[Marxism] China: A Very Self-Confident Imperialist Great Power
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. * A Very Self-Confident Imperialist Great Power Some notes on China’s self-image as a leading actor of the global order By Michael Pröbsting, 13.12.2019 https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/global/a-very-self-confident-imperialist-great-power/ -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 _ 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] Trump Losing To All Democrats In Fox News Poll – Breaking News USA
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. * https://breakingnewsusa.com/2019/12/15/trump-losing-to-all-democrats-in-fox-news-poll/ _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Lysenko
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. * for context, indispensable: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2565-marxism-and-the-philosophy-of-science _ 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] Tom Hazeldine, Revolt of the Rustbelt, NLR 105, May–June 2017
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. * TOM HAZELDINE REVOLT OF THE RUSTBELT Britain is indeed a special case of uneven development within the Europe on which its voters were invited to express their verdict in 2016. The astonishing fact is that the uk is more lopsided economically than Italy, despite its notoriously incomplete Risorgimento; than Spain, with its historic polarity of Catalan–Basque industry and Andalusian latifundia; than Germany, where a quarter of a century after reunification gdp per head in the East was still only two-thirds of that in the West; than France, enshadowed by a metropolis great enough to warrant comparison with its cross-Channel neighbour. At sub-regional level, output per head is eight times higher in inner west London than in west Wales and the Valleys, the largest difference to be found in anyeu member state from Bantry Bay to the Dniester.footnote57 https://newleftreview.org/issues/II105/articles/tom-hazeldine-revolt-of-the-rustbelt _ 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] McKinsey infiltrated the world of global public health. Here’s how. - Vox
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. * https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/13/21004456/bill-gates-mckinsey-global-public-health-bcg _ 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] Corbyn and Brexit
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. * I'm trying to catch up on this Corbyn defeat by reading NLR articles going back to 2016. I am reading Susan Watkins from that year, which is titled "Casting Off". (It's not behind a paywall.) I was struck by this paragraph that summed up the 2016 Brexit referendum, where all this stuff began. Anybody reading this should not be surprised that Corbyn got clobbered: "As the results came in, the scale of the upset became apparent: a decisive 52:48 defeat for the government and its array of international allies, on a 72.2 per cent turnout that broke all recent records. In social terms, nearly two-thirds of the working class (C2, D, E), which overall makes up some 46 per cent of the population, voted Leave, on a turnout six or seven points above recent general elections." https://newleftreview.org/issues/II100/articles/susan-watkins-casting-off _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Stephen Pinker�s Pollyannish Philosophy and Its Perfidio us Politics
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. * I have had a number of beefs with Pinker over his book Enlightenment Now, which I think is quite overrated in the humanist community. I also have taken issue with Pinker for his habit of misrepresenting the ideas of thinkers that he disagrees with. One example of that was he utter distortion of B. F. Skinner's ideas in The Blank Slate. Another bad habit of his is failure to give due credit to thinkers from the past, on whose work he has drawn upon. Over a dozen years ago, I attended a talk by Pinker on the evolutionary psychology of religion. In that talk, Pinker made the case that religion acts to promote social cohesion by among other things demarcating the boundaries between different social groups. So far, so good, but Pinker neglected to mention that the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, had made that very same argument more than a century ago. A person could have easily walked away from the talk with the impression that this was all Pinker's own thinking. And don't get me started about Pinker and Marxism. Pinker knows next to nothing about Marxism, has no interest in learning about it, but thinks himself to be eminently qualified to pontificate about it, nevertheless. Here is another comment that I made about Enlightenment Now in a FB group disucssion back in 2018: I have been reading Pinker's discussion of social Darwinism and I found it a bit unsatisfactory. Pinker complains that the term is too widely used such that it has become meaningless. He seems to blame Richard Hofstadter's book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 for this. He also pins blame on Stephen Jay Gould as well. Pinker seems to think that the only genuine form of social Darwinism was the kind that stemmed from the work of Herbert Spencer and his followers. Pinker takes some pains to show that Spencer's thinking about evolution was not Darwinian, but was very much Lamarckian. He also emphasizes that Spencer's thought was basically libertarian in character and that Spencer was an opponent of imperialism and eugenics. Hence, in Pinker's view, it's illegitimate to tie social Darwinism with other right-wing ideas . What Pinker's discussion ignores is that there were indeed other forms of social Darwinism around in the late 19th and early 20th centuries besides Spencer's. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel, the man who introduced and popularized Darwinism in Germany, was also the proponent of his own brand of social Darwinism. And his variety of social Darwinism was indeed less individualistic than Spencer's, placing emphasis of the struggle for existence between competing nations and races. Haeckel was politically an avid supporter of Otto von Bismarck. He was himself a staunch German nationalist and he attempted to use his work in evolutionary biology to lend support to his political beliefs including his embracing of "scientific racism." Pinker says nothing at all about Haeckel. His name does not even appear in the book's index. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel And yes, if anybody wondered, Pinker is an apologist for capitalism. (https://tinyurl.com/s6veyqc). Much of Pinker's capitalist apologetics in Enlightenment Now, is derived from Pinker's reading of Friedrich Hayek, except that Pinker, who identifies himself as a supporter of the center-left, is more supportive of government providing a strong social safety net than was Hayek. Many of the flaws in Pinker's accounts of how capitalism is responsible for the progress that has been made over the past couple of centuries can be found in Hayek, when he wrote on economic history. As I also noted last year. Yoram Hazony professes to respect and admire Steven Pinker but doesn't have much use for the Enlightenment. (https://tinyurl.com/v3qjvv9) I would disagree with Hazony in terms of classifying David Hume and Adam Smith as "critics of the Enlightenment." Both men were central figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. They were "critics of the Enlightenment" in the same sense that all the Enlightenment thinkers can be said to have been "critics of the Enlightenment." They all criticized each other. Yoram Hazony makes the same sort of error that Steven Pinker does in his book, Enlightenment Now, namely, he treats the Enlightenment as a monolith and fails to see that it was full of contradictions. BTW Hume and Smith were close personal and intellectual friends. It was Hume who encouraged Smith to devote his academic career to the development of a "science of man." The notion of a science of man had been much bandied about by other Enlightenment thinkers too, like Rousseau and Kant.
[Marxism] The Strange Death of Social-Democratic England | by Matt Seaton | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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. * https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/12/12/the-strange-death-of-social-democratic-england/ _ 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] Snowden: A Whistle-Blower Who Lived to Tell About It
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. * https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/snowden-a-whistle-blower-who-lived-to-tell-about-it/ _ 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] Stephen Pinker’s Pollyannish Philosophy and Its Perfidious Politics
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. * (Very interesting. The James Martin mentioned below was an IT guru from the 1960s and 70s that everybody took seriously, including me. That Stephen Pinker relies on his data makes me wonder how I could have gone wrong.) This brings up another important point: the origins of Pinker’s data. Just over a third of the charts and tables in his book come from a single source: Our World in Data, housed in an Oxford University entity called the Oxford Martin School, founded in 2005 with the largest donation in Oxford’s nearly millennium-long history by an IT consultant, best-selling author, and technology evangelist named James Martin. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pinkers-pollyannish-philosophy-and-its-perfidious-politics/ _ 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] Corbyn’s Defeat and the Democratic Socialists of America – New Politics
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. * By Dan La Botz https://newpol.org/corbyns-defeat-and-the-democratic-socialists-of-america/ _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Tweets from Luigi Pagarini on Corbyn
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. * > On Dec 15, 2019, at 11:42 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism > wrote: > > The idea of working class people voting for a party to tax the rich to pay > for redistribution and public services was completely novel, and generally > immediately attractive. It was amazing to see how quickly and instinctively > they grasped a left-wing agenda while saying they had never thought about it > before. There seems like a huge opportunity there for the left to make > inroads with younger non-graduates in towns but how do we reach them? > Organising and social media I guess? Plenty of useful reflections in this thread but the left needs to stop repeating the lie that we need rich people’s money to pay for things. If it isn’t necessary to tax the rich in order to pay for bank bailouts or a bloated military, it isn’t necessary to tax them to pay for social programs, infrastructure, or anything else we need. We should tax them anyway—tax them out of existence, if we can—but in order to eliminate their financial and political power, not because we need their money. There are constraints on the treasury’s ability to advance the common good, but those constraints are political (balance of forces) and material (sufficient supply of inputs, including labour), not financial (availability of liquidity). The capitalist class understands this perfectly well, which is why they don’t hesitate to use the treasury for their own ends, and why they’re so committed to keeping the rest of us attached to this enabling myth of austerity. We should stop making their war against us so easy for them. _ 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] How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World
