[Marxism] Fwd: The Republicans’ Trump Problem | Public Seminar

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Charles Post

Although Trump is a capitalist, he does not represent any significant 
segment of his class. Though not above racist (particularly 
Islamophobic), misogynist, and anti-union politics, the Republican 
establishment and their corporate sponsors embrace neoliberalism and an 
aggressive foreign policy that seeks to secure the dominance of US 
capital across the world. Trump’s opposition to “free trade” agreements, 
from NAFTA to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, and his 
isolationist opposition to the second Gulf War and ambivalence toward 
Israel (the most reliable US ally in the Middle East), is repulsive to 
the US capitalist class.


http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/03/the-republicans-trump-problem/
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[Marxism] Macri's moves to silence TeleSUR slammed as censorship

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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The government of Argentina is seeking to take pan-American TV station
TeleSUR  off the air, in a move the broadcaster
said on March 28 amounts to censorship. Latin American social movements
have already condemned the move by the South American nation's new
right-wing President Mauricio Marci.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/61435
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Re: [Marxism] Venezuela: Socialist Mayor Shot Dead

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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This is the third assassination of leading leftist political figures in
Venezuela in a week.Counterrevolution increasingly combining institutional
warfare with extrajudical terror -- which is far from new but seems to be
worsening,

On 2 April 2016 at 11:17, Greg McDonald via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> In addition, the Union Patriotica in Colombia have denounced an
> assassination attempt against Piedad Cordoba.
>
>
> http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Venezuelan-Socialist-Mayor-Shot-Dead-in-Drive-By-Shooting-20160401-0015.html
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[Marxism] Venezuela: Socialist Mayor Shot Dead

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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In addition, the Union Patriotica in Colombia have denounced an
assassination attempt against Piedad Cordoba.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Venezuelan-Socialist-Mayor-Shot-Dead-in-Drive-By-Shooting-20160401-0015.html
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[Marxism] Peru Elections 2016: The Controversial Candidacy of Keiko Fujimori

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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http://www.coha.org/peru-elections-2016-the-controversial-candidacy-of-keiko-fujimori/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Syria: The 21st-Century Disaster | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Syria may be the essential 21st-century mess.

Our guests, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami have just published 
Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, a new people’s history 
of the civil war. They tell us that beneath a web of thorny conflicts — 
Sunni powers against Iran, Obama against Putin, interventionists against 
isolationists — the central story was quickly lost: a democratic 
uprising, against scarcity, corruption, and oppression, met with a 
scorched-earth crackdown by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, determined to 
retain power.


No matter how you look at this conflict that has displaced 10 million 
Syrians and taken hundreds of thousands of lives, there are grave 
regrets: the creation of ISIS, the reverberations of the Iraq war, 
American vacillation and meddling, and roads to peace not travelled (or 
even considered).


What might have been done, what might yet happen, and what is the lesson 
for the Middle East, the next president and the global community?


Guest List

Robin Yassin-Kassab
blogger, journalist co-author of Burning Country, and novelist of The 
Road From Damascus.


Leila Al-Shami
human rights activist and co-author of Burning Country.
Hugh Roberts
professor of North African and Middle Eastern history at Tufts 
University, and essayist for The London Review of Books.


Jeffrey Sachs
development economist, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia 
University, and author most recently of To Move the World: JFK's Quest 
for Peace.


full: http://radioopensource.org/syria-the-21st-century-disaster/#
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Lies of Neoliberal Economics (or How America Became a Nation of Sharecroppers)

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Corrected url: 
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/hudson/1934/03/camps.htm

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[Marxism] How Hedge Funds Held Argentina for Ransom

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Ed, Apr. 1 2016
How Hedge Funds Held Argentina for Ransom
By MARTIN GUZMAN and JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

PERHAPS the most complex trial in history between a sovereign nation, 
Argentina, and its bondholders — including a group of United 
States-based hedge funds — officially came to an end yesterday when the 
Argentine Senate ratified a settlement.


