[Marxism] Southern Irish elections (exit polls indicate Sinn Fein surge)

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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The Labour Party in Ireland has another disastrous result, Sinn Fein has
another surge; nothing changes for working class. . .

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2020/02/09/southern-irish-election-sinn-fein-joins-the-big-two/
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Re: [Marxism] Idrees Ahmad takes down NYT reporter Robert Worth's filthy attack on two Syrian documentaries

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 2/8/20 8:39 PM, Dennis Brasky wrote:
Of course I admire Ahmad's strong stand on Syria but he has been hostile 
and demagogic on FB as to building some type of left alternative to the 
Dems, going so far as to slander even Sanders supporters as Trump 
allies. I asked him about his call to "support anyone against Trump" and 
he repeated it - proudly.


That's par for the course. Sam Hamad, Robin Yassin-Kassab, and Dick 
Gregory all the same thing. That's what happens when you are a liberal 
rather than a Marxist opposed to Assad.

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Re: [Marxism] Idrees Ahmad takes down NYT reporter Robert Worth's filthy attack on two Syrian documentaries

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Of course I admire Ahmad's strong stand on Syria but he has been hostile
and demagogic on FB as to building some type of left alternative to the
Dems, going so far as to slander even Sanders supporters as Trump allies. I
asked him about his call to "support anyone against Trump" and he repeated
it - proudly.

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 6:19 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> You have to be on Twitter to read this.
>
>
> https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/im_PULSE/status/1226024904769687552
>
> If you want to read Worth's shitty blog post, go here:
>
>
> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/06/and-the-oscar-goes-to-a-simplified-story-of-syrias-civil-war/
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[Marxism] Idrees Ahmad takes down NYT reporter Robert Worth's filthy attack on two Syrian documentaries

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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You have to be on Twitter to read this.

https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/im_PULSE/status/1226024904769687552

If you want to read Worth's shitty blog post, go here:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/06/and-the-oscar-goes-to-a-simplified-story-of-syrias-civil-war/
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[Marxism] Eric Blanc’s ersatz socialism | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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For those trying to keep track of the ongoing attempt to seduce American 
radicals into Democratic Party politics, Eric Blanc’s articles are 
essential. Unlike most of the people who write for the Jacobin, Blanc 
got his initial political orientation during a brief membership in 
Socialist Organizer, a tiny sect affiliated with the U.S. fraternal 
section of the Organizing Committee for the Re-constitution of the 
Fourth International. His next stop was the ISO, where he was likely in 
the vanguard of the group’s mass exodus into the DSA. Now, comfortably 
ensconced there, he is a member of the Bread and Roses caucus that takes 
prides in itself as the Marxist redoubt of the group hoping to 
Re-constitute social democracy in the USA.


On top of all this, he has been something of a disciple of Lars Lih who 
has written millions of words extolling Lenin while at the same time 
making it clear that he is not a socialist. This deep immersion in 
Marxist culture has seen Blanc come up with some very fresh ideas, 
especially on the role of borderland socialists and the evolution of 
Bolshevism on national liberation. More recently, and unfortunately, his 
erudition has mostly been used to promote voting for Democratic Party 
candidates as a tactical “dirty break”. Unlike the crude “lesser evil”, 
“stop the fascist threat” analysis perfected by the Communist Party, 
Blanc frames his arguments in neo-Kautskyist terms, even though, as his 
critics make clear, Kautsky was adamantly opposed to voting for liberals.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/02/08/eric-blancs-ersatz-socialism/
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[Marxism] Democrats Gave Obama a Free Pass. That Could Hurt Us on Election Day.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Ed, Feb. 8, 2020
Democrats Gave Obama a Free Pass. That Could Hurt Us on Election Day.
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylo

The sting of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still hangs heavy over the 
Democratic Party. There has yet to emerge a consensus understanding of 
the party’s failure to beat an opponent who almost everyone assumed 
could be defeated. Some have focused on voter suppression, others on 
Russian interference. Mrs. Clinton continues to blame Bernie Sanders. 
But missing from the various theories is how Barack Obama’s tenure may 
also have contributed to voter disaffection because he failed to bring 
about the transformational changes he promised.


