[Marxism] Tea Party Poll

[brad bauerly]

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Here is another tea party poll:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainstream-Demographics.aspx

As I mentioned, the last poll was skewed upward in income and education
level by asking for self-described tea party activists versus this one which
only asks for tea party supporters. The results show slightly above average
incomes but very slightly below average education levels (probably both
within margins of error).  I highly doubt that this data reveals a
disproportion of petty bourgeoisie.  Which begs the question as to the
material circumstances driving this movement (other than economic hard times
for middle and working income folks).

Brad

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Re: [Marxism] The Goenka Cult

[Greg McDonald]

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http://www.greatwesternvehicle.org/criticism/goenka.htm

A more elaborate and detailed examination of the Goenka cult, a kind
of therevada buddhist immanent critique. As an aside, I too have
experienced assistant teachers deriding my jhanic absorption
experience as against the Goenka teaching. The rationale is that it
prevents meditators from delving more deeply into the attention to
bodily experience and the subsequent release of deep stress. But the
jhanic experience is a highly pleasurable form of body sensation, thus
revealing an underlying puritanism as well from the Goenka teachers.
They think it is dangerous because one may become attached to the
experience. But if one can appreciate it while it is there and not
feel disappointed when it disappears that would seem to me to be a
great lesson in how to live life more fully.

G.


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[Marxism] Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege

[Louis Proyect]

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NY Times April 5, 2010
Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege
By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human 
rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly 
hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their 
critics say endanger the country.

The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country’s 
leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war 
crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the 
limits of free speech and dissent in Israel’s much vaunted democracy.

“Over the years, in a variety of international arenas,” said Hagai 
El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in 
Israel, “it was key for Israeli officials to say, ‘Yes, there are 
many problems, perhaps even abuses; however, we have a strong, 
vibrant civil society with a plethora of voices and we are very 
proud of that.’

“It is inconsistent to make those statements and at the same time 
create a situation that colors us as traitors in the public eye.”

Governments and the watchdog organizations that monitor them have 
rarely seen eye to eye. But rights advocates say that to many 
conservatives and leaders of Israel’s right-leaning government, 
the allegations of war crimes against the Israeli military that 
followed the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-9 have turned human 
rights criticism into an existential threat that is chipping away 
at the country’s legitimacy. And officials have been blunt in 
their counterattacks.

The chief catalyst was the United Nations report last fall on the 
war in Gaza, by a fact-finding mission led by the South African 
jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of 
possible war crimes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since identified what he 
calls the “Goldstone effect,” meaning the delegitimization of 
Israel abroad, as a major strategic threat.

Last summer, he attacked a leftist organization, Breaking the 
Silence, that published allegations by unnamed Israeli soldiers 
about human rights violations during the war, as selectively 
anti-Israel.

Some international rights groups that have been critical of 
Israel, like Human Rights Watch, have said Israel’s government was 
“waging a propaganda war” to discredit them. A senior Netanyahu 
aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was “going to 
dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups.”

Israeli rights advocates say that such comments by officials have 
fostered an atmosphere of harassment. While they do not accuse the 
government of orchestrating a campaign against them, they point to 
a number of seemingly unconnected dots that they say add up to a 
growing climate of repression.

In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several 
Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and 
replaced by Jewish settlers, the police have arrested dozens of 
Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months. Mr. El-Ad 
was detained for 36 hours in January, along with 16 other 
activists, after he explained to the police that their decision to 
break up a rally had no legal grounds. One organizer of the 
protests was arrested at his parents’ Jerusalem home on a night in 
late March, and released three days later.

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses 
on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was 
harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they 
questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was 
meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, 
she said, the authorities backed down.

Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im 
Tirtzu (Hebrew for ‘If you will it’ — the first part of Theodor 
Herzl’s famous maxim) attacked a major organization, the New 
Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups 
in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund 
describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all 
the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right 
to be heard.

Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent 
of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims 
against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 
nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund.

The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu’s findings as a 
fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to 
do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.

Still, for three weeks, Im Tirtzu plastered billboards across the 
country with posters featuring a crude caricature of the New 
Israel Fund president, Naomi Chazan. The posters depicted her with 
a horn a

[Marxism] Ernest Mandel documentary now online

[Louis Proyect]

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Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QoBfIYWdo8


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Re: [Marxism] Tea Party Poll

[Jeffrey Thomas Piercy]

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On 04/06/2010 05:19 AM, brad bauerly wrote:

> Which begs the question as to the
> material circumstances driving this movement (other than economic hard times
> for middle and working income folks).

