[Marxism] Trump attacks black voting rights; defund, dismantle, reimagine policing (Green Left)

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/united-states-amid-mass-upsurge-trump-attacks-black-voting-rights

(By Barry Sheppard)

***

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/black-lives-matter-movement-demands-defund-dismantle-reimagine-policing

(By Malik Miah)

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Re: [Marxism] ‘A Slap in the Face’: Black Veterans on Bases Named for Confederates

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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I have to be honest for a second. As much as I have no love for Confederate
generals, I also have no love for military bases regardless of what names
are given, nor for any of the other legions of racists that preceded the
Confederacy in U.S. history.

While I think the neo-Confederates and Trumpists are trying to rally around
Confederate kitsch to defend white supremacy I think it is equally
questionable how sincere the opposing camp is to claim they are motivated
primarily by "anti-racism". A really anti-racist proposal would not involve
renaming the bases. It would involve decommissioning them altogether --
particularly Fort Benning which is where the notorious School of Americas
operates.

That being said I know these performative stunts are appealing to people
and I suppose there is no harm, so...

Amith R. Gupta


On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 5:17 PM Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> NY Times, June 11, 2020
> ‘A Slap in the Face’: Black Veterans on Bases Named for Confederates
> By Jennifer Steinhauer
>
> WASHINGTON — When Timothy Berry was recruiting black students for West
> Point, where he served as class president in 2013, he often reflected on
> his senior year, when he lived in the Robert E. Lee barracks. It
> bothered him then; it bothers him now.
>
> “I was trying to tell black and brown students that they would have a
> home there,” said Mr. Berry, who served as an Army captain with the
> 101st Airborne Division from 2013 to 2018. “It sent a very strong mixed
> message.”
>
> For many black service members, who make up about 17 percent of all
> active-duty military personnel, the Pentagon’s decision to consider
> renaming Army bases bearing the names of Confederate officers seems
> excruciatingly overdue. Generations of black service members signed up
> for the military to defend the values of their country, only to be
> assigned to bases named after people who represent its grimmest hour.
>
> “It is really kind of a slap in the face to those African-American
> soldiers who are on bases named after generals who fought for their
> cause,” said Jerry Green, a retired noncommissioned officer who trained
> at Ft. Bragg, N.C., which is named for a Confederate general, Braxton
> Bragg. “That cause was slavery.”
>
> There are 10 major Army installations named for generals who led
> Confederate troops — all in the former states of the Confederacy — as
> well as many streets and buildings on military academy campuses that are
> among at least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces in the
> United States.
>
> The push to rename military installations and place names is not new,
> and it is one that black service members and veterans, as well as groups
> including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
> People, have largely pursued.
>
> The movement this week seemed to attract a growing consensus, including
> among former senior military officials of all races, before President
> Trump declared on Wednesday that he would block any of those 10 bases
> from being renamed.
>
> A petition by the liberal group VoteVets received over 20,000 signatures
> in 24 hours urging the military to ban Confederate symbols and rename
> Army bases, a spokesman for the organization said. In a poll conducted
> this week and released Thursday by the group, 47 percent of 935
> registered voters surveyed said they would support the removal of
> Confederate imagery across the entire military.
>
> The Marine Corps issued a ban last week on displays of the Confederate
> battle flag at its installations, and the chief of naval operations,
> Adm. Michael M. Gilday, wrote on Twitter Tuesday that he had directed
> his staff to “begin crafting an order” banning such displays from public
> spaces and work areas on bases, ships, aircraft and submarines. Leaders
> in the Army have called for bipartisan commissions to explore changing
> the names of some its installations.
>
> “The unique thing about this moment is that white friends and colleagues
> now see this,” said Mr. Berry, who lives in New York.
>
> After a white supremacist rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., turned
> deadly when a man drove into a crowd of counterprotesters, and after a
> white police officer fatally shot a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., in
> 2014, “these were 

[Marxism] Tail Can’t Wag the Dog: The DSA NPC Vote on Swing States and The Questions for Democracy - New Politics

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://newpol.org/tail-cant-wag-the-dog-the-dsa-npc-vote-on-swing-states-and-the-questions-for-democracy/

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[Marxism] ‘A Slap in the Face’: Black Veterans on Bases Named for Confederates

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, June 11, 2020
‘A Slap in the Face’: Black Veterans on Bases Named for Confederates
By Jennifer Steinhauer

WASHINGTON — When Timothy Berry was recruiting black students for West 
Point, where he served as class president in 2013, he often reflected on 
his senior year, when he lived in the Robert E. Lee barracks. It 
bothered him then; it bothers him now.


“I was trying to tell black and brown students that they would have a 
home there,” said Mr. Berry, who served as an Army captain with the 
101st Airborne Division from 2013 to 2018. “It sent a very strong mixed 
message.”


For many black service members, who make up about 17 percent of all 
active-duty military personnel, the Pentagon’s decision to consider 
renaming Army bases bearing the names of Confederate officers seems 
excruciatingly overdue. Generations of black service members signed up 
for the military to defend the values of their country, only to be 
assigned to bases named after people who represent its grimmest hour.


“It is really kind of a slap in the face to those African-American 
soldiers who are on bases named after generals who fought for their 
cause,” said Jerry Green, a retired noncommissioned officer who trained 
at Ft. Bragg, N.C., which is named for a Confederate general, Braxton 
Bragg. “That cause was slavery.”


There are 10 major Army installations named for generals who led 
Confederate troops — all in the former states of the Confederacy — as 
well as many streets and buildings on military academy campuses that are 
among at least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces in the 
United States.


