[Marxism] Coming in at number 4 in my top ten of 2015 – Jeremy Corbyn through my Australian eyes

[John Passant via Marxism]

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Coming in at number 4 in my top ten of 2015 – Jeremy Corbyn through my 
Australian eyes

I wrote this in September in response to the enthusiasm for change that Jeremy 
Corbyn's campaign for and stunning election to the leadership of the British 
Labour Party inspired. It compares that enthusiasm and upsurge in Labour Party 
membership to the insipid Labor Party here. I say in part:

'Many of my readers will be hoping for a Jeremy Corbyn in Australia to move the 
Labor Party here to the left. There is no Corbyn in the Parliamentary Labor 
Party. The Labor left, such as it is, is thoroughly imbued with the logic of 
neoliberalism. In the main it is a tribal allegiance rather than an ideological 
ferment of ideas to challenge capitalism. You never hear the S word from these 
very models of a modern major general of capital. None of the possible 
contenders for Corbyn down under have the same track record as Corbyn in 
opposing austerity or fighting against social and political injustice. Indeed 
people like Albanese and Plibersek have been Ministers in Labor governments 
that have implemented neoliberal policies and attacked public services and 
workers’ rights and conditions. They are part of the very problem Corbyn is 
fighting against.'

To read the whole article click here.

http://enpassant.com.au/2015/12/31/coming-in-at-number-4-in-my-top-ten-of-2015-jeremy-corbyn-through-my-australian-eyes/

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Re: [Marxism] Irish songs of resistance

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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Dublin artist The Mighty Stef's 2010 song, capturing anti-austerity anger
and with images of Dublin protests, is a pretty good modern song of
resistance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndzKAaZ3prs

On 31 December 2015 at 10:48, Philip Ferguson via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> I've stuck up Damien Dempsey sing 'James Connolly' at one of the mass
> anti-water tax rallies in Dublin and him and Glen Hansard singing the old
> Brendan Behan song 'The Aul' Triangle' at another anti-water tax rally,
> with some extra verses added with anti-water tax lines:
>
>
> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/songs-of-resistance-james-connolly-and-the-aul-triangle/
>
> Phil
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-- 
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s
original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made,
through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man
Under Socialism

“The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of
dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker
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Re: [Marxism] Sabotaging the water tax in Ireland

[DW via Marxism]

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Wait...what? Water is FREE in Ireland? Seriously? Out of curiosity...are
there any other countries where water is not metered?

DW
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[Marxism] Fwd: Zizek, Turkey and intellectual frivolity - Al Jazeera English

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/12/zizek-turkey-intellectual-frivolity-151223080857545.html
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[Marxism] Sabotaging the water tax in Ireland

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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One of the advantages of a country having a revolutionary tradition, as
Ireland does, is that people have a lot less worry about challenging the
state, including the cops.

In Ireland, people have boycotted the water tax
(non-registration/non-payment), marched in their hundreds of thousands, and
also engaged in physically attempting to stop water meters being put in
and, where Irish Water has been able to install meters, sabotaging the
meters.

eirigi has helpfully produced a video encouraging sabotage of these meters
and showing people how to do it.

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/eirigi-video-on-water-meter-sabotage/
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[Marxism] Irish songs of resistance

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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I've stuck up Damien Dempsey sing 'James Connolly' at one of the mass
anti-water tax rallies in Dublin and him and Glen Hansard singing the old
Brendan Behan song 'The Aul' Triangle' at another anti-water tax rally,
with some extra verses added with anti-water tax lines:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/songs-of-resistance-james-connolly-and-the-aul-triangle/

Phil
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[Marxism] Fwd: Girlhood; Mustang | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Among the dozens of screeners I received from film studio publicity 
machines in conjunction with NYFCO’s awards meeting in early December 
were two that dealt in one way or another with teen girls struggling to 
define themselves against social constraints imposed by poverty and 
religion respectively. Both are serious works and have outstanding 
performances but ultimately fail as statements about the social 
conditions they seek to explain and dramatize. Despite the critical 
remarks I will be making about the films, they will both be categorized 
as “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes since I would prefer to reserve a “rotten” 
for the likes of “Mad Max: Fury Road”.


full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/12/30/girlhood-mustang/
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[Marxism] From Luna Watfa: Waiting for the reunion

[Clay Claiborne via Marxism]

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New from Linux Beach:


 From Luna Watfa: Waiting for the reunion
 


By *Luna Watfa*, first published by *Die Rheinpfalz 
* 
in German, 23 Novermber 2015, translated by Jorg Widmann for Linux 
Beach. This is the forth in a series.


