[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Secret Service tells White House press corps to leave White House grounds in highly unusual move

2020-06-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Trump's escalating war on media, 4-1/2 months before the election, has 
untold sinister implications, as the out-of-control president and a 
progressively winnowed coterie of advisers even more dangerous than 
Bolton, wades on with deliberation into what they have generated as an 
out-of-control repressive situation, with media absent. And even the top 
military honchos look on with seeming dismay.


"The move to force members of the White House press corps off White 
House grounds ... "in response to the increasingly violent 
demonstrations in Lafayette Park" ... is a highly unusual move that did 
not immediately come with an explanation. Typically in security 
situations at the White House, the press corps is locked down inside the 
complex ... Trump declared himself “your President of law and order” as 
peaceful protesters just outside the White House gates were dispersed 
with gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets ..."




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In a highly unusual decision, the US Secret Service told members of the 
White House press corps to immediately leave the White House grounds. 
The decision came during an ongoing demonstration across the street in 
Lafayette Square, where protestors were trying to bring down a statue of 
former President Andrew Jackson that stands in the middle of the park.


The US Secret Service on Monday evening told members of the White House 
press corps to immediately leave the White House grounds, a highly 
unusual decision that did not immediately come with an explanation.


The decision came during an ongoing demonstration in Lafayette Square, 
across the street from the White House where protestors were trying to 
bring down a statue of former President Andrew Jackson that stands in 
the middle of the park. Those protesters were eventually pushed back out 
of the park by police.


Protesters spray painted “BHAZ” on the pillars of St. John’s Episcopal 
Church, which sits across the street from Lafayette Square. The acronym 
stands for “Black House Autonomous Zone,” an apparent reference to the 
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle where protesters have 
taken over a six-square-block area of the city and kept out police in 
order to set up their own self-governing space.


The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone had been a relatively peaceful protest 
until this past weekend. Two men were shot in the zone early Saturday 
morning and one of them later died. Police said a “violent crowd” 
prevented them from getting to the wounded individuals.


In the nation’s capital, tensions between groups of protesters and law 
enforcement outside the White House have been a focal point for the 
nation in recent weeks as protests continue to play out over the killing 
of George Floyd, a Black man who died while in police custody in 
Minneapolis last month.


Last month, Trump was briefly taken to the underground bunker for a 
period of time as protesters gathered outside the White House, according 
to a White House official and a law enforcement source. The President 
was there for a little under an hour before being brought upstairs.


A law enforcement source and another source familiar with the matter 
told CNN that first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were also 
taken to the bunker.


Following that episode, the White House cautioned staffers who must go 
to work to hide their passes until they reach a Secret Service entry 
point and to hide them as they leave, according to an email which was 
viewed by CNN.


A few days after, Trump declared himself “your President of law and 
order” as peaceful protesters just outside the White House gates were 
dispersed with gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets, after which he 
walked to a nearby church for a photo opportunity.


He remained at the boarded-up building, brandishing a Bible for the 
cameras, for only a matter of minutes before returning to the White House.


This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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Re: [Marxism] Chicago Police Illegally Denied Protesters Right To Attorney, Phone Call, Top Public Defender Says | Pascal Sabino | Block Club Chicago

2020-06-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo wrote

https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/06/23/public-defender-joins-activists-to-sue-city-demand-end-to-incommunicado-detention/


Does this deliberate upping the repressive ante have earmarks of a 
global civil war? What the Chicago authorities are doing is being 
repeated everywhere, and not just because of Trump and his ilk. Trump 
appears to be little more than a harbinger and troubadour for worse to 
come.


Access to legal representation and the media are being attacked in the 
streets as well, shutting off informed access to internal wars just as 
they have done with our external wars, out of sight, out of the middle 
class mind. Will we see less and less up-close filmed revelation of what 
they want to conceal, as it even becomes possible, with the steady 
gutting of civil liberties, that people's i-phones at the scene are on 
flimsy grounds silently confiscated? While information is increasingly 
confined to authorities, with surveillance rampant?


Social control is out of control from top to bottom. I see the alarm 
expressed by a few major media outlets lately as the shocked gasp of 
bourgeois liberalism as to what is to come - before they join their 
confreres in the world of business as it must be.


