[Marxism] Russians’ Anxiety Swells as Oil Prices Collapse
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. * NY Times, Jan. 23 2016 Russians’ Anxiety Swells as Oil Prices Collapse By NEIL MacFARQUHAR KRASNODAR, Russia — Last year was bad enough financially for Sergei and Victoria Titov, both music teachers getting along in years. Her government salary was slashed by one third, and rampant inflation put some basic groceries like eggplant and cucumbers out of reach. Then came Jan. 1, and the abrupt decision by the regional government here in Krasnodar, the capital of Russia’s southern agricultural heartland, to chop transportation subsidies for older Russians, forcing the couple to limit their trolley rides. Indignant and fearing worse amid Russia’s accelerating economic problems, Sergei joined an unauthorized demonstration last week by hundreds of older Russians who gathered under the bronze statue of a Cossack horseman on the main square here and chanted, “Return our benefits!” They were not alone, neither in Krasnodar nor across this vast nation, where illegal protests and wildcat strikes are erupting with increasing frequency by truckers, teachers, factory workers and all sorts of Russians facing steep government cutbacks because of plummeting revenue from oil and gas. The global collapse in oil prices is reordering economic relations around the world, but the change is particularly daunting for Russia, which relies on energy exports for 50 percent of its federal budget. In December, President Vladimir V. Putin told the nation that the worst of the recession — the economy shrank 3.9 percent and inflation hit 12.9 percent in 2015 — was over and that modest growth would return in 2016. He has been pushing the oil collapse as an “opportunity” that will wean Russia off energy imports and diversify the economy. Then in January oil fell below $30 per barrel, with no bottom in sight, and the ruble hit a record low of nearly 85 to the dollar before recovering slightly. The last time oil prices dropped so low and stayed there, in the 1980s, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Steadily rising prices since 2000 have lifted Russia out of poverty and economic chaos, buoying the prosperity of many Russians with it. Mr. Putin was lucky enough to be president for much of that period, but he now faces an extended decline, with real incomes shrinking. With the federal budget approved in December based on oil at $50 a barrel, Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, announced that the country faced a budget deficit of about $40 billion, and ministries were ordered to cut spending 10 percent. Budgets were similarly guillotined last year. In Krasnodar, Mr. Titov, 64, braced for harder times. “I do not know what they will cut, but I know it will affect us,” he said. “We are watching all this with alarm. It is clear that the government lacks the necessary resources to give us a normal life.” In Krasnodar, a city of about 800,000 people, retirees register a kind of sticker shock when discussing food prices, yelling out items as they remember newly high prices. “Apples!” one shouted, noting that the cost had nearly doubled. Then “Zucchini!” Then “Smoked sausages!” Food prices rose 20 percent last year, according to official statistics, but often Russians say their grocery tab is up by a third or more, thanks in part to sanctions Moscow slapped on Western food imports in retaliation for sanctions the West imposed over Ukraine. Sergei Galustian, 65, a retired police officer, lives on a downtown street with just 27 houses, their proximity making it easy to assess change. “Nobody is starving yet, but incomes are definitely down,” he said, noting that homes are colder, that neighbors turn on just two lamps after dark where they once used five and that people have stopped buying new clothes. Retail sales across Russia were down by 13.1 percent for the year ending in November, according to official statistics, with car sales off nearly 40 percent. The 100 or so workers at the giant Seydin Machine Tool Factory, once the pride of the city during the Soviet era, have not seen a paycheck for a year and recently received layoff notices. They, too, have on occasion gathered in the main square to demand their back pay. The workers “have to take to the streets!” they wrote in an open letter to Mr. Putin. In a tradition dating from Soviet times, most firms, and especially state-run companies, tend to cut hours or stop paying salaries rather than fire people to diminish the chances for social unrest. In Moscow on Wednesday, about 15 employees of Sbarro, the pizza chain based in Ohio, stood in the brutal cold outside one franchise holding signs saying, “Give
[Marxism] Fwd: Woody Guthrie, 'Old Man Trump' and a real estate empire's racist foundations
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. * In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take. Below all the legal jargon is the signature of the man who had composed “This Land Is Your Land,” the most resounding appeal to an equal share for all in America. Below that is the signature of Donald Trump’s father, Fred. No pairing could appear more unlikely. Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire. full: https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026 _ 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: Environmental racism harms Americans in Flint – and beyond | Jason Nichols | Opinion | The Guardian
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[Marxism] Fwd: Why would Putin have had a former KGB operative murdered? - The Washington Post