*Guest post (4): By now, our Syrian colleague Luna Watfa and her 
husband Basel have been transferred from the emergency shelter in 
Kusel to Koblenz. In her fourth news article for us she writes about 
difficult circumstances at the local hotel and about how difficult it 
is to be separated from their children.*
/"What will happen to us? Have you seen the burning refugee camps in 
France? Can something similar happen in Germany?"/ All of these 
questions I've heard from Syrian refugees in the past few days at the 
hotel where we are now housed. The hotel’s owner has just informed us 
that the dining hall, which is located outside the hotel, will be 
locked by 10 pm from now on. Apparently, for fear of attacks by 
extremists who disapprove of refugees in Koblenz.
*More...* 




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[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: Miko Peled: What is Israel supposed to do?

[Lüko Willms via Marxism]

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Dies ist eine weitergeleitete Nachricht

===8<=== Original Nachrichtentext ===
http://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/third-intifada/294-what-is-israel-supposed-to-do.html

December 28 ,2015
BY Miko Peled 
“What is Israel supposed to do?”
Israel is being attacked by Arab countries that want to destroy it, so what is 
Israel supposed to do? Israeli soldiers are being assaulted by Palestinian 
terrorist with knives, what are they supposed to do? Iran has nuclear 
capabilities and it wants to wipe Israel off the map, so what is Israel 
supposed to do? Hamas is determined to kill Israeli civilians so what is Israel 
supposed to do? And the list of things that make it impossible for Israel to do 
anything but arm itself and then attack and kill Palestinians goes on and on. 
So there is no hope, and no reason to expect change.

Well that’s just fine and dandy. This has been the one liner that Israeli 
officials have used since it was officially created around 1956 by then General 
Moshe Dayan (and used prior to that from time to time by Zionists) to justify 
any and all crimes committed by the state of Israel. Moshe Dayan was an inept, 
cowardly war criminal that was made famous because of his eye patch. He was 
also a renown antiquities thief and whore monger (it is said that when 
Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister was told that Moshe Dayan’s 
insatiable sexual appetite was becoming an embarrassment, Ben Gurion replied: 
“So what? King David was also a womanizer and he was a great king”). Serving as 
the Israeli army Chief of Staff Dayan expressed this “what are we to do” excuse 
in an unforgettably eloquent eulogy he gave, prior to Israel’s 1956 attack on 
Egypt.

Dayan was fomenting fear and a sense of destiny when he described the poor 
refugees in the Gaza strip as “waiting to slaughter us and shed our blood” 
because, as Dayan himself admitted, “we took their land and turned it into 
ours.” But, he explained, we did this because we have no choice, or “what were 
we to do?” after thousands of years in exile and endless persecution, and in 
the aftermath of the Nazi holocaust, we now have returned and must always live 
by the sword and maintain a strong grip on that sword, “for if that grip should 
weaken” those blood thirsty Arabs will see it as a sign of weakness and Jewish 
blood will flood the streets. In other words, maybe these blood thirsty Arabs 
looking at us from beyond the gates of Gaza are justified in hating us, but 
this is a reality in which we have no choice. It is our destiny to always live 
by the sword.

How convenient!

The crimes committed by Israel are committed because Israel has no choice. In 
an interview given several years ago by Israeli intelligence chief 
interrogator, he described how doctors in Israeli hospitals turn a blind eye 
when the agents come to torture wounded “terrorist suspects” in the hospital. 
He described how they “tug at the tubes a little, and then pretty soon “the 
Arabs start talking.” Then he added, that of course no one thinks this is good, 
but what are we do to? He was justifying the most immoral and horrendous 
torture of people who are in the care of a hospital, the doctors turning a 
blind eye and the agents doing their thing, with the same shameless excuse, 
“what is Israel supposed to do?”