We might want to start by investigating why 15% of all Blacks are
apparently Tea Party supporters.


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[Marxism] Left Forum panels: Kliman, Freeman, Jaclard, Cooney, Deasai, Rasmus, Heller, Panviotakis,

[brendan cooney]

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I have posted 3 panels from the Left Forum on my blog:

http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/left-forum-2010-2/

I highly recommend Kliman's talk on the Falling Rate of Profit, and 
Jaclard and Kliman's talk about transition periods and abolishing the 
law of value, especially the discussion that followed, in the first 
Future of World Capitalism panel.

1.Economics and Politics of the Current Crisis: Causes and Prospects for 
the Future
Left Forum 2010
Anne Jaclard (Chair) – National Secretary, Marxist-Humanist Initiative
Brendan Cooney – Video producer, “kapitalism101”
Andrew Kliman – Dept. of Economics-Pleasantville, Pace University

2. Future of World Capitalism book series-Radical Daemon Books
Alan Freeman (Chair) – University of Manitoba Greater London Authority
Radhika Desai – Politics, University of Manitoba Visiting Fellow, 
DESTIN, London School of Economics
Costas Panayiotakis – Sociology, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Andrew Kliman – Economics, Pace University
Anne Jaclard – National Secretary, Marxist-Humanist Initiative


3. The Future of World Capitalism Book Panel 2: Concepts of Transition
Left Forum 2010
Radhika Desai (Chair) – Politics, University of Manitoba Visiting 
Fellow, DESTIN, London School of Economics
Alan Freeman – University of Manitoba Greater London Authority (personal 
capacity)
Henry Heller – History, University of Manitoba
Jack Rasmus – Santa Clara University and Economics and Politics, St. 
Marys College


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Re: [Marxism] Tea Party Poll

[S. Artesian]

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Your math is OK, I think the poll is shite.

- Original Message - 
From: "Jeffrey Thomas Piercy" 


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Re: [Marxism] Welcome to Hanoi

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

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But the setting of "Avatar" can´t but have touched them as a fully Viet 
Namese setting!

Those hills, those jungle-covered areas, that ultra-technological army 
defeated by "primitive" fighters.

Even the foreign soldier that "goes native" can be equated with 
"foreign" Marxism that "went native" through Ho and Giap.

Don´t forget both had been drilled in France...

> 
> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Michael Karadjis  wrote:
>> But what I wanted to mention is that Vietnamese love Avatar - not sure
>> if Steinglass wrote about that in the rest of the article. Vietnam is
>> actually one of the countries where the film has made the most money.
>> Who hasn't seen it here? When I went to see it I bumped into one of my
>> students who was there to see it for the third time. So just because
>> they don't get into self-involved American angst crap doesn't mean they
>> only want the straight story line of Dang Thuy Tram's (fantastic) diary
>> that Steinglass disparages, they can also love such an inspiring
>> anti-imperialist masterpiece though it doesn't directly involve Vietnam,
>> and even though it is a "foreign account" and even though it is not "a
>> triumphant political narrative, enforced with deadening rigor" etc
>>
> 
> 
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> http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/nmgoro%40gmail.com
> 



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Re: [Marxism] Tea Party Poll

[Jeffrey Thomas Piercy]

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On 04/06/2010 12:43 PM, S. Artesian wrote:
> I think the poll is shite.

No arguments here. I hear the Tea Partiers are against taking the census
because it asks for your ethnicity, income and religion. Maybe their
more bored members agreed to rebel against the tyranny of demographic
data by lying about their race when asked.


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Re: [Marxism] [microsound] Bye-bye to the humanities

[joel cosgrove]

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The other problem affecting the humanities is that they don't offer direct
vocational outcomes, unlike business or science degrees. So it's not just a
problem for the lecturers but for the whole discipline as a whole, I know
certainly in New Zealand that a vocationless vocational degree doesn't go
far when the two traditional areas of employment i.e. government and
academia are on a long-term contraction.

