[Marxism] fascist farce in Melbourne

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

The Guardian's Lenore Taylor writes "Not since Tony Abbott gave Prince
Philip a knighthood has the nation appeared so immediately galvanised into
calling out a truly stupid and offensive notion".

Friday the Border police announced they were going to carry out a visa
crack down in the CBD of Melbourne.  The reaction was instantaneous.  Good
old Socialist Alternative led a demonstration against what was an
outrageous escalation of the anti-refugee crusade.  Confronted with the
holy anger of the people the Border Police backed down at once.

Foul deeds are being committed against helpless boat people in the Far
North of Australia and in Nauru Island detention centre.  But the thugs
thought they would go a step further and bring their brutality to a "street
near you".

They badly misread the mood of the people.  Hopefully the reaction will
spread and lead to the closing down of the detention centre and the
creation of a decent humane policy towards refugees.

comradely

Gary
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Bashar al-Assad threatened Syrian holocaust three years ago

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

New from Linux Beach:


 Bashar al-Assad threatened Syrian holocaust three years ago
 


On Wednesday *DesertFire * 
responded to the question I raised in Monday's post,*Is Assad creating 
the first holocaust of the 21st century? 
* 
in a tweet:
*More...* 



_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] thoughts on the Corbyn election thing

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

There is one feature of this that is beginning to intrigue me.  The
Guardian, which I read every day, has been anti-Corbyn from the beginning.
It has also come out and backed Cooper.  Nonetheless, in key articles by
its economic correspondents Elliott and Milne, support has been
demonstrated for Corbyn's Keynesian leanings.  Cooper's attacks in
particular have been rejected.

So if one wants Keynes, one has to support Corbyn.  Interesting.  But for
me the most important aspect of the talk of Keynesian economics is that it
represents a fissure in the monolith of TINA (There is no alternative).
That is why I tell people to read Krugman.  It creates movement at an
intellectual level and gets people beyond the fast thinking of TINA.

At political level, my support from broad political formations and for
Corbyn's campaign is that at the political level, he also represents a
challenge to TINA.  It is the thought that there was no alternative to  the
foul alliance  of Toryism and New Labourism that has driven millions to
despair and apathy. But there is a lesson for us in how Corbyn's campaign
has been able to put a dint in the apathy and hence in the *status quo*.

comradely

Gary
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: What About the Greek Communist Party? | Jacobin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

The battalion-like structure of the KKE, its wide and dense local 
branches, the reproduction of its historical symbols, and a culture of 
conspiracy act as suppressors for expansion and “contamination.”


First expressed as an ideological concept in the process of Rifondazione 
Comunista‘s opening to the movements in the late 1990 and early 2000s, 
the term contaminazione marks an important dividing line between 
Communist and post-communist or new left parties. It demarcates them 
according to their propensity to allow reciprocity in ideological 
influence, towards as well as from other entities with similar goals.


This is inextricably linked to how sound a party — especially its 
leadership — conceives itself to be in terms of theory and social 
wisdom, compared to other currents.


full: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/tsipras-syriza-debt-greece-kke/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] US Congresswoman writes of "a brutal system of occupation that devalues and dehumanizes Palestinian children, " calls for Leahy Law review

[Joseph Catron via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Am I wildly optimistic in thinking this modest crack in the dam could
actually be fairly significant?

http://1.usa.gov/1MXRUCk

US citizens and residents who do this sort of thing can ask their
"representatives" to take similar action here:

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=4532

On a personal note, I had the honor of speaking alongside Siam Nawara at a
panel on June 7:

http://on.fb.me/1Ka5TVd

I think if anyone could have pushed this through a Congressional office
successfully, he's the one!

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: A Brutal American Epic by Charles Simic | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Louis Proyect wrote

This summer I read Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United 
States (1885-1915): Recitative for the first time. I know of nothing 
like it in literature. Based on thousands of pages of court records 
spanning three decades around the turn of the twentieth century,


(...)