During the month of October 2015, while in Jerusalem I watched a news program 
on Israeli television. In this program they interviewed the Palestinian Knesset 
Member Mohammad Baraka from the Joint Arab List, the third largest party in the 
Israeli parliament. He too was asked, “What is a soldier to do when approached 
by a Palestinian wielding a knife?” When Baraka began to talk about the 
occupation he was interrupted and told that what he is saying is not relevant 
and to stick to the question. In other words, the Israeli occupation in 
Palestine has nothing to do with any of this, and “what is a soldier supposed 
to do?” Please say that what Israeli soldiers are doing is justified, that the 
wholesale murder of Palestinians is ok because “what is Israeli to do?” 
Palestinians on Israeli television are always brought in order to be ridiculed 
or to be told to shut up.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was justified, because Jews had no choice. 
The slow genocide of Palestinian people is justified because Israel has no 
choice, the murder of thousands in Gaza is justified because Israel has no 
choice, and so on and so on. In the US media they actually took it a step 
further and added: “We would do the same” as though this adds weight to the 
argument of “what is Israel supposed to do.”

P

[Marxism] Fwd: The House That Marx Built | Dissent Magazine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A symposium on Karl Marx by a rather dubious journal. It is redeemed by 
an article by Benjamin Kunkel who was a leading light at the very good 
Marxist journal N+1.


https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/house-marx-built-feminism-ecology
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[Marxism] Why I will never vote for a Democrat, including Bernie Sanders

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty’s announcement that 
a grand jury, at his office’s recommendation, declined to file charges 
against the two officers who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice surprised 
almost no one.


(snip)

The question now, for those Cleveland residents who are dismayed by the 
sullen, foregone conclusion of the Rice case, is what they plan to do 
about it.


McGinty, a Democrat, faces a March primary, in which he will face former 
assistant prosecutor Michael O’Malley, who resigned from the department 
this spring. O’Malley has the backing of at least one prominent black 
politician: U.S. Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, the former chair of the 
Congressional Black Caucus, and a onetime Cleveland-area mayor.


McGinty, for his part, claims the support of a former NAACP leader and 
once-powerful City Council president, George Forbes, a pillar of 
Cleveland’s black community. But the aging and now-retired Forbes failed 
to appear as scheduled as one of McGinty’s two allotted endorsers when 
the County Democratic Party’s executive committee met this month to 
decide whether to back him for re-election. And depending on whom you 
ask, Forbes’ absence was either a testament to his growing physical 
infirmity, or a telling indication of how deep, or how public, the elder 
statesman intends his support to be.


full: 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/29/rice-prosecutor-indicted-innocent-men-but-not-killer-cops.html

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[Marxism] Fwd: The Shame and Pride of Empire by Jenny Uglow | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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It’s brave of Tate Britain to mount an exhibition called “Artist and 
Empire” when we are constantly mumbling apologies for Britain’s imperial 
past—for wars and slavery, exploitation and looting, religious and 
cultural oppression. Not that this show is a celebration. By its own 
account it is rather an attempt to show how artists have responded to 
the history and ethos of empire over the last five centuries, and to 
address its legacy “not just in public monuments, but in social 
structures, culture and in the fault lines of contemporary global 
politics.” Ambitious, no doubt. But the presentation has an 
uncomfortable diffidence. I went on a drizzly December day with a 
clever, sassy friend, who immediately nudged me as we read the first 
labels, raising her eyebrow at the evasive historical detail, the 
fudging, politically correct phrase.


full: 
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/26/shame-and-pride-artist-and-empire/

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[Marxism] Cleveland’s Terrible Stain

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Dec. 30 2015
Cleveland’s Terrible Stain
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 
12-year-old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class 
neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.


But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had 
the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the 
police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first 
and asks questions later. To grow up black and male in such a place is 
to live a highly circumscribed life, hemmed in by forces that deny your 
humanity and conspire to kill you.


Those forces hovered over the proceedings on Monday when a grand jury 
declined to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann in the killing and Timothy 
McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, explained why he had asked the 
grand jurors to not bring charges. Mr. McGinty described the events 
leading up to Tamir’s death as tragic series of errors and 
“miscommunications” that began when a 911 caller said a male who was 
“probably a juvenile” was waving a “probably fake” gun at people in a park.


The fact that those caveats never reached Officer Loehmann — who shot 
the child within seconds of arriving on the scene — was more than just 
an administrative misstep. It reflects an utter disregard for the lives 
of the city’s black residents. That disregard pervades every aspect of 
this case and begins with the fact that the department failed to even 
review Officer Loehmann’s work history before giving him the power of 
life and death over the citizens of Cleveland. Had the department done 
so, it would have found that Officer Loehmann had quit a suburban police 
department where he had showed a “dangerous loss of composure” during 
firearms training and was found to be emotionally unfit for the stress 
of the job.