On 6 April 2010 13:38, New Tet  wrote:

> ==
> Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> ==
>
>
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> > I would much prefer to define our current job-market difficulties
> > as a problem in underdemand rather than oversupply. The facts,
> > however, cannot be denied. After a generation of dithering, we
> > need to act decisively to minimize the damage that our practices
> > are inflicting on thousands of talented young women and men whose
> > aspirations and idealism are jeopardized by our institutional
> > inertia as well as by our laissez-faire, wishful thinking that the
> > job market will simply take care of itself. If we should have
> > learned one lesson from the current financial crisis, it is that
> > all markets need vigilant oversight.
> >
> > Peter Conn is a professor of English and of education at the
> > University of Pennsylvania.
>
> Oversight indeed!
>
> Shouldn't the task be to shut down the job market by abolishing the
> commodity status of labor?
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://old.nabble.com/-Marxism--Bye-bye-to-the-humanities-tp28139943p28146655.html
> Sent from the Marxism mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
> 
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>

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[Marxism] What's new on LeftClick

[Ratbag Media]

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After a hiatus, a change of pace.Now with even more political satire!

*SATIRE If greed is so good, why can't I afford to be greedy too?
*LeftClick: making online whoopee flatulence
*SATIRE Riley Inc
*SATIRE The discreet charm of bosses
*AUDIO (If it could) a foetus speaks
*VIDEO John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

http://leftclickblog.blogspot.com/

You can also subscribe to Leftclick on facebook
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/leftclick
or join the selectivity enhanced facebook Fan Page.
http://www.facebook.com/ratbagradio#!/pages/LeftClick/114765665207492?ref=ts

You can also subscribe via rss feed
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Leftclick
or via email
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=213189

__


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[Marxism] An Israeli with a conscience faces espionage charges

[Louis Proyect]

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NY Times April 6, 2010
Debate in Israel on Gag Order in Security Leak Case
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in 
mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly 
including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case.

A court-imposed gag order has prevented any reporting of the case in 
Israel, but on Tuesday, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge sharply 
criticized the forced news blackout, saying in a radio interview that it 
must be fought, and stirring a public furor.

The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli 
military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian 
militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She 
apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military 
service.

Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the 
liberal newspaper Haaretz, and that he used the documents as the basis 
for a 2008 exposé.

Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three 
months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a 
Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz.

Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media have so far made 
only cryptic references to the case. On March 9, for example, The 
Seventh Eye, an electronic journal of media affairs published by the 
Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research body in Jerusalem, 
ran an item saying simply that Ms. Kamm was about to go on unpaid leave 
from Walla!, without explaining why.

The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 
issue that readers searched the Internet with the keywords “Israeli 
journalist gag” in order to learn about an affair of interest to 
Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same 
newspaper ran a translation of an article by the American journalist 
Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, on the case, 
with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally 
blacked out.

If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up 
to 15 years in jail.

The case has already received extensive coverage abroad. Details began 
to emerge in mid-March on a blog called Tikun Olam, or Repairing the 
World, by an American writer, Richard Silverstein. The New York-based 
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the British newspapers The Guardian and The 
Independent and The Associated Press have also written about the affair.

According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected 
of having used the confidential military documents, is currently “hiding 
in Britain”.

The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in 
November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two 
Palestinian militants belonging to the extremist Islamic Jihad group 
were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military 
said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with 
Israeli forces.

However Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the two militants, 
Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for 
assassination by the Israeli Army’s Central Command, which is 
responsible for the West Bank.

Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an 
Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited 
the circumstances in which the military is permitted to carry out 
pre-emptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents 
stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were 
eligible targets alongside the report.

Israeli news media were not even allowed to mention that there was a gag 
order in place, according to Uzi Benziman, the chief editor of The 
Seventh Eye. But in a Tuesday morning interview with Army Radio, Dalia 
Dorner, the retired Supreme Court judge who is now the president of the 
Israeli Press Council said the gag order handed down by a magistrate’s 
court was “regrettable,” and should be fought all the way up to the 
Supreme Court.

Ms. Dorner’s comments opened the floodgates to Israeli debate about the 
imposition of such gag orders, though the court ruling still prevented 
any discussion of the actual case.

Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior 
fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, said that Israel’s treatment 
of suspected criminal offenses in the security realm was “draconian.” By 
isolating the suspect and preventing any public debate, he said, the 
authorities could more easily pressure the suspect to accept some 
measure of guilt, arrive at a plea bargain and settle the case “with no 
noise.”

