from:"c b"

OJim Farmelant

 Yes, Ronald Reagan was the master of this, but
 he had his predecessors too.  Back in the
 1950s, President Eisenhower pulled a similar act too.
 He was famous for his press conferences with his jumbled syntax,
 his confusing and confuesed answers, which aroused jeers
 from the pundits but which greatly increased his appeal
 to his base.  We have his diaries where he boasted of
 doing just that.  It was, after all, rather unlikely that
 the man who had been the successful  Supreme Allied Commander
 in Europe during WWII would have been a dope.

^
CB: Agree. Believe it or not, Eisenhower crossed my mind when I wrote
the above; just I didn't want to get too sidetracked from the Tea
Party. Not only that, Ike's Military Industrial Complex is still a
very good left concept. When we say Nixon was to the left of some
Democrats today, Hell , Ike was big in the Popular Front.

  Actually, Lincoln was probably folksier campaigning than the actual
level of his intellect.

George Bush , the Elder's failed effort to dumb down  was the one who
exposed the Reagan ruse somewhat, because he had to try to make such a
switch from his already established personality. How can the former
Cen Intelligence Ag Director be  a yokel LOL

The other Tea Party central Reaganite trope is running to be the
government by running against gov'ment in general. Government is bad
, but I'm running to be in the bad government. And of course, we hold
The Individual to be sacred.






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

 They are frauds and demagoges ( i can never spell
 that). They are big time liars. A main characteristic of the Tea
 Party
 is its mendacity.


 Charles Brown
 ?@Richard these people were born a third base and think they hit
 a
 home run all this ..
 
 This points to a central Tea Party Lie. Most Tea Partiers are middle
 to upper income. They are the types who declare the USA the greatest
 country in the history of the world AND they are among the main
 material beneficiaries of this American Greatness they announce.
 So,
 what a fraud for them to be attacking the US government which has
 done
 more for them than the vast majority of the People. It's such an
 obvious fraud. They are Spoiled , Whining Brats.


 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html

 Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated

 Charles Brown ?...the US government which has done more for them
 than
 the vast majority of the People, but of course, they have and purvey
 the self-serving delusion that they are these Great Individuals who
 accomplished their greater prosperity all on their own, by
 themSelves,
 independently of society, government and others - NOT ! They have
 the
 bourgeois libertarian delusions of grandeur.

 
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 $1* Buys $50,000 Life Insurance. Adults or Children. No Medical Exam.
 http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4d40c6051c584dfb18bst06vuc

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Differences: Colloquial use of delusions of grandeur

Grandiose delusions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Not to be confused with grandiosity.
Delusions of grandeur redirects here. For other uses, see Delusions
of grandeur (disambiguation).
Question book-new.svg
   This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references.
Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)

Grandiose delusions or delusions of grandeur are principally a subtype
of delusional disorder but could possibly feature as a symptom of
schizophrenia and manic episodes of bipolar disorder.[1] Grandiose
delusions are characterized by fantastical beliefs that one is famous,
omnipotent, or otherwise very powerful. The delusions are generally
fantastic, often with a supernatural, science-fictional, or religious
bent (for example, belief that one is an incarnation of Jesus Christ).

Grandiose delusions are distinct from grandiosity, in that the
sufferer does not have insight into his loss of touch with reality.

In colloquial usage, one who overestimates one's own abilities,
talents or situation is sometimes said to have 'delusions of
grandeur'. This is generally due to excessive pride, rather than any
actual delusions.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] The Star Spangled Banner - Jimi Hendrix

My kind a patriotism lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa-q-ztyZZw

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Voo Doo Child

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoAXW30mMAgNR=1

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Total Capitulation

Total Capitulation

Tariq Ali
24 January 2011
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/01/24/tariq-ali/total-
capitulation/

The ‘Palestine Papers’ being published this week by
al-Jazeera confirm in every detail what many Palestinians
have suspected for a long time: their leaders have been
collaborating in the most shameful fashion with Israel and
the United States. Their grovelling is described in grim
detail. The process, though few accepted it at the time,
began with the much-trumpeted Oslo Accords, described by
Edward Said in the LRB at the time as a ‘Palestinian
Versailles’. Even he would have been taken aback by the
sheer scale of what the PLO leadership agreed to
surrender: virtually everything except their own salaries.
Their weaknesses, inadequacies and cravenness are now in
the public domain.

Now we know that the capitulation was total, but still the
Israeli overlords of the PLO refused to sign a deal and
their friends in the press blamed the Palestinians for
being too difficult. They wanted Palestine to be crushed
before they would agree to underwrite a few moth-eaten
protectorates that they would supervise indefinitely. They
wanted Hamas destroyed. The PLO agreed. The recent assault
on Gaza was carried out with the approval of Abbas and
Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, not to mention Washington and its
EU. The PLO sold out in a literal sense. They were bought
with money and treated like servants. There is TV footage
of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David playfully
tugging at Arafat’s headgear to stop him leaving. All
three are laughing. Many PLO supporters in Palestine must
be weeping as they watch al-Jazeera and take in the scale
of the betrayal and the utter cynicism of their leaders.
Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to
disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try
to destroy Hamas militarily.

The two-state solution is now dead and buried by Israel
and the PLO. Impossible for anyone (even the BBC) to
pretend that there can be an independent Palestinian
state. A long crapulent depression is bound to envelop
occupied Palestine, but whether Israel likes it or not
there will one day be a single state in the region,
probably by the end of this century. That is the only
possible solution, apart from genocide.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Bachmann criticized

James :
This is a must watch as Matthews hits the nail square in his depiction
of an almost scriptural recreation of American history
Chris Matthews Rips Tea Party Express Co-Founder Sal Russo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4SuzEWI_0o


Matthews tries to get a comment from Russo on balloon head Michele
Bachmann's lack of knowledge on American history and slavery

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[Marxism-Thaxis] we-the-spiteful/

http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/

Here we are, in 2011—and although 2004 seems like a different world
from today, separated by more events than we can make sense of, the
left still hasn’t come around to answering that big Kansas mystery
about Americans’ farcical voting habits. So the left was left baffled
once again when, in 2009, millions of Americans volunteered as
foot-soldiers to fight for a second-rate TV personality named Rick
Santelli and his rich speculator friends at the Chicago Exchange, who
called for a revolution to protect their money from “losers” because
Santelli and his speculator buddies didn’t want to “subsidize losers’
mortgages.” Next thing you know, these same losers took to the streets
to defend the semi-celebrity Santelli, his rich speculator pals, and
the Koch brothers from… losers.

That is, they revolted against themselves.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Where is the next Milton Rogovin? Gage Gallery opens Working-Class Eye exhibit

http://peoplesworld.org/where-is-the-next-milton-rogovin-gage-gallery-opens-working-class-eye-exhibit/

Where is the next Milton Rogovin? Gage Gallery opens Working-Class Eye exhibit

by: Teresa Albano
January 25 2011

tags: photography, art, working class
JohnBachtellRogovinGage520x324

CHICAGO - The gallery was packed, students scribbling on their
notepads or taking snapshots with their iPhones, gray-haired and
gray-bearded viewers in their winter finery trying to make their way
from photo to photo. Hundreds milled around enjoying hot dogs with
sauerkraut and jalapeños, kettle chips in a paper cone, New York
City's iconic black and white cookie, and of course, Western New
York's Genesee beer.

And so went the opening of The Working-Class Eye of Milton Rogovin
at Roosevelt University's Gage Gallery here, Jan. 20. Buffalo,
N.Y.-based Rogovin, 101, had died just two days before the
long-planned exhibition, turning the celebration of his art into a
celebration of his life.

Exhibit curator and gallery director Michael Ensdorf said the opening
is a celebration of Milton's rich and long life. He said tributes
from all over the world came pouring in for Rogovin, on Twitter,
Facebook, New York Times, NPR and the Library of Congress blog.

Ensdorf worked with Roosevelt labor historians Erik Gellman and Jack
Metzgar and combed through1,000 images housed currently at Mark
Rogovin's, Milton's son, Forest Park home.

Ensdorf introduced Mark by saying his biography keeps Milton's spirit
of arts and activism alive today. Rogovin, an artist and activist
whose accomplishments include founding The Peace Museum, was visibly
moved by the outpouring of support, while mourning the death of his
father.

Mark paid tribute to his mother, Ann, who died in 2003, as a true
partner in his father's art. Mom was integral in everything my dad
did, except work in the dark room.

As he presented a few family slides, Rogovin shared a particularly
ironic and funny story, about waiting for his father's hospice
caregivers at his Buffalo home. We were waiting for the caregiver to
arrive and heard the doorbell. As we opened the door, the woman
standing there said, Hi. I am Jo McCarthy.

Milton and Ann Rogovin, like thousands of others at the time, were
attacked for their political beliefs during the dismal days of Joe
McCarthy's communist witch-hunts. Milton's optometry business was
ruined by the relentless redbaiting, FBI hounding and attacks in the
media. He was called to testify before the House Un-American
Activities Committee and refused to name names or answer the
un-constitutional question, Are you a member of the Communist Party?

The headline in The Buffalo Evening News the next day read: Rogovin
Named as Top Red in Buffalo, Balks at Nearly All Queries, which was
just one of five redbaiting articles in the newspaper that day.

In Milton's obituary, that same newspaper reports without remorse the
repercussions on the Rogovins and their three children, Paula, Ellen
and Mark, were devastating.

Yet, somehow, out of the devastation, the Rogovins turned to the
working class people of Buffalo and Western New York - Black, Italian,
Puerto Rican, Native and Arab Americans - for solace and inspiration,
and found a unique artistic voice in photographing the lives of the
unsung.

The rich have their own photographers. I photograph the forgotten
ones, Milton Rogovin liked to say. And so launched an incredible
journey that is just now gaining the recognition it deserves.

The Rogovins' journey took them beyond the East and West Sides of
Buffalo and Lackawanna steel factories and foundries to Appalachia,
Chile, Zimbabwe, Spain, Mexico and Cuba, where in black and white
Milton captured the global commonalities of working people and the
human spirit.

Mark Rogovin said his father was not a trained photographer and did
not study other social realist photographers like Walker Evans, but
was influenced by the art of Kathe Kollwitz, Vincent Van Gogh, Honore
Daumier and Francisco Goya, all of whom had love and respect for the
poor.

However, Mark said, his father did receive technical help from his
friend and photographer, Minor White.

The Gage exhibit includes Rogovin's first social documentary series,
Storefront Churches - Buffalo, completed in 1960. After receiving
less than stellar feedback from some African American friends, Milton
Rogovin wrote to the towering intellectual and activist, W.E.B. Du
Bois, to ask if I could show him my photographs and get his opinion
about my 'Storefront Church' series because the criticisms troubled
him.

Du Bois invited Rogovin to his Brooklyn home and expressed great
interest in the series and offered to write an introduction to them.
The introduction and series appeared in the photography magazine,
Aperture. In the introduction, Du Bois frames the series by quoting
from his own 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk:

The music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with
its touching minor cadences,

[Marxism-Thaxis] We, The Spiteful: Class War For Idiots

Class War For Idiots / January 22, 2011
We, The Spiteful
By Mark Ames

http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/

super-retard.JPG

In the summer of 2004, I published an article in the New York Press
that answered Thomas Frank’s question “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
The Bush-Kerry campaign was heating up, and it was clear to me that
the American left was going to make the same mistake it’s been making
for 30 years, and will continue making until it faces some unpleasant
truths about the rank, farcical psychology that drives American voting
habits. Why don’t they vote in their own economic interests? Why don’t
voters vote rationally, the way we were taught in grade school civics
classes? In a rational world, with rational voters voting in their
rational economic interests, Bush—who dragged America into two lost
wars before destroying the entire financial system—would’ve been
forced to resign before the first primary and exiled to Saudi Arabia;
rationally, rational voters would have elected anyone or anything,
John Kerry or a coconut crab, over that fuck-up of fuck-ups, George W.
Bush.

The answer came to me just I was just finishing my book Going Postal.
Researching and writing that book was a real mind-fuck: spending all
those isolated months sloshing through Middle American malice. I
realized something obvious when I pulled back from all that research
and looked at the Kerry-Bush race: malice and spite are as American as
baseball and apple pie. But it’s never admitted into our romantic,
naïve, sentimental understanding of who Americans really are, and what
their lives are really like.

If the left wants to understand American voters, it needs to once and
for all stop sentimentalizing them as inherently decent, well-meaning
people being duped by a tiny cabal of evil oligarchs—because the awful
truth is that they’re mean, spiteful jerks being duped by a tiny cabal
of evil oligarchs. The left’s naïve, sentimental, middle-class view of
“the people” blinds them to all of the malice and spite that is a
major premise of Middle American life. It’s the same middle-class
sentimentality that allowed the left to be duped into projecting
candidate Obama into the great progressive messiah, despite the fact
that Obama’s record offered little evidence besides skin pigment to
support that hope. (For the record, I called out the left’s gullible
Obamaphilia during the primary campaigns in early 2008—here in
Alternet, and here in The eXile.)

suckers1

Here we are, in 2011—and although 2004 seems like a different world
from today, separated by more events than we can make sense of, the
left still hasn’t come around to answering that big Kansas mystery
about Americans’ farcical voting habits. So the left was left baffled
once again when, in 2009, millions of Americans volunteered as
foot-soldiers to fight for a second-rate TV personality named Rick
Santelli and his rich speculator friends at the Chicago Exchange, who
called for a revolution to protect their money from “losers” because
Santelli and his speculator buddies didn’t want to “subsidize losers’
mortgages.” Next thing you know, these same losers took to the streets
to defend the semi-celebrity Santelli, his rich speculator pals, and
the Koch brothers from… losers.

That is, they revolted against themselves.

The whole thing was absurd, of course—when Yasha Levine and I first
broke the story in February, 2009 that the Tea Party was an Astroturf
campaign funded by the (then little-known) Koch brothers and
FreedomWorks, no one was more surprised by it all than we were.

It took a long time for the left to get behind our story, largely
because it was just too damn depressing for the left to accept. But by
then, the Tea Party story got even more absurd: what began as a
tightly-coordinated PR campaign quickly exploded into a genuine mass
protest movement. And why not? If Kansas had spent two decades voting
against its rational interests in the polling booth, why wouldn’t
Kansas take the next logical step and hit the streets for an
anti-self-interest revolution?

And they weren’t just revolting against their own rational economic
self-interest—they also rebelled against their health and longevity,
storming town hall meetings with guns threatening any lawmaker who
dared offer them cheaper, better health care of the sort enjoyed in
every other First World country, where people live longer healthier
lives than we do, at half the cost. Fueled by spite, these protesters
proved to the world that Americans would rather die in misery and
bankruptcy than live longer healthier lives. Thanks to them, Obama,
who was never thrilled about offering us cheaper health care in the
first place, made sure that whatever happened, we’d get the very worst
health care reform possible, one that left everyone bitter except the
health care plutocrats. A victory for the spite-ists, in other words.

Like the Grumpy Old Man character, Americans are miserable and we like
it! We love it! Hallelujah!

[Marxism-Thaxis] What's the story behind Mack the Knife?

Staff Report from the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
What's the story behind Mack the Knife?
April 1, 2004

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2155/whats-the-story-behind-mack-the-knife

Dear Straight Dope:

What's with the lyrics to the song Mack the Knife? I heard a radio
report a couple of years ago describing it as a song about the real
life Detroit organized-crime scene. Is it really about the Detroit
mob?

— Harmon Everett

There were no mobs in Detroit in 1728, when the character we know as
Mack the Knife first made his appearance. In those days, there were
only about 30 families living in Fort Ponchartrain near Detroit du
Herie (strait of Erie), and none of them belonged to the Purple Gang.
In fact, the reference is to London, not Detroit, and to politicians
more than street gangs.

The character of Macheath, later to become Mack the Knife, first
appeared in The Beggar's Opera by John Gay (1685-1732). Gay was a
popular English playwright and poet, a friend and collaborator of
Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.

The Beggar's Opera is a comic ballad opera, the first of its kind, and
took London theatre by storm. Gay uses lower-class criminals to
satirize government and upper-class society, an idea that has been
used often ever since. A century and a half later, the title
characters in Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance note that
they are more honest than many a king on a first-class throne. And
in our time, wasn't it Bob Dylan who wrote, Steal a little and they
throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king?

The main character of The Beggar's Opera is a swashbuckling thief
called Macheath. He's a dashing romantic, a gentleman pickpocket, a
Robin Hood type. He is polite to the people he robs, avoids violence,
and shows impeccable good manners while cheating on his wife. The
character is usually understood as partly a satire of Sir Robert
Walpole, a leading British politician of the time.

The Beggar's Opera was a success from its first production in 1728,
and continued to be performed for many years. It was the first musical
play produced in colonial New York; George Washington enjoyed it.

We now skip about 200 years to post-WWI Europe and Bertolt Brecht
(1898-1956), a distant cousin of this SDSTAFFer. World War I had a
revolutionary impact on the arts. The avant-garde movement, in despair
after the war, embraced the concept of the anti-hero. Gay's play was
revived in England in 1920, and Brecht thought it could be adapted to
suit the new era - who's more of an anti-hero than Macheath? So in
1927 he got a German translation and started writing Die
Dreigroschenoper, The Three Penny Opera.

Brecht worked with Kurt Weill (1900-1950) on the adaptation. He did
far more than just translate Gay's play, he reworked it to reflect the
decadence of the period and of the Weimar republic. Mostly, Brecht
wrote or adapted the lyrics, and Weill wrote or adapted the music.
Gay's eighteenth-century ballads were replaced with foxtrots and
tangos. Only one of Gay's melodies remained in the new work. The play
parodies operatic conventions, romantic lyricism and happy endings.

The main character is still Macheath, but Macheath transformed. He's
now called Mackie Messer, AKA Mack the Knife. (Messer is German for
knife.) Where Gay's Macheath was a gentleman thief, Brecht's Mackie is
an out-and-out gangster. He's no longer the Robin Hood type, he's an
underworld cutthroat, the head of a band of street robbers and
muggers. He describes his activities as business and himself as a
businessman. Still, the character does manage to arouse some
sympathy from the audience.

So, we finally get to your song, the Ballad of Mack the Knife (Die
Moritat von Mackie Messer) from The Three Penny Opera. The song was a
last-minute addition to appease the vanity of tenor Harald Paulson,
who played Macheath. However, it was performed by the ballad singer,
to introduce the character. The essence of the song is: Oh, look
who's coming onstage, it's Mack the Knife - a thief, murderer,
arsonist, and rapist. (If these last two startle you, be patient for
a couple paragraphs.)

The Brecht-Weill version premiered in Germany in 1928 and was an
instant hit. Within a year, it was being performed throughout Europe,
from France to Russia. Between 1928 and 1933 it was translated into 18
languages and had over 10,000 performances.

In 1933, The Three Penny Opera was first translated into English and
brought to New York by Gifford Cochran and Jerrold Krimsky. There have
been at least eight English translations over the years. In the 1950s,
Marc Blitzstein wrote an adaptation, cleaning up Mack the Knife and
dropping the last two stanzas about arson and rape. At the revival in
New York using the Blitzstein translation, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill's
widow, made her comeback - she had a role in the original 1928 Berlin
production.

Blitzstein's sanitized adaptation is the best known version of the
song in the English-speaking world, and

[Marxism-Thaxis] More fascism in Arizona

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-minutemen-murder-20110126,0,4235852.story

Mother describes border vigilante killings in Arizona
Gina Gonzalez says her 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, pleaded
for her life. Opening arguments begin in the trial of Shawna Forde of
the Minutemen movement, who is accused in the killing of the girl and
her father.
Shawna Forde

Shawna Forde, center, listens during opening arguments in her murder
trial in Pima County Superior Court in Tucson. The Minutemen member is
accused in the killing of a 9-year-old girl and her father. (Greg
Bryan / Associated Press / January 26, 2011)

By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times

January 25, 2011, 8:55 p.m.

Reporting from Tucson —
As her mother tells it, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores had begged the
border vigilantes who had just broken into her house, Please don't
shoot me.

But they did — in the face at point-blank range, prosecutors allege,
as Brisenia's father sat dead on the couch and her mother lay on the
floor, pretending that she too had been killed in the gunfire. FOR THE
RECORD:
Border vigilante: A story in Wednesday's Section A on the trial of a
border vigilante in Arizona accused of killing a 9-year-old girl and
her father misidentified a defense attorney in the case. It is Eric
Larsen, not Kevin Larson. —

Even as this city continues to mourn the victims in the shooting of
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, another tragedy took center stage Tuesday, as
opening arguments began in the trial of a member of a Minutemen group
accused of killing Brisenia and her father, Raul Flores Jr.

Prosecutors allege that in May 2009, Shawna Forde decided to strike an
odd alliance with drug dealers in southern Arizona: Forde would help
the traffickers ransack their rivals' houses for stashes of drugs and
cash, which could then fund her fledgling group, Minutemen American
Defense.

She and another border vigilante, dressed in uniforms, identified
themselves as law enforcement officers before bursting into the Flores
home, prosecutors allege. If convicted, Forde could face the death
penalty.

That second member of Forde's group is scheduled to go on trial next
month, as is the alleged drug dealer with whom prosecutors say the
Minutemen collaborated. But on Tuesday it was the turn of the woman
who prosecutors contend masterminded the attack.

Shawna Forde organized and planned this event, prosecutor Kellie L.
Johnson told a Pima County Superior Court jury.

Forde's trial was almost delayed by the Giffords shooting. Her
attorneys questioned whether an accused murderer allegedly driven by
right-wing passions could get a fair trial here. The man charged in
the Giffords rampage left behind a trail of writings with no coherent
ideology, but Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik set off a
national firestorm by insisting that Arizona's conservative politics
played a role in that attack.

