Re: [Marxism] Just a Nut Job

[Ralph Johansen]

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So, palaver aside, here's what happens to the really existing mentally 
ill in this American political caring culture:

http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/tapley.php


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[Marxism] Hobsbawm interviewed about Marx, student riots, the new Left, and the Milibands

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/16/eric-hobsbawm-tristram-hunt-marx 



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[Marxism] WikiLeaks: Locking Up Whistleblower Bradley Manning in Solitary Confinement Puts America's Depravity on Full Display

[Ralph Johansen]

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Depravity are us. This is another hideous, unspoken horror in our 
'civilized' existence. I live four miles from one of the world's most 
notorious prisons, Pelican Bay, where over half the 3500 inmates are 
locked up 23 hours a day in 'SHU' solitary confinement...for years and 
years, without so much as a glimpse of the world outside, which in this 
area is breathtakingly beautiful. Warehoused in an inaccessible area of 
California on the north coast, over 700 miles from LA, where the 
preponderance of inmates' friends and family live, their only human 
contact with the outside world and their only reason for clinging to 
life and sanity.

http://www.alternet.org/story/149410/wikileaks%3A_locking_up_whistleblower_bradley_manning_in_solitary_confinement_puts_america%27s_depravity_on_full_display?page=entire

New Deal 2.0  / /By/ /Lynn Parramore 
/


  WikiLeaks: Locking Up Whistleblower Bradley Manning in Solitary
  Confinement Puts America's Depravity on Full Display

We as American citizens should not accept torture by our government, and 
that's what the military is doing to Bradley Manning.
/January 4, 2011/

/The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its 
prisons. ~Fyodor Dostoevsky/

In the earliest days of our Republic, a group of well-meaning 
Philadelphia Quakers set out to reform the prison system. The idea was 
to remove convicts from the mayhem and corruption of overcrowded jails 
to solitary cells where sinners would return to mental and spiritual 
health through reflection. In the Walnut Street Jail 
, no windows 
would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would 
disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.

There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane. The Walnut 
Street Jail was shut down in 1835.

But the word /penitentiary/ became part of the language, and the idea of 
placing prisoners in solitary confinement did not die. It /seemed/ so 
reasonable - so much better than chain gangs or public stocks. New 
prisons opened to test the theory that solitude might bring salvation to 
criminals.

Charles Dickens had a keen interest in prison conditions, having 
witnessed his father's detention in a Victorian debtor's prison. When he 
heard about the latest American innovation in housing convicts, he came 
to see for himself. At Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, the 
wretches he found in solitary confinement were barely human spectres who 
picked their flesh raw and stared blankly at walls. His on-the-spot 
conclusion: Solitary confinement is torture. Dickens wrote 
:

/I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense 
amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged 
for years, inflicts upon the sufferers...I hold this slow and daily 
tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than 
any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are 
not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; 
because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries 
that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret 
punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay./

//A man who had seen his share of inhumanities, Dickens pronounced 
solitary confinement to be "rigid, strict, and hopeless...cruel and wrong."

That was 1842. Since then, piles of scientific studies, along with the 
vivid accounts of victims, have confirmed what was obvious to Dickens. 
Solitary confinement is worse than smashed bones and torn flesh. When 
human beings are deprived of social contact for even a few weeks, 
concentration breaks down, memory fades and disorientation sets in. 
Eventually, many prisoners experience explosive rages, hallucinations, 
catatonia, and self-mutilation. Some become irretrievably insane. Far 
from promoting safety, the most commonly cited justification, solitary 
confinement often amplifies violent impulses, turning prisoners into 
ticking time bombs who are far more dangerous to human society upon 
release than they ever were to begin with (see National Geographic's 
documentary 
 on 
the subject, available on Netflix).

Human beings need social contact for normal brain function. Solitary 
confinement is thus a method of inflicting traumatic injury upon the 
human mind. "It's an awful thing, solitary," wrote former Vietnam 
prisoner John McCain in /Faith of My Fathers/ 

[Marxism] Why Indefinite Detention by Executive Order Should Scare the Hell Out of People

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/23-5

Can it be said enough: This is war on everybody, ultimately. Quigley and 
Warren do not add that the whole business of indefinite detention is 
grounded in the concept of an open-ended "war on terror", with the enemy 
made up and added to as they go along, a "war" ill-defined and with no 
perceptible conclusion, since terrorists old and new always exist, if 
only in the mind of government, and the concept is infinitely elastic - 
to whomever displeases. And the power of oligarchy grows apace.

It boggles, what they have made up, and imposed as a catch 22. What a 
monster.


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Re: [Marxism] Major Media Ignore Veterans, along with Ellsberg and Hedges, Chained to WH Fence

[Ralph Johansen]

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Manuel Barrera wrote

We're on our own. It's time we stop complaining about it and start uniting.

--

Yes. You make the point about organizing. Here's a group that is doing 
so and putting themselves out there by getting arrested. And no media 
response. This is news, even a reality check. Maybe not a bad idea to 
let people on this list know that this is happening, even if no one else 
learns of it. Maybe they'll want to go and join them.


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[Marxism] Major Media Ignore Veterans, along with Ellsberg and Hedges, Chained to WH Fence

[Ralph Johansen]

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Black-Out in DC:
Pay No Attention to Those Veterans Chained to the White House Fence
By Dave Lindorff

There was a black-out and a white-out Thursday and Friday as over a 
hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere 
around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied 
themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say 
enough is enough.

Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being 
called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested 
were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the 
president’s daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the 
government’s Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris 
Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It 
was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia 
Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall 
Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital’s local daily, the 
Washington Post.

Making the media cover-up of the protest all the more outrageous was the 
fact that most news media did report on Friday, the day after the 
protest, the results of the latest poll of American attitudes towards 
the Afghanistan War, an ABC/Washington Post Poll which found that 60% of 
Americans now feel that war has “not been worth it.” That’s a big 
increase from the 53% who said they opposed the war in July.

Clearly, any honest journalist and editor would see a news link between 
such a poll result and an anti-war protest at the White House led, for 
the first time in recent memory, by a veterans organization, the group 
Veterans for Peace, in which veterans of the nation’s wars actually put 
themselves on the line to be arrested to protest a current war.

Friday was also the day that most news organizations were reporting on 
the much touted, but also much over-rated Pentagon report on the 
“progress” of the American war in Afghanistan--a report that claimed 
there was progress, but which was immediately contradicted by a CIA 
report that said the opposite. Again, any honest journalist and editor 
would see the publication of such a report as an appropriate place to 
mention the unusual opposition to the war by a group of veterans right 
outside the president’s office.

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, 
the new independent online alternative newspaper, please go to 
www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/345


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Re: [Marxism] Marx wine quote

[Ralph Johansen]

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I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.

If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon.


W. C. Fields 
 



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[Marxism] What's Behind the GOP's War Against NPR?

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.alternet.org/story/149207/what%27s_behind_the_gop%27s_war_against_npr?page=entire#disqus_thread

These are my comments posted to this Alternet story:

The collapse of public radio and TV are part of an egregious on-going 
saga of failing democracy in the US as elsewhere:

With radio, TV, print news, and investigative journalism being 
controlled by corporate oligarchies, with newspapers failing as a 
profitable investment mainly because fewer are subscribing and ad 
revenues do not pay for any semblance of responsible journalism, we 
should recall that at this nation's founding and throughout the 19th 
century newspapers were heavily subsidized by the federal government - 
not only very low mail rates but tax and many other incentives - which 
produced literally thousands of small, local start-up newspapers, with 
every conceivable shade of opinion. The stated rationale was that a 
literate, informed citizenry was essential to a functioning, 
participatory, Jeffersonian democracy. Then came corporate ownership of 
newspapers, eventually by the turn of the last century ownership by 
oligopoly and support not by subscribers but by restrictive, 
content-restraining corporate advertisers.

Also, we should recall that originally, with the inception of radio and 
TV, Congress imposed minimally protective public interest requirements 
in exchange for turning our public airwaves over to private control and 
virtual ownership. Those requirements have in their application by 
private media been winnowed away to nothing, and now even so-called 
'public' radio and TV, ratcheted down to a minimum of objective 
information in a corporate-supported format, are to be dispensed with 
altogether.

Also, now what of the newly emergent Congressional internet legislation, 
which has removed Communications Commission oversight over the internet, 
giving free rein to corporate control over this once-promising new 
medium of multi-directional communication?

And humanity's intellectual record now sits no longer in our print 
libraries but in electronic records. Those records are increasingly in 
the control of  governmental and corporate archives, subject to erasure, 
concealment and distortion, with no effective public oversight. As 
Julian Assange said in Oslo last month, 'he who controls the internet 
controls the intellectual history of mankind.'




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Re: [Marxism] Petition to stop the WikiLeaks crackdown

[Ralph Johansen]

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I posted this petition at about 4 PM PST. I just returned 9 hours later 
for about 10 or 15 minutes to watch the streaming signatures on the 
petition website. To me, it's quite amazing to see: the stream is steady 
and it's from every country imaginable - Qatar, Hong Kong, Israel, all 
the East, Central and West European countries, Australia, New Zealand, 
South Africa, the US, Canada, India, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil - 
absolutely everywhere in the world, people are signing onto this 
petition. Exception: China. Hong Kong one, but none from China, where a 
substantial plurality have no chance to voice their protest, may not 
even be aware of it. The numbers now are above 650,000 and they're 
heading toward a million or more. I wouldn't guess what the impact might 
be, but a whole lot of fury is being vented out there, by people who are 
tuned to the internet and who feel that this is one more of those rare 
opportunities to be counted in solidarity with others against a system 
of lies and wars and repression and arrogance and corruption, and now 
austerity, that has functioned with virtual impunity despite sporadic 
protests for too long. Take a look, it may or may not last or build into 
something monumental, but I wouldn't bet against that after what I've 
been seeing.


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[Marxism] Petition to stop the WikiLeaks crackdown

[Ralph Johansen]

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I've just signed an Avaaz petition to stop the WikiLeaks crackdown. 
[While signing, watch the names of signers as they come online - 
rapidly.  rj]

I think you'll be interested and might want to support the campaign, 
too. Check out the link below and join me in signing:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/wikileaks_petition/96.php


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Re: [Marxism] Does Liu Xiaobo Really Deserve the Peace Prize?

[Ralph Johansen]

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Shane Mage wrote


On Dec 13, 2010, at 3:00 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
 >>
 >> I wonder why the more meritorious Mumia Abu-Jamal HASN'T received
 >> the Nobel award...
 > Doesn't the question answer itself? Consider
 > some of the people who have won the Prize:
 > Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Yitzhak
 > Rabin, and Barack Obama, war mongers all.

And consider some who have: Carl von Ossietsky, Martin Luther King,
Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Su Kyi, bourgeois democratic political
prisoners all.



I think that for our purposes the Nobel does not by nature of its 
commission and structure with any consistency honor those who have the 
same principles and criteria for honor that we have and we should ignore 
it or/and displace it. Period.