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, Dec. 15, 2019 How the Superrich Took Over the Museum World By Michael Massing (Mr. Massing is the author, most recently, of “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind.”) With the recent opening of its sleek new quarters, the Museum of Modern Art has solidified its position as one of the world’s leading showcases for high culture. Designed by the “starchitect” firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the renovation cost $450 million; that comes on top of the $425 million the museum spent on an earlier makeover, in 2004. That redesign came under sharp criticism, and within a decade a new overhaul was deemed necessary. In less than 20 years, MoMA has spent almost a billion dollars reinventing itself. Most of that money has come from the museum’s board of trustees. For the 2004 renovation, 50 trustees donated $5 million each. For this go-round, board members have again opened their wallets, along with David Geffen, who does not sit on the board but provided a whopping $100 million. The vast fortunes that make such do-overs possible raise questions about the composition of MoMA’s board at a time when such boards in general face growing scrutiny. Earlier this year, both the Metropolitan and Guggenheim museums announced they would no longer accept donations from those members of the Sackler family linked to OxyContin, the powerful painkiller implicated in the opioid crisis. In July, Warren Kanders resigned as a vice chairman of the Whitney Museum after weeks of protests directed at his ownership of a company that manufactures tear gas canisters that had been used against migrants on the United States-Mexico border. And on Oct. 18 — three days before MoMA’s reopening — more than 100 activists picketed an exclusive preview party, calling on one of its board members, Laurence Fink, and his company, BlackRock, to divest its holdings in private prison companies. Individual cases like these reflect a more fundamental reality about museums: their dominance by the superrich in an age of mounting anger over income inequality. MoMA is a prime example. Of its 51 trustees who have a vote, at least 45 (by my count) work in finance, the corporate world, real estate or law, or are the heirs or spouses of the superrich. Only a handful come from outside these gilded ranks, among them the writer and actress Anna Deavere Smith and the Harvard professor of history and race Khalil Gibran Muhammad. As has been widely reported, both MoMA and the Met expect wealthy newcomers to give millions of dollars as the price of membership. (Because donations to museums are for the most part tax-deductible, the giving is leavened with a sizable dose of self-interest.) Art has always depended on wealthy patrons; see the Medicis, Frick and Morgan. In contrast to Europe, where museums receive significant (though now decreasing) state funding, most American museums rely heavily on private donors. And, since the late 1990s, when MoMA’s current push to expand began, its trustees appear to have been chosen overwhelmingly for their wealth, and the board now reads like a roll call of the 0.01 percent. To take a random sample: MoMA’s president, Ronnie Heyman, is the chairwoman of GAF, a roofing manufacturer that her husband, Samuel Heyman, acquired in a hostile takeover. Philip Niarchos is heir to the fortune of the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. Jerry Speyer is the chairman and a founding partner of Tishman Speyer, the real estate colossus that owns Rockefeller Center. Marlene Hess is the daughter of Leon Hess, the oil tycoon who owned the New York Jets. John Elkann is heir to Italy’s Agnelli family, Joel Ehrenkranz is a senior partner in a wealth management firm and Zhang Xin is a Chinese billionaire businesswoman. Many of MoMA’s trustees are devoted collectors of modern and contemporary art, and the museum has benefited accordingly. One longtime trustee (and former president), Agnes Gund, has funded or donated to the museum more than 800 works. And realistically, without the generosity of its trustees, the Modern might have a hard time keeping its doors open. Yet its dependence on the kindness of billionaires comes at a price. Today’s museum world is steeply hierarchical, mirroring the inequality in society at large. In May, the activist group Art + Museum Transparency, seeking to break “the culture of silence and fear” in the industry, published a spreadsheet featuring salaries anonymously entered by hundreds of museum employees. According to it, MoMA curators seem very well paid; people in more junior positions much
[Marxism] Maureeen Dowd column in NY Times: Trump's Bad. Sadly, He's Not Alone