Forde's lawyer, Kevin Larson, told jurors that there is no evidence
she was in the Flores house during the attack.

The state will present to you absolutely no witnesses that will put
her in that home on May 30, Larson said. He said his client was
simply guilty of being an exaggerator extraordinaire for boasting of
her plans to rob drug smugglers.

Forde spent several years as a bit player in the national Minutemen
movement, a loose-knit affiliation of groups that believe that if the
federal government cannot secure the border, armed citizens should do
the job.

Prosecutors say that in April 2009, Forde told two members of the
movement in Denver that she had linked up with drug dealers in the
tiny town of Arivaca, Ariz., just north of the Mexican border and
about 50 miles southwest of Tucson. She proposed helping the dealers
raid a rival's house, which would be full of drug profits she could
steal, prosecutors allege.

The plan so alarmed the members, prosecutors say, that they contacted
the FBI. But Larson said it was such an obviously outlandish idea that
the FBI did nothing with it.

On Tuesday, Johnson and Brisenia's mother, Gina Gonzalez, outlined the
chilling sequence of events in the attack.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on May 30, 2009, Gonzalez was woken by her
husband, who told her that police seemed to be at the door. The two
went to the front room, where their daughter Brisenia was sleeping on
the couch so she could be close to her new dog.

There were two people in camouflage outside — a short, heavyset woman
who did all the talking and a tall man carrying a rifle and pistol,
his face blackened by greasepaint, Gonzalez said. The woman told them
they were accused of harboring fugitives and needed to open the door.

Once the pair were inside, the man —identified by authorities as Jason
Bush — told Flores, Don't take this personal, but this bullet has
your name on it, Gonzalez testified Tuesday.

According to testimony, Bush shot Flores, then Gonzalez. Gonzalez was
hit in the shoulder and leg and slumped to the floor. She testified
that she played

[Marxism-Thaxis] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

Carrol Cox
Homo sapiens evolved as groups, not as individuals thinking for
themselves. All evidence about reading  writing is grounded in what
an isolated individual can produce. And of course, reading and writing
had no part in our evolution. There is no hard (or for that matter
soft) evidence that both reading and writing are not 'freakish' skills
of individuals, which cut across the more 'natural' operations of
human intelligence, namely thinking aloud in a group -- and a group,
moreover defined by common purposes, purposes which involve
spontaneous recognition that the individual cannot think by or for
him/herself or set his/her individual needs.

That is speculation, but it makes as much sense as all this nonsense
about how sad it is that so many (possibly, possibly not) isolated
individuals can read or want to read.

^
CB: Hear, hear !  , Carrol. And even reading and writing is highly
social even when done in isolation by an individual.  The great
individual genius in an area of reading and writing , Newton, said
this well when he said he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Bourgeois thought is completely saturated with the Delusion of The
Individual's Grandeur and Robinsonades.

The group s u refer to above always include past, dead generations
of said groups, thereby expanding the sociality of all individuals
enormously.



Carrol

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Tunisian Protests Spread to Algeria, Yemen

Tunisian Protests Spread to Algeria, Yemen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDjYkL3fpJI


Drawing inspiration from the revolt in Tunisia, thousands of Yemenis
fed up with their president's 32-year rule demanded his ouster
Saturday in a noisy demonstration that appeared to be the first
large-scale public challenge to the strongman. (Jan. 22)

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Al Qaeda And the U.S., Still Battling

Peter L. Bergen

THE LONGEST WAR

The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda

By Peter L. Bergen

Illustrated. 473 pages. Free Press. $28.
Enlarge This Image
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

American and Afghan soldiers after a bomb was detonated in Kandahar
Province in December.
Books of The Times
Al Qaeda And the U.S., Still Battling
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 17, 2011

By now there are already dozens of books — a few of them,
groundbreaking works of reportage — about Al Qaeda and 9/11, the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush and Obama administrations’
management of national security.
What makes “The Longest War,” a new book by Peter L. Bergen, CNN’s
national security analyst, particularly useful is that it provides a
succinct and compelling overview of these huge, complex subjects,
drawing upon other journalists’ pioneering work as well as the
author’s own expertise in terrorism and interviews with a broad
spectrum of figures including leading counterterrorism officials,
members of the Taliban, failed suicide bombers, family and friends of
Osama bin Laden and top American military officers.

For readers interested in a highly informed, wide-angled,
single-volume briefing on the war on terror so far, “The Longest War”
is clearly that essential book.

Mr. Bergen, who was part of the CNN team that interviewed Mr. bin
Laden in 1997, and who has written two earlier books about the Al
Qaeda leader, writes with enormous authority in these pages. He gives
the reader an intimate understanding of how Al Qaeda operates on a
day-to-day basis: he says it’s a highly bureaucratic organization with
bylaws dealing with everything from salary levels to furniture
allowances to vacation schedules. And he creates a sharply observed
portrait of Mr. bin Laden that amplifies those laid out by earlier
writers like Lawrence Wright (“The Looming Tower”), Steve Coll (“The
Bin Ladens”) and Jonathan Randal (“Osama: The Making of a Terrorist”).

Although some of Mr. Bergen’s conclusions are bound to be
controversial, the lucidity, knowledge and carefully reasoned logic of
his arguments lend his assessments credibility and weight, even when
he is challenging conventional wisdom.

On the matter of the dangers posed by Pakistan, Mr. Bergen says that a
rapidly increasing population combined with high unemployment will
play into the hands of militants, but adds that “despite years of
hysterical analysis by the commentariat in the United States, as the
Obama administration came into office Pakistan was not poised for an
Islamist takeover similar to what happened in the shah’s Iran.”

“There was no major religious figure around which opposition to the
Pakistani government could form,” he writes, “and the alliance of
pro-Taliban parties known as the MMA, which had come to power in two
of Pakistan’s four provinces in 2002 and had implemented some
window-dressing measures such as banning the sale of alcohol to
non-Muslims, did nothing to govern effectively and in the election in
2008 they were annihilated in the polls. Ordinary Pakistanis were also
increasingly fed up with the tactics used by the militants. Between
2005 and 2008, Pakistani support for suicide attacks dropped from 33
percent to 5 percent.”

In these pages Mr. Bergen also disputes parallels drawn between the
experiences of America and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (an
argument invoked by the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld as a reason
for keeping the number of United States troops there to a minimum).
Mr. Bergen argues that there is no real analogy since “the Soviets
employed a scorched-earth policy,” killing “more than a million
Afghans and forcing some five million more to flee the country,” while
more American troops have been needed — and wanted by the Afghan
people — to secure the country from the Taliban and to “midwife a more
secure and prosperous country.”

Mr. Bergen also contends that “the growing skepticism about Obama’s
chances for success in Afghanistan” was “largely based on some deep
misreadings of both the country’s history and the views of its people,
which were often compounded by facile comparisons to the United
States’ misadventures” in Vietnam and Iraq.

Skeptics who argue for a reduced American presence in Afghanistan are
wrong, he contends, because “the United States had tried this already”
twice: first, when it abandoned the country in the wake of the Soviet
defeat there, creating a chaotic vacuum in the 1990s from which the
Taliban emerged; and second, when the administration of George W. Bush
got distracted with the war in Iraq and allowed the resurgence of the
Taliban in Afghanistan.

The sections of this book dealing with 9/11, the war in Iraq and the
prosecution of the war on terror retrace a lot of ground covered by
the important work of other journalists, most notably Thomas Ricks,
author of the book “Fiasco”; Bob Woodward of The Washington Post; and
Jane Mayer, Seymour M. Hersh and George Packer of The New Yorker.

[Marxism-Thaxis] Yemen protests urge leader's exit

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/201112314714887766.html


Thousands of Yemeni students, activists and opposition groups have
held protests at Sanaa University, demanding President Ali Abdullah
Saleh's ouster in what appeared to be the first large-scale challenge
to the strongman.

Around 2,500 students, activists and opposition groups chanted slogans
against the president, comparing him to Tunisia's ousted President
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose people were similarly enraged by
economic woes and government corruption.

Oh, Ali, join your friend Ben Ali, protesters chanted.

Police fired tear gas at the demonstrators, whose grievances include
proposed constitutional changes that would allow the president to rule
for a lifetime. Around 30 protesters were detained, a security
official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not
authorised to speak to the press.

Since the Tunisian turmoil, Saleh has ordered income taxes slashed in
half and has instructed his government to control prices.

He also ordered a heavy deployment of anti-riot police and soldiers to
several key areas in the capital and its surroundings to prevent any
riots.

Peoples' grievances

Nearly half of Yemen's population lives below the poverty line of $2 a
day and doesn't have access to proper sanitation. Less than a tenth of
the roads are paved. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their
homes by conflict, flooding the cities.

The government is riddled with corruption, has little control outside
the capital, and its main source of income - oil - could run dry in a
decade.

Protests were also held in the southern port city of Aden, where calls
for Saleh to step down were heard along with the more familiar slogans
for southern secession. Police fired on demonstrators, injuring four,
and detained 22 others in heavy clashes.

Musid Ali, executive director of the Yemeni-American anti-terrorism
center, told Al Jazeera that protests in Yemen were natural given long
years of suffering from dictatorship.

It is natural for an uprising to come. This has come after 30 years
of rule, people are hungry; there is no development for the people,
people are fed up, people are saying Ali Saleh enough is enough.

The Yemeni regime is the terror in Yemen, they are using al Qaeda to
get more money from the west, he said.

While some students protested against Saleh, others affiliated with
his General People's Congress demonstrated in his support, with
banners calling for him to remain in office, and for parliamentary
elections to be held in April.

Saleh said in December that parliamentary polls would take place in
April with or without opposition parties, some of which have said they
are considering boycotting the election.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Obama said on Tunisian rebellion :

And we saw that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of
the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And
tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the
people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all
people. (Applause.)

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/26/133224933/transcript-obamas-state-of-union-address?ps=cprs

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[Marxism-Thaxis] “The Longest War,” a new book by Peter L. Bergen,

This analysis sees Al Qaeda coming into growing conflict with other Muslims

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/books/18book.html?pagewanted=2_r=1

So what is Al Qaeda’s future around the world? On one hand, Mr. Bergen
writes that “many thousands of underemployed, disaffected men in the
Muslim world will continue to embrace bin Laden’s doctrine of violent
anti-Westernism” — he cites a 2008 survey showing that people in
countries as diverse as Morocco, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey
expressed more “confidence” in the Qaeda leader than in President Bush
by significant margins. On the other, he says that half a decade after
9/11 there emerged powerful new critics of Al Qaeda who had jihadist
credentials themselves: Abdullah Anas, who had been a friend of Mr.
bin Laden during the anti-Soviet jihad, denounced the 2005 suicide
bombings in London as “criminal acts,” and Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, a
leading Saudi religious scholar, personally rebuked Mr. bin Laden for
killing innocent children, the elderly and women “in the name of Al
Qaeda.”

In the end, Mr. Bergen says, Al Qaeda has four “crippling strategic
weaknesses” that will affect its long-term future: 1) its killing of
many Muslims civilians — acts forbidden by the Koran; 2) its failure
to offer any positive vision of the future (“Afghanistan under the
Taliban is not an attractive model of the future for most Muslims”);
3) the inability of jihadist militants to turn themselves “into
genuine mass political movements because their ideology prevents them
from making the kind of real-world compromises that would allow them
to engage in normal politics”; and 4) an ever growing list of enemies,
including any Muslims who don’t “exactly share their
ultra-fundamentalist worldview.”

“By the end of the second Bush term,” Mr. Bergen writes near the end
of this valuable book, “it was clear that Al Qaeda and allied groups
were losing the ‘war of ideas’ in the Islamic world, not because
America was winning that war — quite the contrary: most Muslims had a
quite negative attitude toward the United States — but because Muslims
themselves had largely turned against the ideology of bin Ladenism.”

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference : Thoreau's Robinsonade

Henry David Thoreau' Individualist Anarchism is revealed
demonstratively in his famous Robinsonade adventure in _Walden Pond_.
Thoreau is left politically in many practices, but his theory is shown
to be at least partly in the great bourgeois individualist tradition
by that book and activity.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau




Civil Disobedience and the Walden years: 1845–1849
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau in June 1856 (aged 39)
Appletons' Thoreau Henry David signature.jpg
Core works and topics[show]
Civil Disobedience
Herald of Freedom
The Last Days of John Brown
Life Without Principle
Paradise (to be) Regained
A Plea for Captain John Brown
Reform and the Reformers
Remarks After the
Hanging of John Brown
The Service
Sir Walter Raleigh
Slavery in Massachusetts
Thomas Carlyle and His Works
Walden
A Walk to Wachusett
A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers
Wendell Phillips Before the
Concord Lyceum
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau
Thoreau Society
Related topics[show]
Abolitionism · Anarchism
Anarchism in the United States
Civil disobedience
Concord, Massachusetts
Conscientious objection
Direct action · Ecology
Environmentalism
History of tax resistance
Individualist anarchism
John Brown · Lyceum movement
Nonviolent resistance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Simple living · Tax resistance
Tax resisters · Transcendentalism
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
Walden Pond
v · d · e
“       I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear;
nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to
cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then
to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness
to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be
able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.         ”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For [28]

Thoreau needed to concentrate and get himself working more on his
writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, Go out upon
that, build yourself a hut,  there begin the grand process of
devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope
for you.[29] Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year
experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small,
self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest
around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in a pretty pasture
and woodlot of 14 acres (57,000 m2) that Emerson had bought,[30] 1.5
miles (2.4 km) from his family home.[31]

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector,
Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes.
Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War
and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal.
(The next day Thoreau was freed, against his wishes, when his aunt
paid his taxes.[32]) The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In
January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on The Rights and
Duties of the Individual in relation to Government[33] explaining his
tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the
lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:

       Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of
the individual to the State– an admirable statement of the rights of
the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His
allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar's expulsion from Carolina,
his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr.
Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal,
were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great
pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's.

—Bronson Alcott, Journals (1938)[34]

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled Resistance to Civil
Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was
published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers. Thoreau had
taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem
The Mask of Anarchy (1819), that Shelley begins with the powerful
images of the unjust forms of authority of his time – and then
imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.[35]

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described
their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a
publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own
expense, though fewer than 300 were sold.[23]:234 Thoreau
self-published on the

[Marxism-Thaxis] Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?hp

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: Geniuses

http://www.moyak.com/papers/adorno-schoenberg-atonality.html

Theodor Adorno's Theory of Music and its Social Implications

by Moya K. Mason


Art is mind, and mind does not at all need to feel itself obligated to
the community, to society, it may not, in my view, for the sake of its
freedom, its nobility.

^^^
CB: Mind here is individual mind. There couldn't be a clearer
statement of the Individualist conception.

^


 An art that goes in unto the folk, which makes her own the needs of
the crowd, of the little man, of small minds, arrives at wretchedness,
and to make it her duty is the worst small -- mindedness, and the
murder of mind and spirit. And it is my conviction that mind, in its
most audacious, unrestrained advance and researches, can, however
unsuited to the masses, be certain in some indirect way to serve man
in the long run.
Excerpt from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus




http://www.moyak.com/papers/adorno-schoenberg-atonality.html





During the 1930s Adorno considered Arnold Schoenberg the most
progressive person in modern music.(13) He was a musical genius who
received only a few months of training from Alexander von Zemlinsky.
His early songs provoked hostile criticisms and he found solace in his
painting, revealing strong expressionist tendencies. He taught at the
prestigious Sterns Conservatory in Berlin, and later, conducted in
important cities across Europe before entering military service in
World War I. During the early 1920s he lived and taught in Vienna,
leaving the city to teach a master class at the Prussian Academy of
Arts in Berlin. When he was fired by the Nazis in 1933, Schoenberg
went to Paris and converted back to his childhood religion of Judaism.
Soon after, he relocated to the United States, where he lived out the
rest of his life.(14)

Schoenberg composed for chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, stage,
voice, and keyboard. Alongside his musical interests and passion for
painting was a proficiency for writing, with many articles, books, and
essays, to his credit. One of his many maxims, which seems
autobiographical was: genius learns only from itself, talent chiefly
from others.


CB: Another genius, Newton had it better. He knew he stood on the
shoulders of giants.

^

(15) Schoenberg's music developed through four major transformations.
The first was typified by a postromanticism and was influenced by
Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner, as was Alban Berg's early music. His
second period was considerably more abstract and reflected an
innovative spirit. His atonal-expressionism began with Das Buch der
hangenden Garten in 1908, and employed an increased absence of
tonality and a tendency towards dissonance over the typical
consonance. He eliminated symmetry and disregarded formal sequences in
his music, destroying the traditional bonds of coherence and unity in
compositions. These manifestations were considered quite revolutionary
and were abhorred by the general population of the day.(16)

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference

http://www.moyak.com/papers/adorno-schoenberg-atonality.html

Adorno's own work was influenced by Schoenberg's atonality, but in
much more than his musical compositions. In Origins of Negative
Dialetics, Susan Buck-Morss observes that:

Schoenberg's revolution in music provided the inspiration for
Adorno's own efforts in philosophy, the model for his major work on
Husserl during the 1930s. For just as Schoenberg had overthrown
tonality, the decaying form of bourgeois music, so Adorno's Husserl
study attempted to overthrow idealism, the decaying form of bourgeois
philosophy.(1

^
CB: He. Feuerbach, Marx and Engels had already done that
almost a hundred years earlier.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: Libertarian Delusions of Individual Grandeur

Michelle Bachmann's intelligence isn't the issue. Like Palin and W,
she wants to appear less educated, because that enhances her brand
with a she's just one of us vitality. None of these people are
stupid. You can't get where they are if you're stupid. Ad hominem
attacks result from laziness. Zero in on the issues. When we attack
the personalities we are allowing the Republicans to choose the ground
we fight on.


CB:I very much agree with this. The simulated regular person act
pandering to American anti-intellectualism is vintage Reagan. None of
them are stupid. They are frauds and demagoges ( i can never spell
that). They are big time liars. A main characteristic of the Tea Party
is its mendacity.


Charles Brown
‎@Richard these people were born a third base and think they hit a
home run all this ..

This points to a central Tea Party Lie. Most Tea Partiers are middle
to upper income. They are the types who declare the USA the greatest
country in the history of the world AND they are among the main
material beneficiaries of this American Greatness they announce. So,
what a fraud for them to be attacking the US government which has done
more for them than the vast majority of the People. It's such an
obvious fraud. They are Spoiled , Whining Brats.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html

Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated

Charles Brown ‎...the US government which has done more for them than
the vast majority of the People, but of course, they have and purvey
the self-serving delusion that they are these Great Individuals who
accomplished their greater prosperity all on their own, by themSelves,
independently of society, government and others - NOT ! They have the
bourgeois libertarian delusions of grandeur.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Life after Capitalism

2011-01-25 Thread c b

http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/life-after-capitalism/

Life after Capitalism
Robert Skidelsky
Project Syndicate | Wednesday, January 19, 2011

LONDON – In 1995, I published a book called The World After Communism.
Today, I wonder whether there will be a world after capitalism.

That question is not prompted by the worst economic slump since the
1930’s. Capitalism has always had crises, and will go on having them.
Rather, it comes from the feeling that Western civilization is
increasingly unsatisfying, saddled with a system of incentives that
are essential for accumulating wealth, but that undermine our capacity
to enjoy it. Capitalism may be close to exhausting its potential to
create a better life – at least in the world’s rich countries.

By “better,” I mean better ethically, not materially. Material gains
may continue, though evidence shows that they no longer make people
happier. My discontent is with the quality of a civilization in which
the production and consumption of unnecessary goods has become most
people’s main occupation.

This is not to denigrate capitalism. It was, and is, a superb system
for overcoming scarcity. By organising production efficiently, and
directing it to the pursuit of welfare rather than power, it has
lifted a large part of the world out of poverty.

Yet what happens to such a system when scarcity has been turned to
plenty? Does it just go on producing more of the same, stimulating
jaded appetites with new gadgets, thrills, and excitements? How much
longer can this continue? Do we spend the next century wallowing in
triviality?

For most of the last century, the alternative to capitalism was
socialism. But socialism, in its classical form, failed – as it had
to. Public production is inferior to private production for any number
of reasons, not least because it destroys choice and variety. And,
since the collapse of communism, there has been no coherent
alternative to capitalism. Beyond capitalism, it seems, stretches a
vista of…capitalism.

There have always been huge moral questions about capitalism, which
could be put to one side because capitalism was so successful at
generating wealth. Now, when we already have all the wealth we need,
we are right to wonder whether the costs of capitalism are worth
incurring.

Adam Smith, for example, recognized that the division of labor would
make people dumber by robbing them of non-specialized skills. Yet he
thought that this was a price – possibly compensated by education –
worth paying, since the widening of the market increased the growth of
wealth. This made him a fervent free trader.

Today’s apostles of free trade argue the case in much the same way as
Adam Smith, ignoring the fact that wealth has expanded enormously
since Smith’s day. They typically admit that free trade costs jobs,
but claim that re-training programs will fit workers into new, “higher
value” jobs. This amounts to saying that even though rich countries
(or regions) no longer need the benefits of free trade, they must
continue to suffer its costs.

Defenders of the current system reply: we leave such choices to
individuals to make for themselves. If people want to step off the
conveyor belt, they are free to do so. And increasing numbers do, in
fact, “drop out.” Democracy, too, means the freedom to vote capitalism
out of office.

This answer is powerful but naïve. People do not form their
preferences in isolation. Their choices are framed by their societies’
dominant culture. Is it really supposed that constant pressure to
consume has no effect on preferences? We ban pornography and restrict
violence on TV, believing that they affect people negatively, yet we
should believe that unrestricted advertising of consumer goods affects
only the distribution of demand, but not the total?