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* *References*:
  o *Re: [Marxism] Does Liu Xiaobo Really Deserve the Peace
Prize? *
+ /From:/ Jim Farmelant 

* Prev by Date: *[Marxism] The other side of the student demo?
  *
* Previous by thread: *Re: [Marxism] Does Liu Xiaobo Really Deserve
  the Peace Prize? *
* Next by thread: *[Marxism] New title: VOICES OF THE WORLD by
  BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS *
* Index(es):
  o *Date* 
  o *Thread* 


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Re: [Marxism] Obama Isn't Spineless, He's Conservative

[Ralph Johansen]

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Midhurst  wrote

The problem with negative criticism of Obama, is that the alternative is 
worse
In that sense I agree with US Communist Party assessment
FDR, was a reactionary but had a mass movement pushing him
Obama hasn't
George Anthony

-

Only difference or main difference? What difference? Therefore, support 
for Obama, is that what you're implying? Where? In his continuation and 
expansIon of ravaging, revenue-draining colonial wars? His lack of 
commitment against torture? His fixing of health care? His accelerating 
cave-in to corporate financial oligopoly? His support for wildly 
disparate income and its rising intensity? His pro-oligopoly austerity 
policies showing his contempt  toward the increasing working and 
non-working poor and the simultaneous shrinking of the vast so-called 
middle class? His open support for repression, local and global? His 
virtual transfer of responsibility for all this seamlessly from the Bush 
regime to the Obama regime? Is this due merely to a quiescent 
constituency? Looking at its obverse is more instructive, the astounding 
ingenuity in devising sophisticated repressive weaponry, including 
subtle control of communications, promoting helplessness and isolation 
among the mass of humanity, and also regulating the limits to 
surveillance. Case in  point, the emerging repressive legislation in 
process in limitation of major provisions of the Bill of Rights.

How envision a response to that, one that has as its primary objective 
increase in sense of class solidarity?

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[Marxism] Needed: A Real World Counterpart to Nobel Prize

[Ralph Johansen]

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*Documenting how unrepresentative, instrumental and biased the Nobel 
awards are should be piece of cake - pointing to need to instead honor 
the real heroes through establishment of a credible alternative.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/09/julian-assange-nobel-peace-prize
*


  "Julian Assange should be awarded Nobel peace prize, suggests Russia"

***

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay expressed concern over 
reports that private companies, including banks, credit card companies 
and Internet service providers have closed down credit line donations to 
WikiLeaks, reported Democracy Now! 
 "Taken as a whole, 
they could be interpreted as an attempt to center the publication of 
information, thus potentially violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of 
expression," said Pillay.


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Re: [Marxism] James Petras - "The Democratic Party Debacle and the Demis of the Left-Center Left"

[Ralph Johansen]

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Jim Farmelant wrote

In recent years, I have found a lot of Petras's commentary on various 
subjects to be rather loopy, but not this piece.

-

Jim, I disagree. I find this piece to be no more than a news summary, 
without analysis of causes and therefore not contributing one whit to 
addressing the problem.


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Re: [Marxism] New title: FIVE LESSONS ON WAGNER by ALAIN BADIOU

[Ralph Johansen]

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  Louis Proyect wrote


  I suppose I am going to have to find the time to read Badiou one of
  these days since he is such a fave over on the Kasama Project.

  In terms of interesting commentary on Wagner, I am not sure based on the
  Verso blurb whether he deals with George Bernard Shaw who was one of the
  early left-wing defenders of Wagner.
  Wagner as Revolutionist

  By George Bernard Shaw

* * * * *

Possibly the eminent philosophers can also comment on what W.C. Fields 
said about Wagner: that his music is not as bad as it sounds.


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Re: [Marxism] in the spirit of wikileaks...

[Ralph Johansen]

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Mark Lause wrote

This is an interesting site. I love the piece on Ron Paul's defense of 
Wikileaks.

ML

---

Just my exercise in restatement and (self-)clarification, if those who 
know this all too well will hold still, because some may not:

Yes, right answer for the wrong reasons: Ron Paul the right-libertarian, 
mainly standing for limiting the size and scope of the federal 
government, advocating "free market" policies that have to do with 
giving private property free rein, without the fetters of government 
regulation - ignoring the demonstrable historical increase in business 
oligopoly that "market policies" and a system of capital accumulation 
ineluctably produce, and the fact that much of government regulation and 
legislation has to do with supporting and enhancing the propensity of 
transnational corporations to accrue more wealth, more power and the 
corruption necessarily entailed - and therefore, against the interests 
of the small business constituency Paul purports to speak for, as well 
as against the interests of all the rest of us. That he meets the left 
on some issues, such as advocating transparency of government, opposing 
"entangling foreign alliances" and wars, government censorship and 
tyranny, makes him an ally of the left sometimes and only for very 
limited purposes.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/ron-paul-what-wikileaks/


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Re: [Marxism] Attacks on Wikileaks

[Ralph Johansen]

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Gulf Mann wrote

We could make some deft defensive moves, too, by going on the offense 
and starting a campaign to award a joint Nobel to Ellsberg & Assange.

--

Yes, but while Ellsberg acted alone (except for the forgotten Tony Russo 
and some editor/collaborators), in Assange's case I think we should 
celebrate the heroism of his whole organization, and most especially the 
young corporal Bradley Manning, if in fact it was he who made this 
material available.

As Assange said today: 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assange-wikileaks, 
"For the past four years one of our goals has been to lionise the 
sources who take the real risks in nearly every journalistic disclosure 
and without whose efforts, journalists would be nothing. If indeed it is 
the case, as alleged by the Pentagon, that the young soldier - Bradley 
Manning - is behind some of our recent disclosures, then he is without 
doubt an unparalleled hero."

So we should celebrate the heroism of the young corporal Bradley 
Manning, if in fact it was he who made this material available; Manning 
now faces not just trashing of his reputation and being forced to live 
in secret hideouts as Assange now does, but in his case he may face 
spending the rest of his life in a federal prison, where his youth and 
his crime may result in a threat to his well-being that Assange may 
never have to endure.

Also, we would be encouraging further releases of material exposing the 
deepening corruption in this system, and by that route contributing to 
its further exposure and delegitimation, if we made world-class heroes 
of Manning for his sacrifice and all who collectively take their 
inspiration from his example and are moved to do likewise.

And if the reaction of oligarchy is to conceal, sequester, escalate, 
flail and obfuscate, then to that extent they may become as 
delegitimized as the Soviet system became - - especially if as happened 
with the Soviets we're now seeing a growing incapacity of this 
transnational late capitalist regime to meet the basic needs of the 
greater part of what is seen as their world-wide constituency.


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Re: [Marxism] 12-01-10 Like Radio before it , then TV: Obama's FCC chair wants 'to turn the Internet into cable TV'

[Ralph Johansen]

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Connecting dots? Two profiles of Obama's FCC chair, Julius Genachowski:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Genachowski

http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/genachowski/biography.html


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[Marxism] 12-01-10 Like Radio before it , then TV: Obama's FCC chair wants 'to turn the Internet into cable TV'

[Ralph Johansen]

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[Again, quoting Assange: "He who controls today`s Internet servers 
controls the intellectual record of mankind." Whatever we get from the 
FCC this time around, we can be sure that, in a system where capital 
accumulation is the bottom line in communications as everywhere else and 
oligopoly is the mode of appropriation and control, barring massive 
public obstruction we're headed for the gutting of the internet as we 
know it and the dismantling of the closest approximation we have had to 
unfettered, free mass communication.]

Published on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 by The Nation
America Needs Real Net Neutrality, Not a False Promise from a 
Compromising FCC Chair
by John Nichols

When Barack Obama was running for president, he made Net Neutrality an 
issue  [1] 
-- pledging to defend the core values of a free and open Internet by 
assuring that all Americans would have equal access to all websites and 
to all the promise of this digital age. [2]

Asked in 2007 if he would "make it a priority in your first year of 
office to re-instate Net Neutrality as the law of the land" and "pledge 
to only appoint FCC commissioners that support open Internet principles 
like Net Neutrality," candidate Obama responded by saying 
 [1]: "I 
am a strong supporter of net neutrality," said Obama. "What you've been 
seeing is some lobbying that says [Internet providers] should be able to 
be gatekeepers and able to charge different rates to different 
websites... so you could get much better quality from the Fox News site 
and you'd be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites. And that 
I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet -- which is 
that there is this incredible equality there... as president I'm going 
to make sure that is the principle that my FCC commissioners are 
applying as we move forward."

That commitment made Obama a favorite contender among tech-savvy voters 
in general and especially among young voters who see through the spin of 
telecommunications corporations that seek to do away with Net Neutrality 
so they can choose which websites consumers could easily and effectively 
access -- based on whether the owners of the sites paid the providers 
top dollar.

There was never any question that Obama understood the issues involved.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that Obama still talks a good game 
regarding Net Neutrality 

 
[3], the man he appointed to chair the Federal Communications 
Commission, Julius Genachowski, is proposing a "Net Neutrality" rule 
that bares scant resemblance to what candidate Obama promised.

Genachowski's plan, which he unveiled Wednesday and which he wants the 
FCC to vote on December 21, does not restore Net Neutrality as it 
existed before a Republican-dominated FCC took steps to undermine the 
principle, nor does it guarantee Internet freedom and flexibility. (You 
can read Genachowski's plan here  [4].)

An analysis being circulated by the Save the Internet Coalition 
 [5]asserts that Genachowski's 
"proposed rule is riddled with loopholes, and falls far short of what's 
necessary to prevent phone and cable companies from turning the Internet 
into cable TV: where they decide what moves fast, what moves slow, and 
whether they can price gouge you or not: a shiny jewel for companies 
like AT&T and Comcast."

Specifically, the analysis argues  [5] 
that the chairman's proposal:

   1. Fails to restore the FCC's authority over Internet service
  providers (ISP's) like Comcast and AT&T. This guarantees that the
  new rules, if passed, will be swiftly rejected by the courts. Any
  other future rules related to the Internet, such as competition
  policy (that would give you more choices than your expensive
  monopoly cable and phone company) would suffer the same fate if
  the Chairman continues to avoid the simple procedure that would
  restore his agency's authority.
   2. Allows the loophole of 'specialized services,' which effectively
  allows these companies to split the Internet into fast and slow
  lanes that Net Neutrality is trying to prevent. To make matters
  worse, the proposal has weak protections against "paid
  prioritization". That is, ISP's charging content providers extra
  to get their product to move quicker across the Net than others'.
   3. Fails to make even Genachowski's tepid protections apply to
  wireless connections. With the inevitable explosion of

Re: [Marxism] Wikileaks in its broader context - Assange at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum - transcript 2

[Ralph Johansen]

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["He who controls today`s Internet servers, controls the intellectual 
record of mankind."]


In the UK right now, there are 300 secret gag orders. Those are gag 
orders that not only prevent the press from reporting corruption and 
abuse; they prevent the press from reporting that the press has been 
gagged. This is not the liberal democracy that we had all dreamed of. 
This is an encroaching, privatized censorship regime. And just like 
everything else in the West that becomes privatized and fiscalized, 
censorship also is not only a mechanism that is implied by the state. It 
is something that can be hijacked by wealthy plutocrats, by big 
companies, to use the coercive mechanisms of the State through the 
judicial system, through unequal access to the judicial system, through 
patronage networks, to have material removed permanently from the 
historical record.

So, in the West --- and we are, after all, in Norway --- we should not 
be too proud about our sense that there is no state censorship, because 
we have privatized state censorship. We have made it more complex and 
not as obvious. It is not a brute hammer anymore. It is a sophisticated 
device, like money laundering through Caribbean tax shelters is a 
sophisticated device, where the brutality is hidden in its complexity.

Similarly, when we see the path that countries like the United States -- 
which once had a proud tradition of freedom of the press ---is going 
down, we have to question whether it is really holding those values 
anymore, and what we should do about it. Because, if we don't have 
Western countries as a beacon on the hill for Enlightenment values, what 
countries are left to hold that value?

You may -- those of you who are familiar here with World War II --- 
remember the statement that was put by the Nazis on front of 
concentration camps that "work brings freedom," an idea that Himmler had 
when he himself was in prison. But in my investigations of exposing 
documents which include many abuses by the United States military, which 
includes the main manuals for prison camps, like Abu Graibh, Bagram and 
Guantanamo, I have seen pictures on the front of those camps of their 
slogans, So guess which camp has "Honor bound to defend freedom" on the 
front of it. The defense of freedom as a value is on the front of 
Guantanamo Bay. And I say that as a perversion of the truth that slogan 
is worse than "Work brings freedom." And we in the West should be aware 
of that perversion.