Mr. Kremnitzer also criticized 

[Marxism] Glenn Greenwald - Iraq slaughter not an aberration

[Dennis Brasky]

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>
> clip -
>
>
> The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers
> involved -- at least not primarily.  Of course those who aren't accustomed
> to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction
> those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The
> Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but
> this is what they're taught and trained and told to do.  If you take even
> well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous
> war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will
> inevitably be the result.  The video is an indictment of the U.S. government
> and the war policies it pursues.
>
> All of this is usually kept from us.  Unlike those in the Muslim world, who
> are shown these realities quite frequently by their free 
> press,
> we don't usually see what is done by us.  We stay blissfully insulated from
> it, so that in those rare instances when we're graphically exposed to it, we
> can tell ourselves that it's all very unusual and rare.  That's how we
> collectively dismissed the Abu Ghraib photos, and it's why the Obama
> administration took such extraordinary steps to suppress all the rest of the
> torture 
> photos:
> because further disclosure would have revealed that behavior to be standard
> and common, not at all unusual or extraordinary.
>
> full --<
> http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/06/iraq/index.html
> >
>
>
>

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[Marxism] Google bans Cubnn blogger

[Stuart Munckton]

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Google bans Cuban blogger


Havana, March 29 (RHC-ACN)-- Internet giant Google INC cut off Cuban writer
and essayist Henry Ubieta’s access to his ‘La Isla Desconocida’ (The unknown
Island) blog, hosted on Blogger, and blocked his access to his Gmail
account.

Ubieta, who has denounced the brutal campaign waged against Cuba in recent
weeks about alleged human rights violations in Cuba, had published a few
hours before an article entitled “Demonizing Cuba”, impeccable reasoning of
the political undertones that support the new media onslaught.

In a message sent via email and published by Granma International, Ubieta
denounces this decision that blatantly violates the right to freedom of
expression of Cubans on the Internet.

The blogger notes that last Friday, after browsing the net for topics
related to what he usually writes, he logged out his blog for a few hours,
and to his amazement, when he tried to access his Gmail account he was faced
by a warning stating: “account temporarily disabled.”

But when trying to open his blog he was truly shocked with a further notice
from Blogger: “The blog was deleted. Sorry, the blog

“laisladesconocida.blogspot.com” was deleted. This address is not available
for new blogs.”

There have been no explanations from Google on that matter up to now.



*Consulate General of Cuba*

Tel: (02) 9698 9797

Fax: (02) 8399 1106

Email: asisc...@cubamission.com
Web: http://embacuba.cubaminrex.cu/australiaing

-- 
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original
virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through
disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under
Socialism

“The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of
dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker

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[Marxism] Raul Castro's April 4 speech to Young Communist League

[Fred Feldman]

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==


Even more important than the response to the latest propaganda campaigns
against Cuba, in my opinion, is the president's description of the problems
of bureaucratic and other forms of parasitism that are weakening the
economy, undermine living standards, and threaten the basic accomplishments
of the revolution.\
Fred Feldman

http://machetera.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/raul-castros-address-to-cubas-youn
g-communist-league/

Raúl Castro’s address to Cuba’s Young Communist League
April 5, 2010 · 1 Comment

I’ve always loved the stories about the Cuban mambises, who, outgunned and
outnumbered by their nineteenth century Spanish oppressors, resorted to a
clever kind of weaponless warfare; that of wearing their enemy down by
giving them false directions when lost, or harassing them during the night
so they could not rest.  While the Obamas and Estefans share Bloody Marys
with the terrorist faithful on April 15th in Miami Beach, they might spare a
thought for the historic futility of their efforts.  Cuba’s youth will
always outlast them.

“Young Cuban revolutionaries understand perfectly well that to preserve
the Revolution and socialism, and to continue being dignified and free, they
have many more years of struggle and sacrifices ahead of them…Cuba does not
fear lies nor does it kneel to pressure, conditions or impositions, from
whichever direction. It defends itself with the truth, which always, sooner
rather than later, ends up being known.”

Cuban President Raúl Castro’s keynote address to the Young Communist League,
Havana, April 4, 2010 - español

Edited by Machetera

Compañeras, compañeros, delegates and guests,

It has been a good Congress, which actually began last October with the open
meetings attended by hundreds of thousands of young people and continued
with the evaluation meetings conducted by organizations from the rank and
file as well as the municipal and provincial committees where the agreements
were shaped that would be adopted in these final sessions.

If there is one thing we’ve had plenty of during the little over five years
that have passed since Fidel made the closing speech at the Eighth Young
Communist League (YCL) Congress, on December 5, 2004, it’s been work and
challenges.