Capitalism’s defenders sometimes argue that the spirit of
acquisitiveness is so deeply ingrained in human nature that nothing
can dislodge it. But human nature is a bundle of conflicting passions
and possibilities. It has always been the function of culture
(including religion) to encourage some and limit the expression of
others.

Indeed, the “spirit of capitalism” entered human affairs rather late
in history. Before then, markets for buying and selling were hedged
with legal and moral restrictions. A person who devoted his life to
making money was not regarded as a good role model. Greed, avarice,
and envy were among the deadly sins. Usury (making money from money)
was an offense against God.

It was only in the eighteenth century that greed became morally
respectable. It was now considered healthily Promethean to turn wealth
into money and put it to work to make more money, because by doing
this one was benefiting humanity.

This inspired the American way of life, where money always talks. The
end of capitalism means simply the end of the urge to listen to it.
People would start to enjoy what they have, instead of always wanting
more. One can imagine a society of private

[Marxism-Thaxis] Karachi workers struggle and win! All 4500 workers reinstated!

2011-01-25 Thread c b

Karachi workers struggle and win! All 4500 workers reinstated!
KESC WORKERS STRUGGLE IN kARACHI -19-23 JAN 0011

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=135613633167373id=11041473643#!/album.php?aid=26076id=11643110089fbid=136474126417357

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798

2011-01-22 Thread c b

Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In
1798cb31...@gmail.com

Lets see how Scalia tries to get around this .

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/

Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798
Jan. 17 2011 - 9:08 pm | 76,349 views | 3 recommendations | 177 comments
By RICK UNGAR
John Adams: the man who at certain point...

Image via Wikipedia

The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to
block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in
a Florida District Court.

The pleadings, in part, read -

The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate,
either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and
legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.

State of Florida, et al. vs. HHS

It turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed -
“An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law
authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital
service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to
purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle
over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating
this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.

And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for
signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had
a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.

Here’s how it happened.

During the early years of our union, the nation’s leaders realized
that foreign trade would be essential to the young country’s ability
to create a viable economy. To make it work, they relied on the
nation’s private merchant ships – and the sailors that made them go –
to be the instruments of this trade.

The problem was that a merchant mariner’s job was a difficult and
dangerous undertaking in those days. Sailors were constantly hurting
themselves, picking up weird tropical diseases, etc.

The troublesome reductions in manpower caused by back strains, twisted
ankles and strange diseases often left a ship’s captain without enough
sailors to get underway – a problem both bad for business and a strain
on the nation’s economy.

But those were the days when members of Congress still used their
collective heads to solve problems – not create them.

Realizing that a healthy maritime workforce was essential to the
ability of our private merchant ships to engage in foreign trade,
Congress and the President resolved to do something about it.

Enter “An Act for The Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen”.

I encourage you to read the law as, in those days, legislation was
short, to the point and fairly easy to understand.

The law did a number of fascinating things.

First, it created the Marine Hospital Service, a series of hospitals
built and operated by the federal government to treat injured and
ailing privately employed sailors. This government provided healthcare
service was to be paid for by a mandatory tax on the maritime sailors
(a little more than 1% of a sailor’s wages), the same to be withheld
from a sailor’s pay and turned over to the government by the ship’s
owner. The payment of this tax for health care was not optional. If a
sailor wanted to work, he had to pay up.

This is pretty much how it works today in the European nations that
conduct socialized medical programs for its citizens – although 1% of
wages doesn’t quite cut it any longer.

The law was not only the first time the United States created a
socialized medical program (The Marine Hospital Service) but was also
the first to mandate that privately employed citizens be legally
required to make payments to pay for health care services. Upon
passage of the law, ships were no longer permitted to sail in and out
of our ports if the health care tax had not been collected by the ship
owners and paid over to the government – thus the creation of the
first payroll tax in our nation’s history.

When a sick or injured sailor needed medical assistance, the
government would confirm that his payments had been collected and
turned over by his employer and would then give the sailor a voucher
entitling him to admission to the hospital where he would be treated
for whatever ailed him.

While a few of the healthcare facilities accepting the government
voucher were privately operated, the majority of the treatment was
given out at the federal maritime hospitals that were built and
operated by the government in the nation’s largest ports.

As the nation grew and expanded, the system was also expanded to cover
sailors working the private vessels sailing the Mississippi and Ohio
rivers.

The program eventually became the Public Health Service, a government
operated health service that exists to this

[Marxism-Thaxis] Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798

2011-01-22 Thread c b

Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In
1798

Lets see how Scalia tries to get around this .

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/

Image via Wikipedia

The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to
block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in
a Florida District Court.

The pleadings, in part, read -

The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate,
either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and
legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.

State of Florida, et al. vs. HHS

It turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.

And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for
signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had
a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.

Here’s how it happened.

The problem was that a merchant mariner’s job was a difficult and
dangerous undertaking in those days. Sailors were constantly hurting
themselves, picking up weird tropical diseases, etc.

But those were the days when members of Congress still used their
collective heads to solve problems – not create them.

Realizing that a healthy maritime workforce was essential to the
ability of our private merchant ships to engage in foreign trade,
Congress and the President resolved to do something about it.

Enter “An Act for The Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen”.

I encourage you to read the law as, in those days, legislation was
short, to the point and fairly easy to understand.

The law did a number of fascinating things.

This is pretty much how it works today in the European nations that
conduct socialized medical programs for its citizens – although 1% of
wages doesn’t quite cut it any longer.

As the nation grew and expanded, the system was also expanded to cover
sailors working the private vessels sailing the Mississippi and Ohio
rivers.

The program eventually became the Public Health Service, a government
operated health service that exists to this day under the

[Marxism-Thaxis] Tunisia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbMKsVVwstUNR=1

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[Marxism-Thaxis] revolutionary situation

The Tunisian revolution was sparked , according to one report, by an
act of self-burning by
an unemployed college graduate who was selling fruit on the street and
had his carts taken away by the police.

Lenin said a revolutionary
situation exists  when the ruling class can no longer rule in the old
way and the masses no longer want to live in the old way

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Straight shooters

http://metrotimes.com/columns/straight-shooters-1.1092038


Politics  Prejudices
Straight shooters
All I want is a weapon of mass destruction

By Jack Lessenberry

Published: January 19, 2011


A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed.

Those are the actual words of the Second Amendment to the United
States Constitution, held sacred by our nation's gun nuts.

They are powerful words indeed, regardless of the fact the clause is
poorly written, and clearly means something different than almost
everyone thinks it does. No matter that many of its fervent defenders
don't even know what the Second Amendment really says.

True, others have memorized and can unthinkingly recite these words,
sort of like Roman Catholics in the old days repeating Latin
incantations they didn't understand.

Language and the meanings of words change over time, but it is clear
that what adoption of the Second Amendment really meant was that
people should be allowed to have weapons (arms) in case the government
had to quickly throw together a militia to drive off marauders, or put
down some local illegal uprising, like the Pennsylvania farmers who
rebelled over whiskey taxes a couple of years later.

Naturally, it logically follows that the citizens ought to be able to
keep these arms in their homes, as in, on two hooks over the
fireplace, since most people didn't have anywhere else to put them to
begin with, and many used their rifles to go hunt dinner, much of the
time.

Bear in mind too that the nation in which the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights were written was a collection of small, rural states,
with a total population of slightly less than four million people
about the size of metropolitan Detroit today. High-tech arms meant a
single-shot musket, accurate to within a hundred yards or so, maybe.

Once you fired it, it took close to a minute to reload. If you shot it
more than a few times in a row, it was apt to overheat and misfire or
blow up in your face. This was not seen as a weapon of mass
destruction, but more like a household appliance one could use for
defense.

So it was logical to stipulate that the citizens had the right to
keep and bear arms, when these were the arms. What's crazy is that
these words, written for practical reasons in a primitive, largely
rural world, are today being used to justify making it legal for a
mentally troubled person to buy a high-tech weapon of mass destruction
and turn it on helpless civilians.

Anyone who thinks the framers of the Constitution intended that is, to
put it politely, crazier than a shithouse rat.

Nobody I know has remarked on this, but what's going on here isn't a
problem of rights so much as a problem, first of all, of language,
specifically, the word arms. Throughout much of history, arms
meant bows and arrows and pieces of metal that men whacked away at
each other with, at close quarters. Then came gunpowder.

The Founding Fathers may have expected continued improvements in
weaponry. But none of them could have imagined anything like Jared
Loughner's Glock, a weapon of mass destruction good for one thing
only: killing.

There is more difference between a Glock and a Revolutionary War-era
musket than between a musket and a stone club. Maybe even between a
musket and the pistol Sirhan Sirhan used to shoot Bobby Kennedy in a
hotel in 1968.

Had Loughner had a normal pistol, he might have gotten five or six
shots off before being subdued. Instead, he killed or wounded 19
people within seconds, and might easily have got even more, if he
could have gotten a second clip into his gun.

Nobody in their right mind thinks the Founding Fathers would have
wanted to make it possible for this sick young man to spray a peaceful
crowd with lethal ammunition. Yet that's what all sorts of ideologues
and ignorant fools, some of them on the nation's highest courts,
claim.

All this really stems from a problem of semantics. Specifically,
allowing the term arms to be applied to anything that kills people.
Someone, somewhere, needs to come up with some way of defining arms
in a common sense way. We also need, I think, to stop using the term
gun control, which immediately polarizes everyone, and ends anything
like rational give-and-take.

These two steps may make it easier to move on and enact some sensible
regulations. This won't be easy; someone has to stand up and defy the
political power of the National Rifle Association, a group run by
fanatics who are determined to block any limitations on weapons.

Otherwise, we are going to continue to be doomed. More than 10,000 of
us a year, anyway; the number killed, like little Christina Greene, by
gun violence. Another 85,000 or so are shot and survive, like
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

If that's the world we are willing to settle for, very well. If you
are young and poor, you are probably more vulnerable than I am.

But even so, if

[Marxism-Thaxis] Crisis on the corner

http://metrotimes.com/columns/crisis-on-the-corner-1.1092036


Crisis on the corner
Should we legalize drugs to save the hood?

By Larry Gabriel

Published: January 19, 2011
Print Email Twitter Facebook MySpace Stumble Digg
More Destinations

The War on Drugs has been fought from corner to corner in black
communities across the United States. Although African-Americans make
up only 13 percent of the general population, 40 percent of drug
offenders in federal prisons and 45 percent of offenders in state
prisons are black.

It's not that blacks make up 40 or 45 percent of American drug users.
A study of New York drug arrests from 1997 to 2006 by sociologist
Harry Levine and drug policy activist Deborah Small found that
18-to-25-year-old whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to
smoke marijuana, yet blacks were five times and Hispanics three times
more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession.

Similar statistics can be found in all kinds of studies out there. All
of it leads to black and brown communities where young men committing
victimless offenses get criminal records, get sent to jail, lose their
families, and enter a system wherein a life of crime is more likely
than getting an education and a job.

So it's amazing that the drug war and civil rights haven't been more
closely tied together the way linguist and conservative political
pundit John McWhorter links them in a recent column for the The New
Republic's website titled Getting Darnell Off the Corners: Why
America Should Ride the Anti-Drug-War Wave.

I don't know what that guy on the corner is named, Pookie or Tyrone or
whatever, but McWhorter wrote ... with no War on Drugs there would
be, within one generation, no 'black problem' in the United States.
Poverty in general, yes. An education problem in general — probably.
But the idea that black America had a particular crisis would rapidly
become history, requiring explanation to young people. The end of the
War on Drugs is, in fact, what all people genuinely concerned with
black uplift should be focused on. ...

And, in fact, he says all drugs should be legalized. Some civil rights
groups have nibbled at the edges of the drug war, sometimes suggesting
that marijuana is not as bad as other drugs. The California NAACP went
that route last year when it came out in support of Proposition 19 to
legalize marijuana in the state. Proposition 19 lost by a 53.5 to 46.5
percent vote in November. But California NAACP President Alice Huffman
threw down the gauntlet in saying marijuana law reform is a civil
rights issue.

Neil Franklin, president of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who
worked with Huffman in creating the NAACP policy, casts some wisdom on
the roiling waters of drug policy debate.

We went to a prison here in Baltimore with a section for juveniles;
it's a high school in prison for them, says Franklin, an
African-American with more than 30 years policing experience in
Maryland. We did a workshop with 12. I think 10 were there for drug
violations. We asked them what your neighborhood would be like if
drugs were legal tomorrow. The number one answer was that they would
have no money. There would pretty much be no money in their
households. The drug market provides more money into those communities
than anything else. The second answer was that the police would no
longer harass us if drugs were legal in the community.

The kids focused in on two important issues: economics and
police-community relations. Legalizing drugs would cut the economic
legs out from under the drug business because legal drugs would be
cheaper and easily obtainable. Drug dealers would no longer be able to
finance terrorizing neighborhoods, and drug addicts would be a public
health issue not a law enforcement problem. Regarding community
relations, growing up without an adversarial relationship with the
police goes a long way in creating citizens who would rather cooperate
with law enforcement than fight it.

Despite the failure of the drug war to reduce the use of illicit
drugs, support for prohibition remains strong among many
African-Americans. Carl Taylor, a sociology professor at Michigan
State University who focuses on crime and other urban issues, takes a
hard line against legalization. I contend strongly that illegal
drugs, legal drugs and alcohol are truly the barbed wire around the
neck of the black community. I see not one serious plus in my life
experiences professionally or personally from illicit narcotics. ... I
don't agree with McWhorter. I don't think he knows what he's talking
about. If you put the black market out of business, the fellas out on
the street are still going to find deeper and better drugs. Just
because I don't know what to do doesn't mean you do something that
you've got to be out your mind to do from where I'm sitting. The
ignorance of very distorted socialization, the racism, the
discrimination is not going to go away, the failure of the family
structure,

[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference

US lawyers in establishing the legal fiction of the personhood of the
corporation or the Personhood of Capital make a nice representation of
the deep bourgeois ideological illusory concept of Individual
Determinism.  Capital is a profoundly determining _social_ institution
in capitalism, natch.  By making Capital fictional individuals, the
story, i.e. Lie, of Individual determinism is internally consistent.


CB


On 1/5/2011 10:13 AM, c b wrote:
 “In community, the individual is, crucial as the prior condition for
 forming a community. … Every individual in the community guarantees
 the community; the public is a chimera, numerality is everything…”

 – Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

 
 Pace Kierkegaard, of course , for we social determinists , this is
 absolutely backward, fundamentally wrong. The social, the communal,
 the community is prior to individuals. Kierkegaard's statement is a
 basic maxim of bourgeois ideology, whether as existentialism,
 libertarianism, Social Darwinism, positivism, Reaganism, Tea Parting
 et al. In all , the individual is primary over and determinative of
 the social. It is an error in the understanding of the levels of
 organization of reality, and specifically of human life.  Human
 culture, society and history constitute an emergent level of reality,
 in which the whole is more than the some of its parts, and is
 determinative of the parts. It is a philosophical error concerning the
 relationship of the whole and the parts. The human individual is a
 social individual. Even Kierkegaard was; he just didn't know it. So,
 is the most radical libertarian; they just don't know it. Our species
 name should be, not homo sapiens, but homo communis. Our high level of
 sociality is the differentia specifica of our species.




But no-one lives in a vacuum.

^^^
CB: Hello ! Exactly. No _individual_, no ONE, lives in a social
vaccum. No one is an isolated individual. This is the fundamental
bourgeols ideological trick, foolishness. It is rife among the
intelligencia of bourgeois society.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: bourgeois' myth of individual determination of society

the larger human community is predicated upon the pre-existence of individuals.


With due respect, this is the crux. Social determinists r saying that
the community is not predicated on pre-existing , independent,
isolated individuals, or “selves”. Rather the opposite: Society
preexists the individuals. There have never been a bunch of
preexisting individual persons who then got together and made the
group. Robinson Crusoe is a myth so to speak.

Even more an individual ideas are all rooted in their culture. Take
remarkably unique individuals like Mozart , Newton or any genius.
Their ideas are developments of socially generated topics. Newton
understood this and said he stood on the shoulders of giants, most of
them dead when he lived, by the way. This is a key point. Human
Society includes dead generations. Maybe this makes it clearer how
society preexists individuals.

Ironically, the word itself gives the message. Individuals are not
divisiable, or can’t be divided out from society.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: Personhood of Capital

(The Myth of the Wizard of Oz)

[lbo-talk] Mommy, can a corporation be embarrassed?
Eubulides paraconsistent at comcast.net

[Mereological mayhem for methodological individualism]

http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/as-citizens-united-turns-1-u.s.-supreme-court-considers-corporate-personhoo

As Citizens United Turns 1, U.S. Supreme Court Considers Corporate
Personhood Again by Marian Wang ProPublica, Jan. 19, 2011, 1:37 p.m.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today on a case between ATT
and the Federal Communications Commission, revisiting the legal
concept of “corporate personhood” last strengthened under the court’s
Citizen United ruling on corporate campaign spending. (That
controversial ruling has its first anniversary this week.)

The case before the court focuses on whether ATT, a corporation, can
stop government agencies from releasing information obtained for law
enforcement purposes by claiming such disclosures would violate the
company’s “personal privacy.”

The phrase is included as an exemption in the text of the Freedom of
Information Act, a federal law that instructs government agencies on
what information to make public. As the SCOTUS blog notes, however,
there’s no specific definition of the words “personal privacy,” so
it’s not clear whether a corporation can qualify as a person in this
case.

The lower court, the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, sided with ATT in
an earlier ruling, stating that corporations are capable of being
embarrassed, harassed and stigmatized by public disclosures. If the
Supreme Court agrees, it could limit how much information federal
agencies are able to release about the companies they've investigated.
(Here's Bloomberg, with more background.)

In the appeal before the high court, a review of the briefs in support
of each side shows a number of news organizations and government
openness and watchdog groups backing up the FCC. Major business
groups—namely the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber
of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—have filed briefs in support
of ATT.

Justice Elena Kagan, it’s worth noting, was solicitor general at the
time when the FCC and U.S. government petitioned the Supreme Court to
review the ATT case. She has had to recuse herself from considering
it, and should the court split 4-4 without her, the lower court’s
decision would stand.

Kagan’s successor as solicitor general, Neal Katyal, has argued that
“a corporation itself can no more be embarrassed, harassed, or
stigmatized than a stone.”

According to early reports on the day’s proceedings, the high court
showed signs that it agreed. A transcript [PDF] of the oral arguments
has also been made available.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental Difference: Mommy, can a corporation be embarrassed?

, Eubulides wrote:

[Mereological mayhem for methodological individualism]

^^^
CB: Yes indeed

US lawyers in establishing the legal fiction of the personhood of the
corporation or the Personhood of Capital make a nice representation of
the deep bourgeois ideological mythical concept of Individual
Determinism. Capital in the form of Capital enterprises is a
profoundly determining _social_ institution
in capitalism, natch. By making Capital, which is obviously a social
institution, into fictional individuals or persons, the
story, i.e. Lie, of Individual determinism is made internally consistent.

from another discussion of methodological individualism :

c b wrote:
“In community, the individual is, crucial as the prior condition for
forming a community. … Every individual in the community guarantees
the community; the public is a chimera, numerality is everything…”

– Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

Pace Kierkegaard, of course , for we social determinists , this is
absolutely backward, fundamentally wrong. The social, the communal,
the community is prior to individuals. Kierkegaard's statement is a
basic maxim of bourgeois ideology, whether as existentialism,
libertarianism, Social Darwinism, positivism, Reaganism, Tea Partying,
personal responsibility of the poor for their poverty, psychologism and
phenomenology in social science, Margaret Thatcher's there is no such
thing as society, Robinsonades, rational/reasonable man in law and
economics,
et al. (Personhood of the Corporation). In all , the individual
is primary over, prior to and determinative of
the social. Society is a collection of sovereign individuals, It is
an error in the understanding of the levels of
organization of reality, and specifically of human life. Human
culture, society and history constitute an emergent level of reality,
in which the whole is more than the some of its parts, and is
determinative of the parts. It is a philosophical error concerning the
relationship of the whole and the parts. The human individual is a
social individual. Even Kierkegaard was; he just didn't know it. So,
is the most radical libertarian; they just don't know it. Our species
name should be, not homo sapiens, but homo communis. Our high level
of sociality is the differentia specifica of our species.

But no-one lives in a vacuum.

^^^
CB: Hello ! Exactly. No _individual_, no ONE, lives in a social
vaccum. No one is an isolated individual. This is the fundamental
bourgeols ideological trick, foolishness. It is rife among the
intelligencia of bourgeois society.

http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/as-citizens-united-turns-1-u.s.-supreme-court-considers-corporate-personhoo

As Citizens United Turns 1, U.S. Supreme Court Considers Corporate
Personhood Again
by Marian Wang
ProPublica, Jan. 19, 2011, 1:37 p.m.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Menu of choices presented to a free will is socially determined

Bad faith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29

A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are
always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own
chosen goal or project. The claim holds that individuals cannot
escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance,
even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule,
to negotiate, to act in complicity, to resist nonviolently, or to
counter-attack.