And understand that the alliance which once existed between liberals and 
libertarians and the military-industrial complex in opposing Soviet 
abuses in the Cold War - is gone. Where once upon a time people who 
stood up for enlightenment values domestically, in Western countries, 
who stood up for human rights and freedom of the press domestically in 
Western countries, liberals, libertarians and the press itself were in a 
tacit alliance with warhogs. They were in a tacit alliance with those 
people who opposed the Soviet Union merely for geopolitical reasons. And 
that alliance was to pick up a moral stick and to beat the Soviet Union 
for its abuses, its terrible abuses, censorship  The government. and 
military joined this alliance in recognition of the geopolitical value 
of the alliance as a moral stick with which to beat the Soviet Union for 
its terrible abuses in its censorship. As of 1990-91 that artificial 
alliance, that temporary alliance. had dissipated, with reversion to a 
different standard, where the natural interests of authority, the 
natural interests of the intelligence agencies and the natural interests 
of the military is in stifling press reportage of abuse, and it has been 
reasserted in Western countries.

In this broader framework of what we do, it's to try and build a 
historical, intellectual record of how our civilization actually works 
in practice, now, from the inside, everywhere, in every country around 
the world, from the inside.

Because all of our decisions, individual decisions, our political 
decisions are based on what we know. Humanity is nothing but what we 
know and what we have. And what we have can be replaced and degrades 
quickly. And what we know is everything and it is our limit of what we 
can be. So before we can embark on any particular political stratagem we 
first have to know where we are. If we don't know where we are, it's 
impossible to know where we're going. Likewise, it's impossible to 
correct abuses unless we know that they're going on.

So I ask you to think about the words of  Macchiavelli, think about them 
in their negative, when he said, "Thus it happened in matters of state 
when knowing afar off which is only given a prudent man to do the evils 
that are brewing, they are

[Marxism] Wikileaks in its broader context - Assange at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum - transcript 1

[Ralph Johansen]

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This is the transcript of a more philosophical exposition of the basis 
for the existence of Wikileaks, most of which is online, and the rest of 
which I have filled in. It's just about 2000 words, but I send it in two 
installments, and I put it here because although there's been a citation 
here to the audio version, it's more critically viewed in print form. I 
think it is important to be aware of thisbroader context in some 
detail,and who holds it, at a time when there are many insidious and 
some devastating challenges to it and to Assange himself and surely more 
to come. Some of what he says is of course all too evident to those on 
this list, but it helps also to know what explicitly they're about and 
what it is that can be so threatening about their task. He's right about 
the encroaching memory erasure, the alien control over the record of 
collective experience that we are going through, and the desperate need 
to oppose it.

I think this needs badly to be said and done, and I think Assange in his 
quite eloquent public presentations is doing an admirable service. I 
only take exception to one remark here, where Assange says of declining 
Enlightenment values, and he refers more specifically to human rights 
and the freedom of the press, that "if we don't have Western countries 
as a beacon on the hill for Enlightenment values, what countries are 
left to hold that value?That probably is unexceptionable in a liberal 
context as it has been brought to us in all our enlightened Western 
hubris, but it identifies him somewhat, because he should by now know 
better. (Lacks class.)/
/

Transcript of Julian Assange's speech at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum

I'm very pleased to be amongst so many people I can respect. I don't 
think I have ever been in a room with so many people that I think hold 
to my values. That is really an extraordinary honor and I am very 
grateful to the organisers for inviting everyone and me. I see in the 
front front row we have Anwar Ibrahim who I met in Malaysia last year at 
a by-election for the opposition. Just after speaking to Anwar, a few 
hours later that night, I was detained by the secret police in Malaysia, 
so when you speak to him be careful.

So we have heard a lot here about the problems in the developing world 
and in the work that I have done, certainly I have covered many of those 
and we are censored in all the rogues gallery states of China, Iran, 
Israel.

I don't want to talk however, today, too much about that because 
censorship in the West is also a problem, and censorship in the West is 
used to legitimise censorship in other countries, and /abuses in the 
West of Enlightenment ideals, which we should all hold dear, and the 
corrosion of those ideals not only impoverishes Western countries, it is 
also used as an excuse for terrible abuses in other countries, in 
particular countries that follow the common law that was set up by the 
British Empire. For example, abuses of libel law are used in Africa to 
imprison some fine journalists in severe conditions, based upon 
precedent set in the U.K. /

So, I'm not sure how many people here are familiar with the basics of my 
work...now I'll just try and go very briefly through that so you can 
understand where I'm coming from.

As a journalist, and as a programmer, and as someone who was involved in 
the embryonic Internet, and bringing the Internet to people and bringing 
that great tool of information and publishing freedom to people, I saw 
that we could achieve a lot of reform with a little bit of work. And of 
course, you all know this, and you should /remember Solzhenitsyn's 
words, that, "In the right moment, one word of truth outweighs the world." /

Solzhenitsyn was referring to a world of lies. But this still is true, 
free information across the world, and it's also true of the information 
in the West, that, /in some cases, one classified video can possibly 
stop a war, and maybe fifty -- definitely can. So we tried to pull 
together a system to automate that process to get as much new material, 
sensitive material, restricted material -- material that we thought 
would achieve political reform into the historic record and keep it there./
/
/ /We have, in the process, become the publisher of last resort./ We, in 
the past three years, have been attacked over 100 times legally, and 
have succeeded against all those defenses by building an international, 
multi-jurisdictional network, by using every trick in the book that 
multinational companies use to route money through tax havens. Instead, 
we route information through different countries to take advantage of 
their laws, both for publishing and for the protection of sources. And 
that endeavor has been successful in putting over

[Marxism] Re FBI creates, thwarts "terrorist plot" around allegedly angry teenager

[Ralph Johansen]

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This was sent to me by Mike Munk of Portland

A Portlander who spoke with members of the local Somalian community 
about the kid reports here:

http://agonist.org/mmeo/20101127/the_portland_bomber which also links to 
the FBI docs.


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[Marxism] Chinese consumer the hope of the world?

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/11/28/magazine/china-portfolio.html


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Re: [Marxism] Sweden Issues Arrest Warrant for WikiLeaks' Assange

[Ralph Johansen]

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Joaquín Bustelo wrote

I don't particularly LIKE Assange. He seems like a smarmy, 
self-satisfied, quite comfortable in his privileges gavacho...I'll say 
that I have close to zero doubt that the charges against Assange could 
very well be true.

_

What arrant, thoughtless bilge.

Here's a guy who has worked incessantly and against all odds to bring up 
these materials which outdo anything anyone has done since another very 
courageous person, Dan Ellsberg, brought us the Pentagon Papers. Assange 
has done this at serious risk of assassination, being chased all over 
the globe, eluding the many agents capable of doing him in, fearing for 
his life, also risking almost certain destruction of his credibility and 
reputation, which is now taking place in spades, while American 
journalists largely ignore what he has done and minimize its import, 
while like NYT's John Burns playing up the smear. What company you keep.

Have you heard him speak as to his motivation and his mission? Did you 
listen to the London press conference in which he and Ellsberg 
participated? Where in those words do you detect smarm and privilege? 
Where in your arrogant, thoughtless ramblings is the fading presumption 
of innocence, which I would expect would be of particular concern to 
anyone participating in this list, komrade?


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[Marxism] WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Walks Out of CNN Interview

[Ralph Johansen]

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CNN had the appallingly bad editorial judgment to sic a young cub 
reporter to perform this hatchet job on Wikileaks founder Julian 
Assange, who was invited expressly to talk about the massive release of 
Pentagon documents which included the newly-disclosed deaths of 104,000 
people while under the control of the occupying US government. He 
handled it with admirable reserve and dignity, and eloquently exposed 
CNN as the craven hacks that they truly are. How could any sentient 
viewer, having seen this, any longer rely for news on CNN, 
self-described as 'among the world's leaders in online news and 
information delivery'?

http://readersupportednews.org/video/4-video/3731-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-walks-out-of-cnn-interview
 



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[Marxism] PBS 's flagrant definition of news

[Ralph Johansen]

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PBS NewsHour executive producer Linda Winslow: "... FAIR seems to be 
accusing us of covering the people who make decisions that affect 
people's lives, many of whom work in government, the military, or 
corporate America. That's what we do: we're a news program, and that's 
who makes news."

So PBS just echoes the corporate media in performing what is supposed to 
be its most important function, objective information - and PBS 
therefore doesn't warrant public support, anymore than do Fox, CNBC or CNN!

No surprises here for this list - but it's an open acknowledgment that 
confirms for others what we know well.

Read the entire PBS/FAIR exchange at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4186



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[Marxism] NYTimes trashes Wikileaks founder

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?_r=1&hp

. . . . .

Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own 
comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious 
behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness 
that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.

. . . . .

Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan 
documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for 
NATO 

 
troops. "We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke 
about it afterwards," said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks 
volunteer and a member of Iceland's Parliament. "If he could just focus 
on the important things he does, it would be better."

He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and 
molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange has denied the 
allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in 
Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight 
weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his 
quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he 
characterizes the claims as "a smear campaign," the scandal has 
compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.

. . . . .

Within days, his liaisons with two Swedish women led to an arrest 
warrant on charges of rape and molestation. Karin Rosander, a 
spokesperson for the prosecutor, said last week that the police were 
continuing to investigate.

. . . . .

The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and 
supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United 
States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its 
prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing 
celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and 
capricious style.

. . . . .



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Re: [Marxism] Miliband: living wage for reduced labor hours

[Ralph Johansen]

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  Gary MacLennan wrote:

it seems to me that what is happening is a general degrading of people's 
morale...

The big question is what will the workers do? No one knows the answer. 
The workers, I repeat understand they are supposed to tighten their 
belts and "Work for Britain" or the equivalent.



I am reminded again that, If this system of predatory capital 
accumulation and expansion no longer works for the great majority of us, 
and more and more billions of people on the planet are dis-served and 
impoverished under the system of capital accumulation and it isn't 
getting any better for them but palpably worse - - then why on earth 
would any working person think of capitalist, barbaric, dystopian 
solutions as real and the prospect of annealing, socially-based 
solutions as frivolously utopian?

One reason (and it's cause for circumspection and humility among us who 
are over forty or fifty), is that most of those now living, who were 
born in the last forty years, have seldom or never seen success from 
acting together as insurgents against capital - one might only have seen 
the collapse of the Soviet states, the reversion of China, Vietnam, and 
possibly to some extent the modification of the long, 
direct-in-their-face Cuban experiment, to capitalism of one sort or 
another; or recall that the last massive protest, ten million or more 
worldwide against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, ended without 
accomplishing anything meaningful as a result of our efforts and 
outrage; to the present truculent smashing and containment of small 
groups of protesters against the US's middle eastern wars and at the 
political conventions; the increasingly mechanized, automated and 
computerized surveillance and remote-controlled destruction across the 
planet; the absence of workers' strikes and work stoppages and sit-ins 
and sabotage; all have jobs to keep, debts to pay, offspring to protect. 
The directors of the capitalist enterprise have really pulled off a long 
wool-over, if now somewhat in disarray; and that's all been hard on the 
collective identity, and the wind has becalmed and temporarily left the 
collective sails.