This Congress has been held in the midst of one of the most vicious and
concerted media campaigns launched against the Cuban Revolution in its fifty
years of existence, an issue to which I will necessarily refer later on.

Although I was unable to attend the meetings held prior to the Congress, I
have been informed of the essentials of every one of them. I am aware that
there has been little talk about achievements in order to focus on problems,
looking internally and without spending more time than necessary on the
analysis of external factors.  It’s a style that ought to permanently
characterize the work of the YCL in contrast to those who tend to look for
the mote in their neighbor’s eye instead of expending such an effort on
their own tasks.

It has been rewarding to listen to many young people directly linked to
productive activities proudly and simply explaining the work they’re doing,
barely mentioning the material difficulties and bureaucratic obstacles that
affect them.

Many of the shortcomings analyzed are not new; they have accompanied the
organization for quite some time. The previous congresses adopted
corresponding agreements and yet they’ve been reiterated to a greater or
lesser degree, which proves the lack of a systematic and thorough control of
their completion.

In this sense, it is fair and necessary to repeat something reiterated by
comrades Machado and Lazo, who chaired many of the assemblies: the Party
feels equally responsible for every flaw in the work of the YCL, most
especially for the problems concerning the policy with cadres.

We cannot permit that, once again, approved documents become dead letters or
shelved like memoirs. They should be a guide for the everyday work of the
National Bureau and for every member of the organization. You have already
agreed on the basics, now you should act on them.

Some are very critical about the youth of today while forgetting that once
they themselves were young. It would be naïve to pretend that new
generations are the same as those of the past. A wise proverb says: A man
resembles his own time more than that of his parents.

Cuban youth have always been willing to meet challenges. They have proven it
in the recovery from damages caused by hurricanes, confronting the enemy’s
provocations and defense-related tasks; I might mention many more examples.

The average age of Congressional delegates is twenty-eight. All of them have
grown up during these hard years of the Special Period and have participated
in our people’s efforts to pr

Re: [Marxism] [microsound] Google bans Cubnn blogger

[New Tet]

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==





Stuart Munckton wrote:
> 
> Google bans Cuban blogger
> 
> 
> Havana, March 29 (RHC-ACN)-- Internet giant Google INC cut off Cuban
> writer
> and essayist Henry Ubieta’s access to his ‘La Isla Desconocida’ (The
> unknown
> Island) blog, hosted on Blogger, and blocked his access to his Gmail
> account.
> -- 
> “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's
> original
> virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through
> disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under
> Socialism
> 
> “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of
> dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker


Hacked by Google! Likewise its departure from China; a complete mystery if
one
discounts the fiction that it was over a freedom of speech issue.

Corporations are authoritarian entities within totalitarian capitalism.
Their conception
of free speech is as narrow as their private interests go, not a dollar
more.

Ubieta's dilemma is lamentable given the possibility of Google becoming a
monopoly.
Thanks to your heads up he and what he has to say may not sink into
obscurity.

Hopefully, he'll soon find a node at which to graft a healthy blog. In
Europe it's
pointless as he'd be preaching to the converted; in Latin America most
forward-
thinking people on the net know or have good idea of what Cuba is really all
about.
Whereas in the U.S. most are totally ignorant about Cuba or, at best, know
only the
worst aspects of that society (exaggerated and distorted, I'll bet).

We are ignorant about Cuba generally and the internet, in the hands of the
capitalist class helps reinforce and dis-inform us even further. And not
just about
Cuba, mind you.

From the pop culture media, I remember, we were informed about the
revolutionary
possibilities of the new internet blogosphere. Were they wrong?
-- 
View this message in context: 
http://old.nabble.com/-Marxism--Google-bans-Cubnn-blogger-tp28160222p28160509.html
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[Marxism] US shuts down websites from or about Cuba

[Fred Feldman]

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http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/international/2008-03-06/scandalous-censori
ng-of-cuban-websites-by-the-us-revealed/

Scandalous Censoring of Cuban Websites by the US Revealed 

The Juventud Rebelde newspaper published an article on Tuesday March 4, 2008
in The New York Times that reveals how the United Stats has blocked Internet
websites of an English enterprise with the domain “.com.” Juventud Rebelde
adds some questions and answers that the American newspaper fails to raise
concerning this extraterritorial enforcement of US legislation

By: Adam Liptak

Email:
2008-03-06 | 12:33:16 EST

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain and sells trips
to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October,
about 80 of his Websites stopped working, thanks to the United States
government.