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. * I've omitted the first few paragraphs and am starting with an excellent discussion of Democrats, liberals, foreign policy and military elites: We see a constant parade of Washington pooh-bahs like James Comey, Andrew McCabe and John Brennan on cable, sounding the alarm and presenting themselves as the white hats to Trump’s black hat. Retired generals grimace at the president’s impetuous, ego-driven foreign policy. The left keens that the president is destroying our sacred institutions and jeopardizing our national security. But for many Americans, the events of the last week prove that Trump is right to be cynical about a rigged system and deep-state elites. The inspector general’s report about the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation offered a hideous Dorian Gray portrait of the once-vaunted law enforcement agency. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times, the report uncovered “a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process.” The F.B.I. run by Comey and McCabe was sloppy, deceitful and cherry-picking — relying on nonsense spread by Christopher Steele. With the stunning and sad “Afghanistan Papers,” The Washington Post revealed what we knew in our hearts: We have spent 18 years and a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, with generals lying and hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, just as the generals did in Vietnam. As one general conceded, they did not understand Afghanistan and didn’t have “the foggiest notion” of what they were doing. Even as President Barack Obama escalated the war, poured in more billions and promised to crack down on corruption, The Post said, the United States looked away and let its allies — the Afghan president, warlords, drug traffickers and defense contractors — wallow in fraud, corruption and dark money. Then there’s “The Report,” streaming on Amazon, the heroic saga of Daniel Jones, played by Adam Driver. Jones is working for Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Intelligence Committee and spends years compiling a report documenting the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in secret prisons, a barbaric, un-American and ineffective system designed by two creepy psychologists who were paid about $81 million by the C.I.A. The movie is not kind to Barack Obama and Denis McDonough, suggesting that they protected the C.I.A. and tried to bury grisly details from the report to fend off criticism that Obama was weak on terrorism. It is also a harsh portrayal of Brennan, MSNBC’s Voice-of-Morality, who, as C.I.A. director, fought the Senate inquiry so hard that his operatives even clandestinely hacked into the computer network of committee staff members to figure out how they were getting their information. If this weren’t enough institutional perfidy for one week, we had the Boeing hearing in Congress: An F.A.A. analysis done after the first deadly crash off the coast of Indonesia showed that the agency knew that if it did not act, the Boeing 737 Max was likely to crash 115 times in the 45 years it was expected to fly, theoretically killing more than 2,900 people. But that wasn’t enough to immediately ground it. The government is supposed to protect us from the greedy capitalists, not the other way around. Unfortunately, this climate of confusion and cynicism allows Trump to prosper. He did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it. full at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-afghanistan-report-boeing.html _ 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] Social Movements for Climate, Justice during the Decline, of Global Governance
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. * By Patrick Bond https://esforum.de/publications/sfr23/chaps/SFR23_08_Bond.pdf _ 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] Tweets from Luigi Pagarini on Corbyn
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. * I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. The age differential was stark. Of course many of the older people I spoke to were polite and pleasant but 100% of the people who were rude and hostile were 50-80 years old. All of the oldest (>80) and younger (<40) voters were polite, whomever they were voting for. There was a visceral hatred of Corbyn (sometimes combined with Diane Abbott) from a section of voters outside inner London, primarily older white voters, both middle and working class. So far, so obvious. How did the demonization of Corbyn have such a strong effect in 2019 but not in 2017? Although on the face of it that demonization has been raw and relentless, actually it has only circled around the key charge, never making it explicit,... ... so it has taken four years for low engagement voters to absorb it fully. The real charge against Corbyn is that he fundamentally believes that British/white lives are of equal value with the lives of others. Our opponents wouldn’t put it so bluntly but that is what it has always been about. That prioritisation of British lives must always be assumed, never justified, taken for granted as the ground the state is built on, never officially avowed except through ritual. The cenotaph. Gerry Adams. Prosecutions of historic crimes in N.I. Laying wreaths in foreign cemeteries. Poppies. Diane Abbott. Pushing the button. Watching the Queen at Christmas. It is impossible to defend Corbyn against this unspoken charge because it is clearly true. When these voters talk about having paid into the system all their lives, they’re not just talking