We didn't see or have a part in the trembling of Europe and the general 
euphoria at the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, the mid-19th century 
revolt against slavery, the paralysis of the great powers after the 1st 
World War when Russia and some of its eastern European neighbors joined 
in the Soviet state; those under fifty did not see the stand down of 
capital in China in the 1940s, the incomprehension and anger in the time 
of Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and the Kennedys when Cuba had its 
revolution just off-shore in the late 50s, the fear of the Johnson and 
Nixon coteries at the fierceness of the Vietnamese resistance and the 
massive protest against the Vietnam War, the great civil rights marches 
and rage in the ghettos and the liberation of Algeria and numerous 
African and Asian colonies, all in the 60s, the breaking forth also of 
righteous anger in France, the US, the rest of Europe and elsewhere in 
1968, or the retreat of US imperialism from Vietnam in the 70s; and 
those workers' strikes and work stoppages and sit-ins and sabotage which 
the working class heartbreakingly undertook in the 19th and the 1st 70 
or 80 years of the last century. There are still some outposts of 
resistance in the last forty years - the change in South Africa in the 
90s, Cuba, Venezuela, the resistance in among other places Iraq, 
Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, Nicaragua and Somalia. But not enough 
to sustain a feeling of our collective strength.

That's not, as we say, the end of history. Our faith in a species that 
has been so astoundingly creative and resourceful throughout its history 
is fully justified - and not simply because the privileged captains of 
capital have with ingenuity overcome so many of their barriers to 
predatory accumulation. They're not in the least more ingenious: they've 
just have had an easier and better learning curve because they wield the 
power and therefore can more readily learn the ways.

We who are or who align with workers live, we learn, we scratch our 
heads, study, tack, fulminate, gesticulate, innovate and maneuver, 
charge and fall back; just look at how much more we understand, thanks 
initially and mainly to Marx and Engels, all the time about the system 
to which we are subject and how it operates, as we accrue experience and 
a lengthening history of struggle; that experience and knowledge 
permeates broadly and is not lost in the working out of our destiny and 
common welfare. Remembering that it took several years for protest to 
build from the mindless late 20s into the 

[Marxism] IMF fears 'social explosion' from world jobs crisis

[Ralph Johansen]

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  [Acknowledging the real economy: "A joint IMF-ILO report said 30m jobs 
had been lost since the crisis, three quarters in richer economies. 
Global unemployment has reached 210m. "The Great Recession has left 
gaping wounds. High and long-lasting unemployment represents a risk to 
the stability of existing democracies," it said.

The study cited evidence that victims of recession in their early 
twenties suffer lifetime damage and lose faith in public institutions. A 
new twist is an apparent decline in the "employment intensity of growth" 
as rebounding output requires fewer extra workers. As such, it may be 
hard to re-absorb those laid off even if recovery gathers pace. The 
world must create 45m jobs a year for the next decade just to tread water."]


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/8000561/IMF-fears-social-explosion-from-world-jobs-crisis.html


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[Marxism] # Re: A response to Blankfort's hatchet job on Chomsky

[Ralph Johansen]

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  Manuel Barrera wrote:

I am frankly baffled by this seeming nuance; that one should not 
"boycott Israel", but promote divestment of U.S. corporations who 
support Israel. How does one not promote the oppression of the 
Palestinian people by supporting in any way for Israeli society to 
continue existing?

---

1/4 of Israelis are non-Jewish (mostly Arab) and there is a sizable 
Jewish contingent in Israel who oppose the present Zionist government's 
policies with respect to Palestinians, and they get a hearing to some 
extent in the Israeli and international media. One obvious problem with 
boycott is it hurts the working class most, and that includes most Arabs 
in Israel. They would be far more impacted by an effective boycott than 
by a divestment campaign against US corporations. Divestment, as was the 
case with South Africa, affects the moving parties most directly. But 
notwithstanding, if there is a viable Palestinian movement for BDS, then 
the question of support for that movement may be evaluated positively. 
But certainly, emphasis should be on divestment, as Chomsky says. Agree?


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[Marxism] Roubini anticipates 1.5 percent growth, risk of negative feedback, double dip recession

[Ralph Johansen]

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  [in the second half of the year, due to the housing market, bank 
lending, and job growth all being poor, Roubini expects 1.5% GDP growth.]

Read more: 
http://www.businessinsider.com/roubini-double-dip-2010-7#ixzz0upcMIAh7

[3% is, according to Roubini and the conventional wisdom, the growth 
threshold for a "healthy" economy; less than 3% is sluggish, with a 
tendency to a negative feedback effect on jobs, inventory, plant and 
equipment utilization; below 1% is crisis, with many capitalists showing 
no profit at all. Growth from 1945-1973 was about 5%. Throughout the 
history of capitalism the compound rate has been around 2.25%, while in 
the 1930s it was negative. According to David Harvey in his The Enigma 
of Capital.]

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Re: [Marxism] Erdogan argues independent Turkey is good for US -- but US isn't buying

[Ralph Johansen]

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Fred Feldman wrote

June 12, 2010
For Turkey, an Embrace of Iran Is a Matter of Building Bridges


Source, please?


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[Marxism] Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination by Henry Siegman [Haaretz]

[Ralph Johansen]

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Hi all, perhaps the most amazing piece on the Gaza massacre -- 
particularly given the source. Henry Siegman was for years director of 
the American Jewish Congress, and one of the most influential leaders of 
the US pro-Israel movement.

For Henry Siegman to compare Israeli policies to those of the Nazis, 
even though he appropriately recognizes they are not identical, is 
stunning. We should get this around to every member of Congress.

Phyllis Bennis
*
Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination
*/If a people who so recently experienced such unspeakable inhumanities 
cannot understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions 
are inflicting, what hope is there for the rest of us?
/By Henry Siegman
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/israel-s-greatest-loss-its-moral-imagination-1.295600
 




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[Marxism] Israeli Lies Exposed: Smuggled Clip Shows IDF Executing Injured Activist (Possibly the American Furkan Dogan)

[Ralph Johansen]

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[I can't make this out very well at all; maybe others can]


Israeli Lies Exposed: Smuggled Clip Shows IDF Executing Injured Activist 
(Possibly the American Furkan Dogan)

By Dave Lindorff

The false narrative initially put out by Israeli government officials of 
hapless IDF commandos severely threatened by hardened "terrorists" on the Mavi 
Marmara has fallen apart, amid revelations of doctored photos, dubbed voices 
and other deceptions and by the patent absurdity of the claim that the 
commandos had boarded the ship armed only with "paint guns" and low-caliber 
pistols.

This new video, smuggled out by the captured Freedom Flotilla captives, showing 
IDF commandos brutally kicking their captive, who is clearly posing no threat 
to them, and then executing him with four shots from a semi-automatic rifle, 
gives the lie to the whole sordid cover-up. 

The commandos were on the ship with intent to kill and injure, and that's what 
they did.

There are claims from Turkish sources that this clip shows the 19-year-old 
American-born Furkan Dogan being executed. Dogan's autopsy showed he was shot 
four times in the face, and at least once in the back.

So far, the President Obama and the White House and State Department have made 
no condemnation of Israel's attack in international waters on a civilian ship 
flying the flag of a NATO ally.

_

To view the tape, please go to http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/95

WARNING: This is a brutal video of an actual execution.



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[Marxism] Obama Expands Covert Military Operations

[Ralph Johansen]

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("The order was first reported by the New York Times May 25 and 
officials told AFP the account was accurate...[It will] expand military 
operations beyond war zones...(and) authorizes an expansion in the use 
of U.S. special forces throughout the Middle East, U.S. officials said.")

http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
OBAMA EXPANDS COVERT MILITARY OPERATIONS
Compiled May 26 from Agence France Presse,
London Times, and Dreyfuss Report

The U.S. military has ordered an expansion of covert military operations 
in the Middle East and east Africa to disrupt Al-Qaeda and other 
militant networks, officials have said.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, issued the order Sept. 30 
to bolster intelligence gathering against Islamist extremists and lay 
the ground for possible attacks by U.S. forces, officials said. The 
order was first reported by the New York Times May 25 and officials told 
AFP the account was accurate.

The move was designed to "penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy" 
Al-Qaeda and other groups in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, the order 
states, according to the Times. The operations were supposed to "prepare 
the environment" for potential U.S. attacks in the future, but a 
specific country is not singled out in the document for a possible strike.

The order also allows for reconnaissance before possible military action 
in Iran, amid mounting tensions over Tehran's nuclear program. Pentagon 
officials sought to play down the significance of the order, saying it 
did not represent a dramatic break with past practice.

While the directive echoes moves by the administration of former 
president George W. Bush to expand military operations beyond war zones, 
it is designed to outline a more long-term, structured approach, 
officials said.

In a related development, the London Times reported the following May 26:

Teams of American special forces have been authorized to conduct spying 
missions intended to pave the way for a military strike on Iran in case 
President Obama orders one, U.S. government sources have confirmed.

The military units would penetrate Iranian territory to reconnoiter 
potential nuclear targets and make contact with friendly dissident 
groups, according to a secret directive written by General Petraeus. The 
document's existence was disclosed for the first time yesterday.

It authorizes an expansion in the use of U.S. special forces throughout 
the Middle East, U.S. officials said. However, it is the possibility of 
American troops operating covertly inside Iran that has the greatest 
potential to destabilize regional security

News analyst Robert Dreyfuss, in the May 25 Dreyfuss Report, commented 
that the secret military directive "appears to authorize specific 
operations in Iran," continuing:

If President Obama knew about this, authorized it and still supports it, 
then Obama has crossed a red line, and the president will stand revealed 
as an aggressive, militaristic liberal interventionist who bears a 
closer resemblance to the president he succeeded than to the ephemeral 
reformer that he pretended to be in 2008, when he ran for office. If he 
didn't know, if he didn't understand the order, and if he's unwilling to 
cancel it now that it's been publicized, then Obama is a feckless 
incompetent

If Congress has any guts at all, it will convene immediate investigative 
hearings into a power grab by Petraeus, a politically ambitious general, 
and the Pentagon's arrogant Special Operations team, led by Admiral Eric 
T. Olson, who collaborated with Petraeus. And Congress needs to ask the 
White House, What did you know, and when did you know it?"

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[Marxism] Euro crisis in figures

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-54629.html


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[Marxism] An Immigrants' poem, "Imagine the Angels of Bread" by Martin Espada

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/az-governor-april-poetry_b_554934.html#

The poet Martin Espada is the son of a close friend of mine who came to 
the Bronx in the late 30s from Puerto Rico and was never allowed to 
forget his origins and therefore his place. And to have a son who, in 
the second generation, remembers so well is a true blessing.

/Imagine the Angels of Bread/
Martin Espada

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.



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Re: [Marxism] Marx in college?

[Ralph Johansen]

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- Original Message -
From: "brendan cooney" 

I am sometimes asked by young people where they can go to study Marx in 
college. I find it disheartening to have to try to explain to a young, 
eager person interested in Marx how few programs there are that really 
do Marx any justice. I usually say to check out UMass Amherst and UC 
Santa Cruz but I don't know of any good recommendations after that. I 
was hoping folks on this list might help me compile a more definitive 
list of recommendations.



Ask David Horowitz


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[Marxism] 'Venezuela 2d most dangerous for trade unionists after Colombia' - BBC

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/americas/8583662.stm


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Re: [Marxism] What is the biggest flaw in the labor theory of value?

[Ralph Johansen]

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Philip Dunn wrote

"for instance, uncultivated land may have a price, though it has no 
value, since no human labor has been incorporated in it." Here it is the 
assumption that all value is embodied labour value that causes the 
problem. Similarly, it is questionable whether the value of money and 
the value of labour-power are best understood as embodied labour.
---
Mehmet Catagay has responded to the foregoing as I was typing this, 
but anyhow why not put it something like this: uncultivated land in the 
desert, the middle of the ocean, air in space have no value, nor price, 
unless: as with uncultivated land, sea or space that has the potential 
to be husbanded in any way, be it pasturage, crop planting, subsurface 
mineral potential, location of industrial or residential property or 
what have you, earth's materials and surrounds derive value from their 
potential or present capacity to have commodity value realized from them 
by being developed by human labor. Otherwise, they have no value in the 
sense in which this term is used in Marx's analysis of capital. Think 
oxygen bars in central Tokyo.

