[Marxism] Finnegans Wake, fascism, and the essential unity of the human race | Sean Ledwith | Culture Matters
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[Marxism] Understanding the Fires in South America | NACLA
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. * Organizations like the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA)—which represents the Amazon basin’s three million Indigenous people—were quick to perceive that the threat transcended territorial and political divisions. In an open letter, the group blamed the governments of Jair Bolsonaro and Evo Morales “for the disappearance of and physical, environmental, and cultural genocide in the Amazon, which through their actions and inaction worsens every day.” The respective presidents of Brazil and Bolivia, it continued, were no longer welcome in the rainforest, having repeatedly demonstrated “their racism and structural discrimination against indigenous peoples, and only looking to favour the interests of major economic groups that seek to parcel up the Amazon for agroindustrial, mining, and hydroelectric megaprojects.” full: https://nacla.org/news/2019/08/30/understanding-fires-south-america-amazon _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What the Hell is Steve Bannon Doing on Chinese Ex-Pat Television? | Washington Babylon
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[Marxism] PRC, Obama praise Chinese factory in US
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[Marxism] The Hospital Treated These Patients. Then It Sued Them.
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. * (Outrageous.) NY Times, Sept. 3, 2019 The Hospital Treated These Patients. Then It Sued Them. By Laura Beil CARLSBAD, N.M. — The first time Carlsbad Medical Center sued Misti Price, she was newly divorced and working two jobs to support her three young children. The hospital demanded payment in 2012 for what Ms. Price recalled as an emergency room visit for one of her children who has asthma. She could not afford a lawyer, and she did not have the money to pay the bill. Ms. Price let the summons go unanswered, figuring she would settle the balance — with interest, about $3,600 — when she could. A few months later, she opened her paycheck and discovered the hospital had garnished her wages by $870 a month. Her car was soon repossessed because she could no longer make the payments. She was on the verge of losing her house, too, when her mortgage company stepped in to help her save it. “I was going to let it go,” Ms. Price said, tearing up recently in an interview at the Carlsbad Public Library. “It was tough.” And it was only the beginning. Ms. Price, 40, a nurse and local 4-H leader, has been sued five times by Carlsbad Medical Center, for bills totaling more than $17,000. It’s not because she and her children are uninsured; according to the hospital, the charges are what she owed after her insurer had paid. But Ms. Price said she had never received an itemized bill outlining exactly what she owed money for. The collection agency wanted the balance in full, and she was not able to work out a payment plan until after she was sued. In this town, she has a lot of company. An examination of court records by The New York Times found almost 3,000 lawsuits filed by Carlsbad Medical Center against patients over medical debt since 2015, more than 500 of them through August of this year alone. Few hospitals sue so many patients so often. Ms. Price’s sister, a police dispatcher, has been sued twice. Her husband has been sued. The county judge who hears many of these cases was once sued, too. Carlsbad Medical Center is not the only hospital to have filed reams of lawsuits over unpaid bills. In Memphis, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a nonprofit hospital, filed 8,300 lawsuits from 2014 through 2018, including some against its own employees, according to an investigation by the journalism nonprofit groups ProPublica and MLK50. In Virginia, hospitals filed more than 20,000 lawsuits over patient debt in 2017 alone, according to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Just five hospitals accounted for half of the resulting wage garnishments in the state. People across the country are coping with soaring medical costs, opaque pricing and surprise bills, but these issues are felt acutely in one-hospital towns like Carlsbad, where residents have few options for care — and must pay whatever prices the hospital sets. “Hospitals that have little competition can negotiate higher rates, because the insurer wants that hospital in their network,” said Sara Collins of the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund. Patient deductibles, which must be paid out of pocket, are rising for almost everyone, she added. Nationally, more than one in four consumers in 2018 were reported to credit bureaus over unpaid debt, according to the Consumer Credit Protection Bureau. More than half of those reports involved medical bills. One survey of women with breast cancer found that a third of those with health insurance had been referred to bill collectors; among those without insurance, the number rose to 77 percent. People confronted with medical debt typically drain their savings, the Commonwealth Fund has found, and 43 percent said it lowered their credit rating, suggesting that many of these consumers were reported to collections agencies. Melissa Suggs, a spokeswoman for Carlsbad Medical Center, declined requests for interviews about the hospital’s debt collection practices. “The majority of accounts from which we seek to collect payment are patients with insurance who have not fulfilled their deductible, co-payment, or coinsurance responsibility set by their health insurance plan — and who have chosen not to enter into a payment arrangement for those amounts,” the hospital said in a written statement. Following inquiries from The New York Times, the hospital said on Friday that it would no longer sue patients whose incomes are below 150 percent of the federal poverty level (roughly $19,000 for a single person), whether they have insurance or not, and would release current court judgments against any such patients. Uninsured patients will
[Marxism] Can Anyone Hold the Global Economy Together?