To spell out some more of it that we may see but don't often enough 
explicitly enumerate, and don't we know that these probabilities are top 
of the destructive, containing forces' agenda in boardrooms, at Davos 
and Bilderberg:


What, after the election, when they no longer will get federal funds to 
those millions strapped, evicted and hungry, as happened in the thirties 
here and is happening elsewhere all over the world; but this time with 
no growth in increased wealth through expansion of profitable 
value-creating production, and instead more and more generation of and 
sequestering of profits of fictitious capital, property speculation, and 
debt manipulation? When state and municipal governments are failing; 
when the first wave surges, then subsides and a second wave of Covid-19 
strikes; when there is no end to savage racism against all with skins 
darker than pink-skinned Caucasians and with little effective power; 
when global poverty hits big with a new depression that leaves 1929 as 
relatively minor occurrence?


What happens when the environmental meltdown begins to come home to 
Americans and Europeans as forced migration deepens from impoverished, 
starved-out areas of the southern hemisphere generally?


And when massive repression is increasingly resorted to through 
capital's immense power in protecting the privileged from surges of 
protest from every direction?


Is this, or an almost irrepressible part of it, not in our future?

If so, what do we plan to do about it? As to the environment, it has 
gone to the point where mitigation is the only viable objective, and as 
it slips further down the sluice ways still nothing's happening to 
confront it, while the profit-generating panaceas of capital are still 
in charge as solutions.


As to preservation of human lives, we seem to have options but for the 
present we flounder, seemingly irretrievably.


Though objective conditions may point to solutions, if we read those 
developments right, when do we see that happening? When do we start to 
piece together the larger picture, rampant, globe-straddling 
transnational corporate power aided by authoritarian, captive 
governments and their ministrations, and begin to understand what 
effective opposition will look like? Will it be too late, because we, 
unlike capital, have not done our deep-shit homework? Looking back 
fondly on glorious past revolutions and Trotskyist solutions, or 
fulminating on Assad and his like, or remarking interminably on 
manifestations of chaos, certainly won't get it.


Slants on the future are supposed to end on a hopeful note, but my god 
that's become more and more difficult.

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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Environment]: Hyser on Lees, 'Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786-1941'

2020-06-23 Thread Andrew Stewart via Marxism
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-- Forwarded message -
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW 
Date: Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 5:38 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Environment]: Hyser on Lees, 'Planting Empire,
Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786-1941'
To: 
Cc: H-Net Staff 


Lynn Hollen Lees.  Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British
Malaya, 1786-1941.  Cambridge  Cambridge University Press, 2017.  374
pp.  $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-03840-0.

Reviewed by Raymond Hyser (University of Texas at Austin)
Published on H-Environment (June, 2020)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey

Unlike Britain's expansion into other parts of South and Southeast
Asia, Britain's movement into Malaya was not by conquest but rather
by "invitation shadowed by intimidation" (p. 116). Starting her study
in 1786 with Britain's acquisition of Penang, Lynn Hollen Lees, a
noted scholar of European social history, traces the spread of
British colonialism across the Malay Peninsula until the Japanese
occupation in 1941 in her book _Planting Empire, Cultivating
Subjects_. Lees's monograph provides a fresh perspective on British
colonialism in Malaya, and the British Empire more generally, by
firmly rooting the colonial project within a network of transnational
movements that highlights the construction of "a multi-cultural
society under the umbrella of British overlords" (p. 1). Her book
explores how these transnational movements shaped British Malaya
through an analysis of the social history of the parallel
developments of plantations and towns across the peninsula. Through
this exploration, she interrogates the nature of British colonial
governance in Malaya by critiquing such "simple, inflexible
categories" as settler colony and directly ruled possession that
often dominate the study of empires (p. 6). Lees argues that the
British in Malaya "ruled in an environment of layered and shared
sovereignty" that created a political landscape that was as complex
as it was conflicted (p. 4). Couching her argument in the study of
the individual in rural and urban spaces, Lees investigates how the
multi-ethnic populace of British Malaya experienced and adapted to
"empire" as they navigated this political landscape. She aims to show
how imperial Britain "planted a colony in Malaya and cultivated its
inhabitants as British subjects" (p. 16).