Volume 1 of the the poem (to 1890) is here: 
https://signsoflife10.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/reznikoff-testimony.pdf


It's what he describes. The rest is way expensive.
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Stalin's Blue Pencil - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*



http://chronicle.com/article/Stalins-Blue-Pencil/142109/
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Getting to the bottom of Swedish social democracy | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Feeling duty-bound to understand the origins and development of Swedish 
social democracy, I slogged through 342 pages of Herbert Tingsten’s “The 
Swedish Social Democrats: the Ideological Development” that was written 
in 1941. The emphasis is on ideological since the book pays scant 
attention to what is happening on the ground. It reads more or less as a 
chronicle of debates in a party from its founding in 1899. I got what I 
needed from it by the time Tingsten got to 1932 or so when party leaders 
were trying to figure out what relevance their ideology had to the Great 
Depression. As a reflection of the book’s dubious value, it fails to 
mention the General Strike of 1931 that was sparked by the shooting of 
papermill strikers and their supporters in Adalen.


full: 
http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/27/getting-to-the-bottom-of-swedish-social-democracy/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Wall Street's Think Tank

[Michael Yates via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Larry Shoup's new book, Wall Street's Think Tank, is now out from Monthly 
Review Press. It is an in-depth study of the Council on Foreign Relations, 
1976-2014. It is an outstanding work, with great detail throughout. Among many 
other things, it is an implicit criticism of those who seem to believe that 
that the US ruling class has become somehow decadent, unable to conceptualize 
anymore its interests and seek vigorously to achieve them. Shoup also has an 
essay in September's Monthly Review that explores the CFR's recent work on US 
efforts to contain China's global ambitions. 
http://monthlyreview.org/books/cl5519/  
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] "moderator request" and "unsubscribe notification" on marxmail

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 8/27/15 11:53 AM, Steve Heeren via Marxism wrote:

Is there some way of eliminating these two kinds of notices from "Latest
100 messages from Marxism List", too?  It is still a pain to sort out
which messages you want to read from those that seem to be extraneous.



Yes, we're aware of that.

That is a little trickier since I need to know when people subscribe or 
unsubscribe. The latest 100 messages are updated by mail that I receive 
from Mailman and we need to figure out how to filter them from the 
archives but make sure that I receive them.

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] "moderator request" and "unsubscribe notification" on marxmail

[Steve Heeren via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Is there some way of eliminating these two kinds of notices from "Latest 
100 messages from Marxism List", too?  It is still a pain to sort out 
which messages you want to read from those that seem to be extraneous.


--
The weight of this sad time we must obey--
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Arab Countries Are Forcing Palestinian Exiles BackInto Syria

[Michael Karadjis via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

-Original Message- 
From: Joseph Catron via Marxism


"Because "the Islamic Republic of Iran remains host to one of the
world's largest and most protracted refugee populations"
(http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e486f96.html) already?"

True, the Afghan refugees. One might think that might be a good reason 
for Iran to desist from so energetically participating, if not leading, 
the new massive Nakba overwhelming the region from Syria.


Ken rightly said that Syrian refugees and the Iranian regime are 
enemies, because Iran supports the Syrian regime that bombs them to 
bits. Yes, but Iran doesn't only support it. The Iran-led and funded 
Shiite-sectarian international has thousands and thousands of troops in 
Syria - the most massive foreign invasion force by far - fighting for 
the regime. Speaking of the Afghan refugees which Iran hosts, Joe may 
have noted the now well-documented fact of Iran using dirt-poor Hazara 
refugees as cannon-fodder in Syria.


Right now, Hezbollah has been the leading force in the Assad regime 
siege of the Sunni town of Zabadani in the region between Damascus and 
Lebanon that Assad-Iran are trying to completely cleanse in order to 
establish a new Zionist-style sectarian statelet. The "free besieged" of 
Zabadani have so far held out for 2 months, sending several hundred 
Hezbollah invaders back to their country in coffins, despite literally 
hundreds of barrel bombs being dropped on them. As this epic resistance 
goes on, against a regime that murders at a rate that makes ISIS look 
amateur by comparison, the world is unlikely to hear much about it; the 
people of Zabadani, like other besieged and starved Sunni Arab peoples 
in Syria, are not eligible for the Kobani treatment.


So the argument that Iran doesn't take Syrian refugees because it 
already has too many and has been hit by sanctions is irrelevant as it 
lavishes big money on creating massive numbers of new refugees. But its 
OK, go on denying the reality staring you in the face, a lot of the left 
did that in 1947-48 too.


"But feel free to go on whinging about everyone except the affluent 
governments of the First World if you get some kind of smug

gratification out of it."

Joe is right to put the focus on imperialist governments who allow 
hundreds to drown in the sea and accept only a trickle of refugees while 
providing funds with an eye-dropper, but somehow his criticism is 
directed at the wrong place.