Marxmail's purpose as I understand it is to explicate and develop what 
Marx wrote and more importantly to relate this as well as possible to 
what we've experienced in the past and present, bringing in events as 
they either raise problems for and call into question, are illustrative 
of the utility of Marxist perspective, or call for further development 
of Marx's incomplete theorization of capital. That is not a task for 
dilettantes, which I call myself unless I am familiarizing myself with 
Marx's precepts and method; it is nevertheless a task for those who 
aspire to understand, and it might if more consistently implemented on 
this list result in a much-reduced quantity of exchange (though I 
suspect not for long) and a much higher quality. Without that effort, we 
don't get very far past the current headlines.

In that spirit I have over the years read Marx's Capital volume 1 
several times, most recently with the help of David Harvey's excellent 
online 13-session course. I have also just received his newly-published 
"A Companion to Marx's Capital", I'm reading volume 2 for the first time 
(I am an exasperatingly slow reader, at least until I begin to get it, 
although I can race through fiction), and I'm about 190 pages into 
Harvey's newly published, updated edition of "The Limits to Capital". It 
would be helpful to me to have an online course on volumes 2 and 3 of 
Capital. I asked Goldner if he could go online with his present course 
in NYC on volume 2, and he replied that he and his cohort teacher are 
not so sophisticated.

I'm learning that, If what I understand to be the purpose of the 
Marxmail list is correct, I don't see how people have the temerity to 
hold forth here unless they as a prerequisite have thoroughly understood 
or are with due humility in the process of trying to read and understand 
what Marx wrote, as well as finding the more trenchant objections to his 
critique of capitalism. Everything short of that largely results in a 
surfeit of blather, and it dilutes and can destroy a list like this. 
That's so basic to keeping our thinking caps on straight, or else losing 
the vitality of discussion. Case in point is what happened several years 
ago to the old unmoderated Socialist Register list, and what takes place 
on other lists similar to this, as they atrophy and disappear. I don't 
think shifting this range of tasks to Levy's invitation-only list, 
however well it works there or whatever the original intent, is 
appropriate any longer. As long as the discussion is moderated so as to 
avoid one-upping and pettifogging.

A now-deceased CP friend taught Capital during the 30s Depression in 
workers' groups and observed that once it was presented clearly to 
experienced wage workers, whatever their formal education, they got it 
immediately.

Even some who may have thoroughly absorbed Marxian theory and with whom 
I agree on most issues, I question. Leo Panitch, for example, is a 
well-respected, challenging and very productive thinker and doer on the 
left, who professes to be a Marxist.  I am searching through his 
writings online and in the Socialist Register but do not yet see how 
Panitch in a recent inerview can say, "I have never been particularly 
attracted to value theory, in the sense that the only surplus is 
produced by workers, in a narrow industrial sense" and  "I have never 
put much stock in the falling rate of profit as an explanation for 
capitalist crises" 
(http://platypus1917.org/2010/03/02/is-marx-back-an-interview-with-leo-panitch/ 
at 9:20 to 9:40 Part 1).  Of course, he qualifies his questi

Re: [Marxism] Obama's PATCO moment

[Ralph Johansen]

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Louis Proyect wrote

"I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think 
part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 
1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of 
America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill 
Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the 
country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses 
of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there 
wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I 
think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, 
which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that 
sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

--Barack Obama

On August 3, 1981 the union [PATCO] declared a strike, seeking better 
working conditions, better pay and a 32-hour workweek. In doing so, the 
union violated a law {5 U.S.C. (Supp. III 1956) 118p.} that banned 
strikes by government unions. However, several government unions
(including one representing employees of the Postal Service) had 
declared strikes in the intervening period without penalties.[citation 
needed] Ronald Reagan, however, declared the PATCO strike a "peril to 
national safety" and ordered them back to work under the terms of the 
Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Only 1,300 of the nearly 13,000 controllers 
returned to work.[4] Subsequently, Reagan demanded those remaining on 
strike return to work within 48 hours, otherwise their jobs would be 
forfeited. At the same time Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis 
organized for replacements and started contingency plans. By 
prioritizing and cutting flights severely, and even adopting methods of 
air traffic management PATCO had previously lobbied for, the government 
was initially able to have 50% of flights available.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_%281968%29
 


NY Times
March 6, 2010
School’s Shake-Up Is Embraced by the President
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and SAM DILLON

A Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire the entire faculty of a 
poorly performing school, and President Obama’s endorsement of the 
action, has stirred a storm of reaction nationwide, with teachers 
condemning it as an insult and conservatives hailing it as a watershed 
moment of school accountability.

The decision by school authorities in Central Falls to fire the 93 
teachers and staff members has assumed special significance because 
hundreds of other school districts across the nation could face 
similarly hard choices in coming weeks, as a $3.5 billion federal school 
turnaround program kicks into gear.

While there is fierce disagreement over whether the firings were good or 
bad, there is widespread agreement that the decision would have lasting 
ripples on the nation’s education debate — especially because Mr. Obama 
seized on the move to show his eagerness to take bold action to improve 
failing schools filled with poor students.

“This is the first example of tough love under the Obama regime, and 
that’s what makes it significant,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice 
president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, an 
educational research and advocacy organization.

clipped

--

The juxtaposition of news items Lou posted yesterday under this heading 
is right on the mark and provoked further thoughts. It needs an expanded 
analysis. Chris Hedges and others are poking at it. So, a brief attempt 
at speculation and spelling it out:

Many discussions around March 4 have appeared on list concerning the 
attack on teachers and public educational institutions. It's of course 
being presented in the media and by official spokespersons as a personal 
problem blamed on teachers, students and parents.

Do we need reminding of the job of teachers in over-crowded inner-city 
schools and what a punishing, undervalued, demoralizing existence it is 
- to say nothing of the captive students and the force-fed test and 
regurgitate, rigid, state-mandated curricula? Think of the air traffic 
controllers during Reagan's tenure who struck for a 32-hour work week, 
and what their job was in coordinating the perilous flow in the context 
of over-strained, harrowing problems of inadequate airport 
infrastructure, at a time when air traffic was burgeoning.

I hope and trust that protesters are on to what the threat really 
amounts to more broadly (rally speeches aren't published, at least not 
where I've found them) and therefore what the thrust of protest and 
resistance will have to be that:

There is even less need now than ever for an educated workforce, that 
is, the training 

Re: [Marxism] Climate denial grows in Britain

[Ralph Johansen]

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Shawn Redden wrote

In all the hullabaloo yesterday, I missed the link Comrade Johansen sent 
out from one of those writers who has had his bread buttered for a 
couple decades by the "global warming" industry.

Before stovepiping the bourgeois analysis of global warming 
true-believers like McKibben (he got Frank Lunz's memo and now calls it 
"climate change"), it's worth taking a look at what he supports.

Going beyond his idiotic analogies and conspiracy theorizing, McKibben 
specifically cites, links to, and endorses a carbon-dioxide 
privatization scheme belched out of the Senate:

Unlocking the Green Economy: How Carbon Pricing Can Open the Floodgates 
of Private Investment in Clean Energy
http://cantwell.senate.gov/issues/Institute%20for%20Policy%20Integrity%20study.pdf

I assume that you don't endorse the idea of CO2 privatization, Comrade 
Johansen? Am I wrong?

If one doesn't endorse this AND takes issue with those of us who see red 
flags in the UN's IPCC hucksterism (i.e., funding the use of computer 
models in the manner of a derivatives merchant and publishing one's 
massaged, speculative 'findings' as Truth) what does one in such a 
position propose as a means of dealing with climate change?

I am genuinely interested, but rather than answer this fairly 
straightforward question, only paeans to the objective, unbiased truth 
of "climate science", coupled with invective and name-calling have 
presented themselves.

I have made it abundantly clear that those guilty of poisoning the 
earth, destroying the biosphere, and seizing the gene pool (including 
the court 'scientists' who facilitate this rapacity) should be put 
before a firing squad - a scenario that is, admittedly, unlikely to occur.

But a guy can dream.

Soldiarity, Shawn
-
Shawn, I looked at this piece you refer to, How Carbon Pricing Can Open 
the Floodgates of Private Investment. No, I certainly don't agree with 
it and I didn't, still don't, know that McKibben does either, nor am I 
particularly concerned. McKibben, incidentally, doesn't appear on the 
Board of Advisors noted in this article you refer to, nor is he named in 
the footnotes.

 From what little I've read about it I think carbon pricing, CO2 
privatization as you call it, is part of the problem in that it appears 
to be another way to profit from misfortune without mitigating the 
disastrous effects of CO2 in any significant way. And without question 
people like Inhofe and others on the right who are the principal climate 
deniers are profiting handsomely from siding with the energy 
corporations. Quoting McKibben:

2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol
Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted
to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of
such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of
support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest
industry on the planet: the energy business.

But that doesn't speak to the issue. There'll be a whole lot of people 
who will figure out how to get rich off of any catastrophe. There 
probably were many who made book on aspects of Katrina or Haiti - 
certainly the charter school advocates in the case of New Orleans ,and 
no doubt real property speculators everywhere. But I don't see what it 
has to do with McKibben or his article or the merits of the general 
scientific consensus on global warming.

I don't enough about the reliability of the specific computer technology 
or the hard facts on which scientists have reached this consensus; 
that's one of the problems, few of us do, and the argument from 
authority is never sufficient to convince many who perceive much of 
public life as deliberate deception; one thing that has bothered me is 
that it has been pointed out that there have been many chicken little 
type scares in the recent past which have turned out to be 
tissue-gossamer. But I have seen photos, heard from and read accounts 
from those who have seen with their own eyes the precipitate melting 
taking place in the Arctic seas and in glacial land areas. That takes 
this way beyond speculation based on programmed projections, and beyond 
reliance on authority alone - although the consensus among those who 
should know appears, not chicken little, but to be so impressively 
pervasive. I have read what Bellamy Foster, Burkett and others have 
written as well. And that to me makes it imperative that we pay close 
attention, because the prospects for the survival of countless species, 
including ours, is apparently riding on the outcome.

As to the "idiotic analogies and conspiracy theorizing" that you ascribe 
to McKibben, what of 

Re: [Marxism] The Warlords of Afghanistan

[Ralph Johansen]

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Greg McDonald wrote

http://www.warlordsofafghanistan.com/author.php
-

Interesting and shows a lot of painstaking work, although the author 
ends his profile of Aghani warlords (Gul Agha Shirzai) with this 
observation:

"Reforming Kandahar is not as easy as replacing the governor; we have to 
teach modern institutions to the people. Crazy as it sounds, this is 
possible. Athens and Rome, the very founders of modern government, 
started with tribes. But it can't be done in a day. It takes 
generations, and we haven't started."




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Re: [Marxism] Tritium Hot Zone Expands Around Vermont Nuclear Plant

[Ralph Johansen]

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"VERNON - The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be 
"a very large area" at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated 
with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise."

//David:  A picocurie is to a curie as a penny is to 10 BILLION DOLLARS, 
and a curie is not even a very large unit of measure. A curie of tritium
weighs just 0.1 milligrams.?