The resolution was excellent news for a small group of well-connected 
investors, and terrible news for the rest of the world, especially 
countries that face their own debt crises in the future.


In late 2001, Argentina defaulted on $132 billion in loans during its 
disastrous depression. Gross domestic product dropped by 28 percent, 
57.5 percent of Argentines were living in poverty, and the unemployment 
rate skyrocketed to above 20 percent, leading to riots and clashes that 
resulted in 39 deaths.


Unable to pay its creditors, Argentina restructured its debt in two 
rounds of negotiations. The package discounted the bonds by two-thirds 
but provided a mechanism for more payments when the country’s economy 
recovered, which it did. A vast majority of the bondholders — 93 percent 
— accepted the deal.


Among the small minority who refused the deal were investors who had 
bought many of their bonds at a huge discount, well after the country 
defaulted and even after the first round of restructuring. These kinds 
of investors have earned the name vulture funds by buying up distressed 
debt, then, often aided by lawyers and lobbyists, trying to force a 
settlement.


The companies involved included some of the best-known vulture funds, 
including NML Capital, a subsidiary of Elliott Management, a hedge fund 
co-led by Paul Singer, a major contributor to the Republican Party, as 
well as Aurelius Capital and Dart Management. NML, which had the largest 
claim in the Argentina case, was the lead litigant of a group of 
bondholders in New York federal courts.


For a long time, Argentina refused to pay the holdouts. The funds tried 
all sorts of ways to change the country’s position, including, at one 
point, having an iconic Argentine ship seized in Ghana.


Then a 2012 ruling by Judge Thomas Griesa of the United States District 
Court for the Southern District of New York threw the game in the 
vulture funds’ favor, ruling that Argentina had to pay them back at full 
value, a cost to Argentina of $4.65 billion. NML, for example, would get 
a total return of 1,500 percent on its initial investment, according to 
our calculations, because of the cheap prices it paid for the debt and 
because of a “compensatory” interest rate of 9 percent under New York law.


The ruling, which became effective in 2014, did something else: Judge 
Griesa issued an injunction blocking Argentina from paying anything to 
the creditors who had accepted the deal until it had paid the vultures 
in full.


The judge gave the vultures the weapon they needed: Argentina had to 
either pay them off or renege on the default they had negotiated, 
ruining the country’s credit in the future and threatening its recovery.


On Thursday, Argentina finally settled for something close to the terms 
that Judge Griesa set. NML Capital will receive about half of the total 
agreement — $2.28 billion for its investment of about $177 million, a 
total return of 1,180 percent. (Argentina also paid the legal fees for 
the vultures.)


This resolution will carry a high price for the international financial 
system, encouraging other funds to hold out and making debt 
restructuring virtually impossible. Why would bondholders accept a 
haircut if they could wait and get exorbitant returns for a small 
investment?


In some ways, Argentina was an outlier. It fought aggressively for the 
best terms from the initial set of bondholders, setting the stage for a 
spectacular recovery: From 2003 to 2008, until the global financial 
crisis intruded, the country grew 8 percent per year on average, and 
unemployment declined to 7.8 percent from more than 20 percent. In the 
end, the creditors who had accepted the initial restructuring got the 
principal value in full and even 40 percent more.


Most countries are intimidated by the creditors and accept what is 
demanded, with often devastating consequences. According to our figures, 
52 percent of sovereign restructurings with private creditors since 1980 
have been followed by another restructuring or default within five 
years. Greece, the most recent example, restructured its debt in 2012, 
and only a few years later it is in desperate need of more relief.