The push to rename military installations and place names is not new, 
and it is one that black service members and veterans, as well as groups 
including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People, have largely pursued.


The movement this week seemed to attract a growing consensus, including 
among former senior military officials of all races, before President 
Trump declared on Wednesday that he would block any of those 10 bases 
from being renamed.


A petition by the liberal group VoteVets received over 20,000 signatures 
in 24 hours urging the military to ban Confederate symbols and rename 
Army bases, a spokesman for the organization said. In a poll conducted 
this week and released Thursday by the group, 47 percent of 935 
registered voters surveyed said they would support the removal of 
Confederate imagery across the entire military.


The Marine Corps issued a ban last week on displays of the Confederate 
battle flag at its installations, and the chief of naval operations, 
Adm. Michael M. Gilday, wrote on Twitter Tuesday that he had directed 
his staff to “begin crafting an order” banning such displays from public 
spaces and work areas on bases, ships, aircraft and submarines. Leaders 
in the Army have called for bipartisan commissions to explore changing 
the names of some its installations.


“The unique thing about this moment is that white friends and colleagues 
now see this,” said Mr. Berry, who lives in New York.


After a white supremacist rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Va., turned 
deadly when a man drove into a crowd of counterprotesters, and after a 
white police officer fatally shot a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., in 
2014, “these were conversations that black officers were having among 
themselves,” he said. “It was not an open conversation among their white 
peers.”


The fights over statues and Confederate flags in public places have 
bubbled up often over the years, with their defenders repeatedly 
suggesting that banning or removing those items would be akin to erasing 
history.


In 2015, shortly after a white supremacist killed black parishioners in 
a church in Charleston, S.C., a budget bill in Congress almost failed 
amid an ugly floor fight in which Democrats, led by black lawmakers from 
the South, beat back a push by Republicans to allow Confederate symbols 
at national cemeteries.


This week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi once again called for the removal from 
the Capitol of 11 statues of Confederate figures, including Jefferson 
Davis and Robert E. Lee, the latest salvo in a yearslong battle. On 
Thursday, two veterans in the House also introduced bipartisan 
legislation to create a process to rename military installations named 
for Confederates within a year. The Senate Armed Services Committee 
separately advanced a similar measure with a three-year timeline.


“I have been in every one of those barracks,” said Stephane Manuel, 
another West Point graduate who served in the Army from 2011 to 2017. “I 
studied in them and had 

[Marxism] Chase Bank Calls Cops on Black Mayor in His Own City

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-mayor-in-his-own-city/

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Re: [Marxism] Black National Guard members express discomfort with quelling Black Lives Matter protesters

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 6/11/20 5:55 PM, STEVEN ROBINSON via Marxism wrote:


According to reporting from the New York 
Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/politics/national-guard-protests.html
  , when asked to employ “aggressive tactics” against local civilians, “black 
members of the D.C. Guard objected to turning on their neighbors.” Some members 
of the majority-minority force “were so ashamed in taking part against the 
protests that they have kept it from family members,” the Times’s Thomas 
Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper report:


When I read this, I can't help but think that the Russian Revolution is 
still relevant to the tasks we face no matter what Jacobin says.


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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-War]: Caputo on Warren, 'Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
Date: Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 5:15 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Caputo on Warren, 'Fire on the Water:
Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886'
To: 
Cc: H-Net Staff 


Lenora Warren.  Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection
in Early American Literature, 1789-1886.  Lewisburg  Bucknell
University Press, 2019.  169 pp.  $34.95 (paper), ISBN
978-1-68448-017-3.

Reviewed by Sara Caputo (University of Cambridge)
Published on H-War (June, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

In this short and incisive book, Lenora Warren uses literary sources
to observe the history of abolition not from the perspective of white
activism, but from the point of view of black insurrection and
resistance. She is interested in the figure of the "slave" not as a
victim, the politically palatable and expedient portrayal, but as an
agent of violence. More broadly, she tries to understand the
long-standing effect that the abolitionist rhetoric of passivity has
had in shaping racialized perceptions--in particular, fear and
condemnation of "black" violence. This research could not be more
relevant or timely.

Each of the four chapters of the book marries an analysis of a
specific historical figure or context of insurrection and
abolitionism to one or two literary texts produced by contemporaries.
Chapter 1 discusses Olaudah Equiano's controversial _Interesting
Narrative_ (1789) and the abolitionist writings of the late
eighteenth century, most notably Thomas Clarkson's collection of
testimonies pertaining to the slave trade. Through these texts, it
reconstructs the abolitionists' rhetoric of incorporating slave
violence among the negative effects of the more generally violent
slave trade, rather than casting it as a deliberate and rightful
response to oppression. Chapter 2 tackles the Denmark Vesey
conspiracy, discovered in Charleston in 1822, which some historians
have argued was not real but the manifestation of white slaveholders'
paranoia. Warren compares this event to an 1821 black pirate novella
by a minor author, John Howison, which she uses as an example of how
latent fears of slave revolt permeated Atlantic culture. Through the
use of the "gothic" in some of Howison's other fictional
representations of slave insurrection, "the flesh-and-blood slaves
turn into specters who are silenced" (p. 65). Chapter 3 concerns the
_Amistad_ and _Creole_ mutinies of 1839 and 1841, and their echoes in
works by Martin Robison Delany and Frederick Douglass. Warren exposes
how black violence was defused in these narratives by the omission of
detail or by the assimilation of the free, heroic African rebels to
the American founding fathers and to white models of Revolutionary
honor. This necessarily made the legitimation of slave insurrection
not universal but restricted to specific (idealized) cases. Finally,
chapter 4 proposes an elaborate, albeit arguably hard to prove,
connection between the case of Washington Goode, a black sailor
sentenced to death by Herman Melville's father-in-law, and the
novelist's white character Billy Budd. Partly because of the
historical obscurity of Goode's trial, this chapter is the most
decidedly literary of the four, with a strong focus on themes
internal to Melville's opus.