The dramatic contrast between him and his successor, Donald Trump, has, 
in some ways, created pressure on Democrats to focus only on Mr. Trump’s 
transgressions while ignoring other factors that may have contributed to 
his election. As the primary campaign ramped up last summer, for 
example, party insiders made clear they would vigorously challenge any 
scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s presidency. “Stay away from Barack Obama,” one 
said. A former aide to Mr. Obama, Neera Tanden, wrote on Twitter that 
Democratic candidates who “attack Obama are wrong and terrible.” She 
added, “Obama wasn’t perfect, but, come on, people, next to Trump, he 
kind of is.”


The perception of the “perfect Obama” is contradicted by black voter 
turnout in 2016: It declined for the first time in 20 years, falling to 
60 percent from 67 percent in 2012. This surely cannot be attributed 
only to voter suppression or the lack of an African-American candidate 
on the ticket — after all, Mr. Obama framed Mrs. Clinton’s run as his 
so-called third term. It’s safe to presume that disillusionment with Mr. 
Obama’s record, even as people continued to admire him personally, is, 
to some degree, reflected in these turnout figures.


Plus, growing concerns among African Americans about the persistence of 
racial inequality and discrimination, even years into Mr. Obama’s 
tenure, belie notions that a black candidate alone was all that was 
needed to mobilize black voters. After all, Kamala Harris and Cory 
Booker struggled to gain traction among black voters in part because of 
a lack of clarity on how their platforms could translate into an 
improvement in the quality of life for African Americans.


Black voters’ attitudes about the impact of the Obama administration are 
complicated because they hold Barack and Michelle Obama in such high 
regard. As president, Mr. Obama enjoyed extraordinarily high approval 
ratings among African-Americans, even as black unemployment remained 
high. His personal popularity notwithstanding, African-Americans’ 
ratings of public policy, race relations and the state of the country 
declined over his presidency.


In 2009, 71 percent of African-Americans thought Mr. Obama’s election 
was “one of the most important advances for blacks.” By the summer of 
2016, that number had dropped to 51 percent. In 2012, only 20 percent of 
African-Americans believed that the country was “headed in the wrong 
direction,” but by 2016 that number had risen to 48 percent.


Finally, 52 percent of African-Americans said that Mr. Obama’s policies 
had not gone far enough to improve their situation by 2016, an increase 
from the 32 percent who said this during his first year as president. 
While it’s true that voter turnout among African-Americans hit a record 
high in 2012, I think that happened because they believed Mr. Obama 
needed two terms to be able to carry out what he said his agenda was in 
the campaign.


A deeper look into the social and economic conditions of 
African-Americans at the end of Mr. Obama’s presidency is even more 
illuminating. By 2016, a staggering 73 percent of blacks believed that 
racial discrimination was “a very serious problem” and 61 percent 
described “race relations” as bad. This dour assessment was not just 
commentary on interpersonal relationships between African-Americans and 
whites; it reflected the continuing hardship experienced by 
African-Americans, which many of them attribute to racial discrimination.


In 2016, only 34 percent of African-Americans said they were “very 
satisfied with the quality of life in their community.” Four in 10 
reported having trouble paying bills and surprisingly, nearly a quarter 
reported relying on a food bank or pantry in the past year — three times 
higher than for whites. This is the cold reality that lies beneath the 
well-discussed racial wealth gap, in which the median net worth of white 
families is some 13 times higher than it is for black families.


African-Americans 

[Marxism] An Austrian Green being used by the far right

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Usually I use the title of a NYT article in the subject of the email 
but in this instance, as seen below, it was not accurate.)


NY Times, Feb. 8, 2020
A Onetime ‘Refugee Child’ Takes On Austria’s Far Right
By Katrin Bennhold

VIENNA — Alma Zadic is nervous about standing too close to the row of 
large windows in her office. Since becoming Austria’s justice minister, 
the threats have been relentless. “A bullet is reserved for you,” read a 
recent one. Hours after being sworn in last month, Ms. Zadic was given 
police protection.