//What can this conceivably do to allay concerns of someone who knows 
nothing of curies as a measure of relative hazard - "not even a very 
large unit of measure"?  William Irwin, radiological health chief, is 
quoted in the article as saying that there are many potential sources of 
radioactive water at this particularly high concentration of tritium. 
High levels. Is he incompetent? Is the nuclear industry acceding to 
ridiculously low levels of endangerment in  the federal standards? The 
level of contamination recorded on Monday was 2.52 million picocuries 
per liter of water. The federal standard for drinking water is 20,000 
picocuries per liter, according to the article and David doesn't respond 
to this assertion. Is that a standard that was reached by compromise 
with the industry as it's reasonable to assume? That's on the face of it 
an enormous disparity. And saying that the test wells are not used for 
drinking water doesn't pass the smell test. Everyone in the area has 
drinking water wells, apparently, likely of varying depth - so far 
untested, also according to the article, although the few deep water 
wells tested so far, it doesn't say where or how many, have tested 
tritium-free. The indications in the article are that very few have so 
far been tested.

He said the area of contamination was roughly from the reactor building 
to the Connecticut River.

//Connecticut River? That's the largest river in New England, flowing 
through Vermont, New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, and finally 
emptying into Long Island Sound - flowing through farm and urban areas 
for miles before it reaches the ocean.

He said another groundwater monitoring well was in the final stages of 
being put into use and more wells might be drilled to help define the 
plume of contamination.

//Might be? The article states that the leakage was discovered in 
November in one of three 2007 monitoring wells! "The first indication of 
the contamination showed up in November in one of three 2007 monitoring 
wells and the levels quickly rose starting in January. New wells, closer 
to the reactor and turbine buildings, show contamination in extremely 
high levels."

Irwin said it was too early to say how long the leak or leaks had been 
active. "It could be months or even a year or two," he said.

"We have to uncover pipes and see what's leaking. And get a better image 
of flow times and flow directions," he said. Water flows west to east on 
the site, toward the Connecticut River. Some of the monitoring wells are 
15 to 20 feet from the river, while others are 100 feet or 200 feet away 
from the river.

//15 or 20 feet from the river! What is known for sure about ground 
seepage of hazardous materials?

Irwin said the Health Department is starting to test wells at private 
residences along Gov. Hunt Road, where Vermont Yankee is sited.
He said all of the private wells the state is testing are within a 
quarter of a mile of the plant and the point of the highest level of 
contamination.

//"Starting to test wells." Hang by your thumbs, neighbors. Don't panic. 
Just sit back and let your trusted experts handle things.

Irwin said the state was looking to add five or six private residences 
to the state's weekly testing program, but he said the state had to get 
landowners' permissions. He said the department wanted to publish those 
test results, with the names of the individual homes kept confidential.

//Five or six at a time out of how many?

He said the Department of Health is testing private wells at Vernon 
Elementary School, which he estimated was just under a quarter of a mile 
of the contamination. The state is also testing water at two area farms 
- the Miller farm, which he said was about a quarter of a mile north of 
the plant, and the Blodgett farm, which, he said, was a mile from the 
plant "as the crow flies."

In addition, the Vernon Green nursing home and residential center is 
also being tested, he said. He estimated Vernon Green was about a 
half-mile south of the plant.

//Public schools and nursing homes!

Why does this statement of David's seem, in view of the above, grossly 
disingenuous to me: "That means that anti-nuclear activists are
seriously advocating shutting down a power plant with a proven history 
of providing a reliable, affordable, emission free source of 620
Megawatts of electricity into a

[Marxism] Tritium Hot Zone Expands Around Vermont Nuclear Plant

[Ralph Johansen]

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Published on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 by The Rutland Herald (Vermont)
Tritium Hot Zone Expands Around Vermont Nuclear Plant

by Susan Smallheer

VERNON - The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be 
"a very large area" at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated 
with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise.

Because the area is so big, according to William Irwin, radiological 
health chief, there are many potential sources of radioactive water at 
this particularly high concentration of tritium.

"This is a very large area that encompasses many potential sources of 
water at this concentration of tritium, including the condensate storage 
tank and the systems and components of the advanced off-gas system," 
Irwin said late Monday afternoon.

He said the area of contamination was roughly from the reactor building 
to the Connecticut River.

Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear said Monday the new well 
with the highest level of contamination saw its concentration drop a 
little on Sunday to 2.38 million picocuries per liter, but went higher 
on Monday, to 2.52 million picocuries per liter of water. The federal 
standard for drinking water is 20,000 picocuries per liter.

Williams said Entergy Nuclear investigators were working on a strategy 
for excavating the area next to the well with the highest contamination 
levels.

Irwin said despite the increased levels of tritium, no other 
reactor-related radioisotopes have been identified in testing.

He said another groundwater monitoring well was in the final stages of 
being put into use and more wells might be drilled to help define the 
plume of contamination.

Irwin said it was too early to say how long the leak or leaks had been 
active. "It could be months or even a year or two," he said.

The first indication of the contamination showed up in November in one 
of three 2007 monitoring wells and the levels quickly rose starting in 
January. New wells, closer to the reactor and turbine buildings, show 
contamination in extremely high levels.

"We have to uncover pipes and see what's leaking. And get a better image 
of flow times and flow directions," he said. Water flows west to east on 
the site, toward the Connecticut River. Some of the monitoring wells are 
15 to 20 feet from the river, while others are 100 feet or 200 feet away 
from the river.

Irwin said the Health Department is starting to test wells at private 
residences along Gov. Hunt Road, where Vermont Yankee is sited.

He said all of the private wells the state is testing are within a 
quarter of a mile of the plant and the point of the highest level of 
contamination.

Irwin said the state was looking to add five or six private residences 
to the state's weekly testing program, but he said the state had to get 
landowners' permissions. He said the department wanted to publish those 
test results, with the names of the individual homes kept confidential.

He said the Department of Health is testing private wells at Vernon 
Elementary School, which he estimated was just under a quarter of a mile 
of the contamination. The state is also testing water at two area farms 
- the Miller farm, which he said was about a quarter of a mile north of 
the plant, and the Blodgett farm, which, he said, was a mile from the 
plant "as the crow flies."

In addition, the Vernon Green nursing home and residential center is 
also being tested, he said. He estimated Vernon Green was about a 
half-mile south of the plant.

There are no municipal water systems in Vernon, he said, and every 
business and home is dependent on its own well.

Irwin said the Vernon health officer had done some initial private well 
testing when the tritium contamination problem first was made public.

Irwin said all deep wells are testing free of tritium.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat whose district 
includes communities in Vermont Yankee's emergency planning zone, 
visited the plant Monday and said he was satisfied with the effort by 
Entergy to try and find the leak or leaks.

But Hodes, who is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican 
Sen. Judd Gregg, said he planned on introducing a bill that would give 
neighboring states with towns in the emergency planning zone surrounding 
a nuclear power plant some say in the plant's operation.

"Catastrophes do not make exceptions for state boundaries and neither 
should laws designed to protect from them," said Hodes. "Granite Staters 
live within earshot of this nuclear power plant and I believe that 
guaranteeing the safety of Vermont Yankee is central to guaranteeing the 
safety of our citizens," he said in a prepared release.

Under the Hodes' proposal, states in the emergency zone

[Marxism] Venezuelan government writes off Haiti's debt

[Ralph Johansen]

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www.*pslweb.org*
Venezuelan government writes off Haiti's debt
Saturday, February 6, 2010
By: Derek Ford

In brief

During the closing ceremony of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas 
(ALBA) in late January, President Hugo Chávez announced that Venezuela 
will forgive Haiti’s debt.

Referring to the example of the Haitian revolution and the support the 
country provided the independence movement that liberated Venezuela from 
Spanish rule, Chávez stated: “Haiti has no debt with Venezuela. … It is 
Venezuela that has a historic debt with Haiti.”

The International Monetary Fund estimates Haiti’s debt to Venezuela at 
$295 million—almost one-third of Haiti’s international debt. The IMF, 
for its part, has mentioned nothing of cancelling Haiti’s substantial debt.

Since the earthquake, Haiti has received 225,000 barrels of oil through 
Petrocaribe, a regional energy alliance launched by Venezuela intended 
to equalize access to energy. Venezuela has pledged to meet the fuel 
distribution needs of the Haitian people without cost. Additionally, 
during a special meeting of ALBA member-countries allocated $120 million 
to aid in the development of industry, agriculture and vital social 
services.



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Re: [Marxism] reset to 5.31.2008

[Ralph Johansen]

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"Joaquin Bustelo" wrote

Kathleen [kmcook] writes about the Democrats: "The party needs to get 
back to honesty and open government."

Hi. Let me suggest you're on the wrong mailing list. There isn't anyone 
hereabouts who think the Democrats were EVER about "honesty" and "open 
government" and much less that somehow they were democratic until May 
2008. The Democrats are the oldest continuous capitalist party in the 
world, and as such are merely continuing to be true to the tiny clique 
of bankers and big businessmen (and, yes, it had been almost exclusively 
"men") who have been he true masters of this country since it was founded.

You will probably be more comfortable posting in forums like the 
Huffington post or MSNBC or with that sort of outlook. Continuing to 
post here most likely will simply get you pilloried.

Joaquin
--
I don't know what the demographics Les is generating will show about the 
participation of women on this list, if that's even an item in the 
compilation, but this is certainly not going to help anyone find their 
"comfort level" or increase their understanding. No one has mentioned 
this for some time, but it needs to be taken up repeatedly. I know that 
a lot of those contributing and lurking here didn't get involved forty 
years ago in a deep reading of the Marxist classics, or in 20th century 
Trotskyist sectarian politics, and if this is predominantly an old boy 
network rehashing past sectarian history and nattering on about arcane, 
often extraneous trivia instead of continually offering a leg up to the 
newly aware, then we'll wait patiently and regretfully for its demise. 
But it's a shame, because flaming and pillorying contests will, despite 
the moderators' occasional reminders, surely drive younger, otherwise 
responsive people of any gender away who could find value here and 
thereby be part of the solution, especially if they weren't overwhelmed 
by static that has no meaning for them. There's much otherwise very 
helpful information to be gained here, and very few other places, for 
anyone seeking to join in the effort for a saner, more equitable world, 
and we may or may not be ever mindful that the philosophical and 
theoretical underpinnings of the living Marxist project address that, 
are profound beyond measure and will outlast pettifogging, wherever it 
occurs. The mission statement on Lou and Les's prefatory page declares 
that this list has a very good signal to noise ratio, and while that may 
be comparatively true it's still drearily high. That's perhaps an 
inescapable aspect of largely anonymous email exchanges, where people do 
not meet face to face and one-up-person-ship is often present, but this 
doesn't help any of us, man or woman, attend to the main objectives that 
discussion here is purportedly about.

Ralph


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[Marxism] France accuses US of 'occupying' Haiti as troops flood in

[Ralph Johansen]

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Venezuela and Nicaragua have made similar charges, and Spain has also 
charged the US turned its flights away. What? Shock doctrine? Bases in 
Haiti?
 
*US accused of 'occupying' Haiti as troops flood in
*By Aislinn Laing, and Tom Leonard in Port-au-Prince.
Telegraph (UK)Jan 18 , 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7020908/US-accused-of-occupying-Haiti-as-troops-flood-in.html
 
The French minister in charge of humanitarian relief called on the UN to 
"clarify" the American role amid claims the military build up was 
hampering aid efforts.
 
Alain Joyandet admitted he had been involved in a scuffle with a US 
commander in the airport's control tower over the flight plan for a 
French evacuation flight.
 
"This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti," Mr Joyandet said.
 
Geneva-based charity Medecins Sans Frontieres backed his calls saying 
hundreds of lives were being put at risk as planes carrying vital 
medical supplies were being turned away by American air traffic controllers.
 
But US commanders insisted their forces' focus was on humanitarian work 
and last night agreed to prioritise aid arrivals to the airport over 
military flights, after the intervention of the UN.
 