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. * One notable book, "Blowing Up Russia," suggested that the agency was behind a series of apartment bombings in September 1999 that had killed more than 300 people. These bombings had been blamed on Chechen separatists and were a key rationale for Russia engaging in the Second Chechen War — a war that clearly helped the popularity of Putin, prime minister at the time of the bombings. Litvinenko's book presented the argument that the bombings were a "false flag" that killed ordinary Russians for political purposes — something that would create incredible anger in Russia if ever proven. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/21/why-would-putin-have-had-a-former-kgb-operative-murdered/ (Don't bother clicking the link for the article below. It has disappeared from the CounterPunch archives. Unfortunately when they moved to a new format, a bunch of articles got lost apparently.) Counterpunch, September 8, 2004 The Heavy Hand of Putin Russia and Chechnia After Beslan By BÜLENT GOKAY The intentional targeting of a school by Chechen hostage-takers and the cruelty and the brutality they employed against defenceless children has horrified the world. It is an atrocity and the Chechen fighters and Islamist terrorists who carried it out are ruthless criminals. Absolutely nothing progressive can come of such terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. The terrorist methods employed by these groups are absolutely reactionary and entirely counter-productive, and can neither be supported nor defended. To recognise this political fact and state it openly in no way minimises the criminal repression carried out by Putin and the ruling elite of Russia against the Chechen people. The hostage-taking and other similar actions are the inevitable consequence of a war that has long since taken the form of state-organised terror. The brutal war carried out by the Russian army and security forces for over 10 years in Chechnia has fuelled the growth of separatist movements, increasing the desperation of the local people and driving layers of young people towards Islamic radicalism and suicide bombing. Since the time of the tsars, the Chechen people have fought for their independence. The Russian rulers, for most of the time, despised their Muslim adversaries. They considered these fanatical fighters as half-witted and primitive, and treated all Chechens as rebels, bandits and terrorists. This had been the case in the 18th century, and it has been true for all Chechen opponents of Russia since then. In the Russian perception, the only way to deal with the Chechen resistance was (and still is) the policy of massive force, implemented with single-minded ruthlessness. The Soviet press provides rich material on the numerous trials of Sufi sheikhs from Chechnia and their murids in the late 1950s and 1960s. As a rule, the accused were always tried for "banditry" and "manslaughter". Russian leaders on the face of the evidence should have learned a good deal from history. One is struck by the repetition of the same remedies and mistakes in the military and political field for the last two hundred years. Putin's own rise to power was closely bound up with similar aggressive campaigns against Chechnia. In August 1999, Yeltsin nominated the largely unknown former security service veteran, Vladimir Putin, as head of the government. Shortly afterwards a series of bomb attacks destroyed blocks of flats in Moscow and other Russian cities, claiming hundreds of victims. Although the perpetrators were never properly identified, there were many indications that the secret service agency FSB was involved. Putin used the bombings as an excuse to once again undertake a full-scale military mobilisation against Chechnia. Appealing to Russian chauvinism and making crude attacks on Chechens he was swept into office as Russia's president on a wave of nationalist hysteria. According to the story published by Anna Politkovskaia, a journalist of Novaia Gazeta, an agent of the FSB infiltrated the group of Chechen terrorists who took about 800 people hostage in a Moscow theatre in 2002. This agent succeeded in escaping the building and surviving the government rescue assault, as a result of which 129 hostages and the whole group of about 50 Chechen militants were killed. If this report is true, then Putin's government is guilty not only of a cruel and merciless overreaction to the hostage crisis, but also of directly organising one of the greatest armed provocations in recent Russian history. The Russian army established a brutal dictatorship in Chechnia based on naked terror. Ten years ago Chechnya had a
[Marxism] The Children of Manifest Destiny
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. * WSJ, Jan. 23 2016 The Children of Manifest Destiny Andrew Jackson drove a convoy of chained slaves. It was known as a ‘coffle.’ By FERGUS M. BORDEWICH THE AMERICAN SLAVE COAST By Ned and Constance Sublette Lawrence Hill, 754 pages, $35 In 1834, the slave trader Isaac Franklin wrote to a colleague that “the old Lady and Susan”—a pair of slaves—“could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house. . . . It might be . . . established at your place [in] Alexandria or Baltimore for the exclusive use of the [concern] and [its] agents.” Such a blunt acknowledgment of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women was unusual but not unique in the antebellum South, as Ned and Constance Sublette make clear in “The American Slave Coast,” an often heart-wrenching descent into one of the darkest corners of slavery’s history. Slavery’s defenders hypocritically claimed that emancipation would lead to rampant “miscegenation,” although race mixing was extremely rare in the free North but ubiquitous in the South, where the rape of enslaved women was a way of life. Hundreds of thousands of mulattoes were the physical proof: in 1860, they made up at least 13% of the nation’s black population. The Sublettes quote the South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who dryly observed in 1861: “Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—& every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds.” There was no such crime as rape against a slave: A slave owner had full right to do whatever he wished with his property, “and sexual use was part of the portfolio of privileges,” the Sublettes write. The authors note that, beyond the opportunity for unrestrained