A daughter of Bosnian refugees and member of the progressive Green 
Party, Ms. Zadic went into politics three years ago with a clear goal: 
to fight an ascendant far right.


Now, she is charged with defending policies that were codesigned by the 
far right in previous years to effectively keep people like her parents 
out of the country.


That, in a nutshell, is the moral dilemma facing Austria’s liberal 
pro-refugee Greens in joining forces with the conservatives of 
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The Greens have replaced the far-right 
Freedom Party as junior partners in government and get to put climate 
change on the political agenda. But they are also becoming complicit in 
Mr. Kurz’s hard-right immigration policy.


No one personifies this Faustian pact more starkly than Ms. Zadic, 
Austria’s first minister with a migrant background. (“A migrant 
foreground,” she corrects me. “It is the first thing about me that 
people see.”)


Call her Austria’s AOC: Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the superstar 
Democratic representative from New York City, Ms. Zadic is clever, 
winning, young and idealistic, and has a proudly hyphenated identity 
(“Bosnian-Austrian”).


Her story is in many ways a modern day fairy tale: A refugee girl excels 
at school, rises fast in her career, is elected to Parliament and 
becomes a senior member of the cabinet at 35. But what has made Ms. 
Zadic a hero to many has turned her into a target for others.


“Now foreigners get ministerial posts. Austria’s Downfall,” scoffed one 
Twitter post.


“Why don’t we just put a terrorist in charge of Homeland Security?” 
another sneered.


The price of going into government was high, both personally and 
politically, Ms. Zadic admitted in an interview one recent evening. But 
the price of not going into government — of ceding the field to the far 
right again — would have been much higher, she insists.


“It makes a difference who is in government,” Ms. Zadic said.

Ms. Zadic knows this first hand. She was a teenager in 2000, when the 
Freedom Party first joined a conservative government under the 
charismatic and anti-Semitic firebrand Jörg Haider. Other European 
capitals froze diplomatic ties with Vienna, while her parents, both 
engineers, feared they might be deported.


“I was still young but I could feel it,” she recalled. “I know my 
parents worried and had concrete fears about what would happen to us.”


In her current capacity, as Ms. Zadic tells it, her mandate and that of 
her party is not only to promote a long overdue green agenda in this 
small Alpine nation, but to resist the currents of populism and 
safeguard fundamental rights.


How she walks that tightrope will in many ways be the story of this 
uneasy coalition, which is being watched closely in neighboring 
countries, above all in Germany, where the next government will also 
almost certainly be a coalition of conservatives and Greens.


Critics warn that the Greens risk becoming a fig leaf for Mr. Kurz’s 
hard right agenda. In the governing program a modest carbon tax on 
airplane tickets and subsidies for public transport sit side by side 
with a head scarf ban for girls up to 14, deportation centers and a 
controversial new form of “security detention” for asylum seekers, a 
measure Ms. Zadic once called “authoritarian” backsliding.


“You won’t get something like that in Germany,” Annalena Baerbock, 
co-leader of Germany’s Greens, commented tersely.


As for Ms. Zadic, even friends feel conflicted: “She has a mission 
impossible,” said Stephanie Krisper, a lawmaker from the centrist party 
Neos.


For Ms. Zadic it is more complicated than that.

“In opposition we could have written the most beautiful idealistic 
proposals and they would have gone nowhere,” she said.


Mr. Kurz won 37 percent of the votes, the Greens only 14, she noted. 
Between the ballots cast for Mr. Kurz’s party and the Freedom Party, 
Austria still has a conservative majority.


“We will do our best,” she said.

A former competitive volleyball player and fitness coach, Ms. Zadic has 
heaps of stamina. In opposition she was one of the most dogged crit

[Marxism] Germans Unnerved by Political Turmoil That Echoes Nazi Era

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Feb. 8, 2020
Germans Unnerved by Political Turmoil That Echoes Nazi Era
By Katrin Bennhold

BERLIN — When a popular state governor was shunted aside this week, it 
might have been just another local political wrangle. But not in 
Germany, at the current moment, with the far right resurgent.