In fact, one of the reasons I reject the smug and one-sided western left 
whinge about Turkey is precisely because it is literally overwhelmed 
with refugees from the Syrian Nakba, is widely seen among Syrians as 
providing the best services, it allows Syrians to live and work in 
Turkey without visas, it has spent billions of dollars while western 
governments have only contributed a tiny trickle, and this reality of 
being a front-line state naturally influences Turkish government policy, 
regardless of the political nature of the government. Compare this to 
the policy of any imperialist state.


Naturally that doesn't mean the Erdogan government should not be 
criticised like any other bourgeois government, and especially for its 
recent adaptation to the reactionary Kurdish policy of its opponents and 
its dropping of its own peace policy with the Kurds (rejected all along 
by the opposition). However, it is a pity that many leftists recognise 
that politics is "complex" in some cases but abandon all complexity in 
others: the AKP regime has both a very progressive and a very 
reactionary Syria policy at the same time!


Reactionary regarding the Kurdish/YPG issue in Syria, progressive 
regarding the anti-Assad uprising. Why? No, not out of love for 
uprisings (at the outset in 2011, Erdogan was strongly behind Assad), 
but because it wants to be able to re-settle some of the refugees inside 
Syria in a "safe zone" (ie, safe from Assad terror from the sky), which 
the US rejects out of hand; and ultimately it feels the need to deal 
with the source of this massive regional instability, ie, the regime 
creating these millions of refugees.


Just lately, unfortunately, Turkey looks set to join this list of 
reactionary Arab states blocking Syrian refugees, as over the last month 
Turkey has been blocking Syrian refugees arriving by land and putting 
down protests in the camps, while even building a (largely symbolic) 
piece of border wall in one area. This is being declared as "temporary" 
but is likely connected both to the discussion with the US for a joint 
offensive against ISIS in northwest Syria ("security" reasons), and 
above all to internal politics, with Erdogan/AKP play

Re: [Marxism] Arab Countries Are Forcing Palestinian Exiles Back Into Syria

[Joseph Catron via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Jeff via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

Sure, but without even consulting any exact numbers, I believe there are
> more refugees in Lebanon in absolute numbers, with an overall population
> that must be 10 times smaller.


And more in Jordan per capita. Again, why does this conversation only
include relatively poor countries in the Middle East?


> This is the disproportionality that I think Ken was questioning.


Oh, I'm sure it was: a mighty convenient frame of reference, that.


> I had thought this email list was about sharing information and analyses.
> Not an argument over which capitalist government is the most evil, even if
> that were a meaningful question.


There's something singularly ridiculous about First Worlders pissing and
moaning that a country their governments have done everything in their
power to impoverish, which nevertheless absorbs more refugees than any of
them, isn't doing more still.

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."
_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Arab Countries Are Forcing Palestinian Exiles Back Into Syria

[Jeff via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

On 2015-08-27 16:05, Joseph Catron via Marxism wrote:


Because "the Islamic Republic of Iran remains host to one of the
world's largest and most protracted refugee populations"


Sure, but without even consulting any exact numbers, I believe there are 
more refugees in Lebanon in absolute numbers, with an overall population 
that must be 10 times smaller. This is the disproportionality that I 
think Ken was questioning. I can think of reasons that Syrian refugees 
might be less inclined to choose Iran as a destination, but most 
refugees are desperate enough to accept any safe location where they are 
welcome.


Anyway I think it is rather remarkable that Joseph suddenly became so 
defensive when this simple question was posed. I had thought this email 
list was about sharing information and analyses. Not an argument over 
which capitalist government is the most evil, even if that were a 
meaningful question.


- Jeff



One would think it might be a more obvious question why Western
countries seem to think they deserve damn medals of heroism when they
deign to accept a few thousand here and there.



On 2015-08-26 18:39, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote:


I wonder if Iran has accepted any refugees.  Would they be willing to
take those who are being pushed back into Syria?
ken h

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Arab Countries Are Forcing Palestinian Exiles Back Into Syria

[Joseph Catron via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Or, for that matter, why the international agencies tasked with
supporting refugees, like UNRWA and the UNHCR, are all broke, leaving
the less affluent countries of the region to absorb the burden as well
as they can.

UNRWA came perilously close to canceling the school year for millions
of Palestinian refugee children due to its ongoing budget crisis. And
it's supposed to provide for those displaced a second time from Syria
to boot!

But feel free to go on whinging about everyone except the affluent
governments of the First World if you get some kind of smug
gratification out of it.

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
mægen lytlað."

