[Marxism-Thaxis] Let's put blame where it belongs: right-wing extremism
Let's put blame where it belongs: right-wing extremism http://peoplesworld.org/let-s-put-blame-where-it-belongs-right-wing-extremism/ assets/Uploads/_resampled/CroppedImage6060-sam.jpg by: Sam Webb January 10 2011 tags: violence, ultra-right, Arizona teaparty6 In the wake of the senseless shooting in Tucson, Ariz., people and politicians of various political inclinations have appealed for goodwill, civil discourse and national unity. It is said, we have to turn down the rhetorical temperature. I support these sentiments, as do most Americans. Who wouldn't in the wake of the blood spilled and lives lost so tragically this past weekend? But matters can't be left here. Some others things must be said, and if it ruffles civil discourse, so be it. Not everyone is equally to blame for ratcheting up of hate speech, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-government rhetoric, and homophobia. Not everyone urged citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights to settle differences. Not everyone joined in the relentless attack - now two years old - against the first African American president in our nation's history; an attack that is racist in its content and unprecedented in its intensity. Not everyone uses, to borrow from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, eliminationist rhetoric. Not every congressperson tells their constituents to be armed and dangerous, as Republican and tea party leader Rep. Michelle Bachman did. Not everyone placed Rep. Giffords' district in the crosshairs on their website's election map as Sarah Palin did. (She hurriedly removed the image the day of the shooting.) And, not every American had a hand in creating the atmosphere of intolerance and vitriol that currently exists, and resulted in the attempted political assassination of the congresswoman and the senseless deaths of six innocent people, including one young child. Most Americans of various political persuasions believe in, and live out a moral code of tolerance and decency. They don't harbor hatred, nor do they incite others to hate. They never advocate vigilante politics or settling differences with a smoking gun. This contrasts with the modern-day fire eaters on right-wing talk radio and television shows - not to mention their counterparts in elective office - who trade on and get rich from volumes of hateful, divisive and abusive rhetoric. (Fire eaters were the group of extremist pro-slavery politicians from the South who urged the separation of southern states by any means necessary) Civil discourse is a dirty word to them. Hate is what makes them tick. It is what turns them on. It is their fix and they shoot it up and out daily and hourly. Propagandizing hate is what pays them big salaries, and inflates their egos. It gives them a sense of power over other people. And it incites people - sane and deranged - to do harmful things, including political assassinations. Rush Limbaugh and the like aren't talk show hosts; they're conveyers of everything that is bad in our culture. Their redeeming characteristics are zero, zilch. They have none! If I were asked to paint a portrait of a purveyor of hate it would be Limbaugh's face and his gang of like-minded talk show hosts on radio and Fox News in the near background. Take the hate and lies out of their talk and they have nothing to say. But some will assert, Wait a minute. They didn't pull the trigger, nor are they responsible for a young man who is obviously deranged. No quarrel here, but that isn't the issue. The issue is who created the climate of hate and venom? Not the American left, not Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow, not progressive Democrats! Can you imagine Congressman John Lewis suggesting to his constituents that they arm themselves? It would never happen! Never! The trail of evidence leads in one direction and to only one source: right-wing extremism. And people should not be shy in saying this. We should pin the tale on the real donkey! We should name names. Nothing is to be gained by evenhandedness. In fact, in obscuring the truth, it is a disservice to the American people. Truth is: it is misguided when someone on the progressive side does this, for it clarifies nothing in the minds of millions, who are looking for an explanation for this dastardly act. In this instance, and in every instance where people are feeling pain, insecurity and uncertainty about which way to turn, the ideological stock and trade of right wing extremism (the water boy of the most reactionary sections of the ruling class and transnational capital) is to mislead, to confuse, to mystify and to bamboozle the American people. In the wake of this horrible episode of Arizona violence, we can expect more of the same, but democratic-minded people should roll back the fog, attach blame to those who are responsible for the politics of hate and lies, and name names. Photo: Tea party rally sign threatening a Browning gun solution. (JoelnSouthernCA/CC)
[Marxism-Thaxis] The end of the imperialist epoch
The end of the imperialist epoch Marv Gandall Sun Jan 9 07:47:34 PST 2011 * Previous message: [lbo-talk] Haaretz - Shooter of Jewish Congresswoman listed 'Mein Kampf' as favorite book * Next message: [lbo-talk] [Pen-l] The end of the imperialist epoch * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] * Search LBO-Talk Archives Limit search to: Subject Body Subject Author Sort by: Reverse Sort Without describing it in these blunt terms, Financial Times economic columnist Martin Wolf argues below that far away the biggest single factor about our world is the ending of Western imperialist domination of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This is a controversial thesis, particularly among Marxists and in the face of US military power, but since 1980 the relative rates of growth in output and per capita incomes between the advanced capitalist countries and their former colonies and semi-colonies have reversed dramatically. Although the statistical evidence varies, there is no dispute that in China, the epicentre of this