The maneuvering found Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives voting 
with the rival Alternative for Germany, raising alarms that they had 
violated a taboo among mainstream parties against working with the far 
right. The reaction was fast and furious.


“A pact with fascism,” one headline screamed. Another gasped about “a 
coup.” Protesters gathered spontaneously in major cities across the 
country, chanting anti-fascist slogans. Even the chancellor weighed in 
from afar during a visit to South Africa: “It was a bad day for 
democracy,” she said darkly.


Three years after the Alternative for Germany became the first far-right 
party to enter Germany’s national parliament since World War II, the 
events underscored how the country’s beleaguered traditional parties are 
still struggling to deal with the new disruptive force.


Nevermind that on Friday, just more than 48 hours after the mini-coup in 
the tiny eastern state of Thuringia, the right’s favored candidate 
looked certain to step down in the face of the popular backlash. The 
parties will now have to find a compromise candidate or hold new elections.


The small drama had already succeeded in setting off a big round of 
soul-searching in Germany, which is still deeply conscious of its Nazi 
past and anxious about where the present inroads by the far right might 
lead.


For many Germans, allowing the far right to be kingmakers conjures up 
dark memories. It is a red line that many do not want to see crossed.


“Just looking at the reaction you could be forgiven for thinking that 
the Third Reich has been resurrected,” said Jan Techau, director of the 
Europe Program at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.


“Deep down we Germans don’t trust ourselves,” Mr. Techau added. “That is 
one legacy of the Hitler era.”


“A whiff of Weimar — I say, not exaggerating and having reflected deeply 
on this — hangs over the republic,” Gerhart Rudolf Baum, a former 
center-right interior minister, told German public radio.


The taboo of not collaborating with the AfD, while sacred, is at risk of 
crumbling in an increasingly fragmented political landscape.


So far, no German state governor has been elected with support from the 
Alternative for Germany.


But the Alternative for Germany has steadily broadened its presence in 
state legislatures. Especially in eastern states, it has in recent 
elections been among the top finishers.


That is what happened in Thuringia in state elections last October, when 
the AfD doubled to its share to 23.5 percent and finished second, ahead 
of Ms. Merkel’s conservatives.


The winners, though short of a majority, were a coalition of progressive 
and left-wing parties. So, this week, when the leftist incumbent asked 
the state legislature to approve his coalition as a minority government, 
everyone expected him to win.


Instead, the AfD surprised everyone when it threw its support behind a 
little-known candidate of the center-right Free Democrats, who had only 
five representatives in a state house of 90.


He also had the backing of the local chapter of Ms. Merkel’s 
conservatives, giving him enough to win.


The move by the AfD amounted to a political ambush. But it also prompted 
thinly veiled accusations of collaboration.


“The means do not justify the ends and power does not trump decency,” 
wrote Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democratic former foreign minister. That 
was a lesson that “should have deeply and indelibly enshrined’’ in the 
memory of mainstream parties, he added.


Bodo Ramelow, the leftist governor, who got beaten in Wednesday’s vote, 
reacted swiftly by tweeting a quote from Hitler in 1930, the year his 
Nazi party gained its first foothold in Thuringia.


“We achieved the biggest success in Thuringia,” Hitler had boasted at 
the time. “There we are today really the decisive party. The parties in 
Thuringia that have governed so far, are unable to get a majority 
without our assistance.”


The events in Thuringia were all the more symbolic — and significant — 
because it is the fief of the AfD’s most notorious far-right leader, 
Björn Höcke. A history teacher turned far-right ideologue, Mr. Höcke 
uses language that is packed with echoes from the 1930s and has called 
the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “memorial of shame.”


He also runs a movement inside the AfD known as the Flügel, or Wi

[Marxism] The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America - The Atlantic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why 
roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 
in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps 
explain why one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s 
bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, 
parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so 
many American families, despite all the wealth this country has 
generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially 
fragile.”