In the coda to the book, Warren draws some apt and intriguing
parallels between the rhetoric of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
abolitionists and that of the present-day Black Lives Matter
movement, at least as it was when _Fire on the Water_ went to press:
both campaigns favored the language of victimhood and passivity,
which is intrinsically problematic. More implicitly, this reminds us
of how racialized fears of black violence from the slavery era,
construing it as qualitatively different from white violence, still
cast a shadow on the way US society stigmatizes, polices, and
sentences black individuals.

On the whole, this book reads as an elegant and extremely subtle
literary analysis of the relationship between enslaved agency,
abolitionism, and violence by and against black people on the sea. At
times, arguably, this subtleness leaves a bit too much implicit, even
when it is clear that the author is familiar with the scholarship.
For example, there are several themes and historiographies which this
study could have explored further to flesh out its argument: the
literature on colonial constructions of obeah and vodou; the debate
on the moral, psychological, and economic roots of abolitionism; the
changing and increasingly essentialized conceptions of "race" in this
period, and especially the 

[Marxism] Black National Guard members express discomfort with quelling Black Lives Matter protesters

[STEVEN ROBINSON via Marxism]

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A number of public officials, retired military officers 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/military-national-guard-trump-protests.html
 , and protesters were concerned with the Washington, DC, National Guard’s role 
in clearing Lafayette Square 
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/1/21277610/monday-lafayette-square-tear-gas and 
suppressing protests 
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/2/21277877/trump-law-and-order-protests-chaos-dc in 
the nation’s capital last week for a presidential photo op. So, too, were the 
Guard members themselves, according to new 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/politics/national-guard-protests.html 
reports https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/09/national-guard-protests-309932 
.

According to reporting from the New York Times 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/politics/national-guard-protests.html , 
when asked to employ “aggressive tactics” against local civilians, “black 
members of the D.C. Guard objected to turning on their neighbors.” Some members 
of the majority-minority force “were so ashamed in taking part against the 
protests that they have kept it from family members,” the Times’s Thomas 
Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, and Helene Cooper report:


> “Typically, as the D.C. National Guard, we are viewed as the heroes,” 
> said another soldier, First Lt. Malik Jenkins-Bey, 42, who was the acting 
> commander of the 273rd Military Police Company during the first days of the 
> protests. But last week was different, he said.
> 
> “It’s a very tough conversation to have when a soldier turns to me and 
> they’re saying, ‘Hey sir, you know my cousin was up there yelling at me, that 
> was my neighbor, my best friend from high school,’” said Lieutenant 
> Jenkins-Bey, who is African-American.
> 

Full at:  
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21288006/black-national-guardsman-discomfort-enforcers-black-lives-matter-protests-george-floyd
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[Marxism] We Had to Tear This Mothafucka Up: The Legacy of the L.A. Uprising - D oug Greene & Shalon van Tine

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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The mass demonstrations that have erupted since the police murdered George 
Floyd echo the fierce militancy and revolutionary art of the 1992 Los Angeles 
Uprising. While the rebellion was quickly suppressed, its legacy offers lessons 
and hope for the present wave of protests that are fighting back against police 
violence.


https://tinyurl.com/y8nwwdyj

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


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[Marxism] 'Slap in the face to black people': Trump faces backlash over rally on Juneteenth

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Depicted in HBO's "Watchmen" series...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/slap-face-black-people-trump-faces-backlash-over-rally-juneteenth-n1229891

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[Marxism] a bank collapse next year?

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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For the moment, the financial system seems relatively stable. Banks can
still pay their debts and pass their regulatory capital tests. But recall
that the previous crash took more than a year to unfold. The present is
analogous not to the fall of 2008, when the U.S. was in full-blown crisis,
but to the summer of 2007, when some securities were going underwater but
no one yet knew what the upshot would be.

What I’m about to describe is necessarily speculative, but it is rooted in
the experience of the previous crash and in what we know about current bank
holdings. The purpose of laying out this worst-case scenario isn’t to say
that it will necessarily come to pass. The purpose is to show that it
*could*. That alone should scare us all—and inform the way we think about
the next year and beyond.

…And then, sometime in the next year, we will all stare into the financial
abyss. At that point, we will be well beyond the scope of the previous
recession, and we will have either exhausted the remedies that spared the
system last time or found that they won’t work this time around. What *then*
?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/coronavirus-banks-collapse/612247/

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[Marxism] why Minneapolis was the breaking point

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Martin luther king iii and other activists I’ve spoken with in recent days
share a unanimous belief that this time is different. Years into the
movement, the potential for true progress may finally be at hand, in no
small part because the same cycle of unabated violence that has infuriated
black activists is finally, due to the unrelenting stream of video
evidence, forcing many white Americans to wake up.



For decades, police violence and impunity had been problems that, polling
suggests
,
only black people could see. The street uprisings of recent years—in
Ferguson and Baltimore, Baton Rouge and Chicago—were propelled by black
rage; although they had allies, those who flooded the streets in response
to those incidents of police violence were primarily black men, women, and
children. Now white eyes have been opened too.



