Re: [Marxism] Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after 'invented people' claim

[Juan Fajardo]

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On 12/10/2011Juan Fajardo wrote:


"I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs
and
historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go
many
places."


It's a very common claim. Some go further an posit that the Palestinians
are in fact Jordanians and Syrians, whom Jordan and Syria, as well as
other Arab countries refused to take back in, calling them
"Palestinians", fabricating historical ties to the land, and using them
to "embarrass Israel" and excuse to be hostile it.


It follows logically from the Zionist argument that Palestine was "a
land without a people for a people without a land". And has even less
justification historically than most other Zionist claims.

Einde O'Callaghan


It also provides a nifty cover for granting Palestinians "residency 
permits" only, as if they were just visitors, and destigmatizes the 
notion of "population transfers" since the Palestinians are not viewed 
as having permanent or longstanding ties to any piece of land.


"Never Again! (save in cases of X, Y or Z ...)" eh?


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Re: [Marxism] Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after 'invented people' claim

[Einde O'Callaghan]

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On 11.12.2011 01:49, Juan Fajardo wrote:

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On 12/10/2011 12:40 PM, Tristan Sloughter wrote:


"I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and
historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go
many
places."


It's a very common claim. Some go further an posit that the Palestinians
are in fact Jordanians and Syrians, whom Jordan and Syria, as well as
other Arab countries refused to take back in, calling them
"Palestinians", fabricating historical ties to the land, and using them
to "embarrass Israel" and excuse to be hostile it.

It follows logically from the Zionist argument that Palestine was "a 
land without a people for a people without a land". And has even less 
justification historically than most other Zionist claims.


Einde O'Callaghan


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Re: [Marxism] Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after 'invented people' claim

[Juan Fajardo]

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On 12/10/2011 12:40 PM, Tristan Sloughter wrote:


"I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and
historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many
places."


It's a very common claim.  Some go further an posit that the 
Palestinians are in fact Jordanians and Syrians, whom Jordan and Syria, 
as well as other Arab countries refused to take back in, calling them 
"Palestinians", fabricating historical ties to the land, and using them 
to "embarrass Israel" and excuse to be hostile it.



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Re: [Marxism] Left reaction to the Australian Labor Party conference

[Ozleft]

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The Labor left and its role: a response to Doug Jordan

http://ozleft.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/is-there-a-labor-left/



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[Marxism] The Economist anxiously tallies up the parallels to the 1930's

[Marv Gandall]

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Lessons of the 1930s
There could be trouble ahead
The Economist
Dec 10th 2011 

In 2008 the world dodged a second Depression by avoiding the mistakes that led 
to the first. But there are further lessons to be learned for both Europe and 
America

“YOU’RE right, we did it,” Ben Bernanke told Milton Friedman in a speech 
celebrating the Nobel laureate’s 90th birthday in 2002. He was referring to Mr 
Friedman’s conclusion that central bankers were responsible for much of the 
suffering in the Depression. “But thanks to you,” the future chairman of the 
Federal Reserve continued, “we won’t do it again.” Nine years later Mr 
Bernanke’s peers are congratulating themselves for delivering on that promise. 
“We prevented a Great Depression,” the Bank of England’s governor, Mervyn King, 
told the Daily Telegraph in March this year.

The shock that hit the world economy in 2008 was on a par with that which 
launched the Depression. In the 12 months following the economic peak in 2008, 
industrial production fell by as much as it did in the first year of the 
Depression. Equity prices and global trade fell more. Yet this time no 
depression followed. Although world industrial output dropped by 13% from peak 
to trough in what was definitely a deep recession, it fell by nearly 40% in the 
1930s. American and European unemployment rates rose to barely more than 10% in 
the recent crisis; they are estimated to have topped 25% in the 1930s. This 
remarkable difference in outcomes owes a lot to lessons learned from the 
Depression.

Debate continues as to what made the Depression so long and deep. Some 
economists emphasise structural factors such as labour costs. Amity Shlaes, an 
economic historian, argues that “government intervention helped make the 
Depression Great.” She notes that President Franklin Roosevelt criminalised 
farmers who sold chickens too cheaply and “generated more paper than the entire 
legislative output of the federal government since 1789”. Her book, “The 
Forgotten Man”, is hugely influential among America’s Republicans. Newt 
Gingrich loves it.

A more common view among economists, however, is that the simultaneous 
tightening of fiscal and monetary policy turned a tough situation into an awful 
one. Governments made no such mistake this time round. Where leaders slashed 
budgets and central banks raised rates in the 1930s, policy was almost 
uniformly expansionary after the crash of 2008. Where international 
co-operation fell apart during the Depression, leading to currency wars and 
protectionism, leaders hung together in 2008 and 2009. Sir Mervyn has a point.

Look closer, however, and the picture is less comforting. For in two 
important—and related—areas, the rich world could still make mistakes that were 
also made in the 1930s. It risks repeating the fiscal tightening that produced 
America’s “recession within a depression” of 1937-38. And the crisis in Europe 
looks eerily similar to the financial turmoil of the late 1920s and early 
1930s, in which economies fell like dominoes under pressure from austerity, 
tight money and the lack of a lender of last resort. There are, in short, 
further lessons to be learned.

Riding for a fall

It was far easier to stimulate the economy in the 2000s than in the 1930s. 
Social safety nets—introduced in the aftermath of the Depression—mean that 
today’s unemployed have money to spend, providing a cushion against recession 
without any active intervention. States are more relaxed about running 
deficits, and control much larger shares of national economies. The package of 
public works, spending and tax cuts that President Herbert Hoover introduced 
after the crash of 1929 amounted to less than 0.5% of GDP. President Barack 
Obama’s stimulus plan, by contrast, was equivalent to 2-3% of GDP in both 2009 
and 2010. Hoover’s entire budget covered only about 2.5% of GDP; Mr Obama’s 
takes 25% of GDP and runs a deficit of 10%.

Roosevelt raised spending to 10.7% of output in 1934, by which point the 
American economy was growing strongly. By 1936 inflation-adjusted GDP was back 
to 1929 levels. Just how much the New Deal spending helped the recovery is 
still debated. Some economists, such as John Cochrane of the University of 
Chicago and Robert Barro of Harvard, say not at all. Fiscal measures never 
work, they say.

Those who think that fiscal measures do work nonetheless tend to believe that, 
in the 1930s, spending was less important than monetary policy, which they see 
as the prime cause of suffering. In a paper in 1989 Mr Bernanke and Martin 
Parkinson, now the top civil servant in Australia’s finance ministry, wrote 
that rather than providing recovery itself “the New Deal is better 
characterised as having ‘cleared the way’ for a natu

[Marxism] Pioneer Square, December 10, 2011 (Petersburg)

[Thomas Campbell]

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Here is a video from yesterday's anti-Putin demo in Petersburg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CShbQaH2o3c

Our comrade's fierce albeit brief speech about student power begins at the
2:17 mark.