The diplomatic row came amid heightened frustrations that hundreds of 
tons of aid was still not getting through. Charities reported violence 
was also worsening as desperate Haitians took matters into their own hands.
 
The death toll is now estimated at up to 200,000 lives. Around three 
million Haitians -- a third of the country's population -- have been 
affected by Tuesday's earthquake and two million require food assistance.
 
While food and water was gradually arriving at the makeshift camps which 
have sprung up around the city, riots have broken out in other areas 
where supplies have still not materialised.
 
Haiti was occupied by the US between 1915 and 1935, and historical 
sensitivities together with friction with other countries over the 
relief effort has made the Americans cautious about their role in the 
operation.
 
American military commanders have repeatedly stressed that they are not 
entering the country as an occupying force.
 
US soldiers in Port-au-Prince said they had been told to be discreet 
about how they carry their M4 assault rifles.
 
A paratrooper sergeant said they were authorised to use "deadly force" 
if they see anyone's life in danger but only as a "last resort".
 
Capt John Kirby, a spokesman for the joint task force at the airport, 
said the US recognised it was only one of a number of countries 
contributing to a UN-led mission.
 
He also emphasised the US troops, which he said would rise to 10,000 by 
Wednesday would principally be assisting in humanitarian relief and the 
evacuation of people needing medical attention.
 
The main responsibility for security rests with the UN, which is to add 
a further 3,000 troops to its force of 9,000.
 
However, it was agreed on Sunday night that the Americans would take 
over security at the four main food and water distribution points being 
set up in the city, Capt Kirby said.
 
"Security here is in a fluid situation," he said. "If the Haitian 
government asked us to provide security downtown, we would do that." He 
played down the threat of violence, saying: "What we're seeing is that 
there are isolated incidents of violence and some pockets where it's 
been more restive, but overall it's calm."

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[Marxism] MSF Teleconference on Haiti Earthquake on January 18

[Ralph Johansen]

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MSF logo

January 18, 2010 Teleconference on Haiti Earthquake on January 18, 2010

© Joshua Lutz/Redux

Benoit Leduc, MSF operations manager for Haiti

Benoit Leduc, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 
operations manager for Haiti, and Loris de Filippi, MSF operational 
coordinator in Port-au-Prince, participated in a teleconference with 
press regarding MSF's response to the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Listen:

Download

Avril Benoit: Welcome to the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans 
Frontières (MSF) media briefing. I’m Avril, director of communications 
based in Toronto. My name is A-V-R-I-L. Last name is B-E-N-O-I-T.

The purpose of the briefing is to give you the latest update from two of 
our most senior operations people in Port-Au-Prince. Benoit Leduc is 
emergency coordinator. His first name Benoit is spelled B-E-N-O-I-T and 
his family name, Leduc, is L-E-D-U-C. He can answer questions on our 
humanitarian response, security, issues around the cargo planes, and all 
the incendiary issues that are making our work very difficult…quite a 
challenge. Also with us to provide an additional medical overview is 
Loris De Filippi. Loris is spelled L-O-R-I-S, and De Filippi is D-E 
F-I-L-I-P-P-I. Loris has a medical background and is in Haiti as a 
coordinator for MSF, in Choscal in City Soleil, amongst other duties. 
So, for the first 30 minutes of this briefing we will talk in English, 
and then we will switch to French

(2:01) Benoit Leduc: Hello everybody, so just to describe what we’re 
seeing today. Basically we’re seeing the patients that arrived to our 
structures, the existing structures in Port-au-Prince, and some of these 
structures have been damaged. So, patients were inside and people 
continue who, I mean, are wounded, trauma fractures, people coming to 
our structures. So we have been forced to reorganize, either move the 
structure when the (earthquake) hit, or make makeshift hospital and 
surgical capacity, and we operate also in places that we’ve invested 
with our teams and our materials. So now we have all these patients, a 
lot of amputations, a lot of trauma, head injuries, and these people are 
waiting for operations. Pretty quickly…Now it’s day 6 so we are just 
trying to build up our surgical capacity and treat all those people who 
need treatment pretty soon.
(3:00) And of course we are behind pace, it’s really a risk. So that’s 
the first thing, the structures. Now, we have five structures in which 
three of them it’s possible to do surgery. We are clearly seeing 
altogether over a thousand patients. Registration was a bit chaotic but 
we’re pretty sure that this amount were able to reach us. And perform 
300 surgical operations At the same time we’re trying to see what’s 
happening in the western areas like Jacmel, Saint Marc, Petit Goave, 
Léogâne—places which have been very badly hit. The epicenter was on that 
side, in the southwest part of Haiti. So we have teams doing exploratory 
missions.

Access is pretty difficult; they had to hire a helicopter to go there. 
Basically, a lot of destruction in the town and no health capacity, no 
treatment operational, and it’s again the same—they need surgery and the 
trauma, it is a very urgent thing. Then of course in town, a lot of 
internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, difficult to count, difficult 
to get accurate figures. Most probably, when we talk of over 200,000 
people sleeping in the streets, in any open space, any empty space they 
can find. You have groups of like several hundred families, thousands of 
people, sleeping there on the plastic sheeting. What else do we see? 
There’s little operations going on. I know there are a lot of plans, a 
lot of teams on their way, but concretely there’s been only ad hoc food 
distribution, water distribution, or any action in assistance to the 
displaced people in town. Things are building up.
(5:00) It’s difficult operations; we are facing logistic constraints. We 
had five of our planes: three cargo planes and two for expatriate staff. 
I’m talking of surgical teams that we tried to send in pretty quickly. 
Five of these planes were refused to land, had to go to Santo Domingo 
across the border. So these are additional delays. We clearly have like 
48 hours additional delays because of these access problems to the site.

For our cargo, we’re bringing inflatable hospitals, with a 100-bed 
capacity, with 2 operating theaters, we have all the teams coming, and 
the drugs. Right now some of our structures are out of supplies. We have 
the team, we have the operational theaters functional, ready for staff, 
but we’re lacking some essential drugs. So this is something we’re 
trying to work on. We’re doing this stuff as fast as possible. Because 
bas

[Marxism] Re Here it comes, Here comes the night

[Ralph Johansen]

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"S. Artesian"  wrote

 From the FRB Beige Book:

Overall economic activity continued to weaken across almost all of the
Federal Reserve Districts since the previous reporting period. Most
Districts noted reduced or low activity across a wide range of industries,
although a few Districts noted some exceptions in some sectors.
District reports indicate that retail sales were generally weak,

clip

http://www.federalreserve.gov/FOMC/BeigeBook/2009/20090114/default.htm

--

Joke? Birthday memo? This is dated 01-14-09.


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[Marxism] Geostrategic significance of Yemen to US imperialism

[Ralph Johansen]

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html

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[Marxism] Obama's spooky past?

[Ralph Johansen]

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  Frank Espada wrote:
> Hello Ralph: 
>
> Here's a peek at our new regent.  The more things change...
December 28-30, 2009
Obama's White House Press Corps warned about asking certain questions

WMR has learned from a veteran member of the White House Press Corps 
that the Obama administration has made it known through White House 
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and other White House Communications 
officials that certain questions posed by the reporters who cover the 
White House are definitely off-limits.

On the banned list are any questions about Obama's post-Columbia 
University employment with Business International Corporation (BIC), a 
global financial and political information company that WMR previously 
reported was a front for the CIA. White House Press Corps members have 
been quietly told that any questions related to BIC, Obama's withheld 
records while he was a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles from 
1979 to 1981, or his records at Columbia, are forbidden.

At the same time he was attending Occidental, Obama, using the name 
Barry Soetoro and an Indonesian passport issued under the same name, 
traveled to Pakistan during the U.S. buildup to assist the Afghan 
mujaheddin.

WMR has learned from informed sources in Kabul that Obama has been 
extremely friendly, through personal correspondence on White House 
letterhead, with a private military company that counts among its senior 
personnel a number of Afghan mujaheddin-Soviet war veterans who fought 
alongside the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Masood. The 
firm is also involved in counter-insurgency operations in Colombia, 
where Obama is building seven new military bases, and Iraq.

In 1981, Obama spent time in Jacobabad and Karachi, Pakistan, and 
appeared to have an older American "handler," possibly a CIA officer. 
WMR previously reported that Obama also crossed the border from Pakistan 
and spent some time in India.

At the time of Obama's stay in Pakistan, the country was being built up 
as a base for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency by President Carter's 
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and later by President 
Reagan's CIA director William Casey.

Obama has suspiciously refused to release his transcripts from 
Occidental or Columbia University and he has remained cagey about his 
post-Columbia employment with BIC. The word from the White House Press 
Corps is that if anyone were to ask Obama about BIC or possible past CIA 
work, domestically or abroad, the offending reporter would see a quick 
pulling of the White House press credential.

The White House website states the following about openness and 
transparency by the Obama administration:

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level
of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the
public trust and establish a system of transparency, public
participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our
democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
BARACK OBAMA"

..

Frank, what's the url for this and who is WMR?

This is a strange article, with little documentation other than an 
anonymous veteran member of the White House press corps and someone in 
Kabul. Claiming that White House officials are specifically calling off 
questions on Obama's life as a student and his post undergrad 
activities. Very strange, almost sounds like The Onion or the barf about 
birthing .

I had read of the alleged BIC connection before, but this thickens the 
plot. It figures, but what's the angle? That he had begun his career as 
a spook for the CIA, but then what?

I personally have thought for some time that Obama has been carefully 
groomed and vetted for his job - just what the suits need after the 
in-your-face, breathtaking delegitimation during the preceding eight 
years, a new boy with no vulnerable track record in politics, promising 
change and new directions, an anomalous, youthful, articulate, 
pseudo-African-American with a beautiful family and well-groomed fellow 
Harvard Law spouse, with no blood ties or social background in or close 
identification with the class base in the US that his color implies, 
despite marking brief-time as a social worker in south Chicago while 
domiciled on the upscale north side. Slowly but keenly obtaining focus. 
With the moguls of Goldman Sachs and the Chicago machine's Rahm Emanuel 
as policymakers and conduit. Raveling up the knitted sleeve of global 
disaffection, in permanent war, economic and social and climate 
meltdown. A Pied Piper of misguided but ever more desperately hopeful 
lemmings.

Talk about imaginative marketing strategy, if true.

What else don't we know?

And don't wis

Re: [Marxism] ReSocialism and the defense of public education: Shift toHealth

[Ralph Johansen]

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Carroll Cox wrote

That said, may I note that what radicals, marxist or otherwise, think of
this bill is utterly irrelevant to anything. The bill's chances are not
improved by the support of radicals, and it is not threatened by
opposition from radicals. Refere nes to "The Left" in the United states
are references to a non-existent entity. There are 10s of thousands (or
more) of individual leftists but no coherent left that can have any
impact on public affairs.
--

Carroll, I don't agree at all. That is a give-up position and one I've 
noticed you have brought out many times. My own experience is that I 
(and many others, I am convinced) glean what I regard as significant 
information from various news sources and left lists, I send them out to 
a list mainly composed of acquaintances whom I could characterize as 
mainly reformist Democrats, ex-Democrats or independent in political 
orientation, who may not be reading periodicals beyond maybe the Nation, 
Huffington Post, Progressive or other 'liberal' information sources. 
Where I don't think it might be obvious to the reader, in my comments I 
try to connect the dots to show as clearly as I can why the system of 
capital accumulation can't produce anything but further obfuscation and 
growing contradiction in the set of circumstances at issue.

