[Marxism] Iran: If US serious about fighting terrorism it must launch air strikes
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Iran says Obama remarks show US not serious in fighting terrorism http://news.yahoo.com/iran-says-obama-remarks-show-us-not-serious-173636523.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter June 20, 2014 2:48 PM DUBAI (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's plan to send advisers to Iraq to help Baghdad counter Sunni Islamist militants shows the United States is not serious about fighting terrorism, an Iranian official was quoted by official media as saying on Friday. Obama on Thursday offered up to 300 Americans to help coordinate the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). But he held off granting a request for air strikes from the Shi'ite-led government and renewed a call for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to do more to overcome sectarian divisions that have fueled resentment among the Sunni minority. “Obama’s recent remarks showed that the White House lacks serious will for confronting terrorism in Iraq and the region,” the official IRNA news agency reported Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir Abdollahian as saying. Abdollahian said the U.S. “delay” in fighting terrorism and the ISIL has “fueled suspicions and doubts about the U.S. objectives in Iraq,” IRNA reported. Another official, Hamid Aboutalebi, who works in the office of President Hassan Rouhani, also criticized Obama's remarks, the news agency said. "The U.S. cannot adopt contradictory policies in the Middle East; to support war in Syria and peace in Iraq or be on the side of terrorists in Syria and against them in Iraq," Aboutalebi wrote on his Twitter account on Friday, IRNA said. Iraqi forces were massing north of Baghdad on Friday, aiming to strike back at the Islamists' offensive towards the capital. [ID:nL6N0P12GT] (Reporting by William Maclean; Editing by Louise Ireland Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Understanding Tonga's revolutionary crisis
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://readingthemaps.blogspot.co.nz/2014/06/why-tongan-democracy-should-interest-us.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: University of London Union rejects SWP event | Women's Views on News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 21.06.2014 22:19, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: http://www.womensviewsonnews.org/2014/03/university-union-rejects-swp-event/ Louis, this is ancient history - and I'm almost certain that it was reported on the list back in March when it was actually topical. In addition, this refusal to accept a booking hasn't stopped the event happening. It'll be taking place in another building on the same campus next month. Einde O'Callaghan Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Benjamin Kunkel reviews ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ by Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer · LRB 3 July 2014
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n13/benjamin-kunkel/paupers-and-richlings Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: University of London Union rejects SWP event | Women's Views on News
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.womensviewsonnews.org/2014/03/university-union-rejects-swp-event/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Left Forum 2014: panel on art and gentrification | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This is the third in a series of videos I made at the recently concluded Left Forum. As I will point out, the topic might be of great interest to those who have looked askance at the “art market” but unfortunately the presentations were not that great. I do urge you watch the video, however, since the speakers were genuine authorities in the field of how artists often unwittingly serve as the shock troops of gentrification. As a New Yorker, this is a topic that interests me a great deal since I have seen any number of neighborhoods in New York undergo gentrification through a process that follows a familiar pattern. Artists looking for a cheap studio will buy or rent commercial lofts, often in violation of building codes, and then turn them into living lofts. Two old friends, now deceased, bought a loft on the Bowery in 1969 for that very purpose. Around the same time, further to the West, Soho was being transformed after the same fashion. I am not sure how many artists are operating in Soho, an area that is punctuated by Moncler, Gucci, and Armani boutiques. Soon to follow was Tribeca, an area that followed the same pattern. Besides the boutiques, Soho and Tribeca are fabulous places for hedge fund managers to live. With their tattoos and their French bulldogs, they feel utterly bohemian. full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/06/21/left-forum-2014-panel-on-art-and-gentrification/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Indian factory workers kill CEO, beat manager with iron rods after their hours are increased
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Found this in the local paper. http://www.montrealgazette.com/story.html?id=9943646 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] "Tricked into going, Indonesian workers struggle to escape Syria"
