafia supplying a need to American 
society and were critiques that addressed the audience of the eighties 
and nineties, one still presupposing a formal separation between 
organized crime and the ruling class as a whole.


it is implied that perhaps the mob was involved in the Kennedy 
assassination but this is an afterthought. The point of the inclusion is 
again counter-intuitive. Buffalino and Sheeran, mob middle management 
and soldier alike are mournful in spite of themselves, but Hoffa, if 
anything is happy. He refuses to fly the flags at Teamster headquarters 
at half mast.


They inevitably turn to the church, the last refuge of the scoundrel.

The Irishman//is the end of the mob film as statement, the end of the 
figure of the Mafia. This signifier no longer has 

[Marxism] Haiti: The Contagious Revolution

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 19, 2019 ISSUE
The Contagious Revolution
David A. Bell

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
by Julius S. Scott, with a foreword by Marcus Rediker
Verso, 246 pp., $34.95

Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti
by Johnhenry Gonzalez
Yale University Press, 302 pp., $40.00

Historians have traditionally considered Western Europe the epicenter of 
early modern globalization. But in the late eighteenth century, no place 
had a thicker web of connections to other parts of the globe than the 
French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—now called Haiti. This small 
but intensely fertile piece of tropical real estate produced 40 percent 
of the sugar and half the coffee consumed in the world, as well as 
enormous quantities of cotton, chocolate, and textile dyes. Its ports 
teemed with ships from Europe, North America, South America, and other 
points in the Caribbean. Some five hundred a year sailed to the United 
States alone, returning laden with American food exports. Sailors from 
dozens of nations made up roughly 15 percent of the people in the 
capital city of Le Cap. And a higher percentage of Saint-Domingue’s 
population was born on a different continent than anywhere else on earth.


This last statistic, however, was no evidence of cosmopolitanism. 
Rather, it reveals the deadly reason for Saint-Domingue’s prosperity: 
perhaps the most horrific system of slavery ever seen in human history. 
French plantation owners literally worked captive African laborers to 
death—over 5 percent of them died every year. Slave traders, however, 
more than met the hideous demand for labor. Between 1740 and 1789, the 
number of the enslaved in the colony more than quadrupled, to well over 
450,000, which meant that a territory roughly the size of Maryland had 
two thirds the number of slaves who lived in the entire United States at 
the time. The enslaved outnumbered the white population by over fifteen 
to one, with a majority of the adults born in Africa. Early 
globalization was powered by captive humans.


Oppressive as it was, the system might have lasted, as similar systems 
did elsewhere in the Caribbean until well into the nineteenth century. 
But the French Revolution of 1789 fatally destabilized the political 
order in Saint-Domingue. It set different groups of white colonists 
against one another and against free people of color who were demanding 
the “rights of man and citizen” proclaimed in France, but apparently for 
whites only. Against this violent background, in 1791 enslaved people in 
Saint-Domingue staged the largest and most successful slave revolt in 
history. There followed, over the next thirteen years, the extraordinary 
series of events that now goes by the name of the Haitian Revolution.


French commissioners in Saint-Domingue, desperate to contain an 
increasingly brutal, multisided conflict, abolished slavery in the 
colony in 1793, and the radical French Republic soon extended abolition 
to the entire French overseas empire. Black forces led by the brilliant, 
charismatic former slave Toussaint Louverture came over to the 
republic’s side, and after several years managed to take effective 
control of Saint-Domingue. Louverture became governor-general, 
supposedly under the French flag but steering an increasingly 
independent course. In response to this, France’s new leader, Napoleon 
Bonaparte, sent a military expedition in 1801 to reassert French 
authority and reestablish slavery. It defeated Louverture (who died in a 
French prison in 1803), but was decimated by an epidemic of yellow 
fever, which allowed black forces to drive it out. On January 1, 1804, 
the new state of Haiti (supposedly the original Amerindian name of the 
island of Hispaniola) came into being.


For a long time, European and North American historians paid little 
attention to these developments. In their view, revolutions in this 
period involved Western, middle-class revolutionaries overthrowing 
aristocratic elites and establishing democratic institutions while 
paving the way for industrial capitalism. Haiti clearly did not fit this 
model, and it did not help that stories of “savage” Haitian blacks 
slaughtering innocent white colonists remained distressingly influential 
many decades into the twentieth century. Over the past generation, 
however, the old model of revolution has lost its appeal, while 
historians have become better attuned both to currents of global history 
and to “subaltern” voices. As a result, they now insist on the 
importance to world economic history of Saint-Domingue’s 
prerevolutionary 

[Marxism] What Were Dinosaurs For?