And here is the same comrade, after the rally, talking about the rally in
general and expanding more on what she wanted to say:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR8md-J4vtw

Her commentary is followed by that of a young man, who explains why he
thought yesterday's sanctioned rally was a victory for "horizontal"
organizing in the social networks.

I don't know whether Sergii and I are the only people on this mailing list
who speak Russian, but if other people here are interested, I can do a
translation.

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Re: [Marxism] Monthly Review hostile to Russian protesters

[Thomas Campbell]

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From: Louis Proyect 
Subject: [Marxism] Monthly Review hostile to Russian protesters

Check this out:

http://twitter.com/mrzine_notes

>
> #???10 / #Dec10 draws 10,000-50,000 according to various estimates.
> #MSM, overjoyed, "forget" to mention #Russia's population: 141,750,000.
>
> ---
>
> I wondered how long it would take the brain-dead sector of the left
> represented by Monthly Review, Global Research and Counterpunch to begin
> its ideological campaign against the Russian protesters.  Taking shape,
> of course, as the anti-anti-Putin left.
>
> Well, MR beat the others to the punch. I should of course add that this
> diarrhea is flowing out of Yoshie's computer in Ohio and not out of John
> Bellamy Foster's. The problem, however, is that he is responsible for
> her just as the owner of a pit bull would be if the unleashed beast
> attacked a three-year-old.
>
> Many of Yoshie's comments were directed at me. I was "live tweeting" the
Petersburg rally today, and she zeroed in on this and started "grilling" me
at some point.

But what she "forgot to mention" is that there were protests all over
Russia today, not just in Moscow. The Petersburg demo drew an estimated
10,000 people -- easily the biggest anti-Putin rally here ever, including
the first "March of the Dissenters" (which was, admittedly, more fun
because it was totally "illegal"). Numbers in other (smaller) cities were,
apparently, lower, but in many of those places the threshold of fear is
bigger because it's harder to be partly or totally anonymous when
protesting, and there's much fewer media and other activists around to
raise a ruckus when the FSB or Center "E" (the "anti-extremism" police
introduced under Medvedev) go after you (which they do with furious abandon
in many smaller cities).

At this point, it's not sheer numbers on the ground that count, so much as
the change in the atmosphere, and the sense that Putin and United Russia
have crossed the line -- in the minds of lots of people -- from "grudgingly
tolerated" to "unequivocally reviled." A huge element in this shift has to
be young Russians -- many of whom voted for the first time in their lives,
many of whom served as election observers, all of whom are totally plugged
into to the Internet and the social networks.

That was where the spontaneous, "illegal" protests of the past week in
Moscow and Petersburg were organized for the most part. This obviously
scared both the Kremlin and the "opposition," especially its so-called
non-systemic segment (i.e., the liberal politicians whose parties aren't
allowed to run in elections, like Yeltsin-era poster boy Boris Nemtsov),
who quickly (and without asking for anyone's say-so) moved to co-opt the
"illegal" rallies planned for Saturday in Moscow and Petersburg (at
Revolution Square and Insurrection Square, respectively) and at literally
the last minute cut a deal with the local authorities to hold "legal"
rallies at other sites. Police even "graciously" allowed protesters to
march from the original sites to the legalized ones, and hence there were
very few arrests yesterday, unlike all the previous days since the
elections.

I don't know whether this was a good or bad thing, ultimately, but in any
case many people were relieved that a blood bath didn't ensue.

On the downside, protesters in Petersburg were mostly treated to a
standard-issue "opposition" rally that my wife described as "depressingly
dull." But then again, we've seen all these folks before dozens of times
and know their shtick. What was actually depressing was the lack of any
clear program or plan of action, even for the (wholly imaginary) "color
revolution" Yoshie so dreads. But maybe for the thousands of young people
in attendance it was some kind of revelation to hear the slogan "Down with
Putin!" and chant it along with thousands of other people.

One of the only bright notes at the Petersburg demo was a short speech by
one of our allies, a female student activist, who called on her fellow
students to take over their universities at all levels, organize from the
grassroots up, and fight against new measures (like Federal Law No. 83)
aimed at commercializing (i.e., destroying) the educational system, health
care, and other previously free-of-charge public institutions. This might
sound like old hat to many of you in the non-Russian world, but it's
something that barely gets mentioned by the "opposition" here, and
certainly not at their dull rallies, so this young woman's speech visibly
animated the crowd.

In fact, if the "opposition" had really wanted to set things on fire they
would have put more young people like our comrade on the podium. That's
what has really been missing in Russian politics the past twenty years --
young people. Except for tiny groups l

[Marxism] Occupy Cleveland

[jay rothermel]

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Occupy Cleveland will probably focus on foreclosure
crisis
Published:
Saturday, December 10, 2011, 3:00 PM
  By * Olivera Perkins, The Plain Dealer *


Although Occupy Cleveland may shift emphasis, many in the group believe
having a presence on Public Square is important.

**

The group's tent is likely to remain on Public Square until city permits
expire at the end of the year. After that, the group protesting corporate
greed might gear up to fight what they consider the related problem of
property foreclosures.

They say that little of the $700 billion that banks received as part of the
U.S. Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, resulted
in troubled homeowners getting mortgages they could afford. Some members
mentioned the $13 billion of income banks received by taking advantage of
below-market, short-term loans from the Federal Reserve.

"These giant banks have made off with billions of dollars, crashed the
system, got rewarded for crashing the system with billions in bailout
funds, and the upshot is that real people are losing their homes," said Ben
Shapiro, who helps run a farm in the city's St. Clair-Superior
neighborhood.

Occupy Cleveland's first foreclosure "action" occurred in November when
some members occupied the backyard of Elisabeth Sommerer's home on West
94th Street in Cleveland, which is in foreclosure. The protesters were
prepared to intervene when Cuyahoga County deputies came to evict Sommerer
and her two small children. Resistance proved unnecessary. City Councilman
Brian Cummins, an Occupy Cleveland supporter, and other public officials
helped her get a 30-day extension in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.

Though Occupy Cleveland seeks to put down roots, it still shares something
with Occupy movements uprooted in other cities: a somewhat strained
relationship with City Hall.

The tensions are in no way as explosive as they have been in places like
Oakland, Calif., and New York City, where violent clashes ensued as police
tore down encampments. But bad blood has existed between Occupy Cleveland
and Mayor Frank Jackson's administration since the city arrested 11
protesters in October for breaking a 10 p.m. curfew for Public Square.

Some members sought an injunction in federal court, saying the curfew
violated their freedom of speech rights by limiting access to the city
park. The suit was dismissed after the city agreed to grant Occupy
Cleveland 24-hour access to Public Square, but authorities then began
stringently enforcing an ordinance prohibiting camping in city parks.

More recently, friction has revolved around the tent, or canopy. Protesters
want the city to grant a permit for a heater. They accuse city officials of
trying to freeze them out of Public Square. City officials say they have
been reluctant to issue a permit because of safety and liability concerns.

*Appealing to mutual concerns*

Cummins said the city and Occupy Cleveland shouldn't be at odds.