It's becoming much easier to do this, the clearer that things appear to 
me, and as more people seem amenable to our point of view, and as almost 
patently outrageous events increasingly occur. I know that a number of 
other left friends, who read this and similar lists but may not 
contribute here, are doing the same, sending to liberal acquaintances 
who are experiencing obvious disconnects, whoever might seem reachable. 
I often get their mailings. I think we are relevant, and in some ways 
the main hope. If what we profess makes eminent sense to us. why should 
we not assume that it makes sense to others? I know that this is how I 
learn, and I'm positive, from seeing others' changing orientation, so do 
others. And this has always been so, but possibly more than ever now, 
when the nature of ruling class power is becoming ever more transparent 
and their legitimacy is more in question.

Ralph


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Re: [Marxism] Capital Class

[Ralph Johansen]

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It's unfortunate that arrangements haven't been made to video tape these 
sessions. David Harvey did so with his 13 classes on volume 1 of Capital 
and they were excellent. What's badly needed and could be made available 
for those who are not in the NY area, which is almost all of us, is the 
up-coming courses on volumes 2 and 3.

"S. Artesian"  writes:

 > From Loren Goldner:
 >
 > Since early October, Howie Seligman and Loren Goldner have been
 > teaching a Capital study group in the New York area. We will complete
 > Vol. I next Wednesday Dec. 23.
 >
 > We will be continuing with Vols. II and III from January through early
 > June. We will be meeting every other Wednesday night from 7 to 10 PM,
 > at a convenient location on W. 28th St. in Manhattan. We will probably
 > start vol. II on either Jan. 6 or Jan. 13.
 >
 > I have been handling the close reading of Capital and Howie has been
 > providing technical analysis of current developments. This arrangement
 > will continue and will of course be as closely related as possible to
 > the concepts introduced in vols. II and III.
 >
 > If you are interested in participating, contact me at
 >
 > lrgold...@yahoo.com

"S. Artesian"  writes:

 From Loren Goldner:

Since early October, Howie Seligman and Loren Goldner have been teaching 
a Capital study group in the New York area. We will complete Vol. I next 
Wednesday Dec. 23.

We will be continuing with Vols. II and III from January through early 
June. We will be meeting every other Wednesday night from 7 to 10 PM, at 
a convenient location on W. 28th St. in Manhattan. We will probably 
start vol. II on either Jan. 6 or Jan. 13.

I have been handling the close reading of Capital and Howie has been 
providing technical analysis of current developments. This arrangement 
will continue and will of course be as closely related as possible to 
the concepts introduced in vols. II and III.

If you are interested in participating, contact me at

lrgold...@yahoo.com


Bill O'Connor wrote

I can't recommend Loren's group highly enough. If you're in New York
City, you should really get in on it.


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[Marxism] After Obama Visit, Assessing U.S.-China Relations: Orville Schell on Fresh Air

[Ralph Johansen]

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This transcript is informative and challenging and worrisome - and well 
worth reading.

With my limited computer skills I haven't figured out how to locate a 
url through my Firefox browser. Google orville schell + fresh air.

Early warning? This administration and those to come trying to run 
things in the US may well be running out of patience with this 
recalcitrant system in the context of prolonged, intractable crisis. 
Also, the growing clout of China must be keenly felt. And successive US 
administrations may even be able as events develop to get electoral 
assent (especially given the tumultuous right wing and the apathetic 
left wing) to an even vastly stronger executive, increasingly bypassing 
the Congress and hog-tying the courts. Schell's perceptions here may be 
prescient and widely felt among US policymakers. And that's either 
extremely alarming or I'm merely an alarmist.

Council on Foreign Relations member Orville Schell, who accompanied 
Obama to China, on Terry Gross's Fresh Air today: "I heard a statistic 
the other day that a couple years ago China had 700 miles of high-speed 
rail, and now they have 7,000 miles. Now, I may have those statistics 
slightly off, but that's a staggering figure. The United States really 
doesn't have one mile.

We have the corridor from Boston to New York to Washington, but that's 
not really high-speed rail. That's sort of faster-speed rail. So you see 
the infrastructure that's getting laid down, the new highways, the new 
airports, the new ports, the new railroad systems. It's extremely 
impressive, and I think, you know, it raises a question that is sort of 
frightening to contemplate for an American, and that's this: _/*Does the 
Chinese system, this sort of autocratic form of capitalism, deliver 
better than democracy?*/_

And as an ardent democrat, I contemplate the answer to that question 
with some trepidation, because I think, you know, we feel in America, 
and in fact I think it's more than a feeling, that _/*in many ways our 
government is paralyzed, paralyzed by a lack of money, paralyzed in 
Congress, paralyzed by sort of vicious partisan politics, whereas China 
is able not only to gather information well but to form policy quickly 
and then, most importantly, to effect it.*/_ And you feel that 
everywhere you look in this country now, that they are on top of things, 
they're able to do things swiftly to meet the very high-speed demands of 
the situation, whereas I think we are kind of languishing in many 
respects, and I'd say climate change is a kind of a metaphor for how 
difficult it is for us to do things, and health care would be another."]



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Re: [Marxism] Socialist Voice: China /Fidel /Class/ U.S. Health Care

[Ralph Johansen]

  Re: [Marxism] Socialist Voice: China /Fidel /Class/ U.S. Health Care
  S. Artesian"


  I'm sorry, Les, I did it again. I forget to remove the name from my
  cut and paste. etter next time.


Ralph


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Re: [Marxism] Socialist Voice: China /Fidel /Class/ U.S. Health Care S. Artesian"

[Ralph Johansen]

S. Artesian wrote:

In 2003, US Census Bureau reported 45 milllion US residents without health
insurance.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p60-226.pdf


Don't you agree that it should not be difficult to construct an 
extrapolation from these official 2003 estimates that would establish 
that, with the rise in layoffs and plant closures, the reduction in 
working hours and benefits generally in the past 4 years, including 
uninsured and unpolled immigrants, the number of those without health 
care by now stands at well more than 50 million?

Ralph


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Re: [Marxism] Teddy

[Ralph Johansen]

Jim Farmelant wrote:

///I think that Louis Proyect had gotten closer to an answer when he 
posted on Ted Kennedy's early championing of deregulation in trucking 
and transportation.


I recall also when Ted Kennedy was featured on the evening news shortly 
before the US "recognized" China, coming from Beijing where, one can be 
sure, he was the courier, the young wheeler-dealer, nailing down aspects 
of the general agreement on trade and tariffs, the quid pro quo with the 
Chinese government to open China wide to US investment and use of cheap 
Chinese labor and a commanding share in the proceeds of platform 
production in the traditional coastal enclaves, in return for US 
recognition of China's right to exist -- all to the protracted detriment 
of US workers.

And before that, at the 1956 Democratic convention, I remember seeing on 
my postage stamp-size television set Walter Cronkite pointing out 
without comment the Kennedy brothers and their clan, including Sargent 
Shriver, Pierre Salinger and Tip O'Neill, circulating among the southern 
delegates. I later learned that what was taking place was a trade-off 
having to do with New England textile manufacturing moving to the 
southern states and their right-to-work laws and cheap labor; and that 
another part of the trade-off was that they would support the 1956 
candidacy of the southern favorite Estes Kefauver for Democratic 
presidential candidate and withdraw JFK's bid, in return for which the 
southerners would support John F. Kennedy in 1960 on the first ballot.

All par for the course for a friend of labor.

Incidentally and related to current developments with the health care 
debacle, I recall that Estes Kefauver chaired much-ballyhooed Senate 
investigations of the pharmaceutical industry which, despite the 
alarming, much-publicized  disclosures that those hearings produced 
concerning the bloated unearned profit-taking of pharma, ended in a 
weak, watered-down compromise. Shortly thereafter Kefauver died, and 
when they opened his estate to probate his portfolio was loaded with 
pharmaceutical stocks. And has everyone noticed that pharma stocks have 
been among those leading the current market blip/surge?

Those were intense learning days, all about accumulation of capital, for 
Ralphie. I don't have documentation for this, which must be available in 
the archives somewhere, and of course I wasn't recording this for 
posterity, I had no political affiliation on the left or elsewhere, but 
this is the sort of eye-opening stuff that I saw and learned at the 
time. No illusions about Camelot from then on.

Ralph


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Re: [Marxism] Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland

[Ralph Johansen]

Fact is, no one is protesting the wars any longer other than this 
dedicated woman and a few around her, and as Eli says, the few in SF. 
AFP has published the article below but US megamedia haven't picked it 
up, although I'm sure Sheehan has tried. And the writer of the CPunch 
article correctly points out that UFPJ has effectively slunk away. 
Meanwhile, drones and mercenaries and drugged and bamboozled GIs with 
massive indiscriminate fire power are destroying the people in another 
couple of countries, their economies and what's left of their cultures 
and if possible their capacity to resist. I would expect the response 
would be, why is no one declaring that they're joining her up there on 
the Eastern seaboard, or trying to get the word out - however they can, 
demonstrating in every way possible that Obama is sans clothing? And 
what is the merit in making this out to be a Libertarian point of view 
fagodssake?

Ralph


Sheehan returns to rebuke Obama
(AFP) – 1 day ago

OAK BLUFFS, Massachusetts — After spending weeks dogging George W. 
Bush's presidential vacations, anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan is now 
trying to make life uncomfortable for President Barack Obama.

Sheehan used to pitch a peace camp near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, 
becoming a symbol of the anti-war movement after her son Casey died in 
action in Iraq.

On Thursday, she and a band of anti-war protesters turned up outside the 
media center used by journalists covering Obama's vacation on the 
well-heeled east coast resort island of Martha's Vineyard.

"The reason I am here is because ... even though the facade has changed 
in Washington DC, the policies are still the same," Sheehan told a 
handful of journalists, against a backdrop of her "Camp Casey" banner.

She told US peace activists to wake up and protest Obama's escalation of 
the war in Afghanistan, and complained that despite the president's 
anti-war stance, US troops remained in Iraq.

"We have to realize, it is not the president who is power, it is not the 
party that is in power it is the system that stays the same, no matter 
who is in charge."

"We are here to make the wars unpopular again," she said.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.


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[Marxism] Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland

[Ralph Johansen]

  /The Silence of the Antiwar Movement is Deafening/


  Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland

By JOHN V. WALSH 
CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/walsh08262009.html
August 26, 2009 
Cindy Sheehan will be at Martha's Vineyard beginning August 25 a short 
way from Obama's vacation paradise of the celebrity elite but very far 
from the Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq where the body bags and 
cemeteries fill up each day as Obama's wars rage on. She will remain 
there from August 25 through August 29 and has issued a call for all 
peace activists to join her there. For those of us close by in the New 
England states and in New York City, there would seem to be a special 
obligation to get to Martha's Vineyard as soon as we can. 
 
A funny thing has happened on Cindy Sheehan's long road from Crawford, 
Texas, to Martha's Vineyard. Many of those who claim to lead the peace 
movement and who so volubly praised her actions in Crawford, TX, are not 
to be seen. Nor heard. The silence in fact is deafening, or as Cindy put 
it in an email to this writer, "crashingly deafening."  
 
Where are the email appeals to join Cindy from The Nation or from AFSC 
or Peace Action or "Progressive" Democrats of America (PDA) or even Code 
Pink? Or United for Peace and Justice. (No wonder UFPJ is essentially 
closing shop, bereft of most of their contributions and shriveling up 
following the thinly veiled protest behind the "retirement" of Leslie 
Cagan.)  And what about MoveOn although it was long ago thoroughly 
discredited as principled opponents of war or principled in any way 
shape or form except slavish loyalty to the "other" War Party. And of 
course sundry "socialist" organizations are also missing in action since 
their particular dogma will not be front and center. These worthies and 
many others have vanished into the fog of Obama's wars.
 
Just to be sure, this writer contacted several of the "leaders" of the 
"official" peace movement in the Boston