Re: [Marxism] Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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This is not at all a new insight and represents an argument that began with
the Revolution

However, making generalizations this sweeping requires being really
selective about the evidence--both in terms of the role of the British
Empire in shaping the racial policies of its colonists and in smudging what
were really a spectrum of views among those colonists after 1776.

ML
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[Marxism] Fwd: New York Asian Film Festival 2016 | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Although the 2016 New York Asian Film Festival began on June 22nd, 
competing demands on my time prevented me from seeing the five screeners 
reviewed below until now. All are being shown starting tomorrow until 
July 9th, the final day of the festival. Averse as I am to film 
reviewing hyperbole, I can state that they are among the best narrative 
films I have seen this year and would be of the utmost interest to New 
Yorkers who tend to have confidence in my recommendations.


Inside Men; A Violent Prosecutor
These two Korean films share almost identical plots and political 
concerns. If you have been following my reviews of Korean films over the 
years, you will probably be aware that I consider the Korean film 
industry as a source of some of the best work being done in the world 
today. While made largely as pop culture influenced by Hong Kong cinema 
of the 70s and 80s, they have often penetrated the Deep State that rests 
on the four legs of anti-Communism, out-of-control Chaebols, corrupt 
politicians and organized crime. In other words, Korean films are one of 
the main sources of a badly needed critique of the country’s rotten 
capitalist “success” story. Koreans who see such fictional films 
certainly understand that they are ultimately pointing to the grim 
reality of a system in which 304 people died on April 16, 2014 because a 
ferry was allowed to operate in a deregulated system. They were victims 
of a conspiracy to gamble with the lives of high school students on a 
field trip for the sake of a fast buck.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/07/04/new-york-asian-film-festival-2016/
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[Marxism] Amid Brexit Chaos, Government Pushes Ahead with Controversial Land Registry Privatisation

[MM via Marxism]

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"It’s a busy time in UK politics; the nation is still getting to grips with the 
fallout from Brexit, both major parties are facing bitter leadership contests, 
and the union is looking more fragile than ever. Yet amid this turmoil, MPs 
carry on with the business of government, while Brexit threatens to act as a 
smokescreen, shielding other important topics from public scrutiny.

"One such matter is the move to privatise the Land Registry, which has been in 
state hands for hundreds of years. Established in 1925, the Land Registry is a 
record which holds and maintains the data for 24m property titles across 
England and Wales. It provides vital information about the ownership of 87% of 
land, which is worth a total of £4 trillion – including £1 trillion in 
mortgages.

"In 2014/15 alone, the Land Registry cost almost £261m to run – but it also 
generated £297m of revenue from fees for the use of its services, such as title 
searches. As such, it’s no longer seen just as a function of government, but as 
an important asset in a world where data – and the ability to leverage data – 
is very valuable.”


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/land-registry-privatisation-government-brexit-chaos-a7115461.html
 



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[Marxism] Is Coup Against Corbyn a Plot to Spare Blair from War Crimes Probe?

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/07/04/coup-against-corbyn-plot-spare-blair-war-crimes-probe


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[Marxism] Fwd: 'Most honest discussion of US power ever in the NYT'

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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 Forwarded Message 

Subject:[national] Most honest discussion of US power ever in the NYT
Date:   Sun, 3 Jul 2016 20:59:45 -0700
From:   lastma...@gmail.com
To: mdriscol...@charter.net


To consider while the "bombs are bursting in air" on July 4-mm

Ando Arike of Brooklyn writes in response to Ray Scranton's NYT oped 
"The fantasy of American violence":


"This may be the most honest discussion of US military power ever 
published by the NY Times. Thank you, Roy Scranton! How refreshing to 
read someone in these pages questioning the "political utility of 
force," as military theorists call armed coercion! How refreshing to 
read a writer willing to point out the "bloody track of American 
history, from slavery to genocide to empire"! How encouraging, on the 
eve of July 4th, to hear this holiday called what it is -- a celebration 
of American violence! Where is the antiwar movement that we so 
desperately need?"


Read Scranton's piece at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/star-wars-and-the-fantasy-of-american-violence.html?



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[Marxism] Muckraking Anthropology - writing book - are you interested in being interviewed?

[Brian McKenna via Marxism]

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Class Struggle is the Name of the Game at Universities. It’s the Ethical
Elephant in the Room

Posted on June 28th, 2016 by Blog Administrator

Brian McKenna

Picture this. You have a Ph.D. in anthropology and are hired, as an
adjunct, to teach an anthropology course on “colonialism, economic crisis,
peasant struggles, nationalism, indigenous rights, independence movements,
and struggles over development and underdevelopment.” That’s an actual job
posting. The salary for the position is $3,413.

A tenured faculty member may receive about $10,000 to teach the same course.