A Monmouth University poll

taken
a few days after Floyd’s death found that 71 percent of white respondents
deemed racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States—up 26
points from 2015. Nearly 80 percent of Americans—and 75 percent of white
Americans—told pollsters that the protesters’ anger was either “fully” or
“partially” justified. Forty-nine percent of white respondents said police
are more likely to use excessive force against a black culprit than a white
one, nearly double the 25 percent who acknowledged that fact in 2016.



https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/wesley-lowery-george-floyd-minneapolis-black-lives/612391/
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[Marxism] The Debate Over the Word Fascism Takes a New Turn

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, June 11, 2020
The Debate Over the Word Fascism Takes a New Turn
By Jennifer Szalai

On Tuesday last week, as police officers across the country deployed 
brutal tactics in response to protests over the killing of George Floyd, 
the former secretary of labor Robert Reich announced that his old 
vocabulary — crowded already with harsh words for President Trump — was 
making way for a new addition.


“I have held off using the f word for three and a half years, but there 
is no longer any honest alternative,” Reich tweeted. “Trump is a 
fascist, and he is promoting fascism in America.”


Reich wasn’t alone. Until last week, the journalist Masha Gessen was 
also a skeptic. Gessen had just published “Surviving Autocracy,” which 
lists “fascism” among the words that get thrown about in the American 
political conversation without sufficient precision. The day after the 
book’s publication date, Gessen wrote a short essay for The New Yorker 
commenting on what it meant when the president — enamored already of 
military parades and masked men in combat attire — told governors to 
crack down on protesters. “Whether or not he is capable of grasping the 
concept,” Gessen wrote, “Trump is performing fascism.”


It was a notable turn. The word fascism is so loaded that even some of 
the president’s most vociferous detractors had long been reluctant to 
use it. Derived from the Italian for “bundle” or “group,” fascism was 
born at the end of World War I in Italy, adopted by the Nazis in 
Germany, and soon became such a widespread epithet that George Orwell 
decided the closest synonym to “this much-abused word” was “bully.” Ever 
since Trump became the Republican Party’s standard-bearer in 2016, the 
term has been floated and then dismissed for being too extreme and too 
alarmist, too historically specific or else too rhetorically vague.


Some observers countered that it would be reckless to write off the 
possibility of a nationwide slide into fascism, even if, in the initial 
years of the Trump presidency, it was too early to tell. A number of 
books published in 2017 and 2018 essentially told Americans to watch 
out. The ham-fisted slogans, the crude racism, the lurid nationalism, 
the venal corruption — all of it could lay the groundwork for what the 
historian Timothy Snyder, in “On Tyranny” (which he followed with “The 
Road to Unfreedom” a year later), called “a confused and cynical sort of 
fascist oligarchy.”


Even the positive reviews of Snyder’s books exuded a certain discomfort 
with his conclusions, finding them so unthinkable that they were 
“surely” exaggerated and “overwrought.” But when Jason Stanley, a 
philosophy professor at Yale, published “How Fascism Works” in 2018, he 
suggested that not being worried enough was itself a worrying sign. 
Trump’s rhetoric was alarming, yes, but his administration was also 
separating migrant children from their parents and placing them in 
detention centers that were hidden from public view, which Stanley 
compared to concentration camps in Germany in the 1930s.


“The word ‘fascist’ has acquired a feeling of the extreme, like crying 
wolf,” Stanley writes — not because Americans are so unfamiliar with 
fascist tactics but because we are becoming inured to them. 
“Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 
‘fascism’ seem like an overreaction.” Our senses have been dulled by 
exposure. The United States has had a long history of pro- or 
proto-fascist sentiment, including the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, 
the America First movement of the interwar years and the Jim Crow laws 
that Adolf Hitler cited as an inspiration. “Fascism is not a new 
threat,” Stanley writes, “but rather a permanent temptation.”


Writing in The New York Review of Books last month, the historian Samuel 
Moyn took issue with Stanley’s book, and with fascism analogies in 
general. Moyn’s argument, like a recent Op-Ed by Ross Douthat in The 
Times, rests on a straightforward premise: If the president were truly 
keen to crush democracy and impose a dictatorship, then a global 
pandemic should have provided him with the ideal opportunity. Trump, 
they argue, had chosen instead to do basically nothing. “It is surely 
fodder for some future ironist that, after our era of fearing Trump’s 
actions,” Moyn writes, “he appears set in the current pandemic to go 
down in history for a worse sin of inaction.”


It’s true that Trump has so far shown no interest in the kind of 
painstaking, collaborative, scientific action that would stand a chance 
of arresting a public health crisis. But the observation that Trump was 
squandering a chance to 

[Marxism] Wall Street Journal Staff Faults Column on Race by Former Top Editor

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, June 11, 2020
Wall Street Journal Staff Faults Column on Race by Former Top Editor
by Marc Tracy

Staff members of The Wall Street Journal sent a letter to newsroom 
leaders on Monday accusing the paper’s former editor in chief, Gerard 
Baker, who has been an editor at large at The Journal since leaving the 
top job in 2018, of violating rules that apply to those who work on the 
news side.


The letter, from the board of the Independent Association of Publishers’ 
Employees, the union that represents Journal staff members, criticized a 
column by Mr. Baker on race and accused him of tweeting in a way that 
went against the paper’s social media policy.


While Mr. Baker expresses opinions in a weekly column, called Editor at 
Large, The Journal had classified him as a member of the news division, 
just as it had during his five-and-a-half-year run as the editor in chief.