The sites —in English, French and Spanish— had been online since 1998. Some,
like www.cuba-hemingway.com, were literary. Others, like
www.cuba-havanacity.com, discussed Cuban history and culture. Still others
—www.ciaocuba.com and www.bonjourcuba.com— were purely commercial sites
aimed at Italian and French tourists.

“I came to work in the morning, and we had no reservations at all,” said Mr.
Marshall by phone from the Canary Islands. “We thought it was a technical
problem.”

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a US
Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain
name with the server “eNom Inc.,” had been disabled. Mr. Marshall said eNom
told him that it had done so after a call from the Treasury Department; the
company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on
the blacklist through a blog.

Either way, there is no disputing that eNom shut down Mr. Marshall’s sites
without notifying him and has refused to release the domain names to him. In
effect, Mr. Marshall said, eNom has taken his property and interfered with
his business. He has slowly rebuilt his Web business over the last several
months, and now many of the same sites operate with the suffix .net rather
than .com, through a European registry. His servers, he said, have been in
the Bahamas all along.

Mr. Marshall said he did not understand “how Websites owned by a British
national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by US law.”
Worse, he said, “these days not even a judge is required for the US
government to censor online materials.”



A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release
issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said Mr.
Marshall’s company had helped Americans evade restrictions on travel to Cuba
and was “a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its
people.” It added that American companies must not only stop doing business
with the company but also freeze its assets, meaning that eNom did exactly
what it was legally required to do.

Mr. Marshall said he was uninterested in American tourists. “They can’t go
anyway,” he said.

Peter L. Fitzgerald, a law professor at Stetson University in Florida who
has studied the blacklist —which the Treasury calls a list of “specially
designated nationals”— said its operation was quite mysterious. “There
really is no explanation or standard,” he said, “for why someone gets on the
list.”

Susan Crawford, a visiting law professor at Yale and a leading authority on
Internet law, said the fact that many large domain name registrars are based
in the United States gives the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control,
or OFAC, control “over a great deal of speech — none of which may be
actually hosted in the U.S., about the U.S. or conflicting with any U.S.
rights.”

“OFAC apparently has the power to order that this speech disappear,”
Professor Crawford said.

The law under which the Treasury Department is acting has an exemption,
known as the Berman Amendment, which seeks to protect “information or
informational materials.” Mr. Marshall’s Web sites, though ultimately
commercial, would seem to qualify, and it is not clear why they appear on
the list. Unlike Americans, who face significant restrictions on travel to
Cuba, Europeans are free to go there, and many do. Charles S. Sims, a lawyer
with Proskauer Rose in New York, said the Treasury Department might have
gone too far in Mr. Marshall’s case.

“The U.S can certainly criminalize the expenditure of money by U.S. citizens
in Cuba,” Mr. Sims said, “but it doesn’t properly have any jurisdiction over
foreign sites that are not targeted at the U.S. and which are lawful under
foreign law.”

Mr. Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Mr. Marshall was free to ask for a
review of his case. “If they want to be taken off the list,” Mr. Rankin
said, “they should contact us 

[Marxism] China: Back to bad old landlords

[Lajany Otum]

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IN THE dying days of the Cultural Revolution, Yu Changwu was chosen
to serve in the army. His status as a soldier brought great honour to
his mother and family back in what was then an impoverished village
near Yantai on the Shandong coast.
And after four
years the People's Liberation Army gave him two life-defining assets.
One was a soldier-settler plot of land in Nangang village, on China's
frozen northern frontier. The other was a little red book with "retired
soldier" on the front, which confirmed his enduring entitlement to
small privileges and respect. Inside the worn plastic cover is a
picture of Mao Zedong and two lines of calligraphy written in the
Chairman's hand: ''Let the revolutionary tradition shine; strive for
greater honour.''
Yu wed a girl from his new
village and they grew wheat, corn and soybeans on their 16 mu (one
hectare) of black, flood-plain dirt, near the Russian border. In 1994,
officials from the local Fujin municipal government turned up with a
new map that showed the village land sliced in half. The east side of
the map displays the village household plots of land squashed to half
their former size. The Yu family's land, for example, is cut from 16 mu
to eight. And the west side of the map is blank except for two
characters saying ''South Korea''.
Those
characters signify a South Korean company, named on documents from the
time as ''Guangxu Chemical Company'', which was supposed to have signed
an agricultural joint venture with the Fujin government. But the South
Korean investment company never came.
Instead, in
a blur of government committee meetings and opaque private dealings, at
least 570,000 mu (38,000 hectares) of land belonging to Yu and 40,000
other farmers was transferred to the ''joint venture'' company, then
the Fujin municipal government and finally into the names of friends
and relatives of the officials who ran the government. Most of that
stolen land was rented straight back to the farmers who had just been
dispossessed.
''Step by step the government took
over nearly a million mu of land and charged farmers for the right to
use it,'' says Li Zhiying, a Beijing land activist who liaised closely
with village leaders in the area.
''Farmers showed me the names of lots of officials who had land in the names of 
relatives, sometimes thousands of mu each.''
At
times Fujin officials have resorted to violence to ensure no
embarrassing reports make it to higher tiers of government. The new
feudal system sits awkwardly alongside the Communist Party's
revolutionary rationale, but it is making many of them rich. Over the
years officials subcontracted some of the heavy lifting - and a large
slice of the local services sector - to ''black society'' gangs.