Officer Loehmann joined a police department that itself had acquired a 
well-documented reputation for wanton violence and for shooting at 
people who posed no threat to the police or others. In a particularly 
striking event, documented by the Justice Department last year, officers 
mistook the sound of a car backfiring for a gunshot. They chased down 
and fired at the vehicle 137 times, killing two occupants who turned out 
to be unarmed.


The lengthy Justice Department report shows clearly why the black 
community viewed the Cleveland police as dangerous and profoundly out of 
control. In May, the Police Department entered an agreement with the 
Justice Department, enforceable by the courts, under which it is to 
adopt sweeping reforms.


The Police Department’s disregard for life was fully evident in the way 
the officers behaved after shooting Tamir. A surveillance video shows 
them standing by the child for four minutes without giving medical 
assistance, which was finally provided by an F.B.I. agent who happened 
to be in the neighborhood. Officer Frank Garmback, Officer Loehmann’s 
partner, nonetheless tackled the wounded boy’s 14-year-old sister as she 
tried to rush to his side. One can only imagine her suffering as she 
watched in handcuffs from the back seat of the squad car while her 
brother lay bleeding on the ground.


In addition to portraying the killing as a result of a tragic 
misunderstanding, prosecutors have also suggested the officer’s decision 
to kill Tamir was shaped by the fact that the surrounding neighborhood 
had a history of violence and that the boy appeared to be older than 12 
because he was big for his age.


These arguments sidestep the history of violent, discriminatory police 
actions that led up to this boy’s death. They also have the 
reprehensible effect of shifting the responsibility for this death onto 
the shoulders of this very young victim.

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[Marxism] Fwd: An Amateur Critique of String Theory | JSTOR Daily

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I drove a rented sedan to New York City to interview Peter Woit, a 
theoretical physicist at Columbia who has taken refuge in his 
university’s mathematics department. He’s a refugee because his 
criticisms of string theory have made him the subject of some derision 
among other physicists, who have subjected him to such trollish epithets 
as “incompetent, power-thirsty moron” and “stuttering crackpot-in-chief.”


According to Professor Woit’s 2002 article in American Scientist, string 
theory “is built on the idea that elementary particles are not pointlike 
objects but are the vibration modes of one-dimensional ‘string-like’ 
entities,” which exist in 11-dimensional spacetime. But, Woit points 
out, there’s an obvious problem with that: String theory’s requirement 
of 10 spatial dimensions is “in serious disagreement with all the 
evidence of one’s senses.” He continues: “Matching string theory with 
reality requires that one postulate six unobserved spatial dimensions of 
very small size wrapped up in one way or another. All the predictions of 
the theory depend on how you do this, but there are an infinite number 
of possible choices, and no one has any idea how to determine which is 
correct.” Crazy like a fox: apparently my half-drunk skepticism wasn’t 
so misplaced.


full: http://daily.jstor.org/i-heart-physics-love-story/
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[Marxism] Fwd: How ISIS Actually Lost Ramadi - The Daily Beast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The USA carried out 630 bombing raids on Ramadi leading up to the 
assault by Iraq's special forces. It is likely that without the air 
strikes, the city would still be under ISIS control.


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/30/how-isis-actually-lost-ramadi.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Hezbollah Fighters Are Fed Up With Fighting Syria’s War - The Daily Beast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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They joined to fight Israel in Lebanon, but after multiple combat tours 
in the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Idlib, Latakia, and around Damascus, 
Hezbollah reservists tell The Daily Beast that they are no longer 
willing to die in Syria’s unending, bloody civil war.


As a result of their refusal to continue volunteering to prop up the 
embattled government of Bashar al-Assad, they say that the Shia Party of 
God has cut off the money they were accustomed to receiving: reservist 
paychecks and permanent family benefits packages. What other 
consequences there may be remain to be seen.


Imad, as we’ll call him, crouched over a heating stove in a small Bekaa 
Valley farmhouse surrounded by the barren fields where his recently 
harvested crop of marijuana grew. He declined to give his real name 
because of his illegal trade and fear of reprisal for speaking out, but 
he said he decided to stop fighting after losing faith in the Syrian war 
six months ago.