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

Re: [Marxism] Arab Countries Are Forcing Palestinian Exiles Back Into Syria

[Joseph Catron via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Because "the Islamic Republic of Iran remains host to one of the
world's largest and most protracted refugee populations"
(http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e486f96.html) already?

Because a crippling economic sanctions regime has systematically
devastated its economy, reversing decades of growth and pushing
millions of those already there into poverty?

One would think it might be a more obvious question why Western
countries seem to think they deserve damn medals of heroism when they
deign to accept a few thousand here and there.

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
mægen lytlað."

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: A Brutal American Epic by Charles Simic | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

This summer I read Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United 
States (1885-1915): Recitative for the first time. I know of nothing 
like it in literature. Based on thousands of pages of court records 
spanning three decades around the turn of the twentieth century, 
Testimony is a compilation of case summaries, a sequence of 
self-contained pieces. These “recitatives,” as he called them, vary in 
length between five and over two hundred lines, and are divided into 
sections according to geographical region and subject matter (Social 
Life, Domestic Scenes, Machine Age, Negroes, Children, Railroads, 
Chinese, Thefts and Thieves, etc.). They tell the stories of some five 
hundred court cases from all over this country and deal with a broad 
segment of the American population, urban and rural.


full: 
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/aug/25/brutal-american-epic-reznikoff-testimony/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: The Promise, and Peril, of Europe’s New Left Solidarity | The Nation

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

And yet part of the left, in Britain and beyond, also fell into the trap 
of thinking that Greece’s Syriza could serve as a general example—or a 
global vanguard. Syriza’s refusal to commit national hara-kiri by taking 
Greece out of the euro with no currency reserves, a banking system close 
to collapse, and a thousand refugees landing daily on its shores has met 
with petulant disdain from some of those who projected too much hope 
onto the party. “I may have overestimated the competence of the Greek 
government,” murmured New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, 
anti-austerian guru and darling of the pro-Syriza opinion pages.


Well, yes, you may have. You may also have underestimated the weight and 
specificity of Greece’s history, politics, and day-to-day experience, as 
well as the constraints that the Syriza government faced. And now that 
Syriza has capitulated—“failed”—I think we’ll see fewer of the 
solidarity rallies in European cities that so warmed the hearts of those 
who took part in them, as well as of some miserable Greeks who felt a 
little less alone. Spain’s Podemos, once seen as Syriza’s sister party, 
backed away pretty quickly once it understood that Tsipras had his hands 
around a poisoned chalice. Disappointment is corrosive. Solidarity—or 
internationalism—has to acknowledge local differences and local 
realities. Otherwise it’s of limited use, and potentially self-destructive.


full: 
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-promise-and-peril-of-europes-new-left-solidarity/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: The Arab Spring was a revolution of the hungry - The Boston Globe

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Look across the region, and regimes have good reason to be afraid. Even 
in countries where obesity is widespread, people suffer from low-quality 
medical care and malnutrition due to a lack of healthy food.


The basic equation is stark: The Arab world cannot feed itself. Rulers 
obsessed with security have created a twisted web of importers and 
bakeries whose aim is not to feed the population efficiently or 
nutritiously but simply to maintain the regime and stave off that much 
feared revolution of the hungry. Vast subsidies eat up the lion’s share 
of national budgets.


So far, the bakeries haven’t run out of loaves in two of the region’s 
biggest bread battlegrounds, Egypt and Syria. But the sense of plenty is 
only an illusion. Food is expensive, people are poor, and repressive 
regimes rely on imported wheat financed through foreign aid. It’s an 
unsustainable and volatile cocktail.


“You have a system where access to food is a primary mechanism of social 
control,” said journalist Annia Ciezadlo, author of the book “Day of 
Honey,” who has written extensively about food subsidies, unrest, and 
the use of food as a weapon in the Middle East. “The moment something 
happens to that supply of subsidized food, everything can go out of 
control.”


full: 
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/08/22/the-arab-spring-was-revolution-hungry/K15S1kGeO5Y6gsJwAYHejI/story.html

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] Fwd: Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*


The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, 
recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human 
beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half 
of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American 
citizens). As George Will noted last week, “Trump’s roundup would be 
about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of 
Japanese descent.” It would require a massive expansion of the most 
tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense 
post-9/11 explosion. And that’s to say nothing of the incomparably ugly 
sentiments that Trump’s advocacy of this plan, far before its 
implementation, is predictably unleashing.


full: 
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/26/jorge-ramos-commits-journalism-gets-immediately-attacked-journalists/

_
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at: 
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com

[Marxism] On the Verdict in the Kolchenko-Sentsov Show Trial in Rostov-on-Don

[Thomas Campbell via Marxism]

  POSTING RULES & NOTES  
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*

Published here:
https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/kolchenko-sentsov-hostages/

On Kolchenko and Sentsov’s Sentences
August 26, 2015
www.shiitman.ninja

Alexander Kolchenko and Oleg Sentsov

It is important to realize that the sentences that Kolchenko and Sentsov
received are a fiction.