"There is this mutual lack of respect between the movement and the
administration," he said. "There is no time to belittle and disrespect each
other when their common goals are very similar.

"We have done a lot in identifying issues and strategies relative to the
foreclosure crisis," Cummins said of the city's efforts. "I see this
movement as the social consciousness pushing the city to do even more."

On Monday, Cleveland City Council supported Cummins' resolution
"recognizing and supporting the principles of the Occupy movement." The
nonbinding measure also calls for the council and the Jackson
administration to work together to "minimize economic insecurity and
destructive disparities." This might include "reviewing apparent inequities
many people in Cleveland face when lender foreclosure proceedings occur,"
the resolution says.

Ken Silliman, Jackson's chief of staff, said the city doesn't want to be at
odds with Occupy Cleveland.

"There clearly is a commonality of issues," he said. "I would be hard
pressed to find a mayor of a major American city who has been as aggressive
in protecting rights of citizens vs. predatory banking practices. As
council president, [Jackson] sponsored the state's first ban on predatory
lending and when he became mayor, the city sued 21 Wall Street banks.

Cummins, who has offered to be a liaison, said he will continue bringing
both sides together because he believes the union could be a formidable
force against foreclosure.

Greater Cleveland's foreclosure crisis dates back at least a decade, making
it one of the areas in the country that has struggled with the problem the
longest. Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, with an 8.2 percent foreclosure rate,
ranked 27th among 100

[Marxism] 30th Anniversary of El Mozote Massacre of 1000 peasants

[Tom Cod]

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The real face of the "Reagan Revolution"

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/12/10/world/americas/AP-LT-Salvador-Massacre-Anniversary.html?hp


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Re: [Marxism] Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after 'invented people' claim

[Michael Smith]

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On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:40:32 -0600
Tristan Sloughter  quoted:
 
> "I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and
> historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many
> places."

One has certainly heard plenty of liberals make the 
same argument wrt the Palestinians. This mentality 
is completely bipartisan. 

-- 
--

Michael J. Smith
m...@smithbowen.net

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
http://www.cars-suck.org
http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com

Any proposition that seems self-evident 
is almost certainly false.


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[Marxism] Palestinians tell Gingrich to learn history after 'invented people' claim

[Tristan Sloughter]

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/10/palestinians-gingrich-history-invented-people

While its hardly news for Gingrich, or any politician, to praise Israel and
its "right" to exist and even to go as far as to claim there are no such
thing as Palestinians, I think the most striking comment in this case is
the last part of:

"I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and
historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many
places."

"[Had] the chance to go many places."

Is he speaking of on al-Nakba specifically? Because that is disgusting.

And either way, WHY should they have to go anywhere. How should they have
the ability to go "many places".

I have to stop, getting too upset...

Tristan

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Re: [Marxism] Thinking about Occupy -- and the Wobblies

[Tristan Sloughter]

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>
> Occupy is NOT comparable to the old Civil Rights Movement. To be honest, I
> personally resent that analogy. The Civil Rights Movement occurred in a
> very obvious on-going historical context, almost always had at all levels
> effective democratic leadership, and had very clear and specific goals --
> local and national and long range and short-range


I can't tell if I agree or disagree with you here. I think agree... but
with an extension and clarification.

The way I've analyzed it and explained it to people is Occupy is what came
BEFORE the Civil Rights Movement. Occupy consists of a mess of ideas and
ranges of activists and ranges of people.

Now take what was happening in the US before the 1950s. Freetown in Sierra
Leone, Marcus Garvey in the 1920's, Liberia, the move to the North, Black
nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black separatism

All this was producing fight back and movements for decades (centuries?)
leading to the Civil Rights Movement and hopefully one day the end of
racism.

Occupy is occurring in an obvious on-going historical context -- its simply
the largest prolonged outburst we've seen Internationally in a long time --
but its not to the point of the Civil Rights Movement, it is what will be
seen as a beginning of what will come and what will be the next big
movement, in my opinion.

Tristan

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Re: [Marxism] Monthly Review hostile to Russian protesters

[Robin Horne]

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I'm not surprised. This section of the left backed Putin during the South 
Ossetia war. So much for internationalism. 

Robin. 



Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 10, 2011, at 12:05 PM, Tristan Sloughter  
wrote:

> ==
> Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> ==
> 
> 
> Now this one surprises me... I expect "left" defenders of the Iran regime,
> Libya under Qaddafi, China and such but Putin? Really?
> 
> Is it simply that the US and Russia have petty spats over who will most
> dominate world resources and capitalist exploitation of foreigners? And for
> some reason they are on the side of Russian capitalism?
> 
> Or do they just like Putin's corrupt capitalist oligarchy thats come out of
> a mass wealth gap created following the breakup of the USSR?
> 
> Tristan
> 
> Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
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Re: [Marxism] Monthly Review hostile to Russian protesters

[Tristan Sloughter]

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Now this one surprises me... I expect "left" defenders of the Iran regime,
Libya under Qaddafi, China and such but Putin? Really?

Is it simply that the US and Russia have petty spats over who will most
dominate world resources and capitalist exploitation of foreigners? And for
some reason they are on the side of Russian capitalism?

Or do they just like Putin's corrupt capitalist oligarchy thats come out of
a mass wealth gap created following the breakup of the USSR?

Tristan

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Re: [Marxism] pseudo-German was: Andrew Kliman

[Leonardo Kosloff]

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Well, as it happens, that “windbag” Inigo can actually
explain what price is and why political economy, and specifically the
inversions of neoclassical economics, has to put it all backwards. I translated
part of a book where he develops this quite clearly, as I see it, (then again, 
it’s my translation): see chapter 1 specifically 

http://cicpint.org/CICP%20English/Libros/Conocer/conocer.html

I’d be glad to hear what comrades think.

As for my “inquisition” of sorts, I assure you I am as averse
to the Marxist professoriat as you are, but you’re the one who’s repeating all
these things, I wanted to know what is behind it…   
  

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[Marxism] Thinking about Occupy -- and the Wobblies

[Hunter Gray]

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NOTES BY HUNTER BEAR:

(As most know, I've been a working justice organizer for my entire adult life.  
I've practiced that very successfully.  And while that may not always be 
recognized by "parlor organizers" and cloistered academics, it is something 
that's quite consistently well recognized by the grassroots people with whom 
I've directly worked .  It's also been very well recognized by our adversaries. 
I think there are some obvious lessons aplenty in the Occupy experience.)


I draw the impression, and admittedly my sources are limited, that the Occupy 
crusade isn't doing well at all.  And I say this despite my gut sympathy for it 
-- and especially its youthful ethos. Its continuing lack of intra and inter 
organization is striking.  One CNN feature some days ago saw a number of Occupy 
people in their new NYC office, a very large and modern setting in a high grade 
downtown building.  Other shots show a few occupiers here and there with larger 
numbers of others attempting, usually fruitlessly, to resist eviction efforts.  
An especially poignant scene showed a bare handful of freezing people in 
Denver, huddled under tarps and tents in snow.  