Progressing in a largely chronological fashion, the book is divided
into two parts. The first section concentrates on the nineteenth
century where the author describes the expansion of British colonial
rule throughout the Malay Peninsula and the various manifestations of
governance exercised by the colonial state. She traces the
corresponding growth of plantation colonialism, focusing on sugar
cultivation, and the development of urban centers across Malaya. Lees
looks at the contrasting styles of British colonial rule that
developed within plantations and towns. Grounding her discussion in
the papers of the Penang Sugar Estates Company, she explores the
"coercive regime" of plantation colonialism that "depended upon
physical violence and cultural caricatures to sustain a rigid
hierarchy of power and inequality" (p. 99). Built on ideas developed
on Caribbean plantations and slavery, plantation colonialism in
Malaya was an arena of heavy discipline, low pay, and racial
segregation. In contrast, urban populations enjoyed significantly
less direct interaction with the colonial state. Rather than the
rigid, racial hierarchies of plantations, towns enjoyed an
overlapping of social and cultural worlds as their multi-ethnic
inhabitants engaged with one another through marketplace interactions
and urban civil society. In towns, the British colonial state opted
for a mode of governance Lees calls "layered sovereignty" where
colonial officials relegated informal control of the various ethnic
groups to their community leaders (p. 119). Despite the seemingly
insular environments of plantations and towns, the boundaries between
them were relatively open and porous. This allowed for the mobile
society of British Malaya to move across both the physical and
political landscape to experience "multiple layers of imperial rule"
(p. 16).

The second section of the book focuses on the first four decades of
the twentieth century when British control continued to expand across
the Malay Peninsula. The twentieth century saw the rate of
urbanization increase, as well as the dramatic transformation of the
Malayan economy wrought by the widespread adoption of rubber
cultivation. Colonial officials continued their policy of layered
sovereignty but found the status quo increasingly difficult to
maintain as transnational pressures mounted 

[Marxism] Fwd: Economist-The Pandemic and Plastic Pollution

2020-06-23 Thread John A Imani via Marxism
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(JAI:  In California the flimsy but serviceable formerly free plastic bags
at the supermarkets were replaced with heavier duty, 'layered', plastic
that cost the shoppers a dime.  This is an effort to 'train' customers to
reuse the sturdier bags.  This is described much further down in the below.

(That policy has led to a 'sea' of heavy duty plastic bags (now 'free' to
protect the workers from possible contamination by reused bags) and
shoppers, no longer constrained, now routinely use the heavier bags,
accumulating with each trip to the store, to perform tasks, eg as trash
receptacles, that the thin bags formerly accomplished with less damage to
the environs.)

Sea of troubles:  Covid-19 has led to a pandemic of Plastic Pollution


As the world produces more protective equipment—and gorges on
takeaways—pity the oceans
--
Jun 22nd 2020

HONG KONG

THE THAMES has always been a reflector of the times, says Lara Maiklem, a
London “mudlark”. Ms Maiklem spends her days on the river’s foreshore
foraging for history’s detritus, from Roman pottery to Victorian clay
pipes. She can tell the time of year, she says, just by the type of rubbish
she has to sift through: champagne bottles during the first week of
January; footballs in summer. The year 2020 has left its own mark. Since
the coronavirus reached Britain the mud has sprouted a crop of latex gloves.

In February, half a world away, Gary Stokes docked his boat on Hong Kong’s
isolated Soko Island. Soko’s beaches are where OceansAsia, the conservation
organisation he runs, sporadically records levels of plastic pollution. Mr
Stokes says he is all too accustomed to finding the jetsam the modern world
throws up, such as plastic drinks bottles and supermarket carrier-bags. But
what he documented that day made news across Hong Kong: 70 surgical
facemasks on a 100-metre stretch of beach. Having cleaned it up, he went
back four days later. Like a stubborn weed, the masks had returned.

Whether on the foreshore of the Thames or the deserted beaches of Soko, the
planet is awash with pandemic plastic. Data are hard to come by but, for
example, consumption of single-use plastic may have grown by 250-300% in
America since the coronavirus took hold, says Antonis Mavropoulos of the
International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), which represents recycling
bodies in 102 countries. Much of that increase is down to demand for
products designed to keep covid-19 at bay, including masks, visors and
gloves. According to a forecast from Grand View Research, the global
disposable-mask market will grow from an estimated $800m in 2019 to $166bn
in 2020.