No one actually takes the charges against them seriously.

Even the most loyal Putinists do not take the charges seriously. What
terrorism? What does the Right Sector have to do with any of this?

Kolchenko and Sentsov are hostages. Their being held in a Russian prison is
an act of intimidation directed at the Crimeans who stayed home but could
have fought back. Their being held in prison is an act of intimidation
directed against all the people of Ukraine and those Russian citizens who
could have supported them.

The trial was a fiction. The verdict is a fiction. That is why I reacted
without emotion to the sentences, although I understand the shock felt by
many comrades, among whom there are close friends of both Kolchenko and
Sentsov. Twenty years and ten years in prison? The Russian judges could
have give them sentences of forty years and twenty-five years. Or given
both of them life sentences. Or given them each six months in prison, then
retried the case. Or they could have not announced the verdict at all, but
just laughed and made faces. Or mannequins dressed in judicial robes could
have replaced the judges. Nobody would have noticed the difference.

Kolchenko and Sentsov are in prison as long as the Russian Federation is
ruled by Putin’s repressive, aggressive authoritarian regime. They cannot
be freed using lawyer’s tricks. They cannot be freed via “diplomatic
channels.” They can be freed only by defeating Putinist Russia. Or if it
“defeats” itself by choking on its own rage and madness.

And when that happens, it will not matter a whit what numbers have been
written in Kolchenko and Sentsov’s sentences. It doesn’t matter what the
judges whip up in Savchenko’s sentence. The release of the hostages does
not depend on the actions of lawyers. It depends on politicans and military
men. And, in part, on the price of petroleum.

As soon as the “Russian bear,” who has turned out to be a rabid rat,
finally kicks the bucket, all the regime’s hostages will be freed.

Translated by The Russian Reader. As is nearly always the case, my opinions
might not coincide entirely with those expressed by the authors whose texts
I translate and post here. But it has been strange to read the angry
reactions of leftist progressive Russian comrades to this particular text
given the almost total lack of any visible, public solidarity with Sentsov
and Kolchenko on their part.

I won’t even go into the haziness they and many other “ordinary”
“apolitical” Russian citizens experience when figuring out who to blame for
the whole mess in Ukraine. But this is the privilege all imperialist,
metropolitan peoples enjoy: pretending not to know or understand what is
being done in their name somewhere else in the world.

_

Russia’s Sentsov–Kolchenko case “an absolutely Stalinist trial”
Halya Coynash
August 21, 2015
khpg.org

The prosecutor has demanded 23 years for Ukrainian film director Oleg
Sentsov, and 12 years for civic activist Oleksandr Kolchenko in a case with
no crime and where all evidence was obtained through torture. Russian human
rights activist Zoya Svetova likens this to Stalinist repression, not a
court trial.

Svetova has seen a huge number of trials over the last 15 years, but
nothing like the “absolutely insane hearing” on Aug 19. She can’t remember
a case where, with no elements of a crime, or criminal (terrorist) acts,
the prosecutor should be seriously demanding 23-year and 12-year sentences.
This, the fact that everybody expects the court on August 25 to convict two
innocent men, and much more, she says, is reminiscent of Stalinist
repressions where people were arrested for nothing.

Sentsov is charged with leading a ‘terrorist organization,’ Kolchenko of
taking part in it and involvement in one specific firebomb attack on a
pro-Russian organization active in helping Russia seize control of Crimea
in 2014.  There is no evidence that an organization even existed, and the
only specific charge against Kolchenko is one that has not previously been
classified by any Russian court as ‘terrorism.’

“The prosecutor is demanding 23 and 12 years for people accused of crimes
they didn’t commit. Today Sentsov and Kolchenko’s lawyers clearly
demonstrated that there are no elements of a crime in this case, nor any
criminal act. On August 19, 2015, I saw a totally Stalinist trial. Three
judges were sitting