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Review of Books, DECEMBER 19, 2019 ISSUE
What Were Dinosaurs For?
Verlyn Klinkenbor

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
by Steve Brusatte
William Morrow, 404 pp., $29.99

Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology
by Michael J. Benton
Thames and Hudson, 320 pp., $34.95

The World of Dinosaurs: An Illustrated Tour
by Mark A. Norell
University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $32.50

The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal and the Quest for Earth's 
Ultimate Trophy

by Paige Williams
Hachette, 410 pp., $28.00

Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a 
Spectacle

by Lukas Rieppel
Harvard University Press, 325 pp., $29.95

A few fossil bones in clay and limestone have opened a greater vista 
back into Time than the Indian imagination ventured upon for its Gods: 
and every day turns up something new.


—Edward FitzGerald to E.B. Cowell, January 28, 18451

In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, God gathers the archangels and 
announces that He has made animals. Satan—who else?—asks, “What are they 
for?” Perhaps you can hear the strangeness, the dissonance in this 
question, which is the sort that marks the boundary between theology and 
science. Scientists have no trouble asking what the various parts of an 
organism are for or what function it has in a food web or an ecosystem. 
But they tend not to ask Satan’s question because it offers no 
hypotheses to be tested. What are animals for? Here is God’s chilly 
answer: “They are an experiment in Morals and Conduct. Observe them, and 
be instructed.” So Satan goes to Earth and soon concludes that “the 
people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is 
insane, Nature itself is insane.”


You might say of Twain, as Walter Benjamin said of Charles Baudelaire, 
that his “satanism must not be taken too seriously”—that speaking in the 
voice of a disillusioned archangel merely allowed Twain “to sustain a 
nonconformist position.” Yet Letters from the Earth was withheld from 
publication by Twain’s daughter until 1962, and it tends to come 
festooned with editorial disclaimers blaming its antireligious cynicism 
on the circumstances of his old age, as if the book were merely a late, 
funebral fugue, unrelated to the rest of his work. In fact, Satan is the 
Connecticut Yankee in extremis, a rational being in an irrational world.


Why do I mention all this? As I was reading some recent books on 
dinosaurs, I kept wondering, “What were dinosaurs for?” It’s a 
ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, 
dinosaurs were “for” exactly what we are “for,” what every organism has 
been “for” since life began. Every species that has ever lived is a 
successful experiment in the enterprise of living, and every species is 
closely kinned at the genetic level with all other species. This is 
harder to grasp than it seems, partly because the logic of that Satanic 
preposition—“for”—is so insidious, so woven through the problem of time. 
Teleology is the moralizing of chronology, and nowadays science tries to 
keep watch for even the slightest trace of it, any suggestion that 
evolution has a direction tending to culminate in us or in what we like 
to call intelligence or in any other presumably desirable end point.


But the obvious, quotidian logic of chronology is basically too much for 
the human mind: we’re constantly confusing sequence, causation, and 
purpose. Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the 
purpose of what came before. That’s what recent generations of humans 
have supposed and continue to suppose. Such is the nervous logic of 
living not only in the present but also at the constantly moving end 
point of the chronology of life on Earth.


There’s also another view: the belief that humans have, by our 
intelligence and adaptability, somehow won through to global dominance 
where dinosaurs failed thanks to their inadequacy. This assumption is 
parodied in the early stanzas of Wisława Szymborska’s ironic poem 
“Dinosaur Skeleton,” which might well have been called “Eleven Ways of 
Looking at a Fossil.” “Ladies, Gentlemen,” she writes in a docent-like 
voice, “a head this size does not have room for foresight,/and that is 
why its owner is extinct.” There’s a bland wonder in those words, a 
familiar mixture of surprise and easy contempt that was common, even 
among specialists, as late as the early twentieth century. It was put to 
rest only when it became apparent that dinosaurs, whose often 
astonishing heads were as suitable as ours, had nothing to do with their 
own demise. In 1980 a small team of 

Re: [Marxism] Vice report on Iran

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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On 12/1/19 2:22 PM, Ron Jacobs via Marxism wrote:


While I don't dispute that Iranian security forces cracked down excessively
on protesters, the fact that at least two of the sources in the VICE report
are pro-Israel causes me to take their reports with a grain of salt, so to
speak.