Despite a number of vicissitudes, some Oakland zealots are quickly calling for 
a closure of all ports up and down the Pacific Coast in a few days -- in effect 
what they see as an industry wide general strike. A comparable general strike 
effort in Oakland a few weeks ago mounted brief impressive demonstrations but, 
with relatively minimal union backing, shut down little and failed as a general 
strike.  This proposed new and far more ambitious effort seems doomed.  Ralph 
Chaplin's classic and large [48 pp] pamphlet, The General Strike, and still 
available from the contemporary IWW, would be well worth a good read. 

I've heard some about local Occupy groups working on the mortgage foreclosure 
issue.  That's good -- but it takes a lot of painstaking organization and work. 
 A press release from somewhere indicated a local group planned to develop a 
credit union.  That, too, takes a great deal of intricate -- and legal -- 
organization.

Some supporters of Occupy feel it can use the winter season to organize and 
plan effectively.  One hopes so but, given the ethos and drift of the last many 
weeks, it's hard to be optimistic at this point.  When people drift away from a 
specific effort, it can be difficult to bring them back -- and rally others to 
that particular approach.

You certainly don't need a "vanguard party" to be effective -- but you do need 
good, solid democratic organization.

When Occupy began to mushroom, some of its people and a few media types 
attempted to draw analogies with the Civil Rights Movement.  I questioned that 
sharply, and in detail.  [The essence of that piece, in case anyone missed it, 
is at the bottom of this post.]  One also heard some analogies with the 
historical IWW.  That's extremely inaccurate.  The old IWW, despite its 
"frontier syndicalist" [my term] ethos, was the progeny of the Western 
Federation of Miners, and actually was very well organized -- it absolutely had 
to be. As with the Civil Rights Movement, failure to do so meant defeat and 
other very dire consequences.  Its Vision of Industrial Democracy may have been 
somewhat eclectic -- but it essentially stayed in place -- and, in its day to 
day struggles, its goals and objectives and strategies were well thought out 
and usually put forth very effectively. It exemplified democratic and  
principled American pragmatism of the militant and socially conscious genre. A 
'60s historian who once described the IWW as "a banzai charge" was writing 
nonsense.

So far, the Occupy crusade has raised issues and public consciousness.  Maybe 
"things will work out."  If they don't, there'll most likely be something new 
a'rising -- something sooner than later and something much better put together.

Solidarity, H.

Here's the part of my earlier post re Civil Rights Movement:

Occupy is NOT comparable to the old Civil Rights Movement. To be honest, I 
personally resent that analogy. The Civil Rights Movement occurred in a very 
obvious on-going historical context, almost always had at all levels effective 
democratic leadership, and had very clear and specific goals -- local and 
national and long range and short-range. Its commitment to tactical 
non-violence was almost pervasive. Virtually every level and facet of that 
Movement was very well organized -- even to the point that there was usually 
cognizance of potentially unexpected developments -- say, during demonstrations 
-- and thus almost always back-up alternatives "at ready." The stakes were 
always very high. That Adversary was powerful, cunning, absolutely ruthless, 
and downright d

[Marxism] ‘Law & Order: SVU’ Imitation Occupation Draws Real Protesters, and City’s Ire

[Bonnie Weinstein]

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‘Law & Order: SVU’ Imitation Occupation Draws Real Protesters, and  
City’s Ire

"...Show us the script..."
[Occupy TV -- way to go! ...bw]
By JAMES BARRON and COLIN MOYNIHAN
December 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/nyregion/law-order-svu-imitation- 
occupation-draws-real-protesters-and-citys-ire.html?ref=nyregio


“Law & Order” helped give the phrase “ripped from the headlines” as  
much of a place in the consciousness of New York as detectives’  
chatter about “perps” and “vics.” Or that clang-clang noise at the  
beginning of each scene in the television show.


But when the “Law & Order: SVU” production crew began setting up for  
a scene in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan on Thursday night, some of  
the people who actually generated the headlines that “SVU” was  
preparing to rip from — the Occupy Wall Street protesters — were less  
than pleased.


They, in turn, generated some headlines that “SVU” did not want to  
rip from — it turned out that the “SVU” crew did not have a permit to  
be there.


“SVU” is not the only prime-time television drama that has worked in  
material about the Occupy protests, or has tried to. On “The Good  
Wife” last Sunday night, Julianna Margulies’s character had a  
brainstorm as an arbitration hearing droned on. She rushed out of the  
hearing room and used a cellphone to snap a shot of a bulletin-board  
poster that said, “Support Occupy Wall Street.”


Later still, Ms. Margulies had a scene opposite Michael J. Fox  
playing a lawyer who mentioned his “mean corporate clients.”


“The 1 percent,” he added.

The “SVU” brouhaha began when the crew put up tarps and tents in the  
square, in the shadow of the courthouse at 60 Centre Street, a  
familiar backdrop for the step-climbing prosecutors in the “Law &  
Order” universe. The crew tacked up placards denouncing war and  
greed. It installed a library with rows of books and a kitchen,  
complete with a sign that read, “End the War on Workers.”


All in all, the crew transformed Foley Square into a fake encampment  
that looked like the real one a few blocks away, in Zuccotti Park,  
which the police cleared on Nov. 15. But the tents and the  
anticorporate slogans came down before the cameras could roll, done  
in by real Occupy Wall Street protesters who saw the set as a stage  
for political theater.


They streamed onto the set at midnight, stepping over yellow tape and  
brushing off objections from production assistants. Some crawled into  
the tents and lay down. Others danced while pounding drums and waving  
flags. Several headed straight to the kitchen, where they helped  
themselves to muffins and a jar of pickles, among other things.


Some complained about art imitating life, and about unfairness.

“We thought we would bring some extras down and add some reality to  
this show,” Aaron Black, 38, of Brooklyn, said. “Why should they be  
able to put tents up in a public park when we are unable to do that?”


Drew Hornbein, 24, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said he found it  
“bizarre” to walk through an imitation occupation. He wondered  
whether the “SVU” producers had realized that a fake tent city would  
be a target for Occupy protesters. “Did they think we were gone?” he  
said.


Before long, a contingent of police officers gathered. A commander  
said that everyone near the tents had to move on or face arrest,  
protesters and production assistants alike. This was after he said  
the permit for the set had been rescinded — something that turned out  
to be not quite right. On Friday, the city said “SVU” did not have a  
permit to build the encampment, only a permit for filming beginning  
at 8 a.m. Friday.


For a while, the protesters stayed where they were. Eventually, they  
adjourned to a fountain at the southern end of the square and began  
holding a meeting. The police remained on the set, and workers from  
“SVU” began dismantling the tents.


Curt King, a spokesman for NBC Universal, said on Friday that the  
network had no comment about the occupation of the apparently rule- 
breaking set; neither did a spokeswoman for “SVU.” They did not  
explain how “SVU” would rework the scene.


But Warren Leight, an executive producer of “Law & Order: SVU,”  
posted a series of messages on Twitter that began, “Saddened by last  
night’s events.”