When we talked to Imad in April, he was committed to supporting Assad’s 
forces and fueled by a desire to exact revenge on jihadists who beheaded 
a relative in Lebanon’s army after the soldier was captured in the 
Lebanese town of Arsal. Now, although he still wants to exact revenge, 
he has grown weary of the war and frustrated with Syrian government forces.


“I refuse to go back because when we take over a village and hand it to 
the Syrian army, it gets retaken [by rebel forces],” he says while 
fiddling with the stove that heats the small room. His decision, made in 
June, has cost him dearly and since then the school funding for his kids 
has been cut, his family medical benefits have been taken away, and 
heating subsidies evaporated.


full: 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/30/hezbollah-fighters-are-fed-up-with-fighting-syria-s-war.html

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[Marxism] Fwd: A socialist vision fades in Cuba’s biggest housing project | The Washington Post

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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HAVANA — In the Alamar neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, the 
streets don’t have names. To find an address, you need to know the zone, 
the block number and the apartment, because all the buildings look the 
same. Long and rectangular, five stories tall, their facades have been 
stripped by the ocean air and re-pigmented in curlicue patterns of mildew.


Alamar is the largest public housing project in Cuba, if not one of the 
largest in the world, with 100,000 residents. In a country sworn to 
socialist equality, it is arguably Cuba’s most equal place, because 
everyone pretty much has an identical apartment.


“It was a model city,” said Román Pérez, 76, a retired bus driver who 
lives in Zone 8, block D52, apartment 21. He helped build D52 and two 
others with his own hands, as a member of a communist worker 
“micro-brigade.” This was Fidel Castro’s idea.


“We had everything then,” Pérez said. “Everyone looked after each other.”

That was 40 years ago. Today, with U.S.-Cuban relations on the mend, 
this island has come to the edge of a new post-Castro era. The country’s 
ideological foundations are cracking, and new uncertainties are coming — 
perhaps none larger than whether the egalitarian values of Castro’s 
revolution will be swept away by rising inequalities and the breakdown 
of Cuba’s socialist welfare state.


Communist Party elders want to keep a lid on market forces, but with 
every incremental opening, yawning income gaps emerge. The owner of a 
small private restaurant can earn hundreds of dollars a day, or more, in 
a country where three-quarters of the labor force works for the state 
and the average government salary is $20 a month. Tour guides and hotel 
chambermaids make more than scientists and doctors.


Younger Cubans do not seem too troubled. But these disparities, 
authorities fear, bear the seeds of social tensions, resentments and crime.


“Men Die, But the Party Is Immortal,” says a billboard in Alamar, trying 
to reassure residents who may wonder what will happen after Fidel, 89, 
and current President Raúl Castro, 84, are no longer around.


Cuba remains a society of unusual social and economic parity in Latin 
America, a region beset by deep class divisions and the world’s worst 
homicide rates. A fraying system of cradle-to-grave benefits keeps 
Cubans living in a kind of state-administered, socialized poverty, 
earning high scores on U.N. human development surveys but little for 
Cuban wallets.


full: 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/12/29/a-socialist-vision-fades-in-cubas-biggest-housing-project/

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[Marxism] Fwd: When deadly force bumps into hearts and minds | The Economist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A report on Sunni resistance in Ramadi from 2004, a city supposedly 
about to fall to the "Iraq" army now, rescuing it from ISIS so that it 
can once more be screwed by the Shiites. Just like then, the assault is 
in the name of a "war on terror". A Groundhog Day made in hell.


http://www.economist.com/node/3524840?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whendeadlyforces
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[Marxism] Defend unions in Australia

[John Passant via Marxism]

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Defend our unions

But that is the whole point of the Royal Commission - to paint unions as bad in 
and of themselves and further restrict their capacity to win wage increases, 
defend jobs and protect life and limb at work. If the government can get away 
with using TURC as the springboard to further emasculate the union movement 
then Workchoices will seem a picnic compared to what the ruling class will have 
in store for workers. Kiss goodbye to penalty rates, and welcome longer unpaid 
hours, more deaths and serious injuries at work, more job insecurity, 
individual contracts  and massive cuts to the social wage. 

http://enpassant.com.au/2015/12/30/defend-our-unions-2/
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