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/tricked-going-indonesian-workers-struggle-escape-syria "Tricked into going, Indonesian workers struggle to escape Syria"--Bassel Habbab A good article detailing Syria's forgotten victims: Indonesian domestic workers. I agree with the author that the blame is to be put on the corrupt Lebanese government--which has extensive ties to the Lebanese and Syrian bourgeoisie--for its criminalization of domestic workers who runs away from their employers out of abuse and withheld pay. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What happened to the Arab Spring?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Review of Books, July 10 2014 What Happened to the Arab Spring? by Malise Ruthven The Second Arab Awakening: And the Battle for Pluralism by Marwan Muasher Yale University Press, 210 pp., $30.00 The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising by Gilbert Achcar, translated from the French by G.M. Goshgarian University of California Press, 310 pp., $65.00; $27.95 (paper) Demonstrators with a portrait of General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi—now Egypt’s president—at a rally in Tahrir Square, Cairo, January 2014 In 1938 George Antonius, an Egyptian Christian of Lebanese origin living in Jerusalem, published The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement. In his path-breaking book Antonius, who had been educated at Cambridge, charted the Arab national idea from its ethnic and linguistic beginnings in the early Islamic conquests, through the intellectual renaissance in nineteenth-century Syria, and to the grassroots—and eventually armed—political movement that overthrew Ottoman rule in Arabia, Iraq, and Syria—in alliance with Britain—during World War I. In his indictment of British policy Antonius demonstrated that promises made by Britain to the ruler of Mecca, Sharif Hussein, whose sons Faisal and Abdullah led the Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkey, contradicted commitments Britain had made to its allies France and Russia under the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement and to the Zionist leaders who were promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine under the terms of the November 1917 Balfour Declaration. Though Antonius, who died in 1942, did not witness the triumph, and debacle, of Arabism in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Arab Awakening powerfully set the stage for its trajectory. Taking his cue from Antonius, Marwan Muasher, a Jordanian diplomat and former foreign minister now working at the Carnegie Endowment, argues that what some have called the “Arab Spring”—and others the “Arab inferno”—should really be seen as a “second Arab Awakening.” The liberal promise of the “first Awakening” was aborted at the end of the colonial period, he writes, “when foreign despots were replaced by homegrown ones, who went on to rule the region for more than fifty years.” The fatal flaw of these post-independence governments was, at heart, constitutional: none of the regimes, whether monarchist or “republican,”…paid much attention to developing pluralist systems of government, building systems of checks and balances on executive power, or promoting the rich diversity of their populations. Instead, the legitimacy gained during independence struggles hardened into diverse forms of autocratic rule. In short the inadequacy of the first Awakening made the second Awakening—the wave of uprisings beginning in the winter of 2010–2011—inevitable. But that failure also conveys a warning: Toppling despotic rulers alone is no guarantee of a healthy political development. A constructive vision for future polities must be hammered out and must be founded on an unshakable commitment to pluralism—leading to systems of protections and inclusiveness that enable what may be the Arab world’s greatest asset: its ethnic, cultural, religious and intellectual diversity. In most of the countries he visits in the course of preparing his book Muasher finds that a pluralistic approach embodying a respect for differences of values, religions, and ethnicities is conspicuously absent. His book was already being printed when Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only president to have come to power through a transparent electoral process, was removed from office by the military. But he cannot have been greatly surprised, having noted that many of the secular leaders to whom he spoke were prepared to “accept the military’s undemocratic practice of appropriating legislative and executive powers if that would check the growing influence of the Islamists.” A post-coup note added to the book reinforces his argument that the Islamist and secular forces in the Arab world, both before and after Arab uprisings, have shown no solid commitment to pluralistic and democratic norms. Each side has denied the right of the other to operate and has often ignored the popular will. While he does not provide details of the events that followed the coup, when some nine hundred protesters were killed in a confrontation with the army and police—in which armed Brotherhood activists may well have fired first—he sees the Islamist and secular forces as equally intransigent. He blames the Islamists for pushing through a partisan constitution without adequate protections for religious and other minorities, when the very purpose of a constitution must be “to achieve consensus among the various forces i
[Marxism] Fwd: How the Crimean Tatars have survived | Books | The Guardian
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (One of the most reprehensible things about the reprehensible Boris Kagarlitsky was his writing a lengthy article about Crimea without mentioning the Tatars once.) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/21/crimean-tatars-struggle-survival Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] [Sanhati Newsletter] June 2014 newsletter from Sanhati
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dear friends, Greetings! We write to inform you of our website updates in the last month. "Journal 2014, Issue 6" is out with six new articles. Newsreel features several new articles, uploaded over the last month. 1) In A More Ruthless but Clearer Struggle Ahead, Debarshi Das analyses the elections from a medium run perspective and gives a prognosis for the near future. The article adduces the unchanged vote share of regional parties to assert, contrary to popular wisdom, that they have held their ground. It illustrates how parties implementing the anti-people neoliberal agenda have been punished at the polls, and how (Hindu) communalism has served as a useful tool for the neoliberal project by dividing labour and the latter has generating a steady stream of people ready for communal indoctrination. The article asserts that the coming together of big capital and majoritarian communalism culminating in the election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister will lead to an intensification of the neoliberal project and shrinking of political space, and wonders whether the neoliberal project can ever be electorally reversed. 