Although circumstances may limit individuals (facticity), they cannot
force persons as radically free beings to follow one course over
another. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know
that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For
Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes
undeniable precedence (for instance, I cannot risk my life, because I
must support my family) is to assume the role of an object in the
world, merely at the mercy of circumstance—a being-in-itself that is
only its own facticity
^
CB: Well yes, Comrade Sartre, Ye Olde problem of free will and
determinism.  Humans do have free will; so do dogs. But a human
individual still exercises her choices among alternatives that are
given to her _by society_. The alternatives or menu from which she
chooses do not originate and well up from within her individual being
or person. The feelings and emotions that determine her choices are
learned from her society and culture; their genesis is not in her
individual infinite soul or psyche or Mind. Valuing supporting
one's family is learned and socially determined.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Menu of choices presented to a free will is socially determined

In other words:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted
from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brain of the living.

— Karl Marx (The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)





Bad faith

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29

A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are
always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own
chosen goal or project. The claim holds that individuals cannot
escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance,
even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule,
to negotiate, to act in complicity, to resist nonviolently, or to
counter-attack.

Although circumstances may limit individuals (facticity), they cannot
force persons as radically free beings to follow one course over
another. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know
that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For
Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes
undeniable precedence (for instance, I cannot risk my life, because I
must support my family) is to assume the role of an object in the
world, merely at the mercy of circumstance—a being-in-itself that is
only its own facticity
^
CB: Well yes, Comrade Sartre, Ye Olde problem of free will and
determinism.  Humans do have free will; so do dogs. But a human
individual still exercises her choices among alternatives that are
given to her _by society_. The alternatives or menu from which she
chooses do not originate and well up from within her individual being
or person. The feelings and emotions that determine her choices are
learned from her society and culture; their genesis is not in her
individual infinite soul or psyche or Mind. Valuing supporting
one's family is learned and socially determined.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Ressentiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

Ressentiment

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In philosophy and psychology, ressentiment (pronounced /rəsɑ̃tiˈmɑ̃/)
is a particular form of resentment or hostility. Ressentiment is the
French word for resentment (fr. Latin intensive prefix 're', and
'sentire' to feel).

Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one
identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment
of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority
and perhaps jealousy in the face of the cause generates a
rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or
denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an
enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

A term imported by many languages for its philosophical and
psychological connotations, ressentiment is not to be considered
interchangeable with the normal English word resentment, or even the
French ressentiment. While the normal words both speak to a feeling
of frustration directed at a perceived source, neither speaks to the
special relationship between a sense of inferiority and the creation
of morality. Thus, the term 'Ressentiment' as used here always
maintains a distinction.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Perspectives
  o 2.1 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
  o 2.2 Scheler
  o 2.3 Weber
  o 2.4 Sartre
* 3 References
* 4 See also

[edit] History

Ressentiment was first introduced as a philosophical/psychological
term by the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard[1][2][3].
Friedrich Nietzsche later independently expanded the concept; Walter
Kaufmann ascribes Nietzsche's use of the term in part to the absence
of a proper equivalent term in the German language, contending that
said absence alone would be sufficient excuse for Nietzsche, if not
for a translator.[4] The term came to form a key part of his ideas
concerning the psychology of the 'master-slave' question (articulated
in Beyond Good and Evil), and the resultant birth of morality.
Nietzsche's first use and chief development of Ressentiment came in
his book On The Genealogy of Morals; see esp §§ 10–11).[1] [2].

The term was also put to good use by Max Scheler in his book
Ressentiment, published in 1912, and later suppressed by the Nazis.

Currently of great import as a term widely used in Psychology and
Existentialism, Ressentiment is viewed as an effective force for the
creation of identities, moral frameworks and value systems.
[edit] Perspectives
[edit] Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of
levelling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new
things and tearing down old, razing and demolishing as it goes, a
reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary: it hinders
and stifles all action; it levels. Levelling is a silent,
mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals. ... If
the jewel which every one desired to possess lay far out on a frozen
lake where the ice was very thin, watched over by the danger of death,
while, closer in, the ice was perfectly safe, then in a passionate age
the crowds would applaud the courage of the man who ventured out, they
would tremble for him and with him in the danger of his decisive
action, they would grieve over him if he were drowned, they would make
a god of him if he secured the prize. But in an age without passion,
in a reflective age, it would be otherwise. People would think each
other clever in agreeing that it was unreasonable and not even worth
while to venture so far out. And in this way they would transform
daring and enthusiasm into a feat of skill, so as 'to do something,
for something must be done.'
Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: A Literary Review

(T)he problem with the other origin of the “good,” of the good
man, as the person of ressentiment has thought it out for himself,
demands some conclusion. It is not surprising that the lambs should
bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason
for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And
when the lambs say among themselves, These birds of prey are evil,
and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite,
a lamb,—should he not be good? then there is nothing to carp with in
this ideal's establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a
little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, We bear no grudge
against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier
than a tender lamb.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of
one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego
creates the illusion of an

[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference : objectivity of human consciousness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness

Analysis

While a prisoner of war in 1940/1941 Sartre read Martin Heidegger's
Being and Time, an ontological investigation through the lens and
method of Husserlian phenomenology (Husserl was Heidegger's teacher).
Reading Being and Time initiated Sartre's own enquiry leading to the
publication in 1943 of Being and Nothingness whose subtitle is 'A
Phenomenological Essay on Ontology'. Sartre's essay is clearly
influenced by Heidegger though Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any
measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of
fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian re-encounter
with Being. In his much gloomier account in Being and Nothingness, man
is a creature haunted by a vision of completion, what Sartre calls
the ens causa sui, and which religions identify as God. Born into the
material reality of one's body, in an all-too-material universe, one
finds oneself inserted into being (with a lower case b).
Consciousness is in a state of cohabitation with its material body,
but has no objective reality; it is nothing (no thing).
Consciousness has the ability to conceptualize possibilities, and to
make them appear, or to annihilate them.

^^^
CB: Conscious _is_ overwhelmingly  created by objective _social_
reality, by culture. This is fundamentally wrong. Individual human
consciousness is a thing, a socially made thing.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Bees

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_bees_usa/?rc=fb

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Juan Cole: Tunisia Uprising led by Labor Movements, Internet Activists

Juan Cole: Tunisia Uprising led by Labor Movements, Internet Activists
Talking to Democracy Now, Juan Cole speculates on reasons US corporate
media blew off the Tunisian revolution: it was led by workers'
organizations; it was largely secular, not Islamist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBmL_OqaS_I;

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[Marxism-Thaxis] the integration of opposites, the melting of contradictions in order to produce something new.

I have drawn 'Art XIV' in the Foundation position of the Celtic Cross
spread. Meaning, the integration of opposites, the melting of
contradictions in order to produce something new. And a challenge to
look within for transformation. Or something similar...


http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=501694138814set=a.81218033814.77701.579213814

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Milton Rogovin, Working Class Artist and Activist, Presente!

Milton Rogovin, Working Class Artist and Activist, Presente!

1. Milton Rogovin, Photographer, Dies at 101
   New York Times, January 18, 2010

2. The Working-Class Eye of Milton Rogovin
   New exhibition - Roosevelt University, Chicago
   January 20 - June 30, 2011

==

Milton Rogovin, Photographer, Dies at 101

by Benjamin Genocchio

New York Times
January 18, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/arts/design/19rogovin.html


Milton Rogovin, an optometrist and persecuted leftist who
took up photography as a way to champion the underprivileged
and went on to become one of America's most dedicated social
documentarians, died on Tuesday at his home in Buffalo. He
was 101.

He died of natural causes, his son, Mark Rogovin, said.

Mr. Rogovin chronicled the lives of the urban poor and
working classes in Buffalo, Appalachia and elsewhere for
more than 50 years. His direct photographic style in stark
black and white evokes the socially minded work that Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks produced for the Farm
Security Administration during the Depression. Today his
entire archive resides in the Library of Congress.

Mr. Rogovin (pronounced ruh-GO-vin) came to wide notice in
1962 after documenting storefront church services on
Buffalo's poor and predominantly African-American East Side.
The images were published in Aperture magazine with an
introduction by W. E. B. Du Bois, who described them as
astonishingly human and appealing.

He went on to photograph Buffalo's impoverished Lower West
Side and American Indians on reservations in the Buffalo
area. He traveled to West Virginia and Kentucky to
photograph miners, returning to Appalachia each summer with
his wife, Anne Rogovin, into the early 1970s. In the '60s he
went to Chile at the invitation of the poet Pablo Neruda to
photograph the landscape and the people. The two
collaborated on a book, Windows That Open Inward: Images of
Chile.

In a 1976 review of a Rogovin show of photographs from
Buffalo at the International Center of Photography in
Manhattan, the critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Mr. Rogovin in
The New York Times: He sees something else in the life of
this neighborhood - ordinary pleasures and pastimes,
relaxation, warmth of feeling and the fundamentals of social
connection. He takes his pictures from the inside, so to
speak, concentrating on family life, neighborhood business,
celebrations, romance, recreation and the particulars of
individuals' existence.

Milton Rogovin was born on Dec. 30, 1909, in Brooklyn, the
third of three sons of Jewish immigrant parents from
Lithuania. His parents, Jacob Rogovin and the former Dora
Shainhouse, operated a dry goods business, first in
Manhattan on Park Avenue near 112th Street and later in the
Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. After attending Stuyvesant
High School in Manhattan, the young Mr. Rogovin graduated
from Columbia University in 1931 with a degree in optometry;
four months later, after the family had lost the store and
its home to bankruptcy during the Depression, his father
died of a heart attack.

Working as an optometrist in Manhattan, Mr. Rogovin became
increasingly distressed at the plight of the poor and
unemployed - the forgotten ones, he called them - and
increasingly involved in leftist political causes.

I was a product of the Great Depression, and what I saw and
experienced myself made me politically active, he said in a
1994 interview with The New York Times.

He began attending classes sponsored by the Communist Party-
run New York Workers School, began to read the Communist
newspaper The Daily Worker and was introduced to the social-
documentary photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.

Mr. Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 and opened his own
optometric office on Chippewa Street the next year,
providing service to union workers. In 1942 he married Anne
Snetsky before volunteering for the Army and serving for
three years in England, where he worked as an optometrist.
Also in 1942, he bought a camera.

Returning to Buffalo after the war (his brother Sam, also an
optometrist, managed the practice in his absence), Mr.
Rogovin joined the local chapter of the Optical Workers
Union and served as librarian for the Buffalo branch of the
Communist Party.

In 1957, with cold war anti-Communism rife in the United
States, he was called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee but refused to testify. Soon afterward,
The Buffalo Evening News labeled him Buffalo's Number One
Red, and he and his family were ostracized. With his
business all but ruined by the publicity, he began to fill
time by taking pictures, focusing on Buffalo's poor and
dispossessed in the neighborhood around his practice while
living on his wife's salary as a teacher and being mentored
by the photographer Minor White.

His wife, a special education teacher, was a collaborator
throughout his career and helped him organize his
photographs until her death, in 2003.

Mr. Rogovin's photographs were typically

[Marxism-Thaxis] Thousands of Israelis march against “witch-hunt”

http://www.peoplesworld.org/thousands-of-israelis-march-against-witch-hunt/



Thousands of Israelis march against “witch-hunt”


assets/Uploads/_resampled/CroppedImage6060-suewebb3.jpg
by: Susan Webb
January 18 2011

tags: Israel, human rights, democracy
Israelprotest2

Some 20,000 Israelis marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday, Jan. 15, to
protest the Knesset decision to investigate Israeli human rights and
left political organizations - specifically their funding sources.
Representing a broad swathe of Israel's center and left political
spectrum, marchers and speakers denounced the action as akin to U.S.
McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s.

The protest was sparked by the Knesset vote last week to move toward
establishing a panel of inquiry into left-wing groups, alleging they
engage in delegitimization campaigns against the State of Israel and
its armed forces. The probe will focus on the groups' funding,
purportedly to see if they are getting money from foreign sources or
groups considered to be involved in terrorist activities. The measure
was initiated by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's far-right
Yisrael Beiteinu party.

Saturday's marchers, under the slogan Demonstration (since it's still
possible) for democracy, represented a wide range of groups including
the centrist Kadima party, Israeli Peace Now, the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel, the left social democratic Meretz party, the
Israeli Communist Party and an array of human rights organizations.
Knesset members who opposed the witch hunt panel were among the
marchers and speakers.

The marchers carried signs reading Danger! End of Democracy Ahead,
Fighting the Government of Darkness and Democracy is Screaming for
Help, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

Kadima Knesset member Meir Sheetrit called the Knesset's action
offensive and dangerous to the state of Israel ... it makes Israel
one of the states of darkness. He called on organizations to spurn
the investigation if it is launched.

Meretz Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz declared, We are here in
opposition to religious radicalization, racist laws and sickening
incitement against foreign workers and against those who are not loyal
to Lieberman. And now they are putting human rights organizations in
the crosshairs.

Horowitz said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares the blame,
since he is encouraging the racist celebration in the Knesset. He
also criticized Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who has just led a
breakaway from Israel's Labor Party. How are you not ashamed Mr.
Barak? Horowitz asked. You and your party are supporting and
enabling the existence of the most racist government in the history of
the State of Israel.

Hagai Elad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in
Israel, said, The thousands of people who are here understand that
our democracy needs protection against its destroyers. We are voicing
a clear voice in support of human rights and democracy, and against
racism, McCarthyism and future destruction. We will continue to fight
for democratic values, freedom of speech, equal rights for citizens
and the end of the occupation.

Elad's organization was among 16 well-known Israeli human rights
groups that signed an open letter protesting the Knesset measure.

Investigate us all, we have nothing to hide, their letter said. You
are invited to read our reports and our publications. We will be happy
if for a change you relate in a germane way to our questions instead
of trying to besmirch us. It did not work in the past and it will not
work this time.

Right-wing Knesset member Michael Ben Ari denounced the protest.
Labeling the targeted groups movements on the extreme left, he
claimed they would like to see the State of Israel destroyed and are
betraying the state and therefore there is no escape from taking
steps against them. We will reveal that they are funded by enemy
states.

Yet even Israeli President Shimon Peres opposed the Knesset probe,
telling Haaretz it harms Israeli democracy.

In a statement issued before Saturday's march, Dov Khenin, an Israeli
Communist Party leader, Knesset member and civil rights attorney,
warned of the lessons of U.S. McCarthyism.

The creation of parliamentary committees for the investigation of
political activities is associated with the name of the Republican
Senator for Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who was active in the U.S. in
the darkest days of the Cold War, said Khenin.

McCarthy is infamous for his initiative, presented in a speech of
February 1950, to investigate government employees for 'collaboration
with the enemy.'

Senator McCarthy was placed at the head of the Sub-Committee of
Investigation. The House Committee on Un-American Activities worked in
parallel. The two committees published a list of hostile organizations
to be investigated. Among these was the National Lawyers' Guild -
charged with anti-Americanism for including black lawyers in its
ranks.

Since it is very difficult to set limits to political

[Marxism-Thaxis] Imperialist booty and the wages of opportunism in the long run

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/102-102/4659-the-myth-of-american-exceptionalism-implod

The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes

Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American
workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures

A homeless encampment known as Tent City in Sacramento, California A
homeless encampment known as Tent City, in Sacramento, California, in
2009. Since the 1970s, real wages stopped growing and the gap between
rich and poor expanded as the US economy slowed down after decades of
growth. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

One aspect of American exceptionalism was always economic. US
workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that
afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work
paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the
middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens
felt middle class. A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of
labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of
immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the
1970s.

Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists
redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while
replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women's
liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment.
US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour.

US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped
raising wages. When basic labour scarcity became labour excess, not
only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over
the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact,
gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits
(pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised
tax burdens. In economic terms, American exceptionalism began to die
in the 1970s.

The rich, however, have got much richer since the 1970s, as every
measure of US income and wealth inequality attests. The explanation is
simple: while workers' average real wages stayed flat, their
productivity rose (the goods and services that an average hour's
labour provided to employers). More and better machines (including
computers), better education, and harder and faster labour effort
raised productivity since the 1970s. While workers delivered more and
more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The
employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising
profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to
shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve
employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc).

Since the 1970s, most US workers postponed facing up to what
capitalism had come to mean for them. They sent more family members to
do more hours of paid labour, and they borrowed huge amounts. By
exhausting themselves, stressing family life to the breaking point in
many households, and by taking on unsustainable levels of debt, the US
working class delayed the end of American exceptionalism – until the
global crisis hit in 2007. By then, their buying power could no longer
grow: rising unemployment kept wages flat, no more hours of work, nor
more borrowing, were possible. Reckoning time had arrived. A US
capitalism built on expanding mass consumption lost its foundation.

The richest 10-15% – those cashing in on employers' good fortune from
no longer-rising wages – helped bring on the crisis by speculating
wildly and unsuccessfully in all sorts of new financial instruments
(asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, etc). The richest also
contributed to the crisis by using their money to shift US politics to
the right, rendering government regulation and oversight inadequate to
anticipate or moderate the crisis or even to react properly once it
hit.

Indeed, the rich have so far been able to use the crisis to widen
still further the gulf separating themselves from the rest, to finally
bury American exceptionalism. First, they utilised both parties'
dependence on their financial support to make sure there would be no
mass federal hiring programme for the unemployed (as FDR used between
1934 and 1940). The absence of such a programme guaranteed that real
wages would not rise and, with job benefits, would likely fall – as
they indeed have done. Second, the rich made sure that the prime focus
of government response to the crisis would benefit banks, large
corporations and the stock markets. These have more or less
recovered.

Third, the current drive for government budget austerity – especially
focused on the 50 states and the thousands of municipalities – forces
the mass of people to pick up the costs for the government's unjustly
imbalanced response to the crisis. The trillions spent to save the
banks and selected other corporations (AIG, GM, Fannie Mae, Freddie
Mac, etc) were mostly

[Marxism-Thaxis] Dialectical_behavior_therapy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_behavior_therapy

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Twenty Thousand March in Tel-Aviv Against Mccarthyism, Racism and Fascism

Twenty Thousand March in Tel-Aviv Against Mccarthyism,
Racism and Fascism

Communist Party of Israel
January 15, 2011

http://www.maki.org.il/he/english-mainmenu-106

Twenty thousands of activists, Jews and Arabs, from
left-wing movements, parties and human rights
organizations march in Tel Aviv on Saturday (January
15, 2001) in protest of the Knesset's decision to set
up a committee of inquiry to probe the funding sources
of human rights movements.

The protest march, under the headline Demonstration
(since it's still possible) for democracy, left from
Tel Aviv's Meir Park, in front of the Likud
headquarters, toward the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv
Museum of Art, where a rally take place in which
Knesset members from Hadash, Kadima and Meretz as well
as officials from Peace Now and human rights groups
deliver speeches.

Protesters chanted in support of democracy and free
speech and against racism and fascism, and carried
hundreds of red flags and signs with slogans such as
Jews and Arabs together against Fascism, Awaiting
Democracy, Danger - End of Democracy Ahead!,
Fighting the Rightist Government of Darkness and
Democracy is Screaming for Help.  Among the MKs
taking part in the event were Dov Khenin (Hadash), Afo
Agbarie (Hadash), Meir Sheetrit (Kadima), Hanna Swaid
(Hadash), Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) and Mohammad Barakeh
(the Chairman of Hadash, the Democratic Front for Peace
and Equality - Communist Party of Israel).

MK Horowitz inveighed against Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whom he said
were supporting Lieberman's incitement and encouraging
racist legislation in the Knesset.  Tonight we are
telling the Labor Party that it is a full partner of
the most racist government in state history, and that
they must leave it immediately, he said.

Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer said at
the rally that Israel was suffering not only from the
Iranian threat but also from the Liebermanian threat.

Hadash Chairman Barakeh said, We are at a dangerous
crossroads where democracy is concerned. Democracy is
collapsing, not because of Lieberman but because of the
support he is receiving from the prime minister. Jews
and Arabs who care about democracy cannot fail at this
time. Anyone who wishes to know the power of the people
can look to Tunisia. In the same vein he added, The
victory of the people in Tunis over cruel dictatorship
teaches us that oppression is not the fate of mankind
and the people can win.

MK Sheetrit denounced Foreign Minster Avigdor
Lieberman's proposal to probe the funding sources of
human rights organizations.

If such legislation is passed, it will be like taking
a brick out of the wall of democracy. I am surprised
that Likud members support this. It's simply shameful
that they can sit in a government that makes such a
proposal, he said.

MK Khenin said during the protest that the thousands
of people who are here understand that our democracy
needs protection against its destroyers. We are voicing
a clear voice in support of human rights and democracy,
and against racism, fascism, McCarthyism and future
destruction of the democratic values. We will continue
to fight for democratic rights, freedom of speech,
equal rights for Jews and Arabs and the end of the
occupation.