On Tuesday, The Journal reassigned Mr. Baker, formally making him a 
member of the opinion staff, which is led by the editorial page editor, 
Paul A. Gigot, and is run separately from the news department. Those who 
work on the opinion side do not have to abide by the rules that apply to 
the paper’s news reporters and editors. They have more leeway in The 
Journal’s pages and on social media.


The Journal said the move had been in the works before the I.A.P.E. 
union sent the letter. “Conversations about Gerry’s move to Opinion have 
been underway for some time,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed 
statement. “His new, expanded role will include podcasts and other 
projects.” Mr. Baker did not immediately reply to a request for comment.


The I.A.P.E.’s letter was addressed to Matt Murray, Mr. Baker’s 
successor as editor in chief, and Almar Latour, who last month was named 
publisher of The Journal and the chief executive of its parent company, 
Dow Jones, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.


The letter singled out a May 15 column by Mr. Baker headlined “The Often 
Distorted Reality of Hate Crime in America.” He led it with a 
description of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was shot 
while jogging in Georgia after he was pursued by white men, a killing 
that was captured on video.


The I.A.P.E. criticized the column, saying it “posits the highly 
controversial argument that black people commit more hate crimes than 
white people” and adding that to “‘prove’ that he uses only his own 
single weighted statistical calculation, with no attribution or context 
from experts either to support the idea or provide contrary views.” The 
letter also flagged several posts from Mr. Baker’s Twitter account that, 
it said, violated the paper’s social media policy.


The British-born, Oxford-educated Mr. Baker led The Journal at a time 
when its staff produced an award-winning investigation that exposed 
fraudulent claims by the health care tech company Theranos. On his 
watch, the paper was also at the forefront of reporting on payments 
involving President Trump and women who said they had once had sexual 
relationships with him.


His tenure was also marked by unrest. In late-night emails, Mr. Baker 
accused reporters and editors of adding commentary to their coverage of 
Mr. Trump, and the staff pushed back, accusing him in an all-hands 
meeting of going easy on the president. More than a dozen journalists 
left the paper for The Washington Post and The New York Times.


The Journal staff members’ criticism of their former boss came in the 
wake of the resignations of high-ranking editors at The Times and The 
Philadelphia Inquirer. James Bennet, the former editorial page editor at 
The Times, and Stan Wischnowski, the former executive editor of The 
Inquirer, stepped down after large numbers of staff members complained 
about their leadership at a time of worldwide protests against racism 
and police violence prompted by the killing in Minneapolis last month of 
George Floyd, a black man who died after he was pinned to the ground by 
a white police officer.


The letter from the Journal union also included complaints about Mr. 
Baker’s opinion columns for The Times of London, noting that news-side 
staff members are barred from contributing opinion essays to other 
publications. Recent headlines on those columns, the letter noted, 
included “Big Tech Is Blatantly Biased Against Trump” and “The Obama 
Halo Is in Danger of Slipping.”


In closing, the letter said the paper should hold Mr. Baker to the 
standards that apply to everyone else on the news side. Now that The 
Journal has put him in the opinion department, he can follow a different 
rule book.

[Marxism] Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter

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NY Times, June 11, 2020
Economics, Dominated by White Men, Is Roiled by Black Lives Matter
By Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley

The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against 
black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, 
a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open 
greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men.


A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a 
top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald 
Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on 
Twitter and equated its members with “flat earthers” over their embrace 
of calls to defund police departments.


Days earlier, the profession’s de facto governing body, the American 
Economic Association, sent a letter to its members supporting protesters 
and saying that “we have only begun to understand racism and its impact 
on our profession and our discipline.” A group of economists, mostly 
from outside academia, last week hosted an online fund-raising effort 
for the Sadie Collective, an organization that aims to bring more black 
women into the field.


Black economists say the events have brought some progress to a field 
that has long struggled with discrimination in its ranks — and with a 
refusal by many of its leaders to acknowledge discrimination in the 
country at large. But the profession remains nowhere close to a 
full-scale shift on racial issues: On Wednesday, the director of the 
White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told reporters, “I 
don’t believe there is systemic racism in the U.S.”


Black Americans are vastly underrepresented among economics students and 
professors, a wide range of data have shown. There are no black editors 
of the most prestigious economics journals. There are no black 
professors in the main economics department at Chicago, Mr. Uhlig’s 
employer, which is one of the most storied departments in the country.


In a survey of economists released by the American Economic Association 
last year, only 14 percent of black economists agreed with the statement 
that “people of my race/ethnicity are respected within the field.”


As protests against discrimination have grown in recent days, a 
conversation has erupted — often led by black economists — over how the 
lack of diversity has left the profession ill equipped for a moment 
where policymakers are seeking ideas on how to combat racial inequality 
in policing, employment and other areas.


“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how 
we study racial disparities,” the Howard University economist William 
Spriggs wrote to colleagues in an open letter that was posted this week 
on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.


“Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American 
economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are 
equal,” he continued. “We find ourselves, as so often happens in these 
ugly police cases, having to prove that acts of discrimination are 
exactly that — discrimination.”


Mr. Uhlig’s Twitter posts criticized demonstrators for not coordinating 
recent protests with law enforcement, before singling out Black Lives 
Matter over calls to defund the police.


“Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest 
and say #defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young 
and responsibility does not matter,” Mr. Uhlig wrote. “Enjoy! Express 
yourself! Just don’t break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm.”


The posts drew a swift backlash, including criticism from several white 
colleagues at Chicago and a petition calling for him to resign his 
editorship of the Journal of Political Economy, considered one of five 
journals with an outsize role in the field.


Mr. Uhlig, a 59-year-old German citizen, also faced scrutiny over past 
writings on his blog — circulated on Twitter by the Slate journalist 
Jordan Weissmann — that criticize black protesters in the United States.