“We understand OWS emotions run high,” Mr. Leight said, “and also  
protesters’ fear of having their images and history co-opted by  
corporate media — the irony here is the scene we couldn’t shoot  
portrayed OWS in a sympathetic light.”


In another post he said, “And harassing night-shift production  
assistants. Those are not the images of OWS we wanted our audience to  
see.”


“Let’s move forward,” he added. “Peace.”

The posts were

[Marxism] Monthly Review hostile to Russian protesters

[Louis Proyect]

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Check this out:

http://twitter.com/mrzine_notes

#Дек10 / #Dec10 draws 10,000-50,000 according to various estimates. 
#MSM, overjoyed, "forget" to mention #Russia's population: 141,750,000.


---

I wondered how long it would take the brain-dead sector of the left 
represented by Monthly Review, Global Research and Counterpunch to begin 
its ideological campaign against the Russian protesters.  Taking shape, 
of course, as the anti-anti-Putin left.


Well, MR beat the others to the punch. I should of course add that this 
diarrhea is flowing out of Yoshie's computer in Ohio and not out of John 
Bellamy Foster's. The problem, however, is that he is responsible for 
her just as the owner of a pit bull would be if the unleashed beast 
attacked a three-year-old.



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[Marxism] Hunter's comments on Occupy

[Mark Lause]

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Hunter's taken the words right out of my mouth. There's a chronic tendency
to overreach where we are right now, and to pretend that we're farther
along than we really are.  There's much, much work to be done before we can
even begin to talk seriously about doing some of the things regularly
bandied about in Occupy circles.

What's worse, the failure to recognize and acknowledge the weakness of the
movement makes it difficult to do the things it MUST do in order to become
stronger.  The movers and shaker in our local movement--which includes
people who are certainly old enough to know better--are uninterested in
even responding to suggestions that we could do a lot better.

For example, the group has five regular meetings scheduled per week.
There's no real effort to build these other than posting them and
twittering them.  More importantly, they are our of all proportion to
what's actually being done in the wider society.   You shouldn't make a
continuous electronic call for people to show up to things simply because
the technology permits you to do that.  When told that this is because I'm
useless old fossil (obviously) who uses smoke signals, I pointed out that
there's doing a miserable job getting out many young people.  The reasons
are the same.  People should be called out to do things and decide things
and not just called out to go through some feel-good spiritual experience.
Yet, at any one of these, something important could be discussed and
decided.  I've been told that "serious" people will be there for all of
these meetings, and, presumably, the rest of the 99% that aren't or can't
should take a flying leap.

This is NOT what democracy looks like.

This weekend, we're having a set of these kinds of "recharging" meetings.
I asked for an agenda and was pointed to what's posted.  This will include
two hours spent in "Topic focus groups (numerical assignment process)
Topics: principles, political goals, leadership, organization, actions,
outreach, communication, strategy for winter occupation."  There will also
be a half hour for "big picture solidarity issues/ outreach forum."

This is NOT an agenda.  It says nothing about what we're discussing or
deciding about about "principles" or "political goals," etc. If we're
deciding anything?  Are there going to be reports? Concrete proposals?
Shouldn't they be shared ahead of time with the group?   Nobody's saying.
Maybe nobody knows.  But almost everybody else seems to be entirely
comfortable with the idea that nobody needs to know or should know.

Ultimately, I don't think conditions will permit this movement to wither,
but, right now, in this area, it seems that what began here with a big
bang--a march of 1000--has imploded into small groups talking to each other
about general strikes and rearranging the city government.

Occupy has raised all the right issues and at the right time to become a
vastly more important than anything that's gone before.  However, it must
make a serious and thoughtful and strategic set of choices to go that way .
. . If not, the default looks like a meaningless little chat shop or,
worse, a small circle of would-be power brokers in local politics.

ML

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Re: [Marxism] pseudo-German was: Andrew Kliman

[Louis Proyect]

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On 12/10/11 12:50 PM, Leonardo Kosloff wrote:

The first time, in one of his blog posts about Monopoly
Capital, underdevelopment, or whatnot, I asked Louis that if he was going to
affirm that monopolists control prices he ought to know what this specific 
“price”
liable to be controlled by monopolies actually is (because you see, I had a
hunch that Louis had no idea what prices express and why they cannot be
controlled by monopolists as a general rule), but Louis relying I guess on the
sanctity of the Monthly Review doctrines could only make some self-effacing (or
is that self-embarassing?) joke about whether it’s M-C-M or M&M’s or
whatever.


One of the things I noticed a long time ago on listservs, and 
particularly those that were dominated by professors, is that I was 
interrogated all the time along these lines. Fortunately we are not in a 
classroom and I don't need to pass an oral exam to get a degree.


My advice to Leonardo is to write his own analysis and post it here, 
keeping in mind that anything over 33k is held in the moderator's queue. 
That being said, he can post any length he wants and it will definitely 
be approved.


My only advice is not to crosspost anything from that windbag Inigo.


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[Marxism] Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution

[Bonnie Weinstein]

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Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution
“Until folks know what the state’s going to do, people aren’t going  
to take the risk and come forward,” she said. One woman who submitted  
her name fears it will become public. In a recent interview in her  
small home in Lexington, N.C., she said she would be embarrassed if  
her co-workers at a local hospital knew her story. Now 62, she was  
adopted but sent to a state school at 7 because her parents thought  
she was mentally deficient. She remembers being told as a teenager  
that she was getting an appendectomy. When she was 27 and started  
having uterine trouble, a doctor requested her records and discovered  
that she had been sterilized in an operation that had been botched,  
her medical records show. 'I tell you what,' she said. 'I about hit  
the floor.' She went to her mother, who said she was going to tell  
her before she got married. Welfare would have ended if she had not  
consented, her mother said." ...Elaine Riddick, 57, who also lives in  
Atlanta, was sterilized in 1967. She was 14 and had gotten pregnant  
from a rape. Social workers persuaded her illiterate grandmother to  
sign the consent form with an X."

December 9, 2011
By KIM SEVERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced- 
sterilizations-in-north-carolina.html?ref=us


LINWOOD, N.C. — Charles Holt, 62, spreads a cache of vintage  
government records across his trailer floor. They are the stark facts  
of his state-ordered sterilization.


The reports begin when he was barely a teenager, fighting at school  
and masturbating openly. A social worker wrote that he and his  
parents were of “rather low mentality.” Mr. Holt was sent to a state  
home for people with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he  
was ready to get out and start life as an adult, the Eugenics Board  
of North Carolina ruled that he should first have a vasectomy.


A social worker convinced his mother it was for the best.

“We especially emphasized that it was a way of protecting Charles in  
case he were falsely accused of having fathered a child,” the social  
worker wrote to the board.


Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization —  
among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men,  
poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those  
deemed to be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is  
waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most  
aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth.


Although North Carolina officially apologized in 2002 and legislators  
have pressed to compensate victims before, a task force appointed by  
Gov. Bev Perdue is again wrestling with the state’s obligation to the  
estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program.