List of participating organizations in the Emergency
rally

Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) //
Communist Party of Israel // ACRI (Association For
Civil Rights in Israel // Meretz // New Israel Fund //
Peace Now // The Kibbutz Movement // The Progressive
Movement // The Green Movement // Physicians for Human
Rights // The Geneva Initiative // Ha'Shomer Ha'tzair
// Yisrael Hofshit (Free Israel) // Coalition of Women
for Peace // Public Committee Against Torture // Yesh
Gvul // Shutafut/Sharakah - Organizations for a Shared,
Democratic and Egalitarian Society: Agenda, The Abraham
Fund, Negev Institute - NISPED, Sikkuy, Kav Mashve,
Keshev, Shatil //  Gush Shalom  // Yesh Din //
Almuntada Altakadumi - The Progressive Circle in Ar'ara
// Negev Coexistence Forum // Peace NGO's  Forum //
Amnesty International Israel // Banki-Shabiba - Young
Communist League // Hagada Hasmalit Alternative
Cultural Center in Tel-Aviv // Tandi - Democratic
Women's Movement //  Parents Circle - Families Forum //
Social Workers for Peace and Social Welfare // Arab
Movement for Renewal // Mossawa Centre - the Advocacy
Center for Arab Citizens in Israel // Adalah - the
Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel // Yesh
Din - Volunteers for Human Rights //  Machsom Watch //
Tarabut-Hithabrut // Rabbis for Human Rights // Ir Amim
// Maan - Workers' Advice Center // Daam - Workers
Party // Syndianna Galilee for Fair Trade //  Israeli
Children // Campus Le'Kulanu - Left Students Movement,
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Haifa University
// ASSAF - Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum
Seekers in Israel // ICAHD - The Israeli Committee
against House Demolitions // Social TV //

[Marxism-Thaxis] Climate change politics

Message: 9
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:20:12 +0900
From: Bill Totten shimog...@ashisuto.co.jp
Subject: [A-List] The Secret of Herding Cats
To: a-l...@lists.econ.utah.edu
Message-ID: 20110120072012.8bb7b597.shimog...@ashisuto.co.jp
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

by ?John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (January 12 2010)

?
?Granted, it was the season for giving, but I'm not at all sure that
justifies the extraordinary Christmas present Dr David Shearman has given
the climate change denialist movement. Readers of mine who haven't yet
heard of Shearman need not worry; they will be hearing far too much about
him in the months and years ahead.

Shearman, for those who haven't encountered his name yet, is an Australian
scientist who has a long string of publications in the field of global
warming to his credit, and who had an active role in the Third and Fourth
Assessments issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), the international scientific body tasked with sorting out just
what our tailpipes and smokestacks are doing to the Earth's climate. He is
also the co-author of a recent book, The Climate Change Challenge and the
Failure of Democracy (2007).

In this book, he argues that democracy is incapable of dealing with the
global climate change crisis, and therefore needs to be replaced by an
authoritarian world government with the power to force people to do what
Shearman thinks they ought to do.

Those of my readers familiar with the long and inglorious love affair
betweeen a certain class of Western intellectual and the totalitarian end
of the political spectrum already know what to expect from Shearman's
book, and they will not be disappointed. Shearman and his co-author Joseph
Wayne Smith argue that authoritarianism is the natural state of
humanity (page xvi) and that people who agree with their views ought to
form an elite warrior leadership to battle for the future of the
earth (ibid). They propose the manufacture of a new eco-religion out of
the green movement and New Age movement in order to provide social glue
for the masses (page 127), and spend a chapter discussing the training of
natural elites to provide his imagined regime with ecowarriors to do
battle against the enemies of life (page 134). It's all laid out in quite
some detail; very nearly the only thing Shearman and Smith fail to mention
is what symbol will go on their warrior elite's armbands.

I wish I could say I was surprised by the publication of Shearman's book,
or the fact that the Pell Foundation sponsored its publication. The
craving for unearned power that has afflicted intellectual idealists since
Plato's time has cropped up tolerably often in the last few decades of
green activism; the substantial popularity of David Korten's profoundly
antidemocratic The Great Turning (2006) is only one sign among many.
Still, there's a difference of some importance. It takes a careful reading
of Korten's book to notice how his division of humanity into
developmental stages, which just happen to equate to political opinions,
morphs into a claim that political power ought to be monopolized by those
who share Korten's own background and views. Equally, The Great Turning is
as coy about the methods Korten's would-be elite will use to enforce their
power as it is about the reasons why giving that elite unchecked authority
will solve the world's problems. Shearman and Smith have no such qualms;
their totalitarian daydream is right out there in the open.

That in itself points straight to the false logic at the core of The
Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy.

What failed was not democracy but climate change activism, and the
stunning political cluelessness on display in Shearman's and Smith's book
is a central reason why.

One wonders what on Earth Shearman was thinking when he sent the
manuscript to the publisher. Did it never occur to him that people who
disagree with his views would read the book, and make abundant political
hay out of it? They have, dear reader, and it's a safe bet that they will,
as hostile reviews of The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of
Democracy are already showing up on conservative websites. To be fair, it
would demand superhuman forbearance for them to steer clear of what is,
all things considered, a climate denialist's wet dream: a book in which a
significant figure on the other side 'fesses up to an authoritarian agenda
extreme enough to support even the wildest accusations of the far right.
Climate change activism is already reeling from a nearly unbroken sequence
of body blows in the political arena, and an even more serious loss of
public support; by the time the climate denialists finish working it over,
using Shearman's book as a conveniently blunt instrument, there may not be
much left of it.

It's worth glancing back over the last decade or so to get a sense of the
way this book fits into the broader process by which climate change
activism ran off the

[Marxism-Thaxis] For the Arab world, the revolution will be televised, on Al Jazeera

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-tunisia-al-jazeera-20110119,0,3896531.story

For the Arab world, the revolution will be televised, on Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera's rapid-paced, visceral coverage of the Tunisian upheaval
has riveted viewers across the Middle East. Many see it as a big voice
in a landscape of burgeoning Arab dissent. But governments accuse it
of bias.

Tunisian unity government loses 4 former opposition figures
Tunisian unity government loses 4 former opposition figures
*
Tunisia unveils new government as calm returns Tunisia unveils
new government as calm returns
*
Former Tunisia government figures arrested, new Cabinet to be
named Former Tunisia government figures arrested, new Cabinet to be
named
* Stories
*
Neighbors in Tunisia express disgust over former first lady's
family Neighbors in Tunisia express disgust over former first lady's
family
*
In Tunisia, social media are main source of news about protests
In Tunisia, social media are main source of news about protests
*
In Tunisia, Ben Ali was 'big brother' In Tunisia, Ben Ali was
'big brother'
* See more stories »
o
X
Will revolt in Tunisia inspire others?
* Links
*
CIA World Factbook: Tunisia

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

January 19, 2011

Reporting from Cairo —
In cafes and living rooms across the Middle East, the whirling
montages and breathless journalists of Al Jazeera are defining the
narrative of Tunisia's upheaval for millions of Arabs riveted by the
toppling of a dictator.

The Qatar-based television network, as it does with the Iraq war and
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is airing visceral, round-the-clock
coverage in a region of authoritarian states that rarely allow
government-controlled media to show scenes of unrest. Al Jazeera is a
messenger, pricking the status quo, enraging kings and presidents.

It is the big voice in a multimedia landscape of Arab dissent that
encompasses bloggers and online social networks such as Facebook and
Twitter. Whereas strategies of revolt on the Internet are largely the
domain of the young and educated, Al Jazeera has for years been the
touchstone for the masses seeking insight into the wider, mystifying
world.

Get dispatches from Times correspondents around the globe delivered to
your inbox with our daily World newsletter. Sign up »

Al Jazeera has really helped me understand what is going on in
Tunisia, said Ahmed Sanad, who was sitting in a Cairo cafe watching
the network's Behind the News program. We didn't know much or have
much interest in Tunisian politics, but now everyone wants to know
more about Tunisia, and the channel's doing a great job in helping
us.

The satellite network, which has Arabic and English channels, uses its
coverage to pass messages. They look for sentences to make people
compare and see the lessons of Tunis, said Randa Habib, a political
analyst and writer in Jordan. This is an era where you can watch the
revolution live. Al Jazeera's reporting has mostly been solid … but
Arab leaders worry that it's fueling sentiments and pushing people
into the streets.

That influence troubles regimes increasingly unable to shape events in
a media slipstream that moves more briskly than censors and security
forces. Through their Tunisia coverage, Al Jazeera, which relishes
elucidating the failures of U.S. and Israeli policies, and other major
news organizations, including the Al Arabiya channel, are
demonstrating their willingness to expose transgressions in the Arab
world.

In December, Kuwait closed Al Jazeera's bureau there after the network
aired video of police beating political activists. The Kuwaiti
government accused it of interfering in the country's internal
affairs. Egypt became so incensed by how it was portrayed that the
state-owned newspaper, Al Ahram, ran a story in 2010 alleging that Al
Jazeera's female anchors faced sexual harassment. The headline read:
Al Jazeera an Island of Harassment.

Officials in Cairo, Amman and capitals across North Africa criticize
Al Jazeera, accusing it of slanted reporting on the pitfalls of their
regimes while doing little to illuminate the sins of some Persian Gulf
states, notably the network's home of Qatar. These officials regard Al
Jazeera as a tool to advance the political ambitions of the Qatari
emirate at the expense of traditional centers of regional power.

In a sense, multimedia agencies symbolize the aspirations of a new
Middle East looking, with provocative images and high-definition
clarity, beyond the bankrupt ideologies of leaders who have done
little to inspire their people. Al Jazeera has become a hallmark in a
part of the world that increasingly craves unfiltered news.

Much of its coverage in Tunisia is raw and unvarnished, relying on
cellphone videos sent by bystanders and call-in interviews that give
those caught in the passion of events a chance to express

[Marxism-Thaxis] A Watershed Moment in the History of the Arab World

Can we say that a rarely mentioned reason for the US invasion of Iraq
was fear that a revolution like this might have overthrown Sadaam ?

CB

^


A Watershed Moment in the History of the Arab World

The Fall of the West's Little Dictator

By ESAM AL-AMIN
http://www.counterpunch.org/amin01192011.html
January 19, 2011

When people choose life (with freedom)
Destiny will respond and take action
Darkness will surely fade away
And the chains will certainly be broken

Tunisian poet Abul Qasim Al-Shabbi (1909-1934)

On New Year's Eve 1977, former President Jimmy Carter was
toasting Shah Reza Pahlavi in Tehran, calling the
Western-backed monarchy an island of stability in the
Middle East. But for the next 13 months, Iran was anything
but stable. The Iranian people were daily protesting the
brutality of their dictator, holding mass demonstrations
from one end of the country to the other.

Initially, the Shah described the popular protests as part
of a conspiracy by communists and Islamic extremists, and
employed an iron fist policy relying on the brutal use of
force by his security apparatus and secret police. When
this did not work, the Shah had to concede some of the
popular demands, dismissing some of his generals, and
promising to crack down on corruption and allow more
freedom, before eventually succumbing to the main demand
of the revolution by fleeing the country on Jan. 16, 1979.

But days before leaving, he installed a puppet prime
minister in the hope that he could quell the protests
allowing him to return. As he hopped from country to
country, he discovered that he was unwelcome in most parts
of the world. Western countries that had hailed his regime
for decades were now abandoning him in droves in the face
of popular revolution.

Fast forward to Tunisia 32 years later.

What took 54 weeks to accomplish in Iran was achieved in
Tunisia in less than four. The regime of President
Zein-al-Abidin Ben Ali represented in the eyes of his
people not only the features of a suffocating
dictatorship, but also the characteristics of a
mafia-controlled society riddled with massive corruption
and human rights abuses.

On December 17, Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old
unemployed graduate in the central town of Sidi Bouzid,
set himself on fire in an attempt to commit suicide.
Earlier in the day, police officers took away his stand
and confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling
because he lacked a permit. When he tried to complain to
government officials that he was unemployed and that this
was his only means of survival, he was mocked, insulted
and beaten by the police. He died 19 days later in the
midst of the uprising.

Bouazizi's act of desperation set off the public's boiling
frustration over living standards, corruption and lack of
political freedom and human rights. For the next four
weeks, his self-immolation sparked demonstrations in which
protesters burned tires and chanted slogans demanding jobs
and freedom. Protests soon spread all over the country
including its capital, Tunis.

The first reaction by the regime was to clamp down and use
brutal force including beatings, tear gas, and live
ammunition. The more ruthless tactics the security forces
employed, the more people got angry and took to the
streets. On Dec. 28 the president gave his first speech
claiming that the protests were organized by a minority
of extremists and terrorists and that the law would be
applied in all firmness to punish protesters.

However, by the start of the New Year tens of thousands of
people, joined by labor unions, students, lawyers,
professional syndicates, and other opposition groups, were
demonstrating in over a dozen cities. By the end of the
week, labor unions called for commercial strikes across
the country, while 8,000 lawyers went on strike, bringing
the entire judiciary system to an immediate halt.

Meanwhile, the regime started cracking down on bloggers,
journalists, artists and political activists. It
restricted all means of dissent, including social media.
But following nearly 80 deaths by the security forces, the
regime started to back down.

On Jan. 13, Ben Ali gave his third televised address,
dismissing his interior minister and announcing
unprecedented concessions while vowing not to seek
re-election in 2014. He also pledged to introduce more
freedoms into society, and to investigate the killings of
protesters during the demonstrations. When this move only
emboldened the protestors, he then addressed his people in
desperation, promising fresh legislative elections within
six months in an attempt to quell mass dissent.

When this ploy also did not work, he imposed a state of
emergency, dismissing the entire cabinet and promising to
deploy the army on a shoot to kill order. However, as the
head of the army Gen. Rachid Ben Ammar refused to order
his troops to kill the demonstrators in the streets, Ben
Ali found no alternative but to flee the country and the
rage of his people.

On Jan. 14 his entourage

[Marxism-Thaxis] YouTube - Chaka Khan's Night in Tunisia

YouTube - Chaka Khan's Night in Tunisia

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3818706/10453353

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] YouTube - Chaka Khan's Night in Tunisia

Glad u do , Comrade Juan !

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 4:08 PM, juan De La Cruz ballist...@yahoo.com wrote:
 Thank you for the tunes!  I really enjoy it!!

 From: waistli...@aol.com waistli...@aol.com
 To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
 Cc:
 Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2011 3:56 PM
 Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] YouTube - Chaka Khan's Night in Tunisia

 In a message dated 1/20/2011 2:45:58 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
 waistli...@aol.com writes:

 In a  message dated 1/20/2011 2:12:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
 _cb31450@gmail.com_ (mailto:cb31...@gmail.com)  writes:

 YouTube - Chaka Khan's Night in Tunisia

 _http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3818706/10453353_
 (http://video.yahoo.com/watch/3818706/10453353)

 Reply

 Unbelievable.

 I wanted to marry Chaka but she did not know I  existed.

 I love her man and her body  . . . of work with Rufus.

 I get sick to  the stomach thinking about Rufus featuring  Chaka.  I can
 think of about 20 of her songs. After Steve Wonder got  them on the  big
 charts
 with Tell Me Something  Good I  was all in.

 Then she got better.

 Her rendition of African  rhythm and European harmonic structure  is
 American music, which  fortunately is no longer just called black music.

 This is good  stuff.

 WL.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Another Chaka Night in Tunisia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni8FQ_9uOtU

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Diz

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2d06_a-night-in-tunisia_music

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Youth more radically opposed to present government than tea parties, poll finds

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/youth-radically-opposed-present-government-tea-party-poll-finds/

Youth more radically opposed to present government than tea parties, poll finds

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 -- 11:56 am
submit to reddit Stumble This!
2124Share
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Partisan news missing the point: Youth, poor have greater reason for
dissatisfaction than tea parties

londonstudentsriotslavesAFP Youth more radically opposed to present
government than tea parties, poll findsPredictions of a youth uprising
sweeping the United States in 2011 appear to be turning increasingly
true, according to a recent poll.

Figures supporting that hypothesis, produced by the left-leaning
Public Policy Polling (PPP) for a liberal blog, were cited by partisan
news figures as proof of a growing violent radical element in the tea
parties.

But that's missing the larger statistic.

Across Europe in the last year, youth have led sweeping civil unrest
in protest of corrupt governance, harsh austerity measures and what
they see as a guided collapse of their economies.

In Greece, riots became a daily reality in 2010 as Athens has been
repeatedly crippled by black-clad youth openly fighting police in the
streets.

In France, hundreds of thousands shut down the economy in response to
a proposal to raise the retirement age.

In Italy, cars burned and shops were smashed over the barely-there
coalition government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

In London, a massive hike to college tuition fees led throngs of angry
students to smash up the Supreme Court, Treasury and conservative
party buildings. Protesters even got within grabbing range of Prince
Charles and the Dutchess of Cornwall, attacking their car with blunt
objects and paint as it passed.

In Tunisia, acting on disclosures by WikiLeaks about the economic
dominance of the former dictator's family, a 26-year-old street vendor
set himself ablaze in protest of high unemployment, sparking the
unrest that quickly toppled their government. Thanks to his success --
even in death -- more self-immolations have been reported in Algeria,
Egypt and Mauritania as authoritarian Muslim regimes looked on in fear
of their populace.

And that could just be the beginning, if the predictions prove accurate.

Partisanship obfuscates truth

A statistic from PPP that got little play from liberal commentaries
showed that American youths -- not the tea parties -- are more
inclined to think of violence against the US government as acceptable.

tunisiariots afp Youth more radically opposed to present government
than tea parties, poll findsA full 17 percent of those ages 18-29 said
yes, that violence would be justified, while a further 15 percent were
not not sure. Granted, while those figures come out to a clear
majority of young people -- 68 percent -- saying violence is not
justified, it also means that 32 percent either disagree or haven't
made up their minds.

Another statistic sure to surprise some beltway liberals were the
responses of poor people, who tied with tea partiers at 13 percent in
saying violence would be justified. A further 24 percent said they
weren't sure, bringing their level of certainty against violence down
to just 63 percent.

Compounding the potential for civil unrest, the poor and the tea
parties, according to prior statistics, were two very different,
separate groups with virtually no cross-over.

In a survey of Americans who voted in 2008, the nonpartisan group
Project Vote found that, by and large, those sympathetic to the tea
parties were white, wealthy and affluent people, whose political views
represented approximately 29 percent of the electorate.

By comparison, blacks, youths and low-income voters, who turned out in
record numbers to support President Obama, make up 32 percent of the
electorate -- and their views could not be any more different than
their conservative counterparts.

The poll, published last Sept., described tea party participants as
overwhelmingly white and universally dissatisfied, even though
having the least reason for dissatisfaction.

tunisiaprotests afp Youth more radically opposed to present government
than tea parties, poll findsOnly six percent [of tea party
participants] reported having to worry about buying food for their
families in the past year, compared to 14 percent of voters
nationwide, 37 percent of blacks, 21 percent of youths, and 39 percent
of low-income voters, they added.

Discussing the partisan rhetorical fray on MSNBC last night, liberal
news anchor Keith Olbermann failed to mention these figures, focusing
instead on tea partiers and violent rhetoric prevalent in many
Republicans' public discourse.

Global revolution?

Speaking to Russia Today recently, trends analyst Gerald Celente --
who predicted the 2008 economic collapse far in advance -- suggested
that a youth uprising is inevitable thanks to the emergence of a new
kind of journalism that values full disclosure over other goals.

What

[Marxism-Thaxis] Black is Beautiful

2011-01-19 Thread c b

ELLE Cover Lightens The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

By Jorge Rivas
colorlines.com
January 12, 2011

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/01/elle_cover_lightens_the_most_beautiful_woman_in_the_world.html

Leave it to ELLE Magazine to photochop the world's most
beautiful woman. Aishwarya Rai, the reigning queen of Indian
cinema, model and classically trained dancer is currently on
the cover of ELLE India--several shades lighter. Rai's skin
has been lightened and her dark brown hair appears to have a
red tint to it.

The Times of India reported the former Miss World is furious
with the bleaching botch-up and is considering taking legal
action against ELLE.

ELLE's mission is to make women chic and smart, guide their
self-expression, and encourage their personal power, but
their recent covers could lead readers to believe that chic,
smart and personal empowerment only comes to those with
light skin.

This is the second faux pas in recent history for ELLE. Last
year the U.S. edition of the magazine made Oscar- nominated
actress Gabourey Sidibe a much lighter cover girl. It's an
all too common practice that happens across the beauty
industry. Even the untrained eye has become accustomed to
digitally altered images, so accustomed that readers would
notice an image that has not been altered before one that
has.

So we're not surprised that ELLE retouched Aishwarya Rai's
photo, but the severity of the retouching and lightening is
still quite jarring. Not to mention the real implications
that these actions have for readers. To that end, Change.org
has started a campaign
(change.org/petitions/view/elle_magazine_apologize_for_tryin
g_to_whiten_indian_skin) asking the magazine to offer a
public apology.
http://change.org/petitions/view/elle_magazine_apologize_for_trying_to_whiten_indian_skin

India has a thriving skin lightening beauty industry that
includes products with ingredients so hazardous they've been
banned in the European Union, among others. But India is not
alone. A recent study found that 90 percent of the women
entering Arizona clinics for mercury poisoning were Chicanas
who had been using skin-lightening creams. A Harvard medical
school professor notes: These women had tried so desperately
to whiten their skin color that they had poisoned their
bodies by applying mercury-based 'beauty creams'.

For insight on what goes through the minds of the people
doing the retouching check out The New Yorker's Pixel
Perfect, which profiles Pascal Dangin, the premier retoucher
of fashion photographs (Vanity Fair, W, Harper's Bazaar,
Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times
Magazine, among others, also use Dangin.)

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Martin Luther King Jr. and the attack on public workers

Martin Luther King Jr. and the attack on public workers


assets/Uploads/_resampled/CroppedImage6060-ScottMarshallBW.jpg
by: Scott Marshall
January 17 2011

tags: public workers, racism, unions, strikes
IAMAMANNationalGuard

How ironic. As we celebrate the life and historic contributions of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, public workers are under fierce attack
across the country. As the economic crisis worsens for working people
there is a coordinated campaign by big business, the newly energized,
tea party Republican right, and some Democrats to resolve the crisis
on the backs of public workers.

Can you imagine the folks who just got hundreds of thousands of
dollars in tax breaks getting indignant at the wages of sanitation
workers? What the top 1% of the rich will each get just in tax breaks
alone would provide decent, livable wages for several sanitation
workers for a whole year. Such bald faced hypocrisy is the currency of
these attacks.

Sanitation workers pay is not a gift. The pay and benefits that many
local governments are threatening to cut are earned with long hours of
backbreaking, stinky work. Oh, the howls from the gated communities if
the garbage isn't picked up.