about literal national insurance payments and the financial benefits they’re entitled to in recompense. They’re talking about a life of loyalty and deference to the state they expected to be their exclusive patron; and now they see a Labour leader who seems to invite the whole world to his allotment, to offer his homemade jam to anyone who needs it,... ... no matter which flags their ancestors have spilt their blood for. I think this is also how the anti-semitism scandal had such a big effect on people who don’t really care about anti-semitism itself. Leaving aside all the people who do care about anti-semitism for its own sake,... ... for a lot of people Corbyn’s association with anti-semitism seems to represent his association with Islam, where Islam in turn comes to stand for the undifferentiated mass of humanity making a claim for equal eminence. What is particularly strange about all this is how it has moved away from primarily a concern about immigration itself, to a broader set of questions of patriotism, fiscal constraint, Brexit for its own sake rather than to end free movement, and deference to authority. With such voters, already retired or coming towards the end of their careers, talk of what we can build together leaves them sceptical and uncomprehending. It seems more zero sum to them. We have salvaged a small horde from the imperial wreck and only those whose fealty is proven can claim their share. I have absolutely no idea how we can appeal to such people. The idea of taxing the rich didn’t seem persuasive as these people just think it is impossible. They want the patronage of the powerful, not to challenge their power. I also canvassed a lot of young (18-35) working class people who had very little engagement with politics. Many had voted in the referendum (leave or remain but with much less conviction than the older voters) but only occasionally vote otherwise. Many had never heard about class politics at all. The idea of working class people voting for a party to tax the rich to pay for redistribution and public services was completely novel, and generally immediately attractive. It was amazing to see how quickly and instinctively they grasped a left-wing agenda while saying they had never thought about it before. There seems like a huge opportunity there for the left to make inroads with younger non-graduates in towns but how do we reach them? Organising and social media I guess? _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Salon -- Russia went looking for puppets in America — and they found Trump and the Republicans
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. * I just Tweeted this on his account there: I asked someone if there was any beer, and he gave me a stern look and said they didn’t allow drinking at their meetings. --- That was me. I could tell right off the bat that you were just a schmuck looking for trouble. _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Salon -- Russia went looking for puppets in America — and they found Trump and the Republicans
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. * On 12/15/19 10:39 AM, Alan Ginsberg via Marxism wrote: Vicious redbaiting piece, being picked up by AlterNet and other progressives/resisters. It was written by Lucian Truscott IV who wrote for the Village Voice decades ago. He was a West Point graduate who used to write cranky rightwing letters to the Voice until they gave him a job writing hippie-bashing articles. What he wrote in this article about the SWP was pure blithering idiocy. The rancid Salon with its full page pop-up ads for cars and antacids is just the right venue for him. _ 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] Salon -- Russia went looking for puppets in America — and they found Trump and the Republicans
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. * Vicious redbaiting piece, being picked up by AlterNet and other progressives/resisters. Claims that not only the CPUSA, but Progressive Labor, Socialist Workers Party, Workers World, SDS, Weatherman and even the Socialist Labor Party (!) were pawns of the Kremlin. https://www.salon.com/2019/12/14/russia-and-the-republicans-how-vladimir-putin-got-an-american-subsidiary/ _ 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] Jeff Bezos and His Billionaire Space Fantasy
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. * https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/12/jeff-bezos-the-expanse-space-fantasy-sci-fi-syfy _ 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] Revealed: OPCW whistleblower made false claims about 'suppressed' Douma report | al-bab.com
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. * https://al-bab.com/blog/2019/12/revealed-opcw-whistleblower-made-false-claims-about-suppressed-douma-report _ 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] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] This Is What Racism Sounds Like in the Banking Industry