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affordability-crisis-breaking-america/606046/
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[Marxism] Quantum Conversations, Entanglement, and the American Cold War “Physics Bubble” - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/quantum-conversations-entanglement-and-the-american-cold-war-physics-bubble/
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[Marxism] (no subject)

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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As the impeachment hearings showed, one of the major impediments to Trump
one-man rule is the staff in the different wings of the federal government.
That is especially so for the National Security Council, which plays a key
role in coordinating the other agencies of the federal government. Now
Trump is moving on them, just as he did on the State Department.

From the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/alexander-vindman-nsc-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

On Friday, the White House announced that it was *transferring Lt. Col.
Alexander Vindman
*,
who testified during the House impeachment hearings, out of the National
Security Council. The move is unsettling, petty and vindictive. But it’s
not a surprise: The dismissal is just one part of a campaign by the
national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to trumpify one of the most
powerful and important institutions in government.

Over the last six months, while impeachment dominated the news, Mr. O’Brien
undertook the first restructuring of the council in a generation. He cut 60
to 70 positions, about a third of the staff, many of them career
professionals. He also directed that the National Security Council focus
less on transnational issues like global economics and nonproliferation,
and more on bilateral and geographic priorities. In all, Mr. O’Brien’s
trumpification of the staff will hamper the United States’ ability to meet
the world’s challenges, and hamstring the next president.

The staff of the National Security Council has evolved since its creation
in the National Security Act of 1947, which sought to connect the various
departments and agencies that together drive the nation’s foreign policy.
At first, the staff served merely as administrative clerks to the
principals on the National Security Council — the president, secretaries of
state and defense and other leaders. According to its first director, the
staff coordinated and integrated the “ideas in crisscrossing proposals”
from around government.

But over the years, various presidents have coopted the council’s staff,
which grew both bigger and more influential, especially after 9/11 — to the
point where it not only distributes a meeting’s agenda, but sets the
government’s.

Congress mostly indulged the presidents a “personal band of warriors,”
as *George
W. Bush called
*
the
staff, to fight their fights in Washington. And agencies like the Pentagon
and C.I.A. lent the White House almost a battalion’s worth of diplomats,
intelligence analysts and career military officers like Colonel Vindman.

Mr. Trump inherited from President Barack Obama the most powerful National
Security Council in history. But the new president struggled to win over
the hundreds of staff members who’d fought for the sorts of globalist
policies — like trade deals and alliances — he had long opposed. Mr. Trump
certainly tried to conquer the staff, naming a loyalist retired lieutenant
general, Michael Flynn, as his first national security adviser and his
nationalist adviser Steve Bannon to a high-level committee within it. The
message was, as a Trump hire *told one member of the staff
*,
“The president doesn’t care about the things you care about, and the sooner
that you know about it, the better.”

The public outcry over the resulting turmoil at the council — even the
Hollywood celebrities *Sarah Silverman
* and *Judd
Apatow * tweeted
their concerns — forced Mr. Trump to back down and bounce Mr. Flynn and Mr.
Bannon (Mr. Flynn’s legal troubles helped ease his way out). But the fight
continued in the council’s cipher-locked offices and classified memos. Mr.
Trump’s loyalists on the staff *attempted to spy
*
 on, *scapegoat
*
 and *smear
*
their
nonpolitical colleagues. Within a year of the inauguration, Mr. Trump
was *tweeting

[Marxism] Rules of Engagement | Lapham’s Quarterly

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A 2018 report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron and 
written by French historian Bénédicte Savoy and Senegalese economist and 
writer Felwine Sarr, recommended with unprecedented firmness that all 
art objects in French public museums that had been taken from Africa 
should be returned permanently. In recent months, prominent barrister 
Geoffrey Robertson has demanded the British Museum apologize for the 
crimes of empire and return the Hoa Hakananai’a, a moai statue, to 
Easter Island and the Benin bronzes to Nigeria, among other popular 
objects in its collection.


While protests, reports, and demonstrations aimed at institutions and 
benefactors have brought more candid political conversations into museum 
spaces, daily audiences tend not to be implicated in these conflicts; 
instead they are mostly encouraged to enjoy the work by whatever 
measures they can access. But if museums encouraged visitors to feel 
shame around objects carrying the legacies of colonization, slavery, 
theft, and discrimination, what might those exhibitions look like?


https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/rules-engagement
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