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 Op-Ed, Sept. 3, 2019 Can Anyone Hold the Global Economy Together? By Adam Tooze In the last few weeks, the world economy has seen worrying turmoil. Whether or not a recession is imminent, there has certainly been a collapse of confidence. What has investors so rattled? There are long-term factors in play, like demographic trends and a slowdown in technological change. But what seems finally to have dawned on the markets is that globalization is no longer supported by the combination of investor-friendly economic policy and congenial politics they have long taken for granted. In the Trump administration, the nationalist theatrics of economic policy have reached new heights. The White House has responded to the wave of recession talk by pillorying the Federal Reserve Board and threatening more tariffs against China. So incoherent is the Trump administration’s economic policy that no lesser a figure than Bill Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has said that America’s central bank should treat the prospect of President Trump’s re-election as a threat to the United States and the world economy. Mr. Dudley argued that the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, should refuse to cushion the effects of Mr. Trump’s protectionism through further interest rate cuts. If the president’s bluster sets off a recession, so be it. At least the Fed would not help usher in a second Trump term. To be fair, the Fed distanced itself from Mr. Dudley’s suggestion. But he was merely stating what is painfully obvious. The Trump administration — and the Republican Party — threatens the institutions of economic policymaking in the United States. Historically, it’s been radical governments in Europe and Latin America that elicited a hard line from conservative central bankers. It’s extraordinary that this possibility is now being canvassed in what remains the heart of global capitalism. The world economy needs leadership from Europe: No one has more to lose from a collapse of multilateralism. The eurozone is perched on the edge of a recession — a hard Brexit will make matters worse — but a sharp slowdown in Germany means that for once the interests of North and South are actually aligned. The eurozone needs investment. But it has its own deep political dysfunction to deal with. Even today, when bond markets will pay the German government to borrow, it is not clear whether Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ailing coalition government can agree on an expansive fiscal program. It would need the Bundestag to declare an economic crisis to release it from the strictures of its austere fiscal policy. The fact that the world has not yet tipped into recession must in large part be credited to China. This is not to impute superhuman powers or monolithic unity to Beijing. The Chinese government has its hands full managing a nasty combination of slowing growth and a dangerous credit boom. China’s shadow banking sector is a worry, as are the country’s growth-addicted regional governments. China’s corporations piled up cheap dollar debt and are now subject to the erratic upward trajectory of the dollar. And behind the scenes, there are persistent rumors of tension between President Xi Jinping’s clique and that of Premier Li Keqiang. And yet, in handling both its internal and external problems, China, unlike the United States, at least appears to have a playbook. It is not only synchronizing fiscal and monetary policy but is also using banking regulation and foreign exchange controls to contain the risk of capital flight. Once criticized for resisting the upward pressure on the value of its currency, Beijing is now expected by Washington to pull every lever to stop the yuan from devaluing. And even setting aside the contradictory noises from the Trump administration, there are few in the West who would want to see China liberalize its balance of payments and risk the kind of capital flight that rocked global financial markets in 2015 and 2016. Tightening economic controls is the opposite of how Western pundits once imagined China’s integration into the world economy. But it is a tool kit that served both Beijing and the rest of the world well by preventing a further downturn. Though the West still pays lip service to the cause of “market reform,” it has come to depend on Beijing’s maintaining its grip. But there’s an unavoidable question: What are the political consequences of a growing reliance on Beijing’s control over the Chinese economy? The question could be dodged when it was assumed China would converge with the
[Marxism] The Twittering Machine | Richard Seymour on Patreon
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[Marxism] Getting lost on the road to communist utopia | People and Nature
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[Marxism] MR Online | Mixed joy and great sorrow
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[Marxism] Michael Mann on working-class support for fascism