Staggering though such figures are, personal protection is only part of the
story. Lockdowns have also led to a boom in e-commerce. In March, as parts
of America and Europe shut up shop, some 2.5bn customers are reckoned to
have visited Amazon’s website, a 65% increase on last year. In China, more
than 25% of physical goods were bought online during the first quarter of
the year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics,
a think-tank in Washington, DC.

Much of what is bought online comes wrapped in plastic—and the bad kind at
that. Goods are often packaged in plastic comprising several layers. That
keeps the contents safe in aeroplane holds and on delivery lorries. It also
makes it nearly impossible to recycle the plastic. At the same time, the
locked-down masses have been consuming home deliveries from restaurants in
record numbers. First-quarter sales at Uber Eats, one of America’s biggest
restaurant-delivery apps, for example, rose by 54% year on year. Every
extra portion of curry, or pot of garlic dip, means more plastic waste.

If the public’s increasing appetite for single-use plastic worries
environmentalists, then so too does its diminishing inclination to recycle
materials that can be reused. In Athens, for example, there has been a 150%
increase in the amount of plastic found in the general-waste stream, says
Mr Mavropoulos. Anecdotal evidence from ISWA members suggests this is a
worldwide trend. An unwillingness to recycle might be explained by people’s
nervousness about venturing out to put waste in recycling bins. Or it might
just be that lockdowns have put more pressing matters into their minds,
prompting a slip in their diligence.

Covid-19 has led to a glut in plastic waste in other ways. For one, the
pandemic caused a 

[Marxism] Chicago Police Illegally Denied Protesters Right To Attorney, Phone Call, Top Public Defender Says | Pascal Sabino | Block Club Chicago

2020-06-23 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/06/23/public-defender-joins-activists-to-sue-city-demand-end-to-incommunicado-detention/


Sent from my iPhone

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[Marxism] Keynes returns from the dead?

2020-06-23 Thread John Reimann via Marxism
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Those of the younger generations will not remember, and maybe many won't be
familiar with Keynes. He was the architect of the economic strategy post WW
II. That was the strategy that advocated deficit spending as a means of
preventing new economic disasters like the 1930s Depression. His theories
lost capitalist support in the fact of the threat of runaway inflation in
the US in the late 1970s. Now, it seems, in the face of renewed crises,
they may be making a comeback. For those who can't open the article, here
it is:

"
If, like me, you feel like our nation is going through hell right now, then
you might also agree that it’s a good time to recall the admonition, “When
you’re going through hell, keep going.” But where are we to go? What is the
best path out of our intersecting crises: pandemic, recession and violent,
structural racism?

For that, I recommend turning to the renowned British economist John
Maynard Keynes. I’ve been reading Zachary D. Carter’s excellent new
biography of Keynes, finding the book and Keynes’s ideas remarkably timely.
Keynes’s towering body of work points toward a more inclusive economy and
society, one that throws off the yoke of dominant assumptions that, 74
years after Keynes’s death, still repress functional, representative
democracy.

Most people associate Keynesian economics with governments spending their
way out of recessions, a policy playing out in real time across the globe.
That’s certainly core to the Keynesian revolution in political economics,
but to stop there fails to capture the scope of insights Keynes developed
long before he was pushing Roosevelt to spend expansively on the New Deal
during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Through the First World War and especially during its aftermath, when his
sage guidance was ignored, Keynes struggled to reconcile the tragic
occurrences he saw unfolding with the classical assumptions that markets,
and thus the societies they support, would always naturally settle into
optimal conditions.

Keynes correctly predicted that imposing severe reparations on post-World
War I Germany would plant the seeds for the next world war. He saw,
contrary to the classical model in which he’d been trained, endless cycles
of booms and busts born of assumptions about money, wages and work that
relentlessly delivered high unemployment and stagnant earnings for workers
amid huge returns for “rentiers” (those whose incomes derived from
compounding wealth, not work).

He witnessed the political discontent that grew out of these dynamics and
understood how the failure of the capitalism of the day — underwritten by
untethered, often corrupt financial markets — provided powerful fuel for
communism. Keynes rejected Marxism, believing instead, as Carter notes,
that “it was time for capitalism not to be overthrown but to be ‘wisely
managed.’ ” But Keynes understood and feared the political outcomes of an
economic system that failed to deliver consistent security, if not
prosperity, to most people.

Why did capitalism need management?

Because, contrary to assumption, it didn’t manage itself. Keynes observed,
for example, that individual people often saved more than businesses
invested (again, contrary to assumption). To this day, economics students
are taught that savings equals investment, and that the way to boost
investment is to save more (this is a common argument against running
budget deficits).