Full: 


http://www.theage.com.au/world/back-to-bad-old-landlords-20100401-ri3m.html



  

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[Marxism] Colombia: mass graves used to cover up atrocities

[Stuart Munckton]

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*Mass Graves Used to Cover-Up Atrocities in Colombia*
The Bodies of the Innocent  By DANIEL KOVALIK

April 1, 2010

http://www.counterpunch.org/kovalik04012010.html

The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though
you wouldn’t notice it from the total lack of media coverage here.

A mass grave – one of a number suspected by human rights groups in Colombia
– was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in
La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just
south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby
stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to
runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave – a grave marked only
with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the
bodies were buried.

According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina,
Director of the regional office of Colombia’s own Procuraduria General de la
Nacion – a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption –
approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave.

The Colombian Army has admitted responsibility for the grave, claiming to
have killed and buried alleged guerillas there. However, the bodies in the
grave have yet to be identified. Instead, against all protocol for handling
the remains of anyone killed by the military, especially the bodies of
guerillas, the bodies contained in the mass grave were buried there secretly
without the requisite process of having the Colombian government certify
that the deceased were indeed the armed combatants the Army claims.

And, given the current "false positive" scandal which has enveloped the
government of President Alvaro Uribe and his Defense Minister, Juan Manuel
Santos, who is now running to succeed Uribe as President, the Colombian
Army’s claim about the mass grave is especially suspect. This scandal
revolves around the Colombian military, recently under the direction of Juan
Manuel Santos, knowingly murdering civilians in cold blood and then dressing
them up to look like armed guerillas in order to justify more aid from the
United States.


According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pilay, this
practice has been so "systematic and widespread" as to amount to a "crime
against humanity."


To date, not factoring in the mass grave, it has been confirmed by Colombian
government sources that there have been 2,000 civilians falling victim to
the "false positive" scheme since President Uribe took office in 2002. If,
as suspected by Colombian human rights groups, such as the "Comision de
Derechos Humanos del Bajo Ariari" and the "Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda,"
the mass grave in La Macarena contains 2,000 more civilian victims of this
scheme, then this would bring the total of those victimized by the "false
positive" scandal to at least 4,000 --much worse than originally believed.


That this grave was discovered just outside a Colombian military base
overseen by U.S. military advisers -- the U.S. having around 600 military
advisers in that country -- is especially troubling, and raises serious
questions about the U.S.’s own conduct in that country. In addition, this
calls into even greater question the propriety of President Obama’s
agreement with President Alvaro Uribe last summer pursuant to which the U.S.
will have access to 7 military bases in that country.

The Colombian government and military are scrambling to contain this most
recent scandal, and possibly through violence. Thus, on March 15, 2010,
Jhonny Hurtado, a former union leader and President of the Human Rights
Committee of La Cantina, and an individual who was key in revealing the
truth about this mass grave, was assassinated as soldiers from Colombia’s
7th Mobile Brigade patrolled the area. Just prior to his murder, Jhonny
Hurtado told a delegation of British MPs visiting Colombia that he believed
the mass grave at La Macarena contained the bodies of innocent people who
had been "disappeared."

*Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer working in Pittsburgh,
Pa.*





-- 
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original
virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through
disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under
Socialism

“The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of
dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker

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