[Marxism] France's conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is anti-liberte

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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by *Daphna Whitmore*

Last week France passed a law that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
It is based on a definition
 of
anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel such as: “Denying the
Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the
existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “by applying
double standards to Israel not demanded of any other nation”.

How do Palestinians struggle against their second class status within
Israel and the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza now? This law
targets the Palestinian resistance and aims to delegitimise any challenge
to Zionism.

Similar laws are evident in other parts of Europe and in the US. The US has
27 states that oppose the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign
against Israel, on the premise that the campaign is anti-Semitic.

The wording of the French legislation includes a definition of Israel “as a
collective composed of Jewish citizens.” This gives credence to the
Nation-State Law in Israel which enshrines the second class status of
Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel.

As Haaretz writer Gideon Levy asks

” If Israel is a collective of Jewish citizens, what are the Palestinian
citizens? And what are. . . .

full at:
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/12/09/frances-anti-zionism-is-anti-liberte/
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[Marxism] Frank Keane and the Irish Revolution

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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by *Mick Healy*

“The magistrate in his summing up said that he had no doubt whatsoever that
I was politically involved. This should stand to my benefit at a later
stage and should really nail the lie that I’m a gangster, a criminal”.
– Frank Keane, Brixton jail, 14th August, 1970.

Frank Keane, who is now over eighty years of age, was born on May 8, 1936
in Peter Street, Westport, Co. Mayo.  He was once regarded as a dangerous
political opponent by the Irish establishment.

Frank was the eldest of three brothers and a sister and was educated at the
local Christian Brothers School.  In 1952 he moved with his family to North
Road, Finglas in Dublin.  The following year he joined the Jackie Griffith
Sinn Fein Cumann. (The cumann was name after a republican activist shot
dead by the Free State special branch in Dublin on 4 July 1943.)

Frank volunteered for active service during. . .

full at:
https://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/frank-keane-and-the-irish-revolution/
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Re: [Marxism] Jim Brown: Football Has Forgotten the Men Who Made It Great

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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I just finished reading "They Call it a Game" by former corner back in the
Jim Brown era, Bernie Parish. On the one hand, he outlines the various
struggles he went through to try to win an actual union for NFL players.
(Jim Brown was an ally in those campaigns.) Parish explains all the things
that hold a player back - the hope of making it into coaching, the enormous
insecurity for all but the very top tier players, who tend to be somewhat
individualistic, and the manipulations of the owners. Parish also details
the connections between the NFL and the gambling industry. He explains that
so many calls are discretionary that it wouldn't take much to beat or stay
within the point spread.

Published back in 1971, it's well worth reading. Too bad Parish died just a
month or so ago. I'd have liked to have known him.

John Reimann

-- 
*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(This is a must-read article about the Italian textile industry was 
undercut by Chinese firms that opened in Italy. Most of the workers in 
the textile-producing region were Communists. Now they support the 
fascist-like Northern League. In the movie "Gomorrah", there's a 
character drawn from this world, a master dress-making supervisor who is 
paid by a Chinese manufacturer in his city to train his staff. He is 
transported to the factory each night in the trunk of the man's car in 
order to avoid being seen by those who resent the Chinese. In the film, 
this is the mafia, not the Northern League. They eventually kill the 
Chinese boss and the Italian supervisor loses his job and ends up 
driving a truck.)



NY Times, Dec. 8, 2019
The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage
By Peter S. Goodman and Emma Bubola

PRATO, Italy — Like everyone in her family and most of the people in the 
factories where she labored in this town nurtured by the textile trade, 
Roberta Travaglini counted herself an unwavering supporter of the 
political left.


During her childhood, her father brought her to boisterous Communist 
Party rallies full of music, dancing and fiery speeches championing 
workers. When she turned 18, she took a job at a textile mill and voted 
for the party herself.


But that was before everything changed — before China emerged as a 
textile powerhouse, undercutting local businesses; before she and her 
co-workers lost their jobs; before she found herself, a mother of two 
grown boys, living off her retired parents; before Chinese immigrants 
arrived in Prato, leasing shuttered textile mills and stitching up 
clothing during all hours of the night.


In last year’s national elections, Ms. Travaglini, 61, cast her vote for 
the League, an extreme right-wing party whose bombastic leader, Matteo 
Salvini, offered a rudimentary solution to Italy’s travails: Close the 
gates.


Denigrating Islam, and warning of an “invasion” that threatened Italians 
with “ethnic cleansing,” he vowed to bar boats bringing migrants from 
North Africa. He presented himself as an unapologetic nationalist who 
would rescue the dispossessed from what had become of the Italian left, 
long since metamorphosed into a distant elite.


To Ms. Travaglini’s ear, Mr. Salvini was speaking to people like her, 
and offering a coherent explanation for what had happened to their 
lives: Shadowy global forces and morally reprobate immigrants had stolen 
their Italian birthright — the promise of a comfortable life. Artisans 
and hardworking laborers had rescued Italy from the wreckage of World 
War II, constructing a prosperous nation, before wicked elements 
plundered the bounty.