But people worried about the future — maybe due to … oh, I don’t know, an
invisible, pernicious microbe — will, from the perspective of broad social
welfare, oversave and underconsume. There is no invisible hand to magically
balance such things out, and thus an enlightened government must intervene
to offset imbalances.

This all sounds theoretical until you realize that the U.S. labor market,
as I pointed out last week, has been at full employment only 37 percent of
the time since 1972 and the black rate has never reached that mark. In
other words, the assumption that full employment is the norm is thoroughly
disproved by the data now, and it was no truer in Keynes’s time. Yet it
still pervades economic thinking and policy.

Keynes saw that markets do not settle into an “optimal equilibrium” but can
diverge from such conditions for years on end. Moreover, markets exist in a
political context that determines who wins and who loses. Examples include
product and industry regulations, labor standards (e.g., minimum wages and
overtime rules), the extent of collective bargaining, anti-discrimination
rules and their enforcement, and employers’ leeway to fire workers at will.

In his time, as today, that political context is held in place by 

Re: [Marxism] AFL-CIO "Leader" Richard Trumka Defends Police Unions by Comparing Them to Employers

2020-06-23 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22616/afl-cio-richard-trumka-black-lives-matter-police-unions

So what else is new?
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[Marxism] The Ghost of Peter Sellers | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Peter Medak is an 82-year old director who went through the harrowing 
experience of working with Peter Sellers in a comedy titled “Ghost in 
the Noonday Sun” in 1974. Like Ishmael quoting Job in the final page of 
“Moby Dick”, his latest film about this fiasco could have ended with the 
same words rolling across the screen before the closing credits: “And I 
only am escaped alone to tell thee.”


full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/06/23/the-ghost-of-peter-sellers/

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[Marxism] The Great Upheaval of 1877 Sheds Light on Today’s Protests

2020-06-23 Thread Dennis Brasky via Marxism
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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176018
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Re: [Marxism] AFL-CIO "Leader" Richard Trumka Defends Police Unions by Comparing Them to Employers

2020-06-23 Thread wytheholt--- via Marxism
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So Trumka is equating "employers" and "cops" -- and he thinks that is 
acceptable?  Wythe


> On June 23, 2020 at 10:22 AM Dennis Brasky via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
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> 
> >
> >
> >
> > https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22616/afl-cio-richard-trumka-black-lives-matter-police-unions
> >
> >
> >
> >
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[Marxism] AFL-CIO "Leader" Richard Trumka Defends Police Unions by Comparing Them to Employers

2020-06-23 Thread Dennis Brasky via Marxism
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>
>
>
> https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22616/afl-cio-richard-trumka-black-lives-matter-police-unions
>
>
>
>
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[Marxism] This Monument to White Supremacy Hides in Plain Sight

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times Op-Ed, June 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
This Monument to White Supremacy Hides in Plain Sight
By Richard White

(Mr. White is a professor of American history.)

Monuments are symbols, and in times of trouble they prompt symbolic 
action. They went up as political statements, and they come down as 
political statements. But it is far easier to topple a monument or 
change a name than to eradicate racism or counter its long legacy.


In the East, Confederate monuments are the target, but in the West, 
protesters attack explorers, their sponsors, missionaries, soldiers and 
settlers. In the past week the California Legislature with uncommon 
alacrity banished statues of Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus. 
Ulysses Grant and Junipero Serra have come down in San Francisco.


But some monuments escape notice. Activists in Marin County, California, 
have demanded the renaming of places commemorating Francis Drake, an 
English explorer and naval hero as well as a slave trader and pirate. 
But so far they have not yet targeted Drake’s Cross (also known as the 
Prayerbook Cross).


It stands nearly 60 feet tall, sits in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park 
and honors Drake. His slave trading has understandably gotten him in 
trouble, but what Drake is doing in Golden Gate Park is the more 
interesting question.


In 1894 Episcopalians commemorated Drake’s landing in California and 
what they saw as the first Protestant service in North America by 
erecting a giant sandstone cross — a “sermon in stone” — intending it to 
be visible from ships entering the Golden Gate. Trees gradually grew up 
around it; many of its inscriptions have weathered and some have 
disappeared. But the cross — a denominational symbol in a public park — 
has a lot to tell us.