sexual activity, “the existence of a market in young people created a financial incentive for slaveowners to intrude into the reproductive lives of enslaved women.” At least some plantations seem to have employed “breeding men” as studs, or “stock Negroes.” The Sublettes quote a former Louisiana slave, Lueatha Mansfield, who in old age told an interviewer that if a slave owner “saw a fine woman or man on another plantation, he would buy him or her for breeding purposes in order to continue to have good able workers. If he didn’t bring them on the same farm, he would arrange for them to breed from each other.” Evidence of systematic breeding remains anecdotal, however. The Sublettes found no evidence of plantations devoted explicitly to breeding. They point out that such a system would make no economic sense, since “human beings grow too slowly to raise them as a cash-producing monocrop.” But, they conclude, “that doesn’t mean slave breeding didn’t take place on a broad scale, only that it wasn’t practiced as an isolated profession.” They segue to the much more expansive proposition that, especially after the curtailment of the overseas slave trade in 1808, “antebellum slavery was in the aggregate a slave-breeding system.” This may be true in the most general sense, but it is an oversimplification that does not really illuminate, implicitly making slaves’ reproduction everywhere seem congruent with a calculated process of controlled breeding. To make their case, the authors devote most of their book to a lengthy and often digressive account of slavery’s entire history in North America. They begin with 16th-century slave trading and move on to the arrival of the first African slaves in Jamestown and the development of slavery in the Chesapeake region and in Barbados. Their broad exposition includes the creation of a legal regime to define the status of imported Africans; the slaveholding of some of the Founding Fathers; the slave trading of Andrew Jackson (he was the only president to have personally driven a “coffle,” or convoy, of chained slaves); and the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which inspired Americans with a vision of the nation as a transcontinental power and in its specifically Southern iteration included the spread of slavery all the way to the Pacific Ocean. These subjects may well be familiar to readers versed in the larger history of slavery. Fortunately, the Sublettes’ usually crisp prose keeps their narrative moving at a comfortable pace, while their boundless curiosity sometimes leads to unexpectedly interesting places. They offer enlightening discussion of slavery’s intersection with early newspapers, in which ads for slave sales and runaways were a
[Marxism] Fwd: ‘I was terribly wrong’ - writers look back at the Arab spring five years on | Books | The Guardian
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[Marxism] Gates Foundation is spearheading the neoliberal plunder of African agriculture
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[Marxism] Haiti's suffering continues
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. * Aristide was trying to build a new Haiti, but the US opposed him and overthrew him. Clinton allowed him back - if he didn't stray from the heartless neoliberal economic agenda. All of Haiti's misery since must be laid at Washington's doorstep. http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34764-haiti-cancels-elections-indefinitely _ 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 Revenant; The Hateful Eight | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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 Revenant” and “The Hateful Eight” have some things in common. Alejandro González Iñárritu and Quentin Tarantino, their respective directors, are widely considered to have “indie” credibility, pushing at the barriers of Hollywood but not breaking them. The two films are nominally Westerns but like just about all that are made nowadays wear their “revisionist” colors proudly. Finally, I came to them with low expectations since their last two films—“Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” and “Django Unchained”—were major disappointments. While “Birdman” received the Academy Award for best film in 2014, I was unimpressed: The film plays with notions of art versus commerce but only in the most superficial way. I suppose if you’ve never seen Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels” or Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt”, “Birdman” might pass muster. My misfortune is to be old enough to have seen such films in my youth and being spoiled by the experience. The less said about “Django Unchained” the better. In fact I walked out on it after fifteen minutes. When Django shows up at slave-owner’s plantation wearing a powder-blue costume that appeared to be borrowed from a low-budget production of “Don Giovanni”, my patience wore out. I guess my logic fetish got the better of me. full: http://louisproyect.org/2016/01/23/the-revenant-the-hateful-eight/ _ 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] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Arrest of Leftist Israeli Activist Underlines Political Split