historic change, output over the past three decades has risen from around 5% to 20% of US levels, with the trend having accelerated sharply over the past five years. As Wolf notes, citing Ben Bernanke, the aggregate real output of emerging economies was 41 per cent higher than at the start of 2005. It was 70 per cent higher in China and about 55 per cent higher in India. But, in the advanced economies, real output was just 5 per cent higher. For emerging countries, the 'great recession' was a blip. For high-income countries, it was calamitous. One can dispute Wolf's attribution of the reversal to the adoption of pro-capitalist policies by China and India, which he sees as driven by the globalization of markets and technology, and he neglects the widening disparities of income which have accompanied the process, but his conclusion is one which is now widely shared: In the past few centuries, what was once the European and then American periphery became the core of the world economy. Now, the economies that became the periphery are re-emerging as the core. This is transforming the entire world. The overheated Chinese economy may or may not be heading for an imminent bust, but as Wolf also notes, even world wars and depressions merely interrupted the rise of earlier industrialisers. If we leave aside nuclear war, nothing seems likely to halt the ascent of the big emerging countries, though it may well be delayed. -MG * * * In the grip of a great convergence By Martin Wolf January 4 2011 Convergent incomes and divergent growth – that is the economic story of our times. We are witnessing the reversal of the 19th and early 20th century era of divergent incomes. In that epoch, the peoples of western Europe and their most successful former colonies achieved a huge economic advantage over the rest of humanity. Now it is being reversed more quickly than it emerged. This is inevitable and desirable. But it also creates huge global challenges. In an influential book, Kenneth Pomeranz of the University of California, Irvine, wrote of the “great divergence” between China and the west. He located that divergence in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This is controversial: the late Angus Maddison, doyen of statistical researchers, argued that by 1820 UK output per head was already three times and US output per head twice Chinese levels. Yet of the subsequent far greater divergence there is no doubt whatsoever. By the middle of the 20th century, real incomes per head (measured at purchasing power parity) in China and India had fallen to 5 and 7 per cent of US levels, respectively. Moreover, little had changed by 1980. What had once been the centres of global technology had fallen vastly behind. This divergence is now reversing. That is far and away the biggest single fact about our world. On Maddison’s data, between 1980 and 2008 the ratio of Chinese output per head to that of the US rose from 6 to 22 per cent, while India’s rose from 5 to 10 per cent. Data from the Conference Board’s “total economy database”, computed on a slightly different basis, indicate that the ratio rose from 3 to 19 per cent in China and from 3 to 7 per cent in India between the late 1970s and 2009. The comparisons are uncertain, but the direction of relative change is not. Rapid convergence on the productivity of advanced western economies is not unprecedented in the era following the second world war. Japan was the forerunner, followed by South Korea and a few small east Asian dragon economies – Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Japan had already begun to industrialise in the 19th century, with remarkable success. After its defeat in the second world war, it restarted at about a fifth of US output per head, roughly where China is today, to reach 70 per cent in the early 1970s. It attained a peak of close to 90 per cent of US levels in 1990, when its bubble economy burst, before
[Marxism-Thaxis] State Of The Unions
The Financial Page State Of The Unions by James Surowiecki January 17, 2011 http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/01/17/110117ta_talk_surowiecki In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy. Businesses, of course, saw this as grim news. But the general public applauded labor’s new power, even in the face of union tactics that many Americans frowned on, like sit-down strikes. More than seventy per cent of those surveyed in a 1937 Gallup poll said they favored unions. Seventy-five years later, in the wake of another economic crisis, things couldn’t be more different. The bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler saved the jobs of tens of thousands of U.A.W. workers, but were enormously unpopular. In the recent midterm elections, voters in several states passed initiatives making it harder for unions to organize. Across the country, governors and mayors wrestling with budget shortfalls are blaming public-sector unions for the problems. And in polls public support for labor has fallen to historic lows. The hostility to labor is most obvious in the attacks on public-sector workers as what Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota’s former governor, calls “exploiters”—cosseted, overpaid bureaucrats whose gold-plated pension and health plans are busting state budgets. But there’s also been a backlash against labor generally. In 2009, for the first time ever, support for unions in the Gallup poll dipped below fifty per cent. A 2010 Pew Research poll offered even worse numbers, with just forty-one per cent of respondents saying they had a favorable view of unions, the lowest level of support in the history of that poll. In part, this is a simple function of the weak economy. The statistician Nate Silver has found a historical correlation between the unemployment rate and the popularity of unions. Furthermore, an analysis of polling data by David Madland and Karla Walter, of the Center for American Progress, shows that, when times are bad, the approval ratings of government, business, and labor tend to drop in sync; voters, it seems, blame all powerful institutions equally. And although organized labor is much less powerful