It’s common to hear the phrase “moral hazard” when looking at countries 
that face 

[Marxism] Fwd: The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here | VICE | United States

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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No, this is not an April Fool's joke.

http://www.vice.com/read/posadism-trotskyism-guillermo-almeyra-interview-876
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[Marxism] Daesh versus the Saudi state

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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For all of the thousands of articles written about how Saudi Arabia 
created al-Qaeda and Daesh, there has never been the slightest 
acknowledgement of Osama bin-Laden’s fatwa against the Saudi monarchs 
for allowing Marines to be stationed there. Nor is there any 
understanding that bin-Laden as well as the September 11, 2001 hijackers 
identified as Saudi were actually Yemenites, a nationality that had huge 
grievances against the Saudis as explained in Akbar Ahmed’s “The Thistle 
and the Drone”. Despite the fact that they all are Wahhabis, it does not 
follow that they are part of a global conspiracy orchestrated out of the 
royal palace in Riyaddh in consultation with Langley. The only reason 
that there are so few jihadist attacks in Saudi Arabia is the country’s 
vice-like control of society through a vast security apparatus as well 
as the ability of oil revenues to placate the average Saudi. The article 
below illustrates that no matter the surface appearance, the jihadis 
would love nothing better than to destroy the monarchy.


NY Times, Apr. 1 2016
ISIS Turns Saudis Against the Kingdom, and Families Against Their Own
By BEN HUBBARD

BURAIDA, Saudi Arabia — The men were not hardened militants. One was a 
pharmacist, another a heating and cooling technician. One was a high 
school student.


They were six cousins, all living in Saudi Arabia, all with the same 
secret. They had vowed allegiance to the Islamic State — and they 
planned to kill another cousin, a sergeant in the kingdom’s 
counterterrorism force.


And that is what they did. In February, the group abducted Sgt. Bader 
al-Rashidi, dragged him to the side of a road south of this central 
Saudi city, and shot and killed him. With video rolling, they condemned 
the royal family, saying it had forsaken Islam.


Then they fled into the desert. The video spread rapidly across the 
kingdom, shocking a nation struggling to contain a terrorist movement 
seen as especially dangerous not just because it promotes violence, but 
also because it has adopted elements of Saudi Arabia’s conservative 
version of Islam — a Sunni creed known as Wahhabism — and used them to 
delegitimize the monarchy.


“Wahhabism is fundamental to the Islamic State’s ideology,” said Cole 
Bunzel, a scholar of Wahhabi history at Princeton University and the 
author of a recent paper on Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State. “It 
informs the character of their religion and is the most on-display 
feature, in my opinion, of their entire ideology.”


Among 20 terrorist episodes in Saudi Arabia since late 2014, the killing 
of Sergeant Rashidi was the third in which citizens had secretly joined 
the Islamic State and killed relatives in the security services. In each 
case, they justified their acts by saying Saudi Arabia practiced a 
corrupted version of the faith, a charge aimed at a kingdom that holds 
itself up as the only true Islamic state.


The Islamic State, like Al Qaeda before it, accuses the Saudi monarchy 
of corrupting the faith in order to preserve its power. But Qaeda 
networks in the kingdom were dismantled years ago, and the group’s 
leadership abroad has discouraged killing Muslim civilians.


The Islamic State, however, has been able to infiltrate the kingdom 
through digital recruiting, and it has found devotees willing to kill 
fellow Sunnis, as well as Shiites, to destabilize the monarchy.


In July, a 19-year-old man murdered his uncle, a police colonel, before 
carrying out a suicide attack near a prison, wounding two guards.


In an audio message released by the Islamic State after his death, he 
addressed his own mother.


“Your apostate brother was a loyalist to the tyrants,” he said. “Were it 
not for him, the tyrants would not exist.”


Maj. Gen. Mansour Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, 
said that terrorist attacks over the past two years had killed scores of 
people, along with about two dozen militants.


In addition, about 3,000 Saudis have joined militant groups abroad, and 
more than 5,000 have been incarcerated at home on terrorism charges, a 
large increase in recent years.


Saudi Arabia has a tangled history with Islamic militant groups. For a 
long time, it backed them as proxy forces to push its agenda in places 
like Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan (where it worked with the United 
States). But that largely ended in 2003, when Al Qaeda turned its focus 
on the kingdom and staged a series of deadly attacks.