Those included a 2017 post in which he asked supporters of National 
Football League players kneeling to protest police brutality, “Would you 
defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku 
Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?” Mr. Uhlig 
also wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2016, 
complaining about calls for greater diversity in the motion picture 
industry at the Academy Awards.


“This whole ‘diversity = more American blacks in Hollywood movies’ 
thing?” he wrote. “So so strange. Really.”


Janet L. Yellen, the former 

[Marxism] NASCAR Says It Will Ban Confederate Flags

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NY Times, June 11, 2020
NASCAR Says It Will Ban Confederate Flags
By Michael Levenson

NASCAR said on Wednesday that it would ban the Confederate battle flag 
from its events and properties, becoming the latest organization to 
reconsider the emblem’s place amid a national reckoning over racism and 
white supremacy after the death of George Floyd.


“The presence of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to 
our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for 
all fans, our competitors and our industry,” NASCAR said in a statement. 
“Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community 
that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of 
the Confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and 
properties.”


NASCAR made the announcement two days after Darrell Wallace Jr., the 
first black driver in 50 years to win one of its top three national 
touring series, called on NASCAR to ban the flags outright.


“No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race,” Mr. 
Wallace, who is known as Bubba, told Don Lemon of CNN. “So it starts 
with Confederate flags. Get them out of here. They have no place for them.”


The new paint scheme, which Mr. Wallace and his team, Richard Petty 
Motorsports, revealed on Tuesday, also features, on the hood, a black 
fist and a white fist clasped in a grip above the slogan “Compassion, 
Love, Understanding.”


“Bravo. Props to NASCAR and everybody involved,” Mr. Wallace said in an 
interview on Fox Sports, wearing an “I can’t breathe” T-shirt and a face 
mask emblazoned with the American flag. “This has been a stressful 
couple of weeks, and this is no doubt the biggest race of my career 
tonight.”


He added that he was feeling “a lot of emotions, you know, on the 
racetrack and off the racetrack.”


“That was a huge pivotal moment for the sport — a lot of backlash — but 
it creates doors that allow the community to come together as one, and 
that’s what the real mission is here,” he said.


Jeff Gordon, a four-time NASCAR champion who is now an announcer on Fox 
Sports, said the ban was one of the “steps, I believe, will make the 
sport and our country better.”


“In this moment it’s good to see entities like @nascar taking the 
necessary steps to remove symbols of hate, racism, and discrimination 
from their events,” the organization wrote on Twitter.


NASCAR began asking fans to stop bringing Confederate battle flags to 
races in 2015, after photos circulated online of the white man who 
killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., posing with the flag.


But many in NASCAR’s predominantly white Southern fan base have ignored 
the request and brought the flag anyway, hoisting it atop campers and 
R.V.s on fields around racetracks.


It was not immediately clear if NASCAR’s ban would apply to parking lots 
outside racetracks or to Confederate imagery on objects other than 
flags, such as bumper stickers and T-shirts. NASCAR said it was working 
with the industry to establish protocols for the ban, so it can enforce 
them at its tracks.


Across the country, public officials and private institutions have been 
rethinking symbols of the Confederacy as demonstrations against police 
brutality and racism have erupted in the weeks since Mr. Floyd, a black 
man, was killed after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his 
knee onto his neck for nearly nine minutes.


Last Friday, the Marine Corps issued detailed directives about removing 
and banning public displays of the Confederate battle flag at its 
installations — an order that extended to such items as mugs, posters 
and bumper stickers.


Also last week, the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., ordered the removal of a 
Confederate statue from a public park.


On Monday, a Pentagon official said that Secretary of Defense Mark T. 
Esper and Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy were “open to a bipartisan 
discussion on the topic” of removing Confederate names from military bases.


President Trump, however, shut down any such discussions, writing on 
Twitter on Wednesday that “my Administration will not even consider the 
renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”



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[Marxism] Albert Memmi, a ‘Jewish Arab’ Intellectual, Dies at 99

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NY Times, June 11, 2020
Albert Memmi, a ‘Jewish Arab’ Intellectual, Dies at 99
By Sam Roberts

Albert Memmi, a leading mid-20th century French intellectual and writer 
best known for nonfiction books and novels that unraveled his anomalous 
identity as an ardent anti-imperialist, an unapologetic Zionist and a 
self-described “Jewish Arab,” died on May 22 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near 
Paris. He was 99.


His death was announced by Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, the French ambassador 
to Tunisia, where Mr. Memmi was born and raised when it was a French 
protectorate.


Although he was overshadowed by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre (both 
of whom wrote introductions to his books), Mr. Memmi was celebrated in 
Europe and Africa as an author and sociologist.


Among his best-known books, some of which were later translated into 
English, were “The Pillar of Salt” (1953) and “Strangers” (1955), both 
autobiographical novels; “The Scorpion” (1969), another fictionalized 
account of a mixed marriage, like his own; and the nonfiction “The 
Colonizer and the Colonized” (1957), which he followed a half-century 
later with a somewhat disillusioned verdict on the fruits of national 
liberation in “Decolonization and the Decolonized” (2006).


Mr. Memmi was consumed by alienation, his own especially. He supported 
Tunisia’s independence, but once that was achieved, he left the 
fledgling Muslim state and spent the next two-thirds of his life in 
France in self-imposed exile. Even so, he once said that his homeland 
was not the French nation, but the French language.