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. * (Chase CEO Jamie Dimon responded to this article in an open letter; https://secure-web.cisco.com/1V63Itackax2XSRWyfdjM6wdlWxT95KqVc2i9hvjbrJ9lIDfp8bYDmRClmzMN6U3SaAzG3Mo2I3pBsknD_0X_UJ2Hw3lhrxH53vZ_hD4Pq_94WNgbbMFZd_8S93fWiT9s8m90x8oTmchdoi_sMswJAouKQfaVfsjXUpIlxDGv6-3WzvUGph4d0d-J4d1p91kMYsHkqi_PHbMs-jRHXKR4MKTS-kHJBoiB7nNb6jiR48VWadG_j0vOeklVwSHE0Bt5mWis-USEWux8iaUzh9PXNZiXdDeL4Iwsp4FcLO3YQnn0RIisUVuI6-2LxPE-NjKFpdlMgdxbLf9pZ4msgLUnJRDcjecAXcMyHtywqRNgs31Y_oOCwXpG-sMnO97fwfut/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chase.com%2Fpersonal%2Fresponse) NY Times, Dec. 14, 2019 This Is What Racism Sounds Like in the Banking Industry By Emily Flitter Jimmy Kennedy earned $13 million during his nine-year career as a player in the National Football League. He was the kind of person most banks would be happy to have as a client. But when Mr. Kennedy tried to become a “private client” at JPMorgan Chase, an elite designation that would earn him travel discounts, exclusive event invitations and better deals on loans, he kept getting the runaround. At first, he didn’t understand why. Then, last fall, he showed up at his local JPMorgan branch in Arizona, and an employee offered an explanation. “You’re bigger than the average person, period. And you’re also an African-American,” the employee, Charles Belton, who is black, told Mr. Kennedy. “We’re in Arizona. I don’t have to tell you about what the demographics are in Arizona. They don’t see people like you a lot.” Mr. Kennedy recorded the conversation and shared it with The New York Times. It’s no secret that racism has been baked into the American banking system. There are few black executives in the upper echelons of most financial institutions. Leading banks have recently paid restitution to black employees for isolating them from white peers, placing them in the poorest branches and cutting them off from career opportunities. Black customers are sometimes profiled, viewed with suspicion just for entering a bank and questioned over the most basic transactions. This year, researchers for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that black mortgage borrowers were charged higher interest rates than white borrowers and were denied mortgages that would have been approved for white applicants. Banks, including JPMorgan, say they are committed to eradicating the legacy of racism. And they insist that any lingering side effects simply reflect stubborn socioeconomic imbalances in society as a whole, not racial bias among their employees. What recently transpired inside a cluster of JPMorgan branches in the Phoenix area suggests that is not true. Mr. Kennedy was told he was essentially too black. His financial adviser, Ricardo Peters, complained that he, too, was a victim of racial discrimination. What makes their cases extraordinary is not that the two men say they faced discrimination. It is that they recorded their interactions with bank employees, preserving a record of what white executives otherwise might have dismissed as figments of the aggrieved parties’ imaginations. Patricia Wexler, a JPMorgan spokeswoman, defended the bank’s overall treatment of Mr. Peters and Mr. Kennedy. She said that the bank hadn’t been aware of all of the audio recordings and that “in light of some new information brought to us by The New York Times,” the company put one of its executive directors on administrative leave while the bank investigates his conduct. The Back of the Branch Mr. Peters started his career at JPMorgan as a salesman in the bank’s credit cards division. After about eight years in various roles, he was promoted to a financial adviser position in Phoenix in 2016. His job was to help bank customers prudently invest their money. Mr. Peters had won numerous performance awards at the bank, but things soon started going wrong for him. He was working in a JPMorgan branch in the affluent Sun City West area of Phoenix. He sought a promotion to become a private client adviser, a job that would have let him work with wealthier and more lucrative clients. The promotion never came. Instead, Mr. Peters was moved out of an office at the heart of the branch where he worked with other financial advisers and was relegated to a windowless room in the back. In April 2017, one of his bosses, Frank Venniro, told Mr. Peters that another manager had accused him of taking customers’ files home at night, a violation of the bank’s code of conduct. Mr. Peters denied it, and Mr. Venniro accepted that he was telling the truth, according to a recording of the conversation. But, he added, Mr. Peters needed to be more
[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Land and the rentier economy | Michael Roberts Blog
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. * Christophers shows that land makes up a staggering share of national wealth. Using the UK as his laboratory, he finds that, out of total national wealth of £9.8tn, land accounted for £5tn and houses and other structures added another £3.5tn on top of that. The ownership of land acts as a store of wealth and, as the rents rack up, so grows inequality of incomes and wealth, while restricting the productive power of an economy. https://secure-web.cisco.com/1wlJfmTSlGWc775c_hrPyJQmaVYDGnovwNq4NmEBEgtVJ5vh-oN4h8zOt5DQzGsktSGoj8Nigol8c1BlTJtwwOpiDPDqYqcB5yRP5oIJllmGQaahBKa0dng8bhRhe2XeWMKoheRC6K1IXinm6Q8NOwJD04kW2yI-q40iRb19vQQjzz-bJZttj6m2hGSdZxv9--dwDT1embfYbCtG8zvfK-TDllIfN4rHnyo4nAP9gnjeB-N5AJKjhb6An86bYy-Ukl-3K7R1cOtpiJJ8f8OlsRycUrm_ms701Omn1zAbayhq-kIUh1adXpocVMUmipwt8sSUB7dwbNkOCxMsTz3Qu7UsXj0IGzJu84qCB-EgNincCfmx0U7PGD7s771VzVCre4VjiPBKVLS4KxYmfAX1uUw/https%3A%2F%2Fthenextrecession.wordpress.com%2F2019%2F12%2F15%2Fland-and-the-rentier-economy%2F _ 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] Waiting for Godot | Jenny Farrell | Culture Matters
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. * https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/theatre/item/3210-beckett Sent from my iPhone _ 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