2) In How Did the BJP Sweep the Polls in 2014?, Deepankar Basu presents a detailed statistical analysis of the BJP victory. The article illustrates the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, not just in the 2014 elections but also in the 2009 elections, and how the BJP's increase in overall vote-share was built upon an increased vote share in all but one state (Punjab). Besides corporate support for the BJP, discrediting of the Congress for presiding over numerous scams and weakening of the welfare measures that had won it a second term in 2009, and the BJP's calibrated use of communal polarization (engendered through riots) to construct a Hindu vote bank, the article also identifies support from the first time electors (in the age group 18-22 years) as a crucial factor for the BJP victory. The article expresses the hope that while the youth might have bought into the narrative of change and development sold them by the BJP, they have not necessarily voted for authoritarianism, leaving some political space for contestation by the left. 3) Sanhati statement on the post-election scenario discusses the factors enabling the BJP victory in the 2014 elections, and its implications. While anemic employment growth and the precariousness of jobs in the neoliberal economy rendered the youth working class population amenable to the BJP's carefully crafted message of development and change, strong resistance by several people's movements to land acquisition and resource grab left Indian big capital yearning for a strongman to set things right. Where these conflicting aspirations didn't suffice, the BJP didn't hesitate to use the communal card. The current regime will be a brutal march of capital, and can only be thwarted by a united front of progressive and democratic forces. The thrust of this united front politics will necessarily have to be extra-parliamentary; more so now with the current elections having further closed the parliamentary space. Based on militant mass mobilization, this united front should work towards defending and furthering rights over jal, jangal and jamin, the rights and interests of the workers, peasants, religious minorities, dalits and tribals, other minorities and the marginalized, defending the freedom of expression, cultural and education freedom and LGBT and women's rights, and working towards re-building a mass movement for radical, progressive and democratic transformation of Indian society. Only such a consolidated struggle, spanning every sector and across the country, can confront the looming neoliberal onslaught. 4) In The Incredulity Towards Metanarratives and the Logic of Counterinsurgency, Karthick Rm offers a critique of the academic obsession over micronarratives and particularities, and how the proliferation of such micronarratives assists the logic of the counterinsurgent state. The article uses the case of the Eelam Tamils struggle for national liberation to illustrate the struggle to establish a dominant narrative, attempts by the counterinsurgent state to counter the ideology of the insurgent minority with a (collaborationist) favorable minority, and the role played by the intelligentsia in furthering the narrative of the state. The article faults the post-civil-war deluge in narratives of sufferings (of Tamils) and war crimes (by the Sri Lankan state) that omit the political context. While such works, which the author castigates as "suffering pornography", do serve to shine light on what is happening in Sri Lanka, the author avers that they also help build an omnipotent image of the oppressor state and induce fatalism among the survivor
[Marxism] Fwd: Behind Iraq's crisis: New US war no answer | Green Left Weekly
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Tony Iliitis just posted a link to an article he wrote on my blog--I am not exactly sure why. I don't have any strong objection to it as opposed to the baloney on Ukraine showing up on Links but was troubled by these paragraphs: Furthermore, after the 2011 democratic uprisings in the Arab world, the US again backed Sunni fundamentalist groups, both directly and through the Gulf theocracies, this time to hijack the uprisings. In Syria, this strategy helped turn the uprising into a religious-sectarian civil war. This has helped the Assad regime maintain control over part of the country. The secular Assad dictatorship is also a pragmatic ally of Iran. full: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56700 What is the record of Obama backing "Sunni fundamentalist groups"? I don't recall members of the Al-Nusra Front coordinating with the CIA (forget about ISIS). In terms of the "Gulf theocracies", they have their own agenda, don't they? Tony also refers to Iran as "pragmatic" in this article. When both Iran and Syria are referred to in these terms, I can see John Dewey spinning in his grave. A pragmatic Bashar al-Assad would have co-opted some Sunni politicians back in 2011 to give his dictatorship some superficial legitimacy. He is about as pragmatic as Attila the Hun. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Fake: UN Confirmed Russian Intelligence Agencies were Behind the Odessa House of Trade Unions Tragedy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A while back I reported on pro-Euromaidan websites having a far superior record on accuracy and objectivity than those aligned with Russia. This is the latest instance. Stopfake.org largely covers pro-Russian bogus reports (how could it not?) but today they cover attempts to blame Russian secret police for the Odessa fire. http://www.stopfake.org/en/fake-un-confirmed-russian-intelligence-agencies-were-behind-the-odessa-house-of-trade-unions-tragedy/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Dr. Tim “Asad” Anderson: the abuse of academia to spread out propaganda | mabisir ما بيصير