The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic  
engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls  
small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.


Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and  
California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no  
program was more aggressive.


Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people  
for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on  
Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often  
spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the  
time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For  
example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once,  
delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing  
maintenance for a small city.


Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and  
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the  
eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of  
North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace  
Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.


A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the  
program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County  
welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more  
sterilizations than any other in the state.


Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took  
place after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and  
racial minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of  
those sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent.


The program, while not specifically devised to target racial  
minorities, affected black Americans disproportionately because they  
were more often poor and uneducated and from large rural families.


“The state owes something to the vict

Re: [Marxism] pseudo-German was: Andrew Kliman

[Leonardo Kosloff]

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Well, I, as a non-native English speaker, don’t find the
language in itself to be the problem. What I think is sad is that this is the 
only thing Louis ever replied to concrete questions,
running on the fourth or fifth time. 

The first time, in one of his blog posts about Monopoly
Capital, underdevelopment, or whatnot, I asked Louis that if he was going to
affirm that monopolists control prices he ought to know what this specific 
“price”
liable to be controlled by monopolies actually is (because you see, I had a
hunch that Louis had no idea what prices express and why they cannot be
controlled by monopolists as a general rule), but Louis relying I guess on the
sanctity of the Monthly Review doctrines could only make some self-effacing (or
is that self-embarassing?) joke about whether it’s M-C-M or M&M’s or
whatever.

Then, when I asked Louis why he would so staunchly write
against Ahmedijenad and his cohorts and yet defend Peronism/Nasserism as the
road to salvation for the “3rd world working classes”, when Peronism
repressed workers independent struggles up to the creation of the paramilitary
squads organized by him, Louis’ best answer seemed to be that since I must be
some kind of Bordigist, council communist Trotskyite (which I’m not obviously),
I wouldn’t understand the “politics” of broad anti-sectarianism, which Louis
culls from his SWP experience. And later when I replied to someone who defended
this Peronist nonsense from the standpoint of the great “Nationalist Left”, a
Kirchnerist marxistoid group in Argentina who makes excuses among other things
for the assassination of a 23-year-old Trotskyist militant by trade-union
hooligans, Louis best response was to quote a passage of what some guy who got
killed by the mafia was babbling on his deathbed.

There were a couple more, but I’ll save them. 

Now Louis throws out this new theory of “overproduction is
another way of saying underconsumption” and because he can’t defend this
nonsense he has to make a foolish joke about it (I wonder, maybe Andy Pollack 
can
defend this?); or wait, maybe it’s not so new, this is (surprise) Paul Sweezy’s
nonsense assertion in the ‘Theory of Capitalist Development’.But at any rate, I 
don't think Louis would be so perverse as to withhold serious replies to these 
questions, I have to think he has no answers to them and goes into denial with 
these "jokes", unfortunately.

Louis likes to vilify the formulaic “Manichean Marxism”
coming from Marcyite groups, I think that’s excellent and I agree with him that
it requires critical independent thinking that the current atmosphere of
Marxist-Leninist parties strangles, but then should we not contest the formulas
coming from big name ‘theorists’ who more often than not make us regress to the
vulgar conceptions of political economy, like the neoclassical theory of price 
according
to the theory of Monopoly Capital?

I have no “beef”, as they say, with Louis, or with any
comrades in disagreement, and he may rest assured that if the debates in this
list were carried out in Spanish I would be the last to scoff at what he would
be saying in probably incomprehensible babbling Spanish, but in these times of
crisis where a lot of rethinking is going on, rather than mindlessly repeating
what Marxist academic rockstars babble indeed, I would suggest it's better to 
confront the
real questions, and per Marx’s favorite motto, ‘question **everything**’.   
  

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[Marxism] Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West

[Tristan Sloughter]

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-bankers-are-the-dictators-of-the-west-6275084.html

'The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western
reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so
anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so
desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are
merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is
somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and
then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand
for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators
actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the
Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads
all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt
belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family),
Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died
to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.'

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[Marxism] Note sent to Edward Rothstein over the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII

[Louis Proyect]

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As a long-time reader and a sometime admirer of your writings, I tend to 
take your New Criterion politics in stride. But to write an article 
basically "explaining" why Japanese-Americans were put in concentration 
camps without once mentioning the incentive that farmers and ranchers 
had in taking over their land is really quite disgusting.




NY Times December 9, 2011
The How of an Internment, but Not All the Whys
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

POWELL, Wyo. — In a region of inspiring landscapes, this certainly isn’t 
one of them. If you stand near where the barracks once were, not far 
from the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center that opened last 
summer, this barren expanse, with its craggily eccentric mountain in the 
distance, could almost seem cruelly mocking...


By 1943, 10,000 people were living here in the Heart Mountain Relocation 
Center, about a third of them first-generation Japanese immigrants known 
as Issei (who were not American citizens), and the rest Nisei, 
second-generation Japanese-Americans. For a while, Heart Mountain was 
Wyoming’s third-largest city. And along with nine other “internment 
camps” — all in isolated regions where there could be no fear of 
transfer of information or contraband — this was where people of 
Japanese heritage were sent in 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 
by Executive Order 9066. The concern was that they might constitute a 
fifth column that would subvert the American war effort.



(clip)

It would help, too, to have a clearer understanding of the prewar 
Japanese-American population, which is now portrayed as homogenously 
assimilationist. But we know that 1930s Japan was a racist, militant 
society, convinced of the emperor’s divinity, and that a considerable 
number of Nisei were sent there to study.


“Loyalty to the emperor,” we learn at the Japanese American National 
Museum, was a cherished value for the Issei. Even the use of terms like 
Issei and Nisei shows careful attention to Japanese connections. In 
addition, American military and F.B.I. reports describe a number of 
Japanese-American organizations on the West Coast that were financially 
and ideologically devoted to the mother country and its policies.


All of this would have amplified suspicions. In addition, the government 
had decoded dispatches from Japanese agents referring to their plans and 
successes. On May 9, 1941, one from Los Angeles read: “We have already 
established contacts with absolutely reliable Japanese in the San Pedro 
and San Diego area.”


Two days later, a dispatch from Seattle said, “We are securing 
intelligences concerning the concentration of warships within the 
Bremerton Naval Yard”; Japanese residents were relocated from that area 
in 1942.


Moreover, the Japanese were known for similar espionage elsewhere, 
including the Philippines. A treasonous example of assistance from 
residents of Japanese descent also occurred just after Pearl Harbor, in 
which a couple on a remote Hawaiian island tried to help a downed 
Japanese pilot escape. The threat was palpable: a Japanese submarine had 
sunk American ships and shelled a California oil field.




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[Marxism] From Beasts To Barcodes: Its All Part Of The Plan

[Evil For All Time]

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Curious, why was a report able to announce Atlanta having the widest income
gap of all major U.S. cities? It is a Shining Symbol of Southern
Segregation, standing proud and erect.

http://soundcloud.com/kenefat/from-beasts-to-barcodes-its






Enter Kenneth Neal (you can call me Ken): Age, 29, an activist/journalist,
scholarship-winning poet and a sci-fi novelist by trade.