than it once was, voters don’t seem to see it that way: more than sixty per cent of respondents in the 2010 Pew poll said that unions had too much power. The recession has also magnified the gap between unionized and non-unionized workers. Union workers, on average, get paid more than their non-unionized counterparts—most estimates put the difference at around fifteen per cent—and that wage premium widens during recessions. Similarly, union workers often still have defined-benefit pensions, which sets them apart from all those Americans who watched their retirement accounts get ravaged by the financial crisis. That’s given rise to what Olivia Mitchell, an economics professor at Wharton, calls “pension envy.” This resentment is most evident in the backlash against public-sector workers (who now make up a majority of union members). A recent study by the economics professors Keith Bender and John Heywood found that, when you control for a host of variables, public employees are not actually paid more than their private-sector counterparts. But they do often enjoy good retirement schemes, and in states like Illinois and California politicians have agreed to hefty contracts with state employees and then underfunded the pension plans, leaving future taxpayers to pick up the bill. It’s no wonder that people are annoyed. * from the issue * cartoon bank * e-mail this Still, the advantages that union workers enjoy when it comes to pay and benefits are nothing new, while the resentment about these things is. There are a couple of reasons for this. In the past, a sizable percentage of American workers belonged to unions, or had family members who did. Then, too, even people who didn’t belong to unions often reaped some benefit from them, because of what economists call the “threat effect”: in heavily unionized industries, non-union employers had to pay their workers better in order to fend off unionization. Finally, benefits that union members won for themselves—like the eight-hour day, or weekends off—often ended up percolating down to other workers. These days, none of those things are true. Organized labor has been on the wane for decades, to the point where just seven per cent of private-sector workers belong to a union. The benefits that union members still get—like defined-contribution pensions or Cadillac health plans—are out of reach of most workers. And the disappearance of unions from the private sector has radically diminished the threat effect, meaning that unions don’t raise the wages of non-union workers. The result is that it’s easier to dismiss
[Marxism-Thaxis] Shooting of Jewish Congresswoman Giffords Is Not Just a Tragedy
Rabbi Michael Lerner Saturday 09 January 2010 http://www.truth-out.org/shooting-jewish-congresswoman-giffords-not-just-a-tragedy66685 It's part of a right-wing assault on government and the liberals and progressives who support it. Liberals and progressives are hated in many Red States because they support government policies that put restrictions on corporations; challenge the racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred of foreigners that has been part of the traditional conception of what male power; and tend to be insensitive to the legitimate fears that many have about the collapse of families, religious traditions, and the triumph of materialism and selfishness. This last set of concerns is totally valid, and the willingness of liberals and progressives to only see the hateful side of right-wing ideology infuriates many who are drawn to the right not because of hatred of government or because of the various hatreds, but because they feel that their legitimate concerns about the selfishness and looking out for number one are never heard by the Left. Yet, there are a core of haters in the Right, we've seen them not only on Fox t.v., Glenn Beck and company included, but also in the faces of some who were attracted to the Tea Party or who now rally around the anti-immigrant movement. When right-wingers create a climate of hate against liberal government, and then individuals act on that hate as they did in blowing up a Federal Building in Oklahoma City and now this premeditated murder of several people (we are still praying for the survival of Congresswoman Giffords) in hate-filled Arizona (where she had been attacked viciously but not physically for her support of health care reform), the state whose racism has made it famous around the world for profiling Mexican immigrants, there is no call to investigate and protect ourselves from these right-wing hate mongers. Similarly, when Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by right wing Jews, the right-wing ultra-nationalist community in Israel's West Bank settlers never faced any serious investigation of their role in creating the hateful climate that helped produce the murderer. Why does what Hillary Clinton once quite accurately described as the vast right-wing conspiracy get a free pass when its rhetoric can easily be seen to contribute to the climate of hate from which the actions of this lone gunman can be easily understood to have emerged? Isn't it time for us to demand that our government investigate the violence-generating discourse of the racist and the haters? Why, when the House of Representatives was in the hands of Democrats, did they not have any committee or subcommittee at work holding pubic hearings to explore what kind of legislation might help protect us citizens and our liberal and progressive representatives from the kind of violence that exploded in Arizona earlier today? Because if there is no such larger exploration of how to stop the haters and to uncover the full dimensions of those who are committed to destroying, one way or the other, the non-military functions of our government, t hen ordinary people are going to be more afraid to participate in the democratic process or come to any public events--and that is a decisive step toward allowing fascism to triumph in this country. So don't think of this action as a mere irrational event, because it fits very well with the agenda of those who want to give the country back 100% to the corporate powers