Dr. King was murdered in Memphis, Tenn., as he mobilized support for
striking sanitation workers. Forty-three years later these same
workers are under attack again. In the past year, Memphis sanitation
workers have had to face down threats of privatization and severe job
cuts. While across the nation sanitation workers (and fire, police,
hospital, rescue, library, school and many other public service
workers) pay, pensions and other benefits are on the chopping block in
the name of shared sacrifice.

For those of us who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the
1960s, the memory of those poignant days in 1968 Memphis is especially
intense in today's climate of attack on public workers.

Speaking to a rally of striking AFSCME union members, who were mostly
African American, in his famous I've been to the mountaintop speech,
just days before his assassination, Dr. King said, Let us rise up
tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater
determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days
of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an
opportunity to make America a better nation.

Can there be any doubt that if alive today, Dr. King would be leading
the fight to defend all public workers and the fight for jobs. In
Memphis, Dr. King brought together two mighty currents of the struggle
for economic and social justice. Two deeply kindred currents: labor
and civil rights; labor and communities of working people who face
racism and discrimination.

And can there be any doubt where he would stand on the issues of the
day? For instance so many states are now proposing
right-to-work-for-less laws and other measures to deny basic union
rights to public service workers. Dr. King famously said, In our
glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by
false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no
'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of
collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped.

King would never have allowed anyone to separate the interests of
public workers from those who need the public services they provide.
And he was keenly aware of the issue of how to finance needed social
programs. Most of us vividly remember his statement that the bombs in
Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for
a decent America, and, A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death.

We are inspired and encouraged by Dr. King's example, his work and his
words. His words are not meant to comfort us in our efforts, but
rather to spur us into greater action. We celebrate the life and work
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by standing up and fighting for public
workers and public services with greater determination.

Photo: This is a photograph of a famous photograph taken on March 29,
1968, in Memphis, Tenn., during the AFSCME sanitation workers strike.
Strikers wearing I AM A MAN placards march past National Guard
troops who had blocked off Beale Street. (kimintn)

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[Marxism-Thaxis] civility

From: Marv Gandall

On 2011-01-16, at 3:30 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:

 I try to avoid (not always too successfully) psychoanalyzing other people,
 and I reject off hand attempts to read my mind. (Reading minds and
 psychoanalyzing or psychological analysis are more or less synonymous
 terms.) Repugnance is a matter of taste, not a political judgment. The DP,
 which consistently, in office and out of office, acts like a governing
 party, is more dangerous than the Republican Party?

I haven't been reading your mind, Carrol. I've been reading your many
posts over the years.

^
CB: Sounds like you r practicing Behaviorism, Marv, an honorably
materialist tradition in bourgeois psychology. Is it empirical phenomenlogy ?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner



Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an
American psychologist, author, inventor, social philosopher,[1][2][3]
and poet.[4] He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at
Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.[5]

Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own
philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism,[6] and founded his
own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental
analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his
work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous
increase[citation needed] in interest experimentally and in applied
settings.[7]

Skinner discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent
variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative
recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly
influential work on schedules of reinforcement.[8][9] In a June, 2002
survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the
20th century.[10] He was a prolific author who published 21 books and
180 articles.[11][12]


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The end of the imperialist epoch

Hear , hear, Waistline

CB

^
 Comment

 Obviously the modern Chinese state is not a SETTLER STATE or seeking  to
 secure or maintain a colony established by settlers. Treating
 imperialism in
 this era of political domination of speculative finance as  a general
 imperialism defeats the mean of this tread: the end of  the imperialist
 epoch. Qualifying and quantifying the meaning of  imperial-colonialism is
 part
 of asking the question end of the  imperialist epoch.

 Lenin's Hobson unraveling of modern imperialism of his era was  useful
 because a real imperialism was examined in its economic and  political
 features.  Lenin spoke of monopolies, finance capital
 (financial-industrial
 capital);  hundreds of millions of slaves of a  direct colonial system and
 the fight
 amongst  direct colonizers for a  re-division of an already divided world.
 This fight for  spheres of  influence was based in the national productive
 logic of huge   multinational state structures.

 The history of colonialism - at least in general Marxist terms, has  meant
 more than imperial outreach or a lack of rights of those  beings
 colonized.
 Imperialism of the epoch we are leaving has meant an end  to the direct
 colonial  system; the end of neo colonialism and the  imperial colonization
 based on  financial-industrial capital.

 The post WW II period and into the 1980's saw the rise and fall of  the
 colony and neo colonialism as these political forms of rule  expressed
 financial-industrial capital.  Vietnam Liberation and  unification in 1976
 is a
 world book mark on an epoch that began with  our revolution of 1776. This
 does
 not mean no one of earth is  oppressed and exploited through world
 bourgeois
 production relations.  Rather, a specific form of imperialism -colonialism,
 has  been  superseded.

 America inaugurated an epochal wave of colonial revolutions that would span

 two hundred years. We settled our national liberation struggle against the
 British Empire - with a Slave Oligarchy intact seeking its distinct
 anti-colonial interest imperialist interest, and then settled the war
 against
 the slave system. American finance capital emerged from the  Civil War
 facing
 a  world with colonial states as direct appendage of  imperialist state
 structures  preventing its free flow of finance  capital beyond Latin
 America.

 The First World Imperialist War shook imperialism - the direct  colonial
 system, to its foundations, with the Soviets breaching the  political and
 economic bourgeois imperialist chain. The political  basis for imperialist
 war in
 the past century, rather than the economic  impetus for war under
 capitalism,  (anarchy of production with war  production being a profit
 center) was
 the fight  for colonies or  spheres of influence based on colonial
 possessions.
 The fight  between  imperialist states was not over one huge state
 colonizing another but   over the colonies represented by these massive
 states. This
 form of  imperialism  is very much part of the question end of the
 imperialist  epoch.

 The Second World Imperialist War sounded the death knell of direct
 colonialism. The defeat of German fascism was the last gasp of a form of
 finance
 capital politically dominated by industrial capital seeking to  recreate
 the
 direct colonial system. For the German state direct  colonialism meant
 revitalization of economic and social life - the  thousand year rule, or
 in lay
 person terms French wine, Polish hams  and Slavic slave women.

 American finance capital - emerging 50 years before Lenin's  Imperialism,

 sought to recreate the political world leading the  charge to wipe direct
 colonialism from the face the earth. American  financial imperialism sought
 to
 defeat its enemies and identified them as  direct colonizers of the world.
 It's  slogan was national  independence and self determination of nations
 up to and  including  the formation of separate states.  This battering ram
 against the   direct colonial system explains why Uncle Ho armies entered
 Hanoi at the  close  of WW II with CIA in tow playing the Star Spangled
 Banner.
 Then  of course came  the policy change and the Cold War.

 This era of financial-industrial capital - finance capital, from  direct
 colony to neo-colony spanned from the results of the Civil War  until the
 1980's  and the Reagan administration. Bush I declared the  New World
 Order to
 the  citizens of earth. This meant in my mind the  imperialism we had known
 was being  jettisoned from history. Not  imperial outreach but imperialism.

 The imperialist epoch is the epoch of the bourgeoisie rather than  Imperial

 Rome, as its politically dominant sector - based on its  connection in
 commodity  production, sought to recreate the world in  its interest.
 Hence, a
 specific form  of imperialism. Each era and  epoch has its distinct
 political-economic interest.  What is the  political interest of an
 imperial capital
 resting on a

[Marxism-Thaxis] tunisia_uprising_eurasian_ripples

http://www.rferl.org/content/tunisia_uprising_eurasian_ripples/2278808.html

Love the source of this article

CB

Radio Free Europe (!) At 60

On July 4, 1950, RFE went on the air for the first time with a
broadcast to communist Czechoslovakia from a studio in New York City.
Sixty years later, RFE reaches nearly 20 million people in 28
languages and 21 countries. Here's a look at our history.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] News

Tunisia crisis: as it happened | World news | guardian.co.uk
shar.es
Thousands of Tunisians have protested in the capital, leading to the
ousting of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Follow developments as
they happened

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Pink Panther

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhHwnrlZRus

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[Marxism-Thaxis] JFP 1/17: Tunisia puts focus on West-Arab security ties

 *Just Foreign Policy News
January 17, 2011
*
*Just Foreign Policy News on the Web:*
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/808http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=JI284gUQd%2By2CzoY7EA2swuhvnpNkb7y

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*Help Support Our Advocacy for Peace and Diplomacy*
The opponents of peace and diplomacy work every day. Help us be an effective
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*Center for Economic and Policy Research: Analysis of the OAS Mission's
Draft Final Report on Haiti's Election*
CEPR finds that the OAS Mission did not establish any legal, statistical, or
other logical basis for its conclusion that candidate Michel Martelly
finished second and Jude Celestin third.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/47037329/Analysis-of-the-OAS-Mission%E2%80%99s-Draft-Final-Report-on-Haiti%E2%80%99s-Electionhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=gt7znvbVnf9JSDVE%2FKWiXAuhvnpNkb7y
*
Center for Constitutional Rights: Support the Call for Fair Elections in
Haiti*
Ask the State Department to support fair elections in Haiti. 3076 have
signed the petition.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/haitinewelectionhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=RE%2BqE5%2FhlOM%2Bs5XsOXV7IguhvnpNkb7y

*Tunisian Protests Move Hillary's Line on Democratic Reform*
As Hillary Clinton was delivering a scalding critique on the need for
reform to Arab leaders, the New York Times noted that protests demanding
that the President of Tunisia resign echoed loudly in the background.
Could Clinton's remarks mean a shift in U.S. policy? Revolution by the
Have-Nots has a way of inducing a moral revelation among the Haves, Saul
Alinsky said, as Secretary Clinton may have noted when she was researching
her senior thesis on Alinsky.
http://www.truth-out.org/tunisian-protests-move-hillarys-line-democratic-reform66892http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=cztLfpuiJheyupfpIrsaKguhvnpNkb7y

*Amnesty, HRW, IJDH: Haiti Should Arrest, Prosecute Duvalier*
Amnesty- Jean-Claude Duvalier must face justice for Haiti rights violations
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/jean-claude-duvalier-must-face-justice-haiti-rights-violations-2011-01-17http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=K5YfsT9Ew5oORvTWmBJlrguhvnpNkb7y
HRW-Haiti: Prosecute Duvalier
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/01/17/haiti-prosecute-duvalierhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=sLeAG1KiT9%2FpdBNNqRSwHBDkiWEuwbA4
IJDH-Human Rights Groups Call for Immediate Arrest of Jean-Claude Duvalier
http://ijdh.org/archives/16740#Englishhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=xIICOV7jswcNKR9sU6X1AAuhvnpNkb7y

*Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman: Five Myths About Military Spending*
Their list of myths includes: military spending is dictated by the threats
we face; a larger military budget makes us safer; Republicans can't cut
military spending; Gates' cuts are enough.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/14/AR2011011406194.htmlhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=7Sokm0jEbpfb7EY9qD6rQwuhvnpNkb7y

*Summary:*
*U.S./Top News #12d967c26f6befab_January1711m1*
1) The wisdom of Western counter-terrorism links to Arab leaders with poor
human rights records is under fresh scrutiny after the ousting in Tunisia of
a president who portrayed himself as a bulwark against al Qaeda, Reuters
reports. We have to get this idiotic analysis out of our minds, that its
'either repression or al Qaeda', said Francis Ghiles, Senior Research
Fellow at the Barcelona Center for International Affairs. Western security
discourse is like a broken record and we have to transcend it. Brutality and
cruelty by Arab leaders are a huge moral liability for the West, said Larbi
Sadiki, Senior Lecturer in Middle East politics at Exeter University.

2) Tunisia's prime minister announced a national unity government on Monday,
NPR reports. The EU said Monday it stands ready to help Tunisia become a
democracy and will offer economic aid. A spokeswoman said the EU is willing
to prepare and organize the electoral process in Tunisia. French Finance
Minister Lagarde told French radio Paris is keeping a close watch on the
assets of Tunisians in French banks. [Oddly, no word in this NPR story on
whether US authorities intend to keep a close watch on the assets of
Tunisians in US banks - JFP.]

3) Secretary of State Clinton on Sunday urged Tunisia's new leadership to
adopt broad economic and political reforms, AP reports. In a phone call to
Tunisian Foreign Minister Kamal Merjan, Clinton called for the government to
address the underlying causes of the popular discontent that fueled the
uprising, such as unemployment and

[Marxism-Thaxis] Climate Change

In Ventura, a retreat in the face of a rising sea

Higher ocean levels force Ventura officials to move facilities inland,
an action that is expected to recur along the coast as the ocean rises
over the next century.

By Tony Barboza The Los Angeles Times January 16, 2011

Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a
120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By
pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give
the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life.

The effort by the city of Ventura is the most vivid example to date of
what may lie ahead in California as coastal communities come to grips
with rising sea levels and worsening coastal erosion. As the coastline
creeps inland, scouring sand from beaches or eating away at coastal
bluffs, landowners will increasingly be forced to decide whether to
spend vast sums of money fortifying the shore or give up and step
back.

State officials say the $4.5-million project in Ventura is the first
of its kind in California and could serve as a model for threatened
sites along the coast.

Managed retreat, as it's called, is one of the things that we're
going to have in our quiver to deal with sea-level rise and increasing
storms, said Sam Schuchat, executive officer of the California
Coastal Conservancy, which helped fund the Surfers Point project.

Sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the last century and are
expected to swell at an increasing rate as climate change warms the
ocean, experts say. In California, the sea is projected to rise as
much as 55 inches by the end of the century and gobble up 41 square
miles of coastal land, according to a 2009 state-commissioned report
by the Pacific Institute.

For years, the preferred solution to an eroding shoreline has been to
build sea walls or dump imported sand to serve as a buffer. About
one-third of the Southern California coastline and about 10% of the
shore statewide have been fortified with sea walls and other hard
structures.

Although artificial barriers may protect property in the short term,
they often intensify the effect of waves, leaving beaches stripped of
sand until they narrow or disappear, permanently altering surf
patterns.

As a result, beach-armoring projects are increasingly out of favor
with environmentalists and coastal regulators.

At Surfers Point, Ventura officials first knew they had a problem
about two decades ago, when storms started chewing away at the
oceanfront bike path a few years after it was built.

When heavy storms hit, waves ate mounds of sand, washed away chunks of
asphalt and exposed rebar, car parts and junk that had been
underground for decades.

Officials at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, which is on a 62-acre
site next to Surfers Point, initially suggested a buried sea wall. But
environmentalists and surfers fiercely objected, saying that armoring
the shore would protect a parking lot at the expense of the beach and
destroy the point break near the Ventura River that generates the
distinctive, surfer-friendly waves for which the site was named.

After extensive debate, the fairgrounds agreed to give up some of its
property for a plan that would provide room for the sand to shift. It
is based on the idea that beaches are constantly in flux, growing as
the summer's gentle waves bring sand ashore and shrinking when winter
storms scour it away.

It was the right thing to do for all of the residents of the county,
said fairgrounds Chief Executive Officer Barbara Quaid, who prefers
not to view it as sacrificing land but as redirecting its use. Coming
down to the beach and seeing it beautified is a lot different than
coming down and seeing a bike path that's falling into the ocean.

The managed retreat marks a reversal with profound implications for
a state that has for more than a century crammed its most valuable
homes and businesses on the edge of the ocean.

There's the old-school mentality that when nature threatens you, you
fight back, said Paul Jenkin, Ventura campaign manager for the
Surfrider Foundation and a longtime advocate for the project. So this
idea of retreating and moving back was really quite a radical
proposition.

In the near term, there are a number of publicly owned sites, from a
weathered parking lot hugging a narrow strand at Cardiff State Beach
in San Diego County to a lifeguard station within a few steps of the
surf in San Clemente, where planners might soon have to consider
moving structures out of harm's way.

Such a decision would be far tougher for private property owners, but
they too could eventually be in the position of giving up billions of
dollars of desirable real estate.

The challenge is we have built most of our civilization within a few
feet of sea level or right at the edge, said Gary Griggs, a coastal
geologist at UC Santa Cruz who co-wrote the book Living With the
Changing California Coast. It's either going to be managed or
unmanaged, but it's going to be retreat.

Some

[Marxism-Thaxis] Jared Lee Loughner, the conservative/liberal axis and the mentally ill...

lbo-talk] Jared Lee Loughner, the conservative/liberal axis and the
mentally ill...
Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Mon Jan 17 19:52:55 PST 2011

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Mark Bennet asked:

So what is your point exactly?



That more of the wealth which the workers create using natural
resources, should be directed toward care for people with mental
health problems. Granted, living in a class dominated society where
dominance and submission is considered

the norm and especially one where the credo, Hooray for me, devil
take the hindmost reigns, does drive a lot of people looney. Adding
commodified lethal weaponry to the mix, doesn't help matters one
little bit; although packing heat does make those with genuine fears
about living in such a dog eat dog culture feel less fearful.

***

In light of the Tucson tragedy, it would be nice to see the mental
health system, or what's left of it, come up for real discussion,
including serious consideration of vastly expanding mental health
services so that people like Loughner's parents or his philosophy
professor or his algebra teacher could have

actually gotten him the help he needed before he killed someone. (In
the past year, Arizona cut $36 million from its mental health
programs, nearly 40 percent

of its budget.) If nothing else, maybe it's time for some public
service announcements about the symptoms of schizophrenia—how to
distinguish them from ordinary teen angst or political passion, and
how to intervene. Lots of research now shows that the longer someone
with a brain disease remains untreated, the more severe their
dangerous delusions are likely to become. Yet most people go years
before such disases are properly diagnosed. Early intervention could
save a whole lot of lives.

Untreated serious mental illness is a huge risk factor for violent
crime, particularly among those released from mental hospitals. A 1992
study by Dr. Henry Steadman, now the chair of the national advisory
board of the Center for Mental Health Services  Criminal Justice
Research, found that 27 percent of released patients reported having
engaged in at least one violent act within four months of being
discharged. Those findings mirror older research suggesting that
discharged patients had arrest rates for violent crimes 10 times that
of the general population. Another study, published in the American
Journal of Public Health in 2002, found that about 14 percent of
adults with severe mental illness (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder)
had been violent within the previous year. Not surprisingly, then, 16
percent of jail inmates are estimated to be mentally ill, according to
the Justice Department—some 300,000 people, or four times the number
who are in mental hospitals today in the United States.

full: 
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/01/jared-loughner-tucson-mental-health-reform


This is a political issue which the conservatives don't want you to
notice. They

are purposefully underfunding mental health at the public level so that they and

their rich pals can keep more money from the tax assessor. Saint Ronald was only

in it for the money and so his conservative pals backed him in cutting
funding for mental health, starting the ball rolling. And now we have
this situation in California and elsewhere:
** Another thing that happened then was
Frank Lanterman, who drafted the law, was a

conservative legislator from Pasadena, and he had ties to John Birch
Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, very, very conservative
organisations. And

he said and those around him said that psychiatric hospitals were Marxist tools,

that basically that the people in hospitals were political prisoners
and so there was under a cry of libertarianism, and what I would call
political cover of libertarianism said, 'Let these poor people go.'
So. But really what the fiscal - the fiscal side was driving it as
well, that essentially that there is a lot of money to be saved by
closing the state hospitals. 1960 there's half a million people in
state hospitals in the United States, 1980 there's 100,000. So

basically this was under the cover of libertarianism, there was a
fiscal drive to actually empty out the state hospitals as well. So you
have really an arch-conservative/libertarian from Southern California.
His co-author, Nicholas Petris from Oakland, describing the

[Marxism-Thaxis] Researchers aim to resurrect mammoth in five years

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110117/wl_asia_afp/japansciencemammoth_20110117104445


Researchers aim to resurrect mammoth in five years
AFP


Researchers aim to resurrect mammoth in five years MNHN Bibliotheque
Centrale – Artist's impression of the prehistoric mammoth. Japanese
researchers will launch a project this year …

* Prehistoric mammoths Slideshow:Prehistoric mammoths

by Shingo Ito Shingo Ito – Mon Jan 17, 5:44 am ET

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to
resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to
bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time.

The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue
this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian
research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

Preparations to realise this goal have been made, Akira Iritani,
leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told
the mass-circulation daily.

[Related: Scientists find living 34,000-year-old organism]

Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an
elephant's egg cell from which the nuclei have been removed, to create
an embryo containing mammoth genes, the report said.

The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant's uterus in the hope
that the animal will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth.

Click image to see more mammoth photos


AFP/HO/File

The elephant is the closest modern relative of the mammoth, a huge
woolly mammal believed to have died out with the last Ice Age.

Some mammoth remains still retain usable tissue samples, making it
possible to recover cells for cloning, unlike dinosaurs, which
disappeared around 65 million years ago and whose remains exist only
as fossils

Researchers hope to achieve their aim within five to six years, the
Yomiuri said.

The team, which has invited a Russian mammoth researcher and two US
elephant experts to join the project, has established a technique to
extract DNA from frozen cells, previously an obstacle to cloning
attempts because of the damage cells sustained in the freezing
process.

Another Japanese researcher, Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for
Developmental Biology, succeeded in 2008 in cloning a mouse from the
cells of another that had been kept in temperatures similar to frozen
ground for 16 years.

The scientists extracted a cell nucleus from an organ of a dead mouse
and planted it into the egg of another mouse which was alive, leading
to the birth of the cloned mouse.

Based on Wakayama's techniques, Iritani's team devised a method to
extract the nuclei of mammoth eggs without damaging them.

But a successful cloning will also pose challenges for the team, Iritani warned.

If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before
transplanting it into the womb, how to breed (the mammoth) and whether
to display it to the public, Iritani said.