The premise of this work could be considered the fusion from the likes of
Frederick Douglass / Stan Lee / Harvey Milk / Karl Marx.

A social journalist doing my part to promote social, cultural, and class
destruction awareness with my blog.

I invite you to a challenging conversation detailing critical points within
modern Capitalism & Christianity:

http://evilforalltime.blogspot.com

(when you see Karl Marx, you know you've reached the right destination)

Thank you for your time.

If you have any questions after viewing my work, including collaboration
opportunities, feel free to let me know.


-Ken Neal, Atlanta, GA
 Facebook, "Ken E-FAT"
 http://evilforalltime.blogspot.com
 Contributor @  Political Fail Blog:
 http://www.politicalfailblog.com/2011/09/ken-neal-writer.html

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[Marxism] Obama on the power of lobbyists

[Louis Proyect]

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From the speech invoking Theodore Roosevelt:

"Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to 
the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign 
contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the 
highest bidder. It leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the 
system in Washington is rigged against them, that our elected 
representatives aren't looking out for the interests of most Americans."


---

NY Times December 9, 2011
With Lobbying Blitz, For-Profit Colleges Diluted New Rules
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration vowed to stop 
for-profit colleges from luring students with false promises. In an 
opening volley that shook the $30 billion industry, officials proposed 
new restrictions to cut off the huge flow of federal aid to unfit programs.


But after a ferocious response that administration officials called one 
of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a 
much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact 
as it goes into effect next year.


The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major 
federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. 
Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than 
$16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly 
Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend 
their battered image and plead their case.


Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House 
communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the 
embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for 
the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials 
about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s 
private-equity firm has a stake.


A who’s who of Democratic lobbyists — including Richard A. Gephardt, the 
former House majority leader; John Breaux, the former Louisiana senator; 
and Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, ran Mr. Obama’s transition team — 
were hired to buttonhole officials.


And politically well-connected investors, including Donald E. Graham, 
chief executive of the Washington Post Company, which owns Kaplan, and 
John Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix and a longtime 
friend of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, made impassioned appeals.


In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White 
House and Education Department officials, including senior officials 
like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama 
has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special 
interests in Washington.


The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations 
on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for 
work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration 
first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which 
schools would be stripped of federal financing.


“The haranguing had zero effect,” said Cass R. Sunstein, the White House 
official who oversees rule making. Rather, he and other administration 
officials said they listened to what they viewed as reasonable arguments 
and decided to narrow the scope of the original plan.


But Robert Shireman, a former Education Department official who helped 
shape that original plan, said the intense politics surrounding the 
issue played a part in “watering down” the final result.


“From early on, the industry was going to friends inside and out of the 
administration and saying, ‘They’re out to get us,’ and creating the 
impression that these regulations were unfair or irrational,” said Mr. 
Shireman, who left the department before the plan was finished.


“They decided to raise holy hell,” he said in an interview.

Many colleges saw the federal government’s attacks as “Armageddon for 
the industry,” said Avy Stein, a partner at a private equity fund that 
owns a network of schools called Education Corporation of America.


The industry was on the defensive after a series of federal 
investigations portrayed it as rife with abuse. They found that 
recruiters would lure students — often members of minorities, veterans, 
the homeless and low-income people — with promises of quick degrees and 
post-graduation jobs but often leave them poorly prepared and burdened 
with staggering federal loans.


In response to the rising concerns, 18 months ago the Obama 
administration proposed its tough restrictions linking tens of billions 
of dollars in federal student aid to formulas measuring students’ debt 
levels and income after graduation. Colleges whose students were no

[Marxism] A eugenics program that would have made Hitler green with envy

[Louis Proyect]

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NY Times December 9, 2011
Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution
By KIM SEVERSON

LINWOOD, N.C. — Charles Holt, 62, spreads a cache of vintage government 
records across his trailer floor. They are the stark facts of his 
state-ordered sterilization.


The reports begin when he was barely a teenager, fighting at school and 
masturbating openly. A social worker wrote that he and his parents were 
of “rather low mentality.” Mr. Holt was sent to a state home for people 
with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he was ready to get 
out and start life as an adult, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina 
ruled that he should first have a vasectomy.


A social worker convinced his mother it was for the best.

“We especially emphasized that it was a way of protecting Charles in 
case he were falsely accused of having fathered a child,” the social 
worker wrote to the board.


Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization — 
among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor 
teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed to 
be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is waiting to see 
what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics 
programs will decide his fertility was worth.


Although North Carolina officially apologized in 2002 and legislators 
have pressed to compensate victims before, a task force appointed by 
Gov. Bev Perdue is again wrestling with the state’s obligation to the 
estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program.


The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic 
engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls 
small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.


Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California 
each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more 
aggressive.


Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people 
for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on 
Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent 
more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were 
not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an 
adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, 
working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city.


Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and 
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the 
eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North 
Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, 
the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.


A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program 
extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare 
department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than 
any other in the state.


Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took place 
after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and racial 
minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of those 
sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent.


The program, while not specifically devised to target racial minorities, 
affected black Americans disproportionately because they were more often 
poor and uneducated and from large rural families.


“The state owes something to the victims,” said Governor Perdue, who 
campaigned on the issue.


But what? Her five-member task force has been meeting since May to try 
to determine what that might be. A final report is due in February.


This week, the task force set some priorities. Money was the most 
important thing to offer victims, followed by mental health services.


How much to pay is a vexing question, and what North Carolina does will 
be closely watched by officials in other states. In a period of severe 
budget cuts and layoffs, money for eugenics victims can be a hard sell 
to legislators.


States began practicing eugenics in earnest in the United States in the 
1920s and ’30s, driven by a philosophy of social engineering once so 
popular that President Woodrow Wilson, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 
of the Supreme Court and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned 
Parenthood, were ardent supporters.


Before most of the programs were closed down, more than 60,000 people 
nationwide had been sterilized by state order.


The reasons were chilling, reports from state records and interviews 
with survivors and researchers show.


There was a 14-year-old girl deemed low-performing and “oversexed” who 
came from a home with poor housekeeping standards. A man who raped his 
daughter at 12 signed her ste

Re: [Marxism] 70 years ago: FDR and Wall Street wanted war

[Mark Lause]

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It'd probably be more accurate to say that FDR's programs had a very uneven
impact on unemployment.  Large public works projects had a direct and
immediate impact where they were taking place, though not necessarily an
ongoing one that outlaste their completion.

The impact of these had much more to do with public perceptions and morale
than anything else, but that was the main point of the exercise.

ML

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Re: [Marxism] pseudo-German was: Andrew Kliman

[Andrew Pollack]

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ah, Kamerad Caesar,  sehr gut!
now for those who missed the reference, google "Wenn ist das Nunstück git
und Slotermeyer?" and choose videos

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[Marxism] Occupied Chicago Tribune

[Tristan Sloughter]

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http://occupiedchicagotribune.org/ -- Donations open through Kickstarter

Picture of the first print version: http://i.imgur.com/NCeDo.jpg

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Re: [Marxism] 70 years ago: FDR and Wall Street wanted war

[Intense Red]

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> But I don't think they wanted or expected to see Pearl Harbor smashed up.