“I am a Tunisian, but of French culture,” he wrote in “The Pillar of 
Salt.” “I am Tunisian, but Jewish, which means that I am politically and 
socially an outcast. I speak the language of the country with a 
particular accent and emotionally I have nothing in common with Muslims. 
I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is 
ignorant of Jewish culture and detests the middle class.


“I am poor,” he went on, “but desperately anxious not to be poor, and at 
the same time, I refuse to take the necessary steps to avoid poverty, a 
native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti‐Semitic universe, an 
African in a world dominated by Europe.”


Reviewing “The Scorpion” for The New York Times, Richard Locke described 
Mr. Memmi’s earlier novels as memoirs “recorded with a cleareyed 
sensitivity, a modest candor and remarkable strength.” He compared Mr. 
Memmi to “a Tunisian Balzac graced with Hemingway’s radical simplicity 
and sadness.”


“But ultimately,” Mr. Locke wrote, “it is Memmi’s heart, not his skill, 
that moves you: the sights and sounds of Tunis, the childhood memories, 
the brothers’ sympathetic and contrasting voices, their all-too-human 
feelings, have a resonance that reawakens for a while the ghost of 
European humanism.”


Albert Memmi was born in Tunis on Dec. 15, 1920, one of 13 children of 
Fraj Memmi, a Tunisian-Italian Jewish saddle maker, and Maira Sarfati, 
who was of Jewish and Berber heritage.


After starting Hebrew school when he was 4, he graduated from the 
prestigious Lycée Carnot de Tunis in 1939. When France’s 
collaborationist Vichy regime imposed anti-Semitic laws during World War 
II, he was expelled from the University of Algiers, where he was 
studying philosophy, and sent to a labor camp in eastern Tunisia.


When the war ended, Mr. Memmi resumed his studies at the Sorbonne in 
Paris and married Marie-Germaine Dubach, a French Catholic. They had 
three children. The family returned to Tunis in 1951, and he taught high 
school there, but they left after independence was proclaimed in 1956. 
There was no immediate word on his survivors.


Mr. Memmi became a professor at the Sorbonne and received a doctorate 
there in 1970. In 1975 he was named a director of the School of Higher 
Studies in Social Sciences.


Among his other books were the two-part “Portrait of a Jew” (published 
in 1962 and 1966) and “Dominated Man” (1968).


On Middle East policy, he described himself as a left-wing Zionist, 
favoring a separate Palestinian homeland while viewing Zionism as a form 
of anti-colonialism, because, he said, the Jew “has to fight for his 
national liberation and create a nation for himself.”


In The Jewish Review of Books, Daniel Gordon wrote in 2018 that Mr. 
Memmi “has combined, perhaps more than any other writer since World War 
II, the compassion needed to articulate the suffering of oppressed 
groups with the forthrightness needed to censure them for their own acts 
of oppression.”


Mr. Memmi said of his writings: “All of my work has been in sum an 
inventory of my attachments; all of my 

[Marxism] Protest, Passion, Politics | Boston Review

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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As protests work to remake the world, the reissue of Vivian Gornick’s 
The Romance of American Communism invites a new generation to reflect on 
what it means to live a life of political commitment—where the 
passionate pursuit of justice meets organized political action.


by ALAN WALD

http://bostonreview.net/politics/alan-wald-protest-passion-politics

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[Marxism] Henry Wallace: The True Spirit of the New Deal - Progressive.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Paul and Mari Jo Buhle.

https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-true-spirit-of-the-new-deal-buhle-200610/

My own take on Wallace, which, unlike their article, does not consider 
his 1948 campaign "disastrous". It is like saying Paul Robeson's concert 
in Peekskill was disastrous. Disastrous might be interpreted as 
self-inflicted, after all.


https://louisproyect.org/2017/12/23/how-jacobin-got-henry-wallace-wrong/

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[Marxism] Living Is No Laughing Matter: The Twenty-Fourth Newsletter (2020).

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://mailchi.mp/thetricontinental.org/living-is-no-laughing-matter-the-twenty-fourth-newsletter-2020?e=77bd6c9887

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[Marxism] Negative reaction to police

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Police no longer welcome in Vancouver Pride Parade, organizers say. 
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/police-no-longer-welcome-in-vancouver-pride-parade-organizers-say-1.4979197
 

A Canceling ‘Live PD’ Following Ongoing Protests Against Police Brutality
https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/live-pd-a-e-javier-ambler-austin-black-lives-matter-1234630742/
 



‘Cops’ cancelled after 30 years following George Floyd death  
https://globalnews.ca/news/7048347/george-floyd-cops-show-cancelled-after-30-years/
 



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Re: [Marxism] The Intent Was Genocide

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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>
> Settler colonialism of the Australian and American kind.." why leave out
> what the Zionists did in Palestine?



> "As if impatient with wordy exegeses, Ostler defers here to the historian
> Lorenzo Veracini’s definition of the term: in classic
> seventeenth-century colonialism, explains Veracini in his Settler
> Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), “the colonizer says to the
> colonized, ‘You, work for me.’ By contrast, in settler colonialism [of
> the Australian and American kind], the colonizer says, *‘You go away.’” *
> Rather than being conscripted by colonizers to exploit local
> resources—precious metals, fur-bearing animals, timber-rich forests,
> grazing or agricultural acreage—
> *the resident natives are removed to make room for another workforce*,
> whether imported slaves or incoming
> settlers."
>
> In the words of historian Patrick Wolfe, settler societies are
premised on
the *“elimination of the native.” *

>
> NY Review of Books, JULY 2, 2020 ISSUE
> The Intent Was Genocide
> by Peter Nabokov
>
> Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the
> American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas
> by Jeffrey Ostler
> Yale University Press, 533 pp., $37.50
>
>
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Re: [Marxism] Philadelphia pulls 72 cops after watchdog uncovers thousands of officers’ violent, racist social media posts.