After the mammoth is born, we will examine its ecology and genes to
study why the species became extinct and other factors.

[Discovery: Tiny dinosaur set stage for T. rex]

More than 80 percent of all mammoth finds have been dug up in the
permafrost of the vast Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia.

Exactly why a majority of the huge creatures that once strode in large
herds across Eurasia and North America died out towards the end of the
last Ice Age has generated fiery debate.

Some experts hold that mammoths were hunted to extinction by the
species that was to become the planet's dominant predator -- humans.

Others argue that climate change was more to blame, leaving a species
adapted for frozen climes ill-equipped to cope with a warming world.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Nigerian newspaper names Wikileaks founder Man of The Year News - Africa news

http://www.afriquejet.com/news/africa-news/nigerian-newspaper-names-wikileaks-founder-man-of-the-year-2011010466215.html

http://www.nigerianbestforum.com/blog/?p=69165

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Conservatives and Tea Party supporters are worried about the costs of the war in Afghanistan

Just Foreign Policy News
January 13, 2011

1) Survey Results Of Conservatives
Afghanistan Study Group, January 13, 2011

http://www.afghanistanstudygroup.org/2011/01/12/afghanistan-study-group-survey-results-of-conservatives/

The following is an analysis of a poll taken of conservative voters
nationwide. Drawn from a sample of randomly selected phone numbers,
this poll contains 1,000 registered voters who describe their
political ideology as conservative. Voters with listed landline
phones, unlisted landline phones, and cellular phones were eligible to
be called. Respondents were interviewed from 5:00 to 9:00 in their
time zone from January 4th through 10th. The responses to this survey
should be within plus or minus 3.1 percentage points of those that
would have been obtained from interviewing the entire population of
registered conservative voters. 550 respondents describe themselves as
a Tea Party Supporter. The margin of error for this group is 4.2
percentage points. The following summarizes key results from the
survey:

Conservatives and Tea Party supporters are worried about the costs of
the war in Afghanistan. 71% of conservatives overall, and 67% of
conservative Tea Party supporters, indicate worry that the costs will
make it more difficult for the United States to reduce the deficit
this year and balance the federal budget by the end of this decade.
Significant percentages of conservative men (67%) and women (75%)
indicate concern about the costs of the war as do conservatives in all
age groups. Those in active duty military or veteran households are as
worried about the costs of the war (69%) as those in non-military
households (72%). 61% of conservatives who believe the war has been
worth fighting are worried about the current level of costs.

Two-thirds of conservatives support a reduction in troop levels in
Afghanistan. When given a choice between three options, 66% believe we
can either reduce the troop levels in Afghanistan, but continue to
fight the war effectively (39%) or think we should leave Afghanistan
all together, as soon as possible (27%). Just 24% of conservatives
believe we should continue to provide the current level of troops to
properly execute the war. 64% of Tea Party supporters think we should
either reduce troop levels (37%) or leave Afghanistan (27%) while 28%
support maintaining current troop levels. Among conservatives who
don't identify with the Tea Party movement, 70% want a reduction (43%)
or elimination (27%) of troops while only 18% favoring continuation of
the current level.

A majority of conservatives agree that the United States can
dramatically lower the number of troops and money spent in Afghanistan
without putting America at risk. 57% say they agree with that
statement after hearing about the current number of troops in country
and the funding needed to support them. Only a third (34%) do not
agree with this statement. Among Tea Party supports 55% agree that we
can reduce the number of troops without compromising security while
38% disagree. Among non Tea Party conservatives, 60% agree with this
statement while 27% disagree.
[...]

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[Marxism-Thaxis] American Dream Done: WSJ -- Steep, Lasting Drop in Wages

the rate of surplus-value is rising
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American Dream Done: WSJ -- Steep, Lasting Drop in Wages

by Jonathan Tasini http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view.php?blog_id=1

Tuesday 11 of January, 2011
Posted to Front Page Posts

The jobs crisis is really devastating. We all know the numbers on how
many people are out of work. But, the truth is that just calling for
more jobs is not enough--because what we lack in the country is
GOOD-PAYING JOBS. And wages are not coming back.

The Wall Street Journal
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304248704575574213897770830.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond]
reports what many of us have been trying to point out for a long time:

 But the decline in their fortunes points to a signature outcome of the long 
 downturn in the labor market. Even at times of high unemployment in the past, 
 wages have been very slow to fall; economists describe them as sticky. To 
 an extent rarely seen in recessions since the Great Depression, wages for a 
 swath of the labor force this time have taken a sharp and swift fall.

 The only other downturn since the Depression to see similarly large wage cuts 
 was the 1981-82 recession. But the latest downturn is already eclipsing that 
 one. Unemployment has stood above 9% for 20 straight months?longer than the 
 early 1980s stretch?and is likely to remain above that level for most of 
 2011, putting downward pressure on wages.

 Many laid-off workers who have found new jobs are taking pay cuts or settling 
 for part-time work when they get new ones, sometimes taking jobs far below 
 their skill levels.

 Economists had wondered how far this dynamic would go in this recession, and 
 now the numbers are starting to show it: Between 2007 and 2009, more than 
 half the full-time workers who lost jobs that they had held for at least 
 three years and then found new full-time work by early last year reported 
 wage declines, according to the Labor Department. Thirty-six percent reported 
 the new job paid at least 20% less than the one they lost.[emphasis added] 

 When will we get those wages back. Maybe never:

The severity of the latest downturn makes it likely that many of the
unemployed who get rehired will take wage cuts, and that it will be
years, if ever, before many of their wages return to pre-recession
levels, says Columbia University labor economist Till von Wachter.
The deeper the recession, the lower the wage you're going to get in
the next job and the lower the quality of your next job, he
says.[emphasis added]

The WSJ article though is wrong: this actually has been taking place
for at least three decades. Productivity has been rising, more or
less, steadily for the mast 30 years but wages have been flat. So, we
have been falling behind.

When the recent job stats came out, I pointed out that one in five
Americans does not have good-paying work.

We treat poverty as a way of doing business in America. The minimum
wage is a poverty-level wage. We say people who work full-time for the
minimum wage are employed but, for a family of four, that puts them
below the federal poverty line. The minimum wage should be above $19
an hour if we factored in productivity over 30 years--how hard people
have worked.

Now, let's be clear about a few things.

First, this has NOTHING to do with education. The Field of Dreams
strategy and claiming that we would all be just fine if we were
smarter and we were all symbolic analysts was just malarkey. The
chief purveyor of that discredited theory, Robert Reich, was among a
cadre of people who were too afraid to speak out in the 1990s--and
earlier--about the vast class warfare that was underway.

An example from the story:

 Others, like Mr. Cronan, the Starbucks barista in Massachusetts, take 
 whatever work is available. He lost his job in January 2009 at a Boston 
 money-management company, where he says he earned a $100,000 salary and 
 $50,000 annual bonus in recent years. Mr. Cronan, 40, enrolled in 
 adult-education courses and tried to wait out the downturn as he saw other 
 people with MBAs take entry-level, $40,000-a-year jobs.

 But once his 19-month severance period ended, Mr. Cronan needed health 
 insurance and decided he couldn't limit his search to only his field. So, in 
 August, he got a job at his local Starbucks?the one he'd visited daily since 
 losing his job?even though he expects to leave once he finds employment in 
 his field.

He says he's now earning $8.85 an hour for about 38 hours a week of work.

Getting education is fine. But, it is not a national strategy to increase wages.

If you look actually at the facts, the top four jobs in the past year
accounting for over 14 million jobs in that period paid less than $10
an hour. And if you scan the chart you can see that the median wage of
the majority of

[Marxism-Thaxis] JFP 1/13: Conservatives, Tea Partiers worried re cost of Afghanistan war

*Just Foreign Policy News
January 13, 2011
*
*Just Foreign Policy News on the Web:*
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/804http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=ADVOp%2BX0LyvIqpFJEO6IGJXfhPp%2Bpmkq

[To receive just the Summary and a link to the web version, you can use this
webform:
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]

**Action: Center for Constitutional Rights: Support the Call for Fair
Elections in Haiti*
Ask the State Department to support fair elections in Haiti.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/haitinewelectionhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=0SbCg4ACK32dPpn8oYiorZXfhPp%2Bpmkq

*Maxine Waters Calls for New Elections in Haiti*
Rep. Waters has called for the results of the disputed November presidential
election in Haiti to be set aside and for new elections to be held. She
writes: I call upon the Government of Haiti to set aside the flawed
November 28th elections and organize new elections that will be free, fair
and accessible to all Haitian voters. The electoral data from 2010 and 2006
strongly suggest that the call for new elections reflects the opinions and
interests of the majority of Haitians.
http://www.truth-out.org/maxine-waters-calls-new-elections-haiti66807http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=yQMn0LJeUdXM2t6hMYkfnpXfhPp%2Bpmkq

*Glenn Greenwald: Media Lying About WikiLeaks and Zimbabwe*
Several papers - including the Guardian - ran pieces trashing WikiLeaks for
publishing a cable about Zimbabwe, when in fact it was the Guardian that
published the cable. Efforts to correct the record have been spectacularly
modest.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/12/propaganda/index.htmlhttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=e%2FbIdUPwDvIytgifjSzl%2BJXfhPp%2Bpmkq

*PDA: January Brown Bag Lunch Vigils to Bring the Troops Home*
PDA and others gather at local Congressional offices. Check to see if there
is a vigil near you.
http://pdamerica.org/articles/misc/2009-11-13-12-49-50-misc.phphttp://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=uHDp6jWJPLRHqtUiWts2T5XfhPp%2Bpmkq

*Help Support Our Advocacy for Peace and Diplomacy*
The opponents of peace and diplomacy work every day. Help us be an effective
counterweight.
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*Summary:*
*U.S./Top News #12d821904cc857d4_January1311r1*
1) Conservatives and Tea Party supporters are worried about the costs of the
war in Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Study Group reports, based on a poll
that it commissioned. Two-thirds of conservatives support a reduction in
troop levels. A majority of conservatives agree that the United States can
dramatically lower the number of troops and money spent in Afghanistan
without putting America at risk.

2) The highly contested November 28 elections in Haiti and the unrest that
followed have sharpened criticisms against UN troops and heightened concerns
about self-determination, human rights lawyer Beatrice Lindstrom writes for
the Center for International Policy. Forcing Haitians to accept undemocratic
elections will not set a foundation of stability, she writes. It will do the
opposite, as evidenced by last month's unrest. MINUSTAH's militarized
response to their protests was yet another example of the UN being on the
wrong side of the democratic struggle. The MINUSTAH mission has had a
troubled relationship with democracy in Haiti from its inception. The force
was brought in to secure a U.S.-led coup d'etat.

3) The contours of a large and lasting US presence in Iraq are starting to
take shape, the Washington Post reports. Planning is underway to turn over
to the State Department some of the most prominent symbols of the U.S. role
in the war - including several major bases and a significant portion of the
Green Zone. The department would use the bases to house a force of private
security contractors and support staff that it expects to triple in size, to
between 7,000 and 8,000, U.S. officials said. But the return to Iraq of
Moqtada al-Sadr, who opposes any U.S. military presence, could jeopardize US
plans. A Sadr spokesman said movement oppose all US influences and would
have to study whether U.S. contractors should be allowed to stay beyond
2011.

4) It's pretty rich for the State Department to complain about Iran blocking
fuel trucks from going to Afghanistan on the grounds that Energy is a
critical resource to any country and any economy, and it should be available
at whatever the appropriate market price is, writes Ali Gharib for LobeLog,
given that blocking gas exports to Iran is a key goal of US policy.

5) An Afghan presidential commission has determined that military operations
in the Kandahar area have caused more than $100 million in damage to homes
and farms over the past six months, the New York Times

[Marxism-Thaxis] Arizona Shooting, the Limits of Normal and Our Future (2 views)

Arizona Shooting, the Limits of Normal and Our Future (2
views)

1. Arizona Shooting Means We Have Reached the Limits of the
   Normal (Roberto Lovato)

2. The Tucson Massacre and Our Future - An Analysis
   (Lawrence Davidson

==

Arizona Shooting Means We Have Reached the Limits of the
Normal

by Roberto Lovato
Submitted to Portside by the author

Huffington Post

January 13, 2011 -- 02:17 PM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roberto-lovato/arizona-shooting-means-we_b_808689.html

Like her friend Gabby Giffords and like her former
colleague, the late Judge Roll, Isabel Garcia has known the
hatred that can kill. Garcia, a Pima County public defender
and outspoken immigrant rights activist, was shocked and
moved by Saturday's shooting near the Safeway on Tucson's
palm tree and mesquite-studded northside. But she was not
surprised at the slaughter of so many innocents.

I'm praying for Gabby and the other victims. This is very
sad, she told me when I called her recently. It makes me
very sad knowing that there are lots of people in Tucson
capable of doing these things, lots of people with guns and
hatred she said, adding It makes you even sadder that we
couldn't do anything to prevent it.

Her positions in defense of immigrants make her a favorite
target of Tucson's radio shock jocks and local Republicans
-- and Democrats -- whose rhetoric and denunciations fueled,
she believes, the numerous death threats that she herself
has received. Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time
before things blew up even more. The anger and fear have
become 'normal' here.

Garcia's insights and concerns about the larger culture of
fear and violence spinning out of control in Tucson are
shared by many from among the group that, according to FBI
hate crime statistics, is most targeted by that fear and
violence throughout Arizona and the entire country: Latinos.
Latinos have a very particular response to these
developments; we understand how extremist groups and right
wing think tanks, well-heeled foundations and Tea Party
activists have turned Arizona into the largest laboratory
for mainstreaming the extreme in the United States. As much
as any group, Latinas like Garcia understand that it's not
just the deranged, lone gunmen and mentally ill we
must be weary of; we understand that Jared Loughner acted
within and drew from a political and cultural climate
increasingly prone to fear, hatred and violence. We
understand that the Tucson tragedy means we have reached the
limits of the normal.

The killing of nine year-old Christina-Taylor Green, for
example, surely stirs memories among many of us of the
trauma-inducing murder of another nine-year-old local,
Brisenia Flores. Flores was killed by a woman affiliated
with organizations designated hate groups, groups like the
Federation of Immigration Reform whose smart-suited,
rational-sounding spokespeople are regularly sought out by
national media outlets as experts on immigration. Rather
than simply watch as entertainment the doings of Joe Arpaio,
America's Toughest Sheriff, on network newscasts and
syndicated television shows, our first response is to ask,
'tough' on who? Though some of us recognize the inherent
racism of referring to the Grand Canyon state as a a mecca
for racism and bigotry (ie; we wouldn't call Arizona a
Jerusalem of hatred), we understand the reality behind
controversial Sheriff Dupnik's statement.

Until Saturday's attack on Giffords and her followers at a
political event, the primary political issue heating up the
headlines, classrooms and streets of Tucson since I visited
there several months ago has been the ban on Latinos
learning about their history and culture in ethnic studies
classes. Latinos studying themselves means they're not
normal. Attacking Latinos for studying themselves is. It
can even get you elected to high office. And prior to the
ethnic studies ban, both the state political process and
much of the country's body politic were politically and
physically (i.e. a Latino man in Phoenix was killed in a
racist attack by his white neighbor in one of several
largely unreported hate crimes) clashing around SB-1070,
Arizona's racial profiling law.

While many of us will join Daniel Hernandez and President
Obama in their call for civil discourse, we will do so
without losing sight of the fact that, for disconcerting
numbers of regular Americans, hate and fear are the new
normal. That Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of
SB-1070 and one of Arizona's most powerful politicians, sat
in solemn attendance at the memorial was duly noted by many.
But his attendance and the calls for civil discourse will
not, should not erase less-publicized knowledge of the fact
that Pearce has ties to the Neo-Nazi extremist groups whose
members he has praised and whose rallies he has attended.

To many of us, the deranged lone gunmen on the desert
fringe can sometimes bear more than a passing resemblance to
the God-fearing, gun-wielding patriot filling our

[Marxism-Thaxis] Stephen Hawking Says Universe Not Created by God

This is old, but...

CB

Stephen Hawking Says Universe Not Created by God

 Physics, not creator, made Big Bang, new book claims
 Professor had previously referred to 'mind of God'

The Guardian
September 2, 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/02/stephen-hawking-big-bang-creator

God did not create the universe, the man who is
arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in
a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen
Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring
following the intervention of a divine being, was
inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had
seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the
universe. But in the new text, co-written with American
physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed
a creator is not necessary.

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the
Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's
belief that the universe must have been designed by God
as it could not have created out of chaos.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe
can and will create itself from nothing, he writes.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something
rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we
exist.

It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue
touch paper and set the universe going.

[Continue reading this article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/02/stephen-hawking-big-bang-creator]

In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September,
Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory,
will achieve this goal: M-theory is the unified theory
Einstein was hoping to find, he theorises.

The fact that we human beings - who are ourselves mere
collections of fundamental particles of nature - have
been able to come this close to an understanding of the
laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.

Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the
universe could not have risen from chaos was the
observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other
than our Sun. That makes the coincidences of our
planetary conditions - the single sun, the lucky
combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass - far
less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence
that the earth was carefully designed just to please us
human beings, he writes.

Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of
God in the creation of the universe, writing in his
bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, he said:
If we discover a complete theory, it would be the
ultimate triumph of human reason-- for then we should
know the mind of God.

Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the
position.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Government overthrown in Tunisia

Tunisia crisis: as it happened | World news | guardian.co.uk
shar.es
Thousands of Tunisians have protested in the capital, leading to the
ousting of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Follow developments as
they happened

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/blog/2011/jan/14/tunisia-wikileaks

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[Marxism-Thaxis] UAW's King ups pressure on foreign auto plants in U.S.

2011-01-13 Thread c b

http://detnews.com/article/20110113/AUTO01/101130397/1148/UAW%E2%80%99s-King-ups-pressure-on-foreign-auto-plants-in-U.S.

UAW's King ups pressure on foreign auto plants in U.S.
David Shepardson and Christine Tierney / The Detroit News

United Auto Workers President Bob King on Wednesday stepped up his
rhetoric demanding that foreign automakers agree to avoid tactics that
pressure workers to reject unions.

King, who spoke at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit,
threatened to expose companies that don't agree to fair bargaining
as human rights violators, but stopped short of calling for a
possible boycott.

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I would not want to be a company that was branded as a human rights
violator, King said, saying the damage from such a label could total
hundreds of millions of dollars. That would be a bad business
decision.

The UAW has set aside $60 million from its strike fund to work toward
organizing so-called transplants — U.S. auto plants owned by foreign
automakers — and has vowed to conduct global protests if they don't
agree to fair union elections, as defined by the union.

The UAW released a set of principles last week calling on companies to
allow unions the same access to workers as management, to avoid
threats and disavow threats from allies, and to not disparage unions.
The UAW demands that employers agree to speedy resolutions of disputes
and quickly reach a first contract. The single dominant factor in a
worker's decision is fear, King said. Current labor laws and the
process laid out, he said, is fatally, hopelessly flawed.

Foreign-based automakers have said the decision is up to their
workers. But they have traditionally opposed the UAW's organizing
efforts, which have been unsuccessful.

They spend millions of dollars trying to keep the UAW out of their
facilities, King said of the automakers, arguing that it would be
cheaper for them to work with the union.

We just have to convince them that we're not the Evil Empire that
they think that we were at one point, King said. The UAW has learned
from the past.

He said he was having private meetings with foreign automakers to talk
about the union's ability to organize workers, but declined to
identify them.

Honda Motor Co., the first Japanese automaker to build a U.S. assembly
plant, responded coolly. Honda has had no dialogue with the UAW, and
has no interest in a discussion with them, the automaker said in a
statement Wednesday.

One of Toyota Motor Corp's senior U.S. manufacturing executives, Steve
St. Angelo, said it wasn't up to the company to decide. That's up to
the workers.

But Toyota doesn't see the need for a union as an interlocutor between
line workers and management. We provide competitive wages and
benefits, and we have open communications throughout the company, St.
Angelo said Monday.

He noted that Toyota, unlike other automakers, did not lay off workers
— it calls them team members — at its plants during the recent
industry downturn. Instead, they were kept on, given training or other
work, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, St. Angelo said.

The UAW has not succeeded in organizing an Asian auto plant in the
United States, although some factories built and previously run by one
of Detroit's automakers, such as the Mazda/Ford Flat Rock joint
venture, and the shuttered Toyota-General Motors production venture in
Fremont, Calif., have employed union workers.

Harley Shaiken, a labor expert and professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, called the renewed effort to organize
transplants pivotal to the UAW and central to Bob King's project.

The transplants' share has grown so significant that they're
increasingly setting the direction and the wages for the industry,
Shaiken said.

With the U.S. auto industry shrinking dramatically, UAW membership
fell to a new post-World War II low in 2009, dropping by nearly 76,000
to 355,191 members. The union had 1.53 million members at its peak in
1979.

Union leaders have been unsuccessful in winning passage of a bill in
Congress, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier to
organize.

Current rules are outdated and ineffective, King said. American
labor law today simply does not provide a fair framework for union
elections. Companies can intimidate, threaten and coerce employees
almost with total immunity.

Shaiken said King's preference is to work with the foreign-based automakers.