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. * Michael Mann believes that 20th century Marxism has made a mistake by describing fascism as a petty-bourgeois mass movement. He does not argue that the leaders were not bourgeois, or that the bourgeoisie behind the scenes was financing the fascists. He develops these points at some length in an article "Source of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Movement" which appeared in the New Left Review of July/August 1995. If he is correct, then there is something basically wrong with the Marxist approach, isn't there? If the Nazis attracted the working-class, then wouldn't we have to reevaluate the revolutionary role of the working-class? Perhaps it would be necessary to find some other class to lead the struggle for socialism, if this struggle has any basis in reality to begin with. Mann relies heavily on statistical data, especially that which can be found in M. Kater's "The Nazi Party" and D. Muhlberger "Hitler's Followers". The data, Mann reports, shows that "Combined, the party and paramilitaries had relatively as many workers as in the general population, almost as many worker militants as the socialists and many more than the communists". Pretty scary stuff, if it's true. It is true, but, as it turns out, there are workers and there are workers. More specifically, Mann acknowledges that "Most fascist workers...came not from the main manufacturing industries but from agriculture, the service and public sectors and from handicrafts and small workshops." Let's consider the political implications of the class composition of this fascist strata." He adds that, "The proletarian macro-community was resisting fascism, but not the entire working-class." Translating this infelicitous expression into ordinary language, Mann is saying that as a whole the workers were opposed to fascism, but there were exceptions. Let's consider who these fascist workers were. Agricultural workers in Germany: were they like the followers of Caesar Chavez, one has to wonder? Germany did not have large-scale agribusiness in the early 1920's. Most farms produced for the internal market and were either family farms or employed a relatively small number of workers. Generally, workers on smaller farms tend to have a more filial relationship to the patron than they do on massive enterprises. The politics of the patron will be followed more closely by his workers. This is the culture of small, private agriculture. It was no secret that many of the contra foot-soldiers in Nicaragua came from this milieu. Turning to "service" workers, this means that many fascists were white-collar workers in banking and insurance. This layer has been going through profound changes throughout the twentieth century, so a closer examination is needed. In the chapter "Clerical Workers" in Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital", he notes that clerical work in its earlier stages was like a craft. The clerk was a highly skilled employee who kept current the records of the financial and operating condition of the enterprise, as well as its relations with the external world. The whole history of this job category in the twentieth century, however, has been one of de-skilling. All sorts of machines, including the modern-day, computer have taken over many of the decision-making responsibilities of the clerk. Furthermore, "Taylorism" has been introduced into the office, forcing clerks to function more like assembly-line workers than elite professionals. We must assume, however, that the white-collar worker in Germany in the 1920's was still relatively high up in the class hierarchy since his or her work had not been mechanized or routinized to the extent it is today. Therefore, a clerk in an insurance company or bank would tend to identify more with management than with workers in a steel-mill. Even under today's changed economic conditions, this tends to be true. A bank teller in NY probably resents a striking transit worker, despite the fact that they have much in common in class terms. This must have been an even more pronounced tendency in the 1920's when white-collar workers occupied an even more elite position in society. Mann includes workers in the "public sector". This should come as no surprise at all. Socialist revolutions were defeated throughout Europe in the early 1920's and right-wing governments came to power everywhere. These right-wing governments kept shifting to the right as the mass working-class movements of the early 1920's recovered and began to reassert themselves. Government workers, who are hired to work in offices run by
[Marxism] bellingcat - Lega Nord's Bedfellows: Russians Offering Illicit Funding to Italian Far-Right Party Identified - bellingcat
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Re: [Marxism] 44 percent of workers in Brandenburg voted AfD yesterday
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 data is self-reported, so take that for what it's worth. The available categories being "workers", "salaried employees", "self-employed", and "retirees/pensioners". I'm curious what the breakdown for Saxony looks like. Am Montag, 2. September 2019, 23:31:59 MESZ hat Mark Lause Folgendes geschrieben: This doesn't tell us anything about how they're defining the category? Or what was going on in other places? I rethink things continually, but haven't had much reason to reconsider my sense that these terms have little practical meaning the way most people use them. On Mon, Sep 2, 2019, 11:39 AM Angelus Novus via Marxism wrote: 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. * Interesting breakdown by social class: https://twitter.com/formelfriedrich/status/1168402855880994816 In confronting the rise of authoritarian far-right populism, Marxists should really re-think the old Trotskyist shibboleths about fascism being a primarily petit-bourgeois or "Bonapartist" phenomenon. It's pretty clear that the new far-right has a substantial proletarian base. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/markalause%40gmail.com _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