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. * NY Times, Jan. 23 2016 Arrest of Leftist Israeli Activist Underlines Political Split By ISABEL KERSHNER JERUSALEM — Ezra Nawi, an Israeli Jewish plumber, has a long history as a left-wing activist helping Palestinians in their struggle against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Now he is under arrest in Israel, after a right-wing activist surreptitiously filmed him bragging about exposing Arab brokers who tried to sell Palestinian land to Jewish settlers. Such sales are a capital crime under Palestinian law. Considered variously as a big-mouthed provocateur and a colorful human-rights adventurer, Mr. Nawi has become the latest symbol in the battle between advocacy groups on opposite sides of Israel’s political spectrum, and the increasingly fierce debate here over the nature of Israeli society and democracy. The debate has heated up as Israel’s conservative government is pushing forward contentious legislation that would require nongovernmental organizations to disclose funding they receive from foreign governments in their publications, advertising and meetings with public officials. The proposed bill, which supporters say is meant to increase transparency, would apply mainly to leftist groups critical of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians, since rightist groups mostly receive private funding from abroad, and it has already drawn harsh criticism from the Obama administration and European diplomats. Daniel B. Shapiro, the American ambassador to Israel, took the unusual step of meeting with Israel’s justice minister, Ayelet Shaked of the rightist Jewish Home Party, and then released a pointed statement afterward noting Washington’s “concern” about the bill. “A free and functioning civil society is an essential element of a healthy democracy,” the statement said. “Governments must protect free expression and peaceful dissent and create an atmosphere where all voices can be heard.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel later endorsed the bill, set to be introduced in Parliament as early as next week, saying, “I do not understand how a requirement for transparency is antidemocratic; the opposite is true.” He added, “Financing by governments is certainly something the public should know about.” Mr. Netanyahu said the legislation should “require reports about the first shekel or dollar from foreign governments,” rather than apply only to groups that raise more than half their money abroad. But he also urged dropping a provision that would require representatives of foreign-funded groups who appear in Parliament to wear tags saying so. Some have compared the legislation to a 2012 law in Russia that required nongovernmental organizations to register as “foreign agents” if they raised money abroad. In India, foreign-backed groups are prohibited from engaging in political activity, a law that activists there feared was a way of curbing criticism of government policies. Here in Israel, it is part of a toxic tug of war over the boundaries of political discourse amid mounting international criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. The dwindling left is frequently vilified as traitorous, as empowered right-wingers create ever-narrower definitions of Zionism. And the tactics are getting uglier. Mr. Nawi, a gay Arabic speaker in his 60s and a prominent member of an Israeli-Palestinian rights group called Taayush, was not caught in a sting by the security apparatus for either Israel or the Palestinian Authority. Instead, he was tripped up by a plant from a right-wing organization, Ad Kan, which says it aims to “expose the true face” of what it terms anti-Israeli organizations. Video from Ad Kan’s hidden camera was broadcast by the respected television documentary program “Uvda” — like an Israeli “60 Minutes” — on Jan. 7. A court-imposed gag order on Mr. Nawi’s arrest — for, among other charges, contact with a foreign agent and conspiracy to commit a crime — was lifted on Thursday. It is an odd case. Mr. Nawi, described in a 2009 New York Times profile as “the Robin Hood of the South Hebron Hills,” helping Palestinians who love him and “thwarting settlers and soldiers who view him with contempt,” is now accused of endangering the lives of Palestinians. That is because selling land to Israeli Jews is punishable by death according to the Palestinian Authority. Although the authority is not known to have carried out any executions for any offense in more than a decade, there have been reports of torture in its prisons. The Ad Kan video, from about a year ago, shows Mr. Nawi behind the wheel of his jeep,
[Marxism] Syria-Libya-Turkey
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. * Dear Friends, This is a twenty minute segment on TeleSur's The Empire Files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_5p2Gwq42k. It encapsulates my years of reporting from the region, particularly my reporting of the Syrian conflict - actively - since 2013, and of course Libya and Turkey from long before then. I did my first story from Turkey in 1996, from the southwest of the country which was then - as now - in a hot conflict between the state and the Kurdish populations. My most recent report from Diyarbakir, Turkey is here: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/turkeys-war-on-the-kurds/article8065303.ece?homepage=true. Silope, near the Iraq border, is being bombed to bits. Terrible situation there. Most recent report from Tripoli, Libya is here: http://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/descent-into-chaos/article8123795.ece?homepage=true. Warm regards, Vijay. _ 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: Karl reMarks: Robert Fisk: Reporting from Syria ‘with sensational quotes in the headline’
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. * As I got in the car, a 1962 Mercedes built in the same factory where my father had once fought the German army in 1917, the driver smiled and nodded wisely, as all taxi drivers in the Middle East do when they’re driving a foreign journalist around. Ahead lay a deceptively empty stretch of road that my imagination quickly filled with the mental image of Sargon II’s soldiers marching along, primarily to illustrate my excellent knowledge of history. The man back at the hotel had warned me about the false tranquillity of this part of Aleppo that I was about to visit. He only identified himself as ‘the raven’, but something told me that I must trust this man dressed strangely in an Abayya made of black feathers despite the searing heat. I have stopped long ago questioning those mysterious men I encounter while reporting, and so too have my editors. full: http://www.karlremarks.com/2012/08/robert-fisk-reporting-from-syria-with.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