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Anti racist activists should conduct the same operation in all US cities!

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 10:17 AM Louis Proyect via Marxism

>
>
> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/philadelphia-plain-view-project-police-social-media-racism-offensive-facebook.html
>
>
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[Marxism] Philadelphia pulls 72 cops after watchdog uncovers thousands of officers’ violent, racist social media posts.

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/06/philadelphia-plain-view-project-police-social-media-racism-offensive-facebook.html

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[Marxism] The Intent Was Genocide

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Review of Books, JULY 2, 2020 ISSUE
The Intent Was Genocide
by Peter Nabokov

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the 
American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas

by Jeffrey Ostler
Yale University Press, 533 pp., $37.50

At the close of the introduction to Surviving Genocide, his intense and 
well-researched overview of American Indian land losses, population 
declines, and personal miseries from the years leading to the republic’s 
birth through the wholesale tribal removals of Andrew Jackson’s 
presidency, the University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler doubts 
whether the federal government will ever “establish a Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission to honestly assess the United States’ impact 
on Native nations and propose meaningful remedies, including land 
return, for deep historical injustices.” Yet the most productive way to 
plow through his catalog of the unrelenting horrors and tragedies 
visited upon American Indians from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi 
River is to imagine it as an early draft of the first volume of just 
such a report, a mammoth affidavit that, once completed, will cry out 
for that overdue reckoning.


Ostler makes an ambitious case that there was a more or less continuous 
campaign of brutal conquest, diplomatic duplicity, and near genocide, 
but he does not ground it on a few cherry-picked highlights in the long 
history of relations between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, as the 
freelance author Ronald Wright did with his Iroquois and Cherokee 
examples in Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes Since 
1492 (1992). Instead his magisterial perspective in this volume takes in 
the vast trans-Appalachian region with all its tribes and subtribes; the 
continent’s trans-Mississippi West will be similarly covered in volume 2.


Ostler’s swift-paced yet meticulous coverage of the wars and diasporas, 
great and small, and attendant fluctuations in native populations has 
been assembled as if he intends it to be his academic generation’s 
manifesto, one that argues, as expressed in the upbraiding title of a 
recent anthology, Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without 
American Indians (2015). That collection of essays offered 
native-centered investigations into the history of Indian slavery, 
native literacy, maps in historical textbooks, native women during the 
colonial period, civil rights activism, the significance of Indians to 
narratives of modernity, and post–World War II urban migrations. No 
longer, insist its contributors, can American history books minimize, 
marginalize, or rest upon entertaining sidebars wherever American 
Indians—in all their tribal, personal, temporal, and circumstantial 
diversity—were implicated, which is the case in even such recent works 
as Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) and 
David McCullough’s The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who 
Brought the American Ideal West (2019).


Ostler’s contribution to Why You Can’t Teach United States History 
Without American Indians, which addressed critical omissions in writings 
about the Plains Indian wars, gave little hint that he was piecing 
together this grand synthesis. But Juliana Barr’s opening chapter to 
that collection laid out the geopolitical premise of Surviving Genocide:


At the time of European invasion, there was no part of North America 
that was not claimed and ruled by sovereign Indian regimes. The 
Europeans whose descendants would create the United States did not come 
to an unsettled wilderness; they grafted their colonies and settlements 
onto long-existent Indian homelands that constituted the entire continent.


To back up this foundational claim, the first of Ostler’s many useful 
maps depicts a jigsaw puzzle of dozens of separate tribal territories 
nestling against one another in 1760, from the Atlantic seaboard to the 
eastern parts of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, with hardly any space 
between them. By the end of his account, most of these native nations 
have been decimated and displaced, year by painful year, as a result of 
warfare, famine, disease, diplomatic pressure, coercive land turnovers, 
and sheer exhaustion. This does not mean that Indians did not put up a 
fight; indeed, Pontiac’s multitribal rebellion of the 1760s is one of 
the more riveting episodes of Ostler’s chronicle, even if it proved 
incapable of stemming the settler tide.


Ostler’s historical-ideological premise is heavily influenced by two 
relatively new subfields in American Indian history. One is settler 
colonialism studies, an approach that was first elaborated about 

[Marxism] Tracing Syria's descent under Assad

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com/rallaf/status/1270677277215522816

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[Marxism] “Dirty Break” for Independent Political Action or a Way to Stay Stuck in the Mud? - New Politics

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Kim Moody debunks Eric Blanc.

https://newpol.org/dirty-break-for-independent-political-action-or-a-way-to-stay-stuck-in-the-mud/

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[Marxism] Economics of Imperialism: Viruses

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://economicsofimperialism.blogspot.com/2020/06/viruses-imperialism.html

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[Marxism] Wichita State's president draws board, donor scrutiny after canceling Ivanka Trump speech

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/11/wichita-states-president-draws-board-donor-scrutiny-after-canceling-ivanka-trump

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[Marxism] Lenin and 'Sacred Texts'

[Aaron Kyereh-Mireku via Marxism]

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I've recently read Christopher Read's excellent biography of Lenin. In it, Read 
notes that Lenin was very uneasy about having his texts republished for fear 
they would be treated like sacred scripture. Only reluctantly did he agree to 
the project. Our present-day 'Leninist' sects clearly aren't aware of this, 
since they do precisely what Lenin feared - treat his texts like sacred 
scriptures torn from all context.
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