and their Republican agents in Congress while scaring those who might wish to participate in helping build any kind of progressive alternative. And don't underplay the anti-Semitic elements either. According to Ha'aretz newspaper, the killer's website had Hitler's hate book Mein Kampf listed as one of his favorite books! When Jews are targeted, it's rarely by chance. Right-wing haters particularly hate Jews, since Jews were the most consistent non-African American constituency for the Democratic Party , in 2010 voting 70% for Democrats. If the rest of the country voted like Jews we'd have a liberal Democratic Congress. And this is not lost on the right-wingers. Just listen to the tapes of Nixon and you see how extreme the hatred of Jews is revealed to be by the moderate Nixon, and now we have the more extreme elements of the Right coming to power. Jews are, in the minds of these haters, the same as liberals or progressives--maybe even the worst of them. And then, the sexism of the right manifests dramatically in attempting to kill a woman--the perfect symbol of uppity femini sts who dare to take power away from the male chauvinists who thought that their country was about white male Christian power. You won't hear the media dealing with these dimensions of the reality--but they are central. Most immediately, I invite you to join us in prayer for Representative Gabrielle Gifford and all those wounded and their families! May she receive a refu'ah shleymah, a healing of body and a healing of soul, and
[Marxism-Thaxis] San Francisco's 1st Asian-American mayor sworn-in
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_san_francisco_interim_mayor ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Tea Party Group Blames 'Leftist' for Giffords Shooting
Tea Party Group Blames 'Leftist' for Giffords Shooting by Garance Franke-Ruta The Atlantic January 9, 2011 -- 1:49 PM ET http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/01/tea-party-group-blames-leftist-for-giffords-shooting/69153/ cross-posted on the Cuentame Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/cuentame?v=app_11007063052#!/notes/cuentame/is-the-blame-game-appropriate-tea-party-group-blames-leftists-for-giffords-shoot/486496362610 Showing no sign of tamping down on divisive political rhetoric in the wake of the shooting of 20 people that left six dead in Tucson Saturday, the Tea Party Nation group e- mailed its members Sunday warning them they would be called upon to fight leftists in the days ahead and defend their movement. TPN founder Judson Phillips, in an article linked off the e- mail The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and the left's attack on the Tea Party movement, described the shooter as a leftist lunatic and Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik as a leftist sheriff who was one of the first to start in on the liberal attack. Phillips urged tea party supporters to blame liberals for the attack on centrist Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot through the head and is now fighting for her life, as a means of defending the tea party movement's recent electoral gains. The hard left is going to try and silence the Tea Party movement by blaming us for this, he wrote. Clinton used the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to blame conservative talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh and The tactic worked then, backing conservatives off and possibly helping to ensure a second Clinton term. The left is coming and will hit us hard on this. We need to push back harder with the simple truth. The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words, he wrote. The Tea Party Nation is the sponsor of the Tea Party Convention at which former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was the keynote speaker in February 2010. America is ready for another revolution! Palin told the assembled at the conference, to standing ovations. Other tea party groups took a less combative tone. Tea Party Express Chairwoman Amy Kremer said Saturday her group was shocked and saddened by the terrible tragedy. These heinous crimes have no place in America, and they are especially grievous when committed against our elected officials. Spirited debate is desirable in our country, but it only should be the clash of ideas, Kremer said in a statement published by the New York Times. An attack on anyone for political purposes, if that was a factor in this shooting, is an attack on the democratic process. We join with everyone in vociferously condemning it. [Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at The Atlantic and oversees politics coverage for TheAtlantic.com ] == Arizona's History of Hate: A Timeline by Jamilah King ColorLines.com January 11 2011 http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/01/arizonas_history_of_hate_a_timeline.html Shortly after Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, the state of Arizona became jokingly known in some progressive circles as the new Mississippi. Of course, this didn't change the fact that Mississippi is still Mississippi. But the comparison was based on the idea that Arizona had become to the modern immigrant rights movement what Mississippi was to its civil rights predecessor over four decades earlier: ground zero for the political and cultural changes sweeping the rest of the country. And the defiant, often violent, backlash that comes with it. According to activists at Alto Arizona, last Saturday's deadly shooting rampage in Tucson is just the latest in a string of violent political acts dating back over two decades in the state. They've put together a timeline dating back to 1987 showing that Arizona's status as a rouge state isn't new. It includes Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lawlessness in Maricopa County and the horrific murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father by Minuteman activists, and much more. Check out the timeline, which we've posted above, and add your own story. http://prezi.com/doz0js1hj3rv/a-history-of-hate-political-violence-in-arizona/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