Now answer this. How can you NOT talk about your own struggles when the
subjects you are hired to teach on – oppression and struggle – apply to
you? You are a flesh and blood native of Nacirema (“America” spelt
backwards) standing before the students. You can provide insider testimony,
as a key informant, about “the other.” And you are “the other.” You are a
Ph.D. anthropologist who is actually working in the field.

Many adjunct professors are afraid to speak about the elephant in the
classroom. They are being monitored. They are under constant surveillance
from customers (student smartphones and course evaluations), middle
managers (teaching observations by Chairs), technicians (email monitoring
by IT), executive officers (annual reviews read by Deans), and CEOs
(Provosts and Presidents). They must be careful. They need that paycheck
for food, housing, health care, even burial. At one university where I
worked I was informed that, before I arrived, the department had to take up
a collection for the funds to bury an adjunct professor after he died from
a massive heart attack in his office.


full:
http://ethics.americananthro.org/class-struggle-is-the-name-of-the-game-at-universities-its-the-ethical-elephant-in-the-room/


-- 
Brian McKenna, Ph.D.
Anthropologist
Department of Behavioral Sciences
CASL 4025
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Dearborn, Michigan
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[Marxism] July 4th observed in Havana Times

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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The Havana Times carries mainly criticisms of the Cuban government, in a few 
instances written by myself.  More often I feel a need to defend the government 
against criticism.
Here is a hard-hitting piece by a Cuban-American.  He came to the US as part of 
the Mariel boatlift of 1980.
ken h


What July 4th Means to Black America
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=119759
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[Marxism] Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Ed, July 4 2016
Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?
By ROBERT G. PARKINSON

Binghamton, N.Y. — FOR more than two centuries, we have been reading the 
Declaration of Independence wrong. Or rather, we’ve been celebrating the 
Declaration as people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we 
should, but not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin 
and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, 
if not more, about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable 
rights.


The Declaration’s beautiful preamble distracts us from the heart of the 
document, the 27 accusations against King George III over which its 
authors wrangled and debated, trying to get the wording just right. The 
very last one — the ultimate deal-breaker — was the most important for 
them, and it is for us: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst 
us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the 
merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an 
undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” In the 
context of the 18th century, “domestic insurrections” refers to 
rebellious slaves. “Merciless Indian savages” doesn’t need much explanation.


In fact, Jefferson had originally included an extended attack on the 
king for forcing slavery upon unwitting colonists. Had it stood, it 
would have been the patriots’ most powerful critique of slavery. The 
Continental Congress cut out all references to slavery as “piratical 
warfare” and an “assemblage of horrors,” and left only the sentiment 
that King George was “now exciting those very people to rise in arms 
among us.” The Declaration could have been what we yearn for it to be, a 
statement of universal rights, but it wasn’t. What became the official 
version was one marked by division.


Upon hearing the news that the Congress had just declared American 
independence, a group of people gathered in the tiny village of 
Huntington, N.Y., to observe the occasion by creating an effigy of King 
George. But before torching the tyrant, the Long Islanders did something 
odd, at least to us. According to a report in a New York City newspaper, 
first they blackened his face, and then, alongside his wooden crown, 
they stuck his head “full of feathers” like “savages,” wrapped his body 
in the Union Jack, lined it with gunpowder and then set it ablaze.


The 27th and final grievance was at the Declaration’s heart (and on Long 
Islanders’ minds) because in the 15 months between the Battles of 
Lexington and Concord and independence, reports about the role 
African-Americans and Indians would play in the coming conflict was the 
most widely discussed news. And British officials all over North America 
did seek the aid of slaves and Indians to quell the rebellion.


A few months before Jefferson wrote the Declaration, the Continental 
Congress received a letter from an army commander that contained a 
shocking revelation: Two British officials, Guy Carleton and Guy 
Johnson, had gathered a number of Indians and begged them to “feast on a 
Bostonian and drink his blood.” Seizing this as proof that the British 
were utterly despicable, Congress ordered this letter printed in 
newspapers from Massachusetts to Virginia.


At the same time, patriot leaders had publicized so many notices 
attacking the November 1775 emancipation proclamation by the governor of 
Virginia, Lord Dunmore, that, by year’s end, a Philadelphia newspaper 
reported a striking encounter on that city’s streets. A white woman was 
appalled when an African-American man refused to make way for her on the 
sidewalk, to which he responded, “Stay, you damned white bitch, till 
Lord Dunmore and his black regiment come, and then we will see who is to 
take the wall.”


His expectation, that redemption day was imminent, shows how much those 
sponsored newspaper articles had soaked into everyday conversation. 
Adams, Franklin and Jefferson were essential in broadcasting these 
accounts as loudly as they could. They highlighted any efforts of 
British agents like Dunmore, Carleton and Johnson to involve 
African-Americans and Indians in defeating the Revolution.