Now the Islamic State poses a new challenge, by turning aspects of Saudi 
Arabia’s conservative creed against it. Wahhabism has been molded over 
the years to serve the interests of the monarchy, 

[Marxism] Fwd: The Lies of Neoliberal Economics (or How America Became a Nation of Sharecroppers)

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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From a Chris Hedges interview with Michael Hudson:

"If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the 
inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative. If 
the socialist parties and media don’t come forth with an alternative to 
this neofeudalism, you’re going to have a rollback to feudalism."


http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/the-lies-of-neoliberal-economics-or-how-america-became-a-nation-of-sharecroppers/

As it happens, Hudson is actually the godson of Leon Trotsky. His father 
was Carlos Hudson who was one of the Trotskyists who went to prison in 
1941 for opposing WWII.

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[Marxism] Miersault and the Sickness of Imperialism

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2016/04/miersault-and-sickness-of-imperialism.html


-- 
Check out my newest books , Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
 and Can We Escape the Eternal Flame?

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[Marxism] Fwd: Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée, Edited by Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin, 9781783486816 | Rowman & Littlefield

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The concept of 'uneven and combined development' was originally coined 
by Leon Trotsky to theorise Tsarist Russia's distinctive experience of 
modernity and revolution. But it has re-emerged over the last decade or 
so as a burgeoning research programme within International Relations 
(IR) and historical sociology. It has been critically and creatively 
deployed in two main areas: the provision of a sociological foundation 
to international theory overcoming the chronic schism between 
‘sociological’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of enquiry; and, relatedly, in 
superseding prevailing Eurocentric approaches in the social sciences.


This volume is the first to provide a sustained reflection on the idea 
of uneven and combined development as the intellectual basis for a 
non-Eurocentric social theory of ‘the international’. It does so through 
a series of empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of 
socio-historical change, political transformation, and intersocietal 
conflict over the longue durée. The volume thereby aims to demonstrate 
the unique potentials of uneven and combined development in overcoming 
IR and historical sociology’s shared inability to theorize the 
interactive and multilinear character of development.


full: 
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783486816/Historical-Sociology-and-World-History-Uneven-and-Combined-Development-over-the-Longue-Dur

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[Marxism] Fwd: Assad’s ‘good deeds’ in Syria can’t go unpunished

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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What is not mentioned is an explanation of why, exactly, did Assad lose 
Palmyra to Islamic State last May? His forces had all the advantages 
from the air, after all.


One regime insider told me that Assad badly wanted to convince the 
U.S.-led coalition to bomb the Islamic State fighters who were visible 
for miles in the desert on their march to Palmyra. It was intended to 
show that the regime was partnered with the West in the so-called “War 
on Terror.”


“After all, not only was ISIS marching toward a World Heritage Site, but 
it was also the gateway to Homs and the coast, where ISIS would have 
threatened Syria’s Christian and Alawite minorities,” he said, using an 
acronym for Islamic State.


But the coalition forces took no such step, and neither did the Syrian 
Air Force. Instead, top Syrian Army commanders and their Iranian 
advisers withdrew from Palmyra, leaving behind dozens of conscripts 
without provisions or support, according to locals and regime insiders. 
The conscripts were subsequently killed by Islamic State, and footage of 
these crimes was referenced by Syrian TV announcers as evidence of the 
state’s own war on terror.


full: 
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2016/03/31/assad-look-at-me-i-saved-christian-relics-and-ancient-palmyra-too/

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[Marxism] Fwd: European colonialists 'carried deadly dysentery bug with them to the tropics rather than bringing it back to Europe' | Europe | News | The Independent

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/european-colonialists-carried-deadly-tummy-bug-with-them-to-the-tropics-rather-than-bringing-it-back-a6944496.html
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[Marxism] a Fukushima on the Hudson/ evacuation of 20 million people?

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176122/tomgram%3A_cantarow_and_levy%2C_could_nuclear_disaster_come_to_america/#more
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