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == My name is Andrea Glioti, I’m the journalist who intervened at Dr. Tim Anderson’s talk at Sydney UNI “Why I went to Syria” on March 6 (2014), an event promoting a blatant apology of the Syrian regime under the pretext of “counter-information”. A professor of political economy, Tim Anderson (https://www.facebook.com/timand2037?fref=ts) has been part of a delegation led by the Wikileaks Party and the Asadist activist group “Hands Off Syria”, which paid its homage to the Syrian regime during a visit of solidarity in December 2013. This is a response to some of the absurdities I heard about the Syrian conflict and, apart from the single case of Anderson, it addresses several points continuously raised by the so-called “anti-imperialist left”. It would be actually fair to rename this ideological stubbornness on Syria as a Stalinist-Soviet approach, if we were between the 1950s the 1960s, Anderson and his likes would be probably denying the Hungarian and Czech revolts ever took place. If we were in the Spanish Civil War, they would probably defend the Soviet decision to crush the anarchists. As long as a government sits in the anti-American camp (no matter the hypocrisy of Syrian foreign policies in this regard), it doesn’t really matter if it tortures leftists in its own prisons. full: https://mabisir.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/dr-tim-asad-anderson-the-abuse-of-academia-to-spread-out-propaganda/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: FIFA and the World Cup (HBO)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == If anyone has not been watching, Costa Rica just trounced Uruguay and Italy, until now two of the better teams in the world cup (historically speaking). These were not fluke victories, but rather solid efforts on the part of the Ticos, who are not only in excellent shape, they are playing with some innovative tactical maneuvers as well. They have a brilliant coach in Jorge Luis Pinto. Costa Rica managed to disrupt Italy's game plan of controlling the ball in midfield. Such control and possession allows the Italian side to launch organized attacks. By placing as many as four players at a time just outside the opposing penalty box, the Costa Rican squad forced Italy off balance, making it more difficult for them to advance. It would be the same thing as a full court press in basketball, risky but doable, with the caveat that your squad must be in superb physical shape. The lone goal of the match was sheer mastery, and reflected Tico control of the pitch. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, Costa Rica's integrity has been called into question by, you guessed it, FIFA. Yes, and here is the latest scandal: FIFA tests seven Costa Rica players René Tovar | ESPN.com Mexico June 21, 2014 RECIFE, Brazil -- Bryan Ruiz and Keylor Navas guaranteed that if FIFA wanted the whole Costa Rica team to undergo doping tests then they would, because they've got nothing to hide. After the Ticos beat Italy on Friday, FIFA ordered seven of their players to undergo post-match doping tests, while only two Italian players were tested. In a statement posted by Football Italia, FIFA explained that two Costa Rica players were ordered for normal post-match tests, while the five others had not done pre-competition testing Navas, Ruiz, Celso Borges, Joel Campbell, Yeltsin Tejeda, Christian Bolanos were among the players who took and passed the test, while reports said Michael Barrantes was the seventh. Following almost two hours spent between the locker room and doping control, the last three Ticos players finally appeared after taking the test. Goalkeeper Navas said that "people still don't believe" that Costa Rica could beat Uruguay and Italy. "We believed it from the outset, but thank God we're all relaxed, with a clear conscience," Navas said. "If they want to test the whole team, that's no problem". Navas said that initially it may not "have sat well with them" that so many players had to attend the doping tests, as it could be seen as a "a lack of respect as well." "You have to take it in good humour," he said. "At the end of the day, we're all relaxed and happy that we've gone through" to the knockout stage. Team captain Ruiz also supported the words of his teammate. "It seems a little bit excessive to me, but we can't do anything about it," he said. "We've got nothing to hide. We have trained well, without taking any banned substances. It's partly that people can't believe what we're doing, I think that's it. "They ordered the tests, we didn't have a problem with taking them, but perhaps seven is excessive." On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Charles Faulkner via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > == > Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > == > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlJEt2KU33I > > Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/gregmc59%40gmail.com > Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] No nuclear waste dump for Muckaty Station
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Plans to develop Australia's first nuclear waste dump at Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory have been shelved, writes Cathy Lewis in Red Flag. The decision is a significant victory for traditional owners and serves as a powerful demonstration that communities who stand united and strong, can fight back and win. http://enpassant.com.au/2014/06/21/no-nuclear-waste-dump-for-muckaty-station/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] NY Times: "Presbyterians Vote to Divest Holdings to Pressure Israel"
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == "After passionate debate over how best to help break the deadlock between Israel and the Palestinians, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted on Friday at its general convention to divest from three companies that it says supply Israel with equipment used in the occupation of Palestinian territory." http://nyti.ms/Upe1sz -- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað." Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