The invisibility of Drake’s Cross may make it the most fitting monument 
to white supremacy in the country. Quite unintentionally, the sandstone 
cross records the persistence of racial ideologies and their decline, 
their viciousness and their vacuousness, the horrors they condone and 
the ridiculousness of what they commemorate.


It is an attempt to enshrine Anglo-Saxonism, which is a 
late-19th-century variant of white supremacy. It carries us back into a 
putatively Anglo-Saxon America, when, with deep worries about the racial 
identity of a heavily immigrant city, many Californians became crazed 
over the long-dead Drake. They enlisted him to shoulder the white man’s 
burden.


Drake’s Cross actually commemorates a nonevent. Francis Drake neither 
sailed into San Francisco Bay nor set foot on the site of San Francisco, 
although he very probably landed somewhere nearby in 1579.


He spent a month somewhere in California (or maybe Oregon) repairing his 
ship before crossing the Pacific. Californians named things after him 
and built monuments to him.


Now, along with people in California, Black Lives Matter has made Drake 
a target in Plymouth, England, where Drake began and ended the 
round-the-world voyage that brought him to California.


The inscriptions on the cross — those that still can be read — celebrate 
Drake as part of the beginning of a Protestant Anglo-Saxon America. He 
was the first Protestant, the first Englishman, the first missionary on 
“our” coast, in “our” country, on “our” continent.


The story that the cross commemorates is a testimony to American 
credulity. After robbing, raping and murdering his way up the Pacific 
Coast, Francis Drake reached California and called it Nova Albion (New 
England). California became the first New England, the place where the 
United States began. Drake supposedly inspired Walter Raleigh to found 
Roanoke, which led to Jamestown and then the second New England, which 
led to the American Revolution, which eventually produced American 
expansion that came full circle to California. The Gold Rush 
Forty-Niners were not invaders; they were just coming home.


All this was pretty bold talk and a heavy burden to put on an Anglican 
pirate who spent a month on a beach patching a ship. The story claimed 
that the beginning of California was white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and 
peaceful rather than mestizo, Catholic and violent; that Anglo-Saxons 
did not conquer California in an imperial war and displace its Native 
and Mexican population; that Native people had already freely given 
their territory to Drake and, supposedly, just disappeared. In The Los 
Angeles Times in 1930, George Wycherley Kirkman underlined the cross’s 
declarations, celebrating Drake as “the first Anglo-Saxon” to see 
California, the first English speaker and the first booster who wanted 
to plant an English colony in 

[Marxism] Rice in the Time of Sugar | Louis A. Pérez Jr. | University of North Carolina Press

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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How did Cuba’s long-established sugar trade result in the development of 
an agriculture that benefited consumers abroad at the dire expense of 
Cubans at home? In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Pérez proposes a new 
Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island’s cuisine, and 
sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. In the 
dynamic between the two, dependency on food imports—a signal feature of 
the Cuban economy—was set in place.


https://uncpress.org/book/9781469651422/rice-in-the-time-of-sugar/

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[Marxism] ‘Way Too Fast’: As Purdue Pushed to Reopen, Parents and Alumni Urged Caution

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Chronicle of Higher Ed
‘Way Too Fast’: As Purdue Pushed to Reopen, Parents and Alumni Urged Caution
By Lindsay Ellis JUNE 19, 2020  PREMIUM

Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president and a former governor of Indiana, has 
been one of the loudest and earliest voices in favor of reopening 
campuses in the fall. He wrote in April that the university was 
“determined not to surrender helplessly” to the virus. Such a stance has 
received a big megaphone. Daniels was invited to the White House with 
roughly a dozen other presidents to talk about reopening, and he spoke 
at a Senate committee hearing about Purdue’s plans.


“All of our students have attended class or exams sick with a fever or 
other symptoms because they can't afford to miss. This mentality just 
spreads the virus.”
But as Purdue publicized its ambitious plans, the administration was 
receiving skeptical feedback from parents and alumni — much of it 
mirroring the anxiety that the faculty and others nationwide feel about 
returning to their campuses. Purdue opened an online portal to share 
suggestions, and The Chronicle obtained submitted comments through an 
Indiana Access to Public Records Act request. Here are three takeaways 
from the responses:


1. Some viewed the university’s commitment to reopening as morally wrong 
— and reminded Purdue that lives are on the line.