Even though the black Philadelphian saw this as wonderful news, the 
founders intended those stories to stoke American outrage. It was a very 
rare week in 1775 and 1776 in which Americans would open their local 
paper without reading at least one article about British officials 
“whispering” to Indians or “tampering” with slave plantations.


So when the crowd in Huntington blackened the effigy’s face and stuffed 
its head with feathers 

[Marxism] How Anti-Growth Sentiment, Reflected in Zoning Laws, Thwarts Equality

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, July 4 2016
How Anti-Growth Sentiment, Reflected in Zoning Laws, Thwarts Equality
By CONOR DOUGHERTY

BOULDER, Colo. — The small city of Boulder, home to the University of 
Colorado’s flagship campus, has a booming local economy and a pleasantly 
compact downtown with mountain views. Not surprisingly, a lot of people 
want to move here.


Something else is also not surprising: Many of the people who already 
live in Boulder would prefer that the newcomers settle somewhere else.


“The quality of the experience of being in Boulder, part of it has to do 
with being able to go to this meadow and it isn’t just littered with 
human beings,” said Steve Pomerance, a former city councilman who moved 
here from Connecticut in the 1960s.


All of Boulder’s charms are under threat, Mr. Pomerance said as he 
concluded an hourlong tour. Rush-hour traffic has become horrendous. 
Quaint, two-story storefronts are being dwarfed by glass and steel. Cars 
park along the road to the meadow.


These days, you can find a Steve Pomerance in cities across the country 
— people who moved somewhere before it exploded and now worry that 
growth is killing the place they love.


But a growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth 
sentiment, when multiplied across countless unheralded local development 
battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal 
American economy.


It has even to some extent changed how Americans of different incomes 
view opportunity. Unlike past decades, when people of different 
socioeconomic backgrounds tended to move to similar areas, today, 
less-skilled workers often go where jobs are scarcer but housing is 
cheap, instead of heading to places with the most promising job 
opportunities, according to research by Daniel Shoag, a professor of 
public policy at Harvard, and Peter Ganong, also of Harvard.


One reason they’re not migrating to places with better job prospects is 
that rich cities like San Francisco and Seattle have gotten so expensive 
that working-class people cannot afford to move there. Even if they 
could, there would not be much point, since whatever they gained in pay 
would be swallowed up by rent.


In Boulder, for instance, the median home price has risen 60 percent 
over the last five years, to $648,200. Today, someone who makes the 
typical Boulder salary would have to put about 40 percent their monthly 
income toward payments on a new mortgage or about half toward rent, 
according to Zillow.


“We’ve switched from a world where everybody educated and uneducated was 
moving from poorer parts of the country to the richer parts of the 
country,” said Professor Shoag, “to a world where the higher-educated 
people move to San Francisco and lower educated people move to Vegas.”


Zoning restrictions have been around for decades but really took off 
during the 1960s, when the combination of inner-city race riots and 
“white flight” from cities led to heavily zoned suburbs.


They have gotten more restrictive over time, contributing to a jump in 
home prices that has been a bonanza for anyone who bought early in 
places like Boulder, San Francisco and New York City. But for 
latecomers, the cost of renting an apartment or buying a home has become 
prohibitive.


In response, a group of politicians, including Gov. Jerry Brown of 
California and President Obama, are joining with developers in trying to 
get cities to streamline many of the local zoning laws that, they say, 
make homes more expensive and hold too many newcomers at bay.


To most people, zoning and land-use regulations might conjure up little 
more than images of late-night City Council meetings full of gadflies 
and minutiae. But these laws go a long way toward determining some 
fundamental aspects of life: what American neighborhoods look like, who 
gets to live where and what schools their children attend.


And when zoning laws get out of hand, economists say, the damage to the 
American economy and society can be profound. Studies have shown that 
laws aimed at things like “maintaining neighborhood character” or 
limiting how many unrelated people can live together in the same house 
contribute to racial segregation and deeper class disparities. They also 
exacerbate inequality by restricting the housing supply in places where 
demand is greatest.


The lost opportunities for development may theoretically reduce the 
output of the United States economy by as much as $1.5 trillion a year, 
according to estimates in a recent paper by the economists Chang-Tai 
Hsieh and Enrico Moretti. Regardless of the actual gains in dollars that 
could be achieved if zoning laws 

[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] In New Jersey Student Loan Program, Even Death May Not Bring a Reprieve

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Loan-sharking worse than anything Tony Soprano ever was involved with.)