He's saying, 'Look, let's sit down and talk about it. But if you're
not willing to do this, we're not just going to walk away. We'll use
every means at our

[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

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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

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[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/

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Cave Drops Hints to Earliest Glass of Red

2011-01-11 Thread c b

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11wine.html?_r=3src=tptw


Cave Drops Hints to Earliest Glass of Red
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: January 11, 2011


Scientists have reported finding the oldest known winemaking
operation, about 6,100 years old, complete with a vat for fermenting,
a press, storage jars, a clay bowl and a drinking cup made from an
animal horn. Grape seeds, dried pressed grapes, stems, shriveled
grapevines and residue were also found, and chemical analyses indicate
red wine was produced there.
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The discovery, published online Tuesday in The Journal of
Archaeological Science, occurred in a cave in Armenia where the team
of American, Armenian and Irish archaeologists recently found the
oldest known leather shoe. The shoe, a laced cowhide moccasin possibly
worn by a woman with a size-7 foot, is about 5,500 years old.

These discoveries and other artifacts found in the cave provide a
window into the Copper Age, or Late Chalcolithic period, when humans
are believed to have invented the wheel and domesticated horses, among
other innovations.

Relatively few objects have been found, but the cave, designated
Areni-1 and discovered in 1997, is proving a perfect time capsule
because prehistoric artifacts have been preserved under layers of
sheep dung and a white crust on the cave’s karst limestone walls.

“We keep finding more interesting things,” said Gregory Areshian,
assistant director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-director of the
excavation, which is financed by the National Geographic Society and
other institutions. “Because of the conditions of the cave, things are
wonderfully preserved.”

Experts called the find a watershed.

“I see it as the earliest winemaking facility that’s ever been found,”
said Patrick E. McGovern, an archaeological chemist at the University
of Pennsylvania Museum, which is not involved in the project. “It
shows a fairly large-scale operation, and it fits very well with the
evidence that we already have about the tradition of making wine.”

Some of that evidence was identified by Dr. McGovern and colleagues,
who determined that residue in jars found at a northwestern Iran site
called Hajji Firuz suggested that wine was being made as early as
7,400 years ago.

But “that’s just a number of wine jars that we identified,” said Dr.
McGovern, author of “Uncorking the Past.”

“Just how elaborate this one is suggests that there was earlier
production” of a more sophisticated nature.

Stefan K. Estreicher, a professor at Texas Tech University and author
of “Wine: From Neolithic Times to the 21st Century,” said the Armenian
discovery shows “how important it was to them” to make wine because
“they spent a lot of time and effort to build a facility to use only
once a year” when grapes were harvested.

The wine was probably used for ritual purposes, as burial sites were
seen nearby in the cave. Dr. Areshian said at least eight bodies had
been found so far, including a child, a woman, bones of elderly men
and, in ceramic vessels, skulls of three adolescents (one still
containing brain tissue).

Wine may have been drunk to honor or appease the dead, and was “maybe
also sprinkled on these burials,” he said.

The cave, with several chambers, appeared to be used for rituals by
high-status people, although some people, possibly caretakers, lived
up front, where the shoe was found. Researchers have also found two
“dark holes, essentially jars filled with dried fruit, including dried
grapes, prunes, walnuts and probably the oldest evidence of
cultivating almonds,” Dr. Areshian said.

And there is evidence of a 6,000-year-old “metallurgical operation,”
including smelted copper and a mold to cast copper ingots, he said.

Mitchell S. Rothman, an anthropologist and Chalcolithic expert at
Widener University not involved in the expedition, said these
discoveries show “the industry and technology developing,” and “the
very inklings of some kind of social differentiation.”

It is “the sort of thing where ritual becomes not only part of the
desire to appreciate the gods, but a way in which the people involved
in that become somehow special,” added Dr. Rothman, who has visited
the cave.

The winemaking discovery began when graduate students found grape
seeds in the cave’s central chamber in 2007, and culminated last fall.
A shallow, thick-rimmed, 3-by-3 1/2-foot clay basin appears to be a
wine press where people stomped grapes with their feet. The basin is
positioned so juice would tip into a two-foot-deep vat.

Scientists verified the age and function with radiocarbon dating,
botanical analysis to confirm the grapes were cultivated, and analysis
of residue for malvidin, which gives red wine its color.

Dr. Areshian said scientists are undertaking “a very extensive DNA
analysis of the grape seeds” from the cave and “our botanists want to
plant some of the seeds.”
A version of

[Marxism-Thaxis] Think Again: American Decline

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/think_again_american_decline?page=full

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] On Paul Samuleson as a tragic figure

At first sight, it seems that Samuelson was simply trying to give
Keynes a stronger analytical backbone, turning the art of government
intervention, at a time of crisis, into a mathematical science.  What
could be wrong with that?  The answer is: Everything!  Keynes'
greatest contribution was to alert us to a disarmingly simple truth:
in a complex, financialized capitalist economy, it is impossible
(rather than just hard) to derive, by analytical reasoning, the well
defined mathematical expectations which one needs to close a
macroeconomic model.  Drop this insight, and you have lost all that
matters in Keynes' analysis of the Great Depression in particular and,
more generally, of capitalism's tendency to stumble and fall on its
face.  By transcribing Keynes' view of the macro economy into a closed
optimization problem, Samuelson effectively poured down the drain
everything of importance in Keynes' General Theory: a striking example
of honoring one's inspiration mostly in the breach rather that in the
observance. . . .

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Jim Farmelant farmela...@juno.com wrote:


 http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/varoufakis030111.html

 Jim Farmelant
 http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
 www.foxymath.com
 Learn or Review Basic Math
 
 Browse the web faster. Download Chrome
 Browse the web as fast as you think. Give Google Chrome a try
 http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4d27c0929e92e54aeacst05vuc
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Mapping every city, every block in US

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

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[Marxism-Thaxis] 47.8 Million People Live in Poverty -- Far More Than Previously Thought

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/424987/47.8_million_people_live_in_poverty_--_far_more_than_previously_thought/



47.8 Million People Live in Poverty -- Far More Than Previously Thought

The Census Bureau has released new estimates that show the US poverty
rate is far higher than previously thought, with 1 in 6 Americans
living below the poverty line, reports the AP. Unlike the official
poverty rate, the new numbers take into account medical bills as well
as transportation costs and work expenses. The number of seniors
living in poverty almost doubles under the new formula, according to
the AP.

The report also found that in 2009 many families were saved from
poverty by government aid programs like work stamps and tax credits.
The piece quotes a Census Bureau research economist who says:

Under the new measure, we can clearly see the effects of our
government policies ... When you're accounting for in-kind benefits
and tax credits, you're bringing many people in extreme poverty off
the very bottom.

Less likely to pull people out of poverty: showboating about the
deficit, threatening Social Security, promising to repeal health care
reform and other preoccupations of the newly inaugurated Republican
House.
By Tana Ganeva | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at January 5, 2011, 4:08 pm

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Arizona Sheriff Dupnik's criticism of political 'vitriol' resonates with public

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2011/01/sheriff-dupniks-criticism-of-p.html


Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, who is overseeing the
investigation of Saturday's mass shooting that critically wounded Rep.
Gabrielle Giffords (D), became an overnight sensation with his remarks
that the vitriol in today's political discourse contributed to the
incident and that Arizona has become a mecca for prejudice and
bigotry.

Dupnik's name was a top search term on Twitter Saturday night, with
many of the tweets thanking him for his candor, and overnight, a
Facebook page titled Clarence Dupnik is my Hero sprung up.

In a news conference Saturday evening, Dupnik condemned the
atmosphere of hatred and bigotry that he said has gripped the nation
and suggested that the 22-year-old suspect being held in the shooting
was mentally ill and therefore more susceptible to overheated messages
in the media.

There's reason to believe that this individual may have a mental
issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially
susceptible to vitriol, he said during his televised remarks. People
tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear
inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing
that. That may be free speech, but it's not without consequences.

His remarks especially resonated with liberals, who even before the
name of the suspect was released suggested that the shooter may have
had been incited by the tea party. There is no indication that the
suspect, Jared Lee Lougner, identified with the tea party or was
politically conservative. During the campaign, liberal pundits and
politicians asserted that the sometimes militant language some
conservative politicians used could incite violence.

MSNBC talk show host Keith Olbermann, who acknowledged and apologized
for his role in the acrimonious political climate, praised Dupnik's
extraordinary comments at the close of his show on Saturday.
Dupnik's remarks drew criticism from conservatives.

We have no idea at this point the motivation of this murderer's act.
Yet Dupnik took his moment in the spotlight to drive a political wedge
into the event, local conservative radio host Jon Justice said in an
e-mail to the Tucson Weekly. They were reckless and dangerous
statements made by someone who should have known better. He should
have been using his time to help bring the community together.

Dupnik, 74, a Democrat who has served as Pima County sheriff since
1980, is known for his colorful and often bluntly partisan commentary.
Last year, he refused to enforce Arizona's aggressive new law
targeting illegal immigrants, calling it stupid and racist. He
coined the phrase political fornickaboobery, to describe the motives
he felt were behind the crackdown.

He has called the tea party bigots, and on Saturday, he had similar
words about Arizona's reputation. The anger the hatred the bigotry
that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous, and
unfortunately I think Arizona has become sort of the capital, he
said. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

Yet Dupnik has also argued that the state should not be obligated to
educate illegal immigrant children, and a group of fellow Democratic
officials in 2009 asked him to apologize after he said 40 percent of
students at a particular school district were illegally in the
country. He refused.

His remarks on Saturday further ingratiated him with liberals who have
often taken issue with another Arizona sheriff - Maricopa County's Joe
Arpaio, a Republican and frequent speaker at tea party events who has
clashed with federal authorities over his aggressive tactics in
dealing with illegal immigrants.

Pima is a border county of nearly 1 million that includes Tucson, a
Democratic-leaning city, and overlaps with the 8th congressional
district, which Giffords represents. According to the Pima County
sheriff's office web site, Dupnik is a 50-year veteran in law
enforcement, having first served in the Tucson Police Department in
1958.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Caudwell critique's bourgeois concept of individual liberty

http://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/index.htm



Christopher Caudwell 1938
Liberty
A study in bourgeois illusion

Source: “Studies in a Dying Culture,” first published 1938.
Republished 1977 in “The Concept of Freedom,” Lawrence  Wishart, London.
Transcribed: by Dominic Tweedie;
Proofed and corrected: by Guy Colvin, November 2005.

Many will have heard a broadcast by H. G. Wells in which (commenting
on the Soviet Union) he described it as a “great experiment which has
but half fulfilled its promise,” it is still a “land without mental
freedom.” There are also many essays of Bertrand Russell in which this
philosopher explains the importance of liberty, how the enjoyment of
liberty is the highest and most important goal of man. Fisher claims
that the history of Europe during the last two or three centuries is
simply the struggle for liberty. Continually and variously by artists,
scientists, and philosophers alike, liberty is thus praised and man’s
right to enjoy it imperiously asserted.

I agree with this. Liberty does seem to me the most important of all
generalised goods – such as justice, beauty, truth – that come so
easily to our lips. And yet when freedom is discussed a strange thing
is to be noticed. These men – artists, careful of words, scientists,
investigators of the entities denoted by words, philosophers
scrupulous about the relations between words and entities – never
define precisely what they mean by freedom. They seem to assume that
it is quite a clear concept, whose definition every one would agree
about.

Yet who does not know that liberty is a concept about whose nature men
have quarrelled perhaps more than any other? The historic disputes
concerning predestination, Karma, Free-Will, Moira, salvation by faith
or works, determinism, Fate, Kismet, the categorical imperative,
sufficient grace, occasionalism, Divine Providence, punishment and
responsibility, have all been about the nature of man’s freedom of
will and action. The Greeks, the Romans, the Buddhists, the
Mahomedans, the Catholics, the Jansenists, and the Calvinists, have
each had different ideas of liberty. Why, then, do all these bourgeois
intellectuals assume that liberty is a clear concept, understood in
the same way by all their hearers, and therefore needing no
definition? Russell, for example, has spent his life finding a really
satisfactory definition of number and even now it is disputed whether
he has been successful. I can find in his writings no clear definition
of what he means by liberty. Yet most people would have supposed that
men are far more in agreement as to what is meant by a number, than
what is meant by liberty.

The indefinite use of the word can only mean either that they believe
the meaning of the word invariant in history or that they use it in
the contemporary bourgeois sense. If they believe the meaning
invariant, it is strange that men have disputed so often about
freedom. These intellectuals must surely be incapable of such a
blunder. They must mean liberty as men in their situation experience
it. That is, they must mean by liberty to have no more restrictions
imposed upon them than they endure at that time. They do not – these
Oxford dons or successful writers – want, for example, the
restrictions of Fascism, that is quite clear. That would not be
liberty. But at present, thank God, they are reasonably free.

Now this conception of liberty is superficial, for not all their
countrymen are in the same situation. A, an intellectual, with a good
education, in possession of a modest income, with not too uncongenial
friends, unable to afford a yacht, which he would like, but at least
able to go to the winter sports, considers this (more or less)
freedom. He would like that yacht, but still – he can write against
Communism or Fascism or the existing system. Let us for the moment
grant that A is free. I propose to analyse this statement more deeply
in a moment, and show that it is partial. But let us for the moment
grant that A enjoys liberty.

Is B free? B is a sweated non-union shop-assistant of Houndsditch,
working seven days of the week. He knows nothing of art, science, or
philosophy. He has no culture except a few absurd prejudices, his
elementary school education saw to that. He believes in the
superiority of the English race, the King’s wisdom and loving-kindness
to his subjects, the real existence of God, the Devil, Hell, and Sin,
and the wickedness of sexual intercourse unless palliated by marriage.
His knowledge of world events is derived from the News of the World,
on other days he has no time to read the papers. He believes that when
he dies he will (with luck) enter into eternal bliss. At present,
however, his greatest dread is that by displeasing his employer in
some trifle, he may become unemployed.

B’s trouble is plainly lack of leisure in which to cultivate freedom.
C does not suffer from this. He is an unemployed middle-aged man. He
is free for 24 hours a day. He is free to go

[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Estranged Labour has individual life as its purpose; self-interested individual, etc.

 The role of the
 existential sensibility in one's overall world view and trajectory is
 vital to understand, as well as the appropriation of the
 metaphysical/epistemological baggage to support one's projects.

 The modern period, which of course witnesses the scientific revolution,
 the Enlightenment, the rebellion against feudal authority, clericalism,
 and metaphysics, and the emergence of the bourgeoisie, also sees the
 emergence of the individual as a self-conscious entity.

^^^
CB: Not surprising.  The individual gets irritated or alienated out by
capitalist  estrangement .( See Marx's Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844 on this alienation or estrangement process)


Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Karl Marx
Estranged Labour

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm



In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active
functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species
from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of
individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and
individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract
form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract
and estranged form


CB: Estrangement produces the modern self-interested individual type
among masses, not just in the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Thus, in
trying to raise working class class consciousness, Marxism has relied,
paradoxically ,  majorly on appeal to material self-interest of
individuals as a _class_ .  It is difficult to avoid this riddle given
the generalization of pursuit of self-interest among the masses of
workers by the estrangement process.  The mythical American right of
pursuit of happiness reflects this.  Economics' rational man reflects
this.

I think this issue underlies a lot of what Ted Winslow on LBO-Talk
essays constantly.  The rational or selfish or self-interested
individual who is only in elite classes down through other modes of
production  in history becomes general among masses , among the
wretched of the earth, with capitalist estrangement. In a sense, it
makes masses of workers petit bourgeois in their ideology. This is in
the sense that the bourgeoisie ,of course, have an unabashed ideology
of selfishness, material self interestedness, personal and individual
greed. Justification , rationalization of rich people's greed is the
first cause of the purveyance and mass supply of  various abstract
Individualisms  or individual primacy or individual determinist
theories etc among the intelligentsia (organic intellectuals)  of
bourgeois society ( Existentialism, Libertarianism, Reaganism, Tea
Partying, positivism, economic rational man, Economic Robinsinades,
Christian infinite individual Soul, Monotheism, Freudianism, Hollywood
personality cults,  (Individual) Survival television shows,  etc.).
The mass demand for these forms of consciousness, the mass consumption
is generated by the Estranged Labour process

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[Marxism-Thaxis] What Would You Do With a Trillion Dollars?

What Would You Do With a Trillion Dollars? |
 CommonDreams.org

www.commondreams.org

PHILADELPHIA - January 6 - The American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) and National Priorities Project (NPP) are preparing to announce
the six lucky winners of If I Had a Trillion Dollars (IHTD), a
national video contest which asks young people to convey how they
would spend the more than $1 tr

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[Marxism-Thaxis] The Not So Great Islamist Menace

The Not So Great Islamist Menace

By Dan Gardner,


...Islamists? They were behind a grand total of one
attack. Yes, one. Out of 294 attacks in Europe last year.

Ottawa

January 5, 2011

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/great+Islamist+menace/4058778/story.html
See More
The not so great Islamist menace
www.ottawacitizen.com

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[Marxism-Thaxis] India

Book Review - India Calling - By Anand Giridharadas
www.nytimes.com
An exploration of fundamental changes in family and class
relationships, and in the very idea of what it is to be Indian.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Renaissance Fashion: The Birth of Power Dressing

http://www.historytoday.com/ulinka-rublack/renaissance-fashion-birth-power-dressing


Renaissance Fashion: The Birth of Power Dressing
Ulinka Rublack, 21 December 2010
History TodayCulturalSocialRenaissanceEuropeVolume: 61 Issue: 1
Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend to friend

At what point did it begin to matter what you wore? Ulinka Rublack
looks at why the Renaissance was a turning point in people’s attitudes
to clothes and their appearance.

I shall never forget, while staying in Paris, the day a friend’s
husband returned home from a business trip. She and I were having
coffee in a huge sunny living room overlooking the Seine. His key
turned in the door. Next, a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew
down the corridor. Finally the man himself appeared. ‘My feet are
killing me!’ he exclaimed. The shoes were by Gucci.

We might think that these are the modern follies of fashion, which now
beset men as much as women. My friend certainly valued herself partly
in terms of the wardrobe she had assembled and her accessories of
bags, sunglasses, stilettoes and shoes. She had modest breast implants
and a slim, sportive body. They were moving to Dubai. In her spare
time when she was not looking after children, going shopping, walking
the dog, or jogging, she would write poems and cry.

Yet neither my friend nor her husband would be much out of place in
the middle of the 15th century. Remember men’s long pointed Gothic
shoes? In the Franconian village of Niklashausen at this time a
wandering preacher drew large crowds and got men to cut off their
shoulder-length hair and slash the long tips of their pointed shoes,
which were seen as wasteful of leather. Learning to walk down stairs
in them was a skill. Men and women in this period aspired to an
elongated, delicate, slim silhouette. Very small people were
considered deformed and were given the role of grotesque fools.
Italian doctors already wrote books about cosmetic surgery.

When, how and why did looks become deeply embedded in how people felt
about themselves and others? The Renaissance was a turning point. I
use the term in its widest sense to describe a long period, from
c.1300 to 1600. After 1300 a much greater variety and quantity of
goods was produced and consumed across the globe. Textiles,
furnishings and items of apparel formed a key part of this
unprecedented diffusion of objects and increased interaction with
overseas worlds. Tailoring was transformed by new materials and
innovative techniques in cutting and sewing, as well as the desire for
a tighter fit to emphasise bodily form, particularly of men’s
clothing. Merchants expanded markets in courts and cities by making
chic accessories such as hats, bags, gloves or hairpieces, ranging
from beards to long braids. At the same time, new media and the spread
of mirrors led to more people becoming interested in their self-image
and into trying to imagine how they appeared to others; artists were
depicting humans on an unprecedented scale, in the form of medals,
portraits, woodcuts and genre scenes, and print circulated more
information about dress across the world, as the genre of ‘costume
books’ was born.
Dressed to thrill

These expanding consumer and visual worlds conditioned new ways of
feeling. In July 1526 Matthäus Schwarz, a 29-year-old chief accountant
for the mighty Fugger family of merchants from Augsburg, commissioned
a naked image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely noted his
waist measurements. He worried about gaining weight, which to him
signalled ageing and diminished attractiveness. Over the course of his
life, from his twenties to his old age, Schwarz commissioned 135
watercolour paintings showing his dressed self, which he eventually
compiled into a remarkable album, the Klaidungsbüchlein (Book of
Clothes), which is housed today in a small museum in Brunswick. From
the many fascinating details the album reveals we know that, while he
was courting women, Schwarz carried heart-shaped leather bags in
green, the colour of hope. The new material expression of these
emotions, which were tied to appearances, heart-shaped bags for men,
artificial braids for women or red silk stockings for young boys, may
strike us as odd. Yet the messages they contained (of self-esteem,
erotic appeal or social advancement; and their effects, which ranged
from delight in wonderful craftsmanship to concern that a look had not
been achieved or that someone’s appearance was deceiving) remain
familiar to us today.

When cultures throw up new words, historians can be fairly sure that
they have struck on new developments. The word ‘fashion’ gained
currency in different languages during the Renaissance. Moda was
adapted from Latin into Italian to convey the idea of fashionable
dressing as opposed to costume, which denoted more stable customs
relating to dress. In 16th-century France, the word mode began to
supersede the Old French expression cointerie to mean ‘in style’. The
French term

[Marxism-Thaxis] Sublime Frequencies

Sublime Frequencies

http://www.sublimefrequencies.com/

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[Marxism-Thaxis] jean-quan-becomes-first-asian-american-woman-to-lead-major-u-s-city/

http://www.peoplesworld.org/jean-quan-becomes-first-asian-american-woman-to-lead-major-u-s-city/

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[Marxism-Thaxis] 'Music from Saharan cellphones, Vol. 1':

'Music from Saharan cellphones, Vol. 1':

http://ghostcapital.blogspot.com/2010/08/va-music-from-saharan-cellphones-vol-1.html

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Midnight at the Oasis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3tHYb4_bAg

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Your changing brain

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/brain/changing.php

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Fundamental difference: Estranged Labour has individual life as its purpose