Parents wondered why the university didn’t spend more time making a 
decision. With time, they wrote, Covid-19 would be better understood and 
under control.


“This is moving way too fast to ensure the safety of the students and 
staff,” one wrote. “It can’t always be about the money … it’s not worth 
the life of someone they love.” That parent said they might pull their 
son out of Purdue.


Another parent said remaining virtual is an “obvious solution” that the 
university ignores at its “peril.” “Imagine trying to convince juries 
hearing the cases of grief-stricken families that the university had no 
other options,” that person wrote. “The facts overwhelmingly establish 
that the university was able to, and did, use technology to keep 
students, faculty, and staff safe during the spring and summer semesters.”


Daniels has stressed that young people’s risks to Covid-19 are lower 
than older populations, and the university said it will offer 
accommodations, possibly including remote work, to employees. But one 
parent of a student with an underlying health condition urged the 
university to be safe rather than sorry. An alumna also expressed concern.


“This is a frankly incendiary, irresponsible, and irrelevant statement 
from Daniels that makes me ashamed to be associated with the school,” 
the graduate wrote.


A spokesman for the university, Tim Doty, previously told The Chronicle 
that Purdue issued its plans in April because people were asking. The 
campus, he had said, wanted to “provide clarity” and begin planning.


Daniels wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that students “overwhelmingly” 
want to resume classes in person and on campus. The university has said 
it will offer some online classes for students who can’t come back in 
the fall, or choose not to. A “subset” of courses chosen based on past 
enrollment will be offered virtually, and most will be hybrid in case an 
instructor needs to quarantine, Purdue has said.


2. Parents want answers to logistical questions.

Can lectures be held remotely, with recitations in person? How are you 
changing dining-hall operations? Where will sick students quarantine? 
Will dorms be cleaned professionally?


“DON'T rely on the students to clean the rooms — they don't have the 
time or interest,” one parent wrote.


The university has since outlined responses to some of these questions. 
Most classrooms will have 50-percent capacity, with a maximum occupancy 
of 150 people, and courses are anticipating some hybrid instruction. 
Dining will offer carry-out food only, with one-way traffic. The 
university designated 400 beds for isolation. And a universal pledge 
stressing personal responsibility will require everyone to keep living, 
studying, and working spaces clean.


In the portal, some people wondered how out-of-state and international 
students could safely return to campus, with the risks of flight travel 
and airport-shuttle rides. (Like many public research universities, a 
smaller percentage of Purdue’s students have come from the state since 
the 2008-9 recession.) The university has not issued guidance on this 
question, Doty said.


A major concern from parents was the reliability of the Purdue 
University Student Health center, known as PUSH. “It takes days to be 
seen if you can even get an 

[Marxism] CUNY system suffers more coronavirus deaths than any other higher ed system in the U.S.

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/23/cuny-system-suffers-more-coronavirus-deaths-any-other-higher-ed-system-us

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[Marxism] Cartographies of Baltic labour resistance | Lefteast

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/cartographies-of-baltic-labour-resistance/

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[Marxism] When workers at Barnes & Noble got sick, we organized our warehouse and won

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://wagingnonviolence.org/2020/06/barnes-nobles-sick-organized-warehouse-won/

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[Marxism] Philly Sanitation Workers Rally, Join Demand for PPE, Right to Refuse Dangerous Work | Labor Notes

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/06/philly-sanitation-workers-rally-join-demand-ppe-right-refuse-dangerous-work

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[Marxism] US nurses at for-profit hospital chain to strike over cuts and PPE shortages | US news | The Guardian

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/23/us-nurses-strike-over-cuts-ppe-shortages-pandemic

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[Marxism] Defending Land and Water from Mining Profiteers in the Time of COVID-19 | Portside

2020-06-23 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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Over the years, the mining industry has taken advantage of dictatorship, 
disasters, and a variety of distractions to expand operations in Latin 
America. In the time of Covid-19, with entire populations under lockdown 
and economies falling apart, mining companies have also hopped on the 
pandemic profiteering bandwagon.


https://portside.org/2020-06-22/defending-land-and-water-mining-profiteers-time-covid-19

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[Marxism] What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives? | Robin D. G. Kelley | The New York Times

2020-06-23 Thread Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/george-floyd-protests-looting.html


Sent from my iPhone


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