Who are the two?
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[Marxism] Vice report on Iran

2019-12-01 Thread Ron Jacobs via Marxism
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While I don't dispute that Iranian security forces cracked down excessively
on protesters, the fact that at least two of the sources in the VICE report
are pro-Israel causes me to take their reports with a grain of salt, so to
speak.
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[Marxism] Amazon Everywhere

2019-12-01 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism
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Amazon Everywhere
Prime Mover: How Amazon Wove Itself Into the Life of an American City
By Scott Shane

BALTIMORE — Another big Prime Air 767 takes off from Baltimore-Washington
International Airport — where Amazon’s shipping last year eclipsed that of
FedEx and U.P.S. put together — and wheels above the old industrial city.
Below, the online giant seems to touch every niche of the economy, its
ubiquity and range breathtaking.

To the city’s southeast stand two mammoth Amazon warehouses, built with
heavy government subsidies, operating on the sites of shuttered General
Motors and Bethlehem Steel plants. Computers monitor workers during
grueling 10-hour shifts, identifying slow performers for firing. Those on
the floor earn $15.40 to $18 an hour, less than half of what their
unionized predecessors made. But in Baltimore’s postindustrial economy,
the jobs are in demand.

Near the Inner Harbor are the side-by-side stadiums of the Ravens and the
Orioles, where every move on the field is streamed to Amazon Web Services
for analysis using artificial intelligence. Football players have a chip
in each shoulder pad and baseball players are tracked by radar, producing
flashy graphics for television and arcane stats for coaches.

Up in northwest Baltimore, a pastor has found funding to install Amazon
Ring video cameras on homes in a high-crime neighborhood. Privacy
advocates express alarm at proliferating surveillance; footage of suspects
can be shared with the police at a click. But the number of interested
residents has already outstripped the number of cameras available.

In City Hall downtown and at Johns Hopkins University a few miles away,
procurement officers have begun buying from local suppliers via Amazon
Business — and even starred in a national marketing video for the company.
Buyers say the convenience more than justifies interposing a Seattle-based
corporation between their institutions and nearby businesses. Critics
denounce the retail giant’s incursion into long-established relationships.
It is a very Amazon dispute.

As federal regulators and Congress assess whether Amazon’s market power
should be curbed under antitrust laws — and whether, as some politicians
argue, the company should be broken up — The New York Times has explored
the company’s impact in one American community: greater Baltimore.

Baltimore’s pleading pitch last year to become an additional headquarters
city for Amazon, promising a whopping $3.8 billion in subsidies, did not
even make the second round of bidding. But Amazon’s presence here shows
how the many-armed titan may now reach into Americans’ daily lives in more
ways than any corporation in history. If antitrust investigators want to
sample Amazon’s impact on the ground, they could well take a look here.

Anirban Basu, a Baltimore economist who has studied the region for years,
is skeptical of apocalyptic claims about Amazon, saying Sears and Walmart
were both once seen as all-powerful. But he called Amazon a “profit-margin
killer” and said it should be scrutinized, particularly because
technological trends that include artificial intelligence, driverless
trucks, drones and new payment systems all play to its advantage.

Ken Knight has felt Amazon’s long reach. He plans to close his
152-year-old Baltimore houseware and hardware store, Stebbins Anderson, at
the end of the year. He pins most of the blame on Amazon.

“It’s put me out of business,” said Mr. Knight, 70, who had hoped to pass
the business to his son. Mr. Knight is especially aggrieved by government
subsidies to the company in the name of job creation; he will be laying
off 40 employees.

Amazon insists, in an argument it is likely to use in antitrust
proceedings, that its market power is nothing like what people imagine.
Yes, it accounts for 40 to 50 percent of online retail in the United
States — but that is only four to five percent of total retail. (Walmart’s
revenue is still twice that of Amazon, though Amazon’s total value on the
stock market is the fourth largest among American companies, more than
double Walmart’s.) And while Amazon may sell nearly half of
cloud-computing services, it points out that the cloud makes up a small
fraction of information technology spending.

“We welcome the scrutiny,” said Jay Carney, Amazon’s top Washington
representative and a former White House press secretary for President
Barack Obama. “We operate in huge competitive arenas in which there are
thousands and thousands, if not millions, of competitors. It’s hard to
argue that if you’re four percent of retail you’re not in competition.”

Baltimore offers in microcosm the contentious issues that Amazon’s conduct

[Marxism] Marxists Internet Archive November Newsletter

2019-12-01 Thread Alan Ginsberg via Marxism
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I just received the e-mail Newsletter. It contains this message:

A ONE TIME DONATION TO THE MIA FOR $25 WOULD GO A LONG WAY IN KEEPING THE
MIA ONLINE!

Send your donation via paypal to: paym...@marxists.org

The MIA is such a wonderful and valuable resource.I hope comrades give
consideration to supporting the Marxist Internet Archive.
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