   I disagree. Have you read Robert Stinnett's book "Day of Deceit"? (If not, 
I strongly recommend it.) He lays out a detailed and well-supported/documented 
argument that the administration knew Pearl Harbor was the target.

   They may not have expected the extent of the damage they received, but it's 
pretty clear they were aware that Hawaii was the target.

> They seriously under-estimated the Japanese for racist reasons...

   In this I completely agree.


-- 
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the 
spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that 
spectrum." -- Noam Chomsky


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Re: [Marxism] pseudo-German was: Andrew Kliman

[Louis Proyect]

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On 12/10/11 7:47 AM, Tom O'Lincoln wrote:


There's nothing in the MIA like this nonsense. Lou pasted in some real,
but apparently irrelevant German. The others just pasted in
nonsense.There is no such word as Nunstuck. We shouldn't play these
games with languages, it's disrespectful to non-English speakers.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0iMF6DWpo8


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Re: [Marxism] 70 years ago: FDR and Wall Street wanted war

[Louis Proyect]

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On 12/10/11 8:37 AM, Paddy Hackett wrote:


Did FDR promise to launch public spending during the presidential campaign and 
during the depression?


In his first term, he not only ran on a balanced budget program but 
implemented spending cuts that took the biggest bite out of the veterans 
who expected to get paid for their service in WWI on the so called bonus 
basis. When they discovered they were getting screwed, they Occupied DC.


In the middle of his first term, he did adopt big spending programs, 
none of which had any big impact on unemployment.



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Re: [Marxism] 70 years ago: FDR and Wall Street wanted war

[Paddy Hackett]

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Did FDR promise to launch public spending during the presidential campaign and 
during the depression?

Paddy



Tom O'Lincoln  wrote:

>==
>Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
>==
>
>
>On my reading, FDR and co did plan for war with Japan, and created an 
>environment where Japan was  likely to strike. But I don't think they wanted 
>or expected to see Pearl Harbor smashed up. They seriously under-estimated 
>the Japanese for racist reasons, and probably expected an attack further 
>west, eg Philippines.
>
> Neither would I be confident to say they wanted war. More meaningfully I'd 
>say they  had decided war inevitable. But as I say in my book, they "got 
>more than they bargaiined for. 
>
>
>
>
>Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
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Re: [Marxism] Andrew Kliman and the failure of capitalist production

[fustie luggs]

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They're just having a bit of fun. Those quotes aren't written by any real
German, let alone Marx. Something google translate spat out, maybe.

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Joaquín Bustelo  wrote:

> ==**==**==
> Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> ==**==**==
>
>
> WTF? Aren't there at least translations of this stuff in the MIA that you
> guys could point to?
>
>
> On 12/9/2011 9:11 AM, Andrew Pollack wrote:
>
>> To which Engels replied:
>>
>> Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?
>>
>
>
> __**__
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> Marxism@greenhouse.economics.**utah.edu
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> utah.edu/mailman/options/**marxism/fustieluggs%40gmail.**com
>

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[Marxism] pseudo-German was: Andrew Kliman

[Tom O'Lincoln]

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There's nothing in the MIA like this nonsense. Lou pasted in some real, but 
apparently irrelevant German. The others just pasted in nonsense.There is no 
such word as Nunstuck.  We shouldn't play these games with languages, it's 
disrespectful to non-English speakers.



Joaquin wrote:
WTF? Aren't there at least translations of this stuff in the MIA that you 
guys could point to?


On 12/9/2011 9:11 AM, Andrew Pollack wrote:

 To which Engels replied:

 Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?






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[Marxism] 70 years ago: FDR and Wall Street wanted war

[Tom O'Lincoln]

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==


On my reading, FDR and co did plan for war with Japan, and created an 
environment where Japan was  likely to strike. But I don't think they wanted 
or expected to see Pearl Harbor smashed up. They seriously under-estimated 
the Japanese for racist reasons, and probably expected an attack further 
west, eg Philippines.


Neither would I be confident to say they wanted war. More meaningfully I'd 
say they  had decided war inevitable. But as I say in my book, they "got 
more than they bargaiined for. 





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Re: [Marxism] Andrew Kliman and the failure of capitalist production

[Joaquín Bustelo]

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WTF? Aren't there at least translations of this stuff in the MIA that 
you guys could point to?


On 12/9/2011 9:11 AM, Andrew Pollack wrote:

To which Engels replied:

Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?




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[Marxism] Prominent Latino Atlanta Occupier arrested at his university library

[Joaquín Bustelo]

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Joe Diaz, a prominent activist in Occupy Atlanta and Emory University 
graduate philosophy student was arrested at his university library two 
nights ago. The incident was recorded by a friend of Joe's, also an 
occupier, Meghan Jordan.


Joe has now posted in a blog an explanation of what happened and what he 
was thinking at the time, the political lessons to be drawn about the 
militarization of the police, along with a link to the video. That is 
here: http://dirtseyeview.wordpress.com/


The incident provoked a lively discussion on Occupy Atlanta's open group 
in facebook, with a spread of views ranging from Joe being at least 
partly to blame for having failed to immediately hand over his student 
ID when demanded by Emory University cops to those (like myself) who 
viewed this as another attack on democratic rights, a completely 
unprovoked assault and battery that might well have involved not just 
the random nastiness of increasingly militarized police forces but the 
mistreatment of Joe as a Latino or even specific targeting of Joe as a 
reprisal for his political activities.


The broad range of views expressed in that discussion is testimony to 
the breadth of this movement and the need for Marxists and other 
radicals to consciously take up developments in the different local 
Occupy movements and use them to patiently explain our views in such a 
way as to win people over, not drive them out or provoke deep chasms.


It is rare for radicals to have such a diverse audience genuinely open 
to hearing points of views like ours. And although numerically this may 
not be that many people, they generally tend to be leading people in 
whatever circles they come from, and if we convince them they will 
convince others. We also have to realize that this will not be 
instantaneous, but rather uneven. We need to be clear but 
non-confrontational with others in the movement, avoid demeaning or 
denigrating language, put aside leftist cliches and lingo, pay close 
attention to how the discussion is unfolding, and use the common 
experiences we and other occupiers are going through in the movement to 
draw the lessons.


We should be personable, persistent, pedagogical and patient.

*  *  *

Joe has not asked for any specific protest or action on his behalf, but 
replying to another graduate student at Emory on his facebook page he 
said, "... thanks for the words of support. I'd encourage graduate 
students to organize on their own and respond in whatever way they 
can... a range of autonomous action in this situation would be powerful 
..." so it's not like he is trying to keep it quiet, quite the contrary.


I would imagine that publicizing the video all over the place but 
especially among students and sending protest messages to Emory 
University would not go amiss.


Joaquín

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