NY Times, July 4 2016
In New Jersey Student Loan Program, Even Death May Not Bring a Reprieve
By ANNIE WALDMAN

Amid a haze of grief after her son’s unsolved murder last year, Marcia 
DeOliveira-Longinetti faced an endless list of tasks — helping the 
police gain access to Kevin’s phone and email; canceling his 
subscriptions, credit cards and bank accounts; and arranging his burial 
in New Jersey.


And then there were the college loans.

When Ms. DeOliveira-Longinetti called about his federal loans, an 
administrator offered condolences and assured her the balance would be 
written off.


But she got a far different response from a New Jersey state agency that 
had also lent her son money.


“Please accept our condolences on your loss,” a letter from that agency, 
the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said. “After careful 
consideration of the information you provided, the authority has 
determined that your request does not meet the threshold for loan 
forgiveness. Monthly bill statements will continue to be sent to you.”


Ms. DeOliveira-Longinetti, who co-signed on the loans, was shocked and 
confused. But her experience with the authority, which runs by far the 
largest state-based student loan program in the country, is hardly an 
isolated one, an investigation by ProPublica, in collaboration with The 
New York Times, found.


New Jersey’s loans, which currently total $1.9 billion, are unlike those 
of any other government lending program for students in the country. 
They come with extraordinarily stringent rules that can easily lead to 
financial ruin. Repayments cannot be adjusted based on income, and 
borrowers who are unemployed or facing other financial hardships are 
given few breaks.


The loans also carry higher interest rates than similar federal 
programs. Most significant, New Jersey’s loans come with a cudgel that 
even the most predatory for-profit players cannot wield: the power of 
the state. New Jersey can garnish wages, rescind state income tax 
refunds, revoke professional licenses, even take away lottery winnings — 
all without having to get court approval.


“It’s state-sanctioned loan-sharking,” Daniel Frischberg, a bankruptcy 
lawyer, said. “The New Jersey program is set up so that you fail.”


The authority, which boasts in brochures that its “singular focus has 
always been to benefit the students we serve,” has become even more 
aggressive in recent years. Interviews with dozens of borrowers, who 
were among the tens of thousands who have turned to the program, show 
how the loans have unraveled lives.


New Jersey Loans

This article was produced in collaboration with ProPublica, an 
independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism 
in the public interest.


The program’s regulations have destroyed families’ credit and forced 
them to forfeit their salaries. One college graduate declared bankruptcy 
at age 26 after struggling to repay his debt. The agency filed four 
simultaneous lawsuits against a 31-year-old paralegal after she fell 
behind on her payments.


Another borrower, Chris Gonzalez, could not keep up with his loans after 
he got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was laid off by Goldman Sachs. While 
the federal government allowed him to suspend his payments because of 
hardship, New Jersey sued him, seeking $266,000 in payments, and seized 
a state tax refund he was owed.


One reason for the aggressive tactics is that the state depends on Wall 
Street investors to finance student loans through tax-exempt bonds and 
needs to satisfy those investors by keeping losses to a minimum.


Loan revenues also cover about half of the agency’s administrative budget.

In 2010, the agency filed fewer than 100 suits against borrowers and 
their families. Last year, it filed over 1,600. (Some could result from 
federal loans handled by New Jersey, though such loans make up just 4 
percent of the agency’s portfolio.)


The cases are handled by debt collectors, who can tack on another 30 
percent in fees on top of the outstanding debt.


Marcia Karrow, the authority’s chief of staff, said that “the vast 
majority of these borrowers are happy with the program.” She added that 
New Jersey’s loans had “some of the lowest default rates” in the 
country. But when asked to produce the annual default rates, the agency 
sent ProPublica and The Times data only for students with strong credit 
scores, making it impossible to calculate the overall rate.


A spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie said the governor did not control 
the authority and declined to respond to 

[Marxism] Spain: How the left short in poll, amid new election deadlock

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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Dick Nichols, Barcelona

The key question about the result of the June 26 Spanish general election
is also the most difficult to answer: why did 1.09 million people — who in
the December 20 elections voted for the anti-austerity party Podemos, the
United Left (IU) and the three broader progressive tickets Together We Can
(Catalonia), Podemos-Commitment (Valencian Country) and In Tide (Galicia) —
not vote for the combined Podemos-IU ticket (United We Can) and these
broader tickets at this poll?

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/62071
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[Marxism] Does Jobson Grothe still have a job?

[John Passant via Marxism]

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The Australian ruling class is going berserk. Their strategy to smash 
the building unions and more generally to slash and burn social services 
and social welfare to pay for tax cuts for them is in tatters. Even if 
he manages to hobble together a government of sorts Liberal Prime 
Minister Malcolm Turnbull as the sword bearer for the ruling class is a 
dead man walking.

http://enpassant.com.au/2016/07/04/does-jobson-grothe-still-have-a-job/

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