“We are in the hands of the world elites that want to keep us poorer and 
poorer,” Ms. Travaglini says. “When I was young, it was the Communist 
Party that was protecting the workers, that was protecting our social 
class. Now, it’s the League that is protecting the people.”


The rise of the League — now exiled from the government, yet poised to 
lead whenever national elections are next held — is typically explained 
by public rage over immigration. This is clearly a major factor. But the 
foundations of the shift were laid decades ago, as textile towns like 
Prato found themselves upended by global economic forces, and especially 
by competition from a rapidly evolving China.


It is a story with parallels to the American industrial Midwest. As 
China rapidly ascended as an export power, joblessness and despair grew 
in the manufacturing heartland of the United States. Anger over decades 
of trade liberalization played a key role in putting Donald J. Trump in 
the White House.


Italy has proved especially vulnerable to competition from China, given 
that many of its artisanal trades — textiles, leather, shoemaking — have 
long been dominated by small, family-run operations lacking the scale to 
compete with factories in a nation of 1.4 billion people. Four Italian 
regions — Tuscany, Umbria, Marche and Emilia-Romagna — that were as late 
as the 1980s electing Communists, and then reliably supporting 
center-left candidates, have in recent years swung sharply toward the 
extreme right.


Many working-class people say that delineation is backward: The left had 
already abandoned them.


“So many Italian families are struggling,” says Federica Castricini, a 
40-year-old mother of two who works at a shoemaker in Marche, and who 
has dumped the left for the League. “The left doesn’t even see the 
problems of Italian families right now.”


Despite its Marxist trappings and solidarity with the Soviet Union, the 
Italian Communist Party was never 

Re: [Marxism] The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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good critiques of other e-waste are also the basis of this little video 
by Annie Leonard:


https://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-electronics/?utm_source=storyofelectronicsdotorg


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[Marxism] Jim Brown: Football Has Forgotten the Men Who Made It Great

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Op-Ed, Dec. 8, 2019
Jim Brown: Football Has Forgotten the Men Who Made It Great
By Jim Brown

Turn on any N.F.L. game on Sunday, and you’ll see the league celebrating 
its 100th season. Thunderous video montages and “Top 10 Tight Ends” 
specials will exalt football’s history with one clear, though unspoken, 
message: The appeal and profitability of today’s N.F.L. derives as much 
from its past as its present.


What the highlights won’t show, however, is how many of the actual human 
beings in those grainy films — rank-and-file players from the 1960s, 
’70s and ’80s who helped make the league the $15 billion business it is 
today — are now, in old age, struggling to make ends meet. The reason is 
not that their salaries were in the thousands rather than the millions. 
It’s that their pensions from the league are shockingly, immorally, low.


Most N.F.L. players who retired before 1993 receive a pension of about 
$365 a month per season they played, meaning that the typical seven-year 
player gets about $2,500 a month. Thousands get considerably less, and 
have stories you won’t see on network broadcasts.


One star of those New York Jets’ Super Bowl team videos now lives in a 
trailer; unable to afford a dentist, he barely has any teeth. A standout 
lineman from the storied 1970s Minnesota Vikings played 17 years and 
gets just $2,300 a month (he took some of his pension early). That’s not 
enough to cover his football-related medical bills, leaving him and his 
wife living check to check. There are countless more like them.


Now, I am not one of these players. I was fortunate to have second 
careers, in marketing for PepsiCo and as an actor. But I know too many 
of these men and their families. They need a voice, one that can be 
heard over the highlights.


This situation is easily fixed. The N.F.L. and the players union are 
negotiating a labor agreement that will ultimately split up more than 
$100 billion — perhaps even $200 billion — in revenue. The money for 
dignified pensions is there. In fact, according to Fairness for Athletes 
in Retirement, an advocacy group, less than 1 percent of the revenue 
from each side, the players’ union and the league, would more than 
double the current pension for every pre-1993 player for the rest of 
their lives.


The question is whether the league and players want to step up for the 
men on whose knees, shoulders and brains the N.F.L. was built.


Team owners should understand the urgency. They see old players (many of 
whom they cheered in childhood) on canes at fund-raising events or in 
wheelchairs at Hall of Fame ceremonies. They know that films about the 
league’s history and the heavily sponsored 100th-season specials will 
make a fortune for the teams. And they also know that almost none of the 
players featured in those videos will get a dime of it. Today’s paltry 
pensions are the last vestige of the one-sided labor rules in the league 
before 1993.


The N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, has said, “Nothing the league 
can do can ever fully express our appreciation to the players who helped 
build our league.” I believe he is sincere, but real appreciation would 
be an appropriate pension.


Current players need more education about the history of their 
profession. They don’t understand that their seven- and eight-figure 
salaries exist only because players from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s — who 
are now in their 60s, 70s and 80s themselves — risked and even 
sacrificed their careers to fight for basic employment rights that are 
now taken for granted.


Players of my generation and those who came after me fought to be 
represented by an agent, to get an independent medical opinion on 
injuries and to receive severance pay. They had no 401(k) plans or the 
annuity plans that today give players a total of $2 million as a 
retirement safety net.


Thousands of players went on strike in 1982 and 1987 to pursue and, 
eventually, win free agency for future generations of players. Yet 
today, the sole retirement benefit for these pioneers is a pension check 
that is less than what today’s average player makes per snap.


In football terms, today’s players should remember their blockers. As a 
running back, I know that you get only as far as the men who take 
punishment and remove obstacles for you to run. The nameless linemen in 
highlight reels didn’t block for just me and long-ago stars like Franco 
Harris and Walter Payton. They blocked for current players, too.


The National Basketball Association understands this. The N.B.A. has 
pensions that are three times the N.F.L.’s, and in 2017 the N.B.A. and 
its players agreed that 

[Marxism] The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Dec. 8, 2019
The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand’s Lungs
By Hannah Beech and Ryn Jirenuwat

KOH KHANUN, Thailand — Crouched on the ground in a dimly lit factory, 
the women picked through the discarded innards of the modern world: 
batteries, circuit boards and bundles of wires.


They broke down the scrap — known as e-waste — with hammers and raw 
hands. Men, some with faces wrapped in rags to repel the fumes, shoveled 
the refuse into a clanking machine that salvages usable metal.


As they toiled, smoke spewed over nearby villages and farms. Residents 
have no idea what is in the smoke: plastic, metal, who knows? All they 
know is that it stinks and they feel sick.


The factory, New Sky Metal, is part of a thriving e-waste industry 
across Southeast Asia, born of China’s decision to stop accepting the 
world’s electronic refuse, which was poisoning its land and people. 
Thailand in particular has become a center of the industry even as 
activists push back and its government wrestles to balance competing 
interests of public safety with the profits to be made from the 
lucrative trade.


Last year, Thailand banned the import of foreign e-waste. Yet new 
factories are opening across the country, and tons of e-waste are being 
processed, environmental monitors and industry experts say.


“E-waste has to go somewhere,” said Jim Puckett, the executive director 
of the Basel Action Network, which campaigns against trash dumping in 
poor countries, “and the Chinese are simply moving their entire 
operations to Southeast Asia.”


“The only way to make money is to get huge volume with cheap, illegal 
labor and pollute the hell out of the environment,” he added.


Each year, 50 million tons of electronic waste are produced globally, 
according to the United Nations, as consumers grow accustomed to 
throwing away last year’s model and acquiring the next new thing.


The notion of recycling these gadgets sounds virtuous: an infinite loop 
of technological utility.


But it is dirty and dangerous work to extract the tiny quantities of 
precious metals — like gold, silver and copper — from castoff phones, 
computers and televisions.


For years, China took in much of the world’s electronic refuse. Then in 
2018, Beijing closed its borders to foreign e-waste. Thailand and other 
countries in Southeast Asia — with their lax enforcement of 
environmental laws, easily exploited labor force and cozy nexus between 
business and government — saw an opportunity.


“Every circuit and every cable is very lucrative, especially if there is 
no concern for the environment or for workers,” said Penchom Saetang, 
the head of Ecological Alert and Recovery Thailand, an environmental 
watchdog.


While Southeast Asian nations like Indonesia, Malaysia and the 
Philippines have rejected individual shipments of waste from Western 
countries, Thailand was the first to push back more systematically 
against the electronic refuse deluging its ports.


In June of last year, the Thai Ministry of Industry announced with great 
fanfare the ban on foreign e-waste. The police made a series of 
high-profile raids on at least 10 factories, including New Sky Metal.


“New Sky is closed now, totally closed,” Yutthana Poolpipat, the head of 
the Laem Chabang Port customs bureau, said in September. “There is no 
electronic waste coming into Thailand, zero.”


But a recent visit to the hamlet of Koh Khanun showed that the factory 
was still up and running, as are many others, a reflection of the weak 
regulatory system and corruption that has tainted the country.


Despite the headlines about the police raid, New Sky Metal was fined a 
maximum of only $650 for each of its licensing infractions.


Since the e-waste ban, 28 new recycling factories, most dealing with 
electronic refuse, began operations in one province east of Bangkok, 
Chachoengsao, where Koh Khanun is located, according to provincial 
statistics. This year, 14 businesses in that province were granted 
licenses to process electronic waste.


Most of the new factories are in central Thailand between Bangkok and 
Laem Chabang, the nation’s biggest port, but more provinces are allowing 
the businesses.


Thai officials say that some incinerators may still be burning because 
factories are working through old stockpiles. Plants may also be 
processing domestic rather than foreign refuse, they say.


But neither explanation is likely, according to industry experts. Hoards 
of imported waste wouldn’t last this long. And the amount of electronic 
trash that Thailand produces is far outpaced by the number of new factories.


Foreign e-waste 

[Marxism] Life Under the Algorithm: How a Relentless Speedup Is Reshaping the Working Class | Gabriel Winant | The New Republic

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://newrepublic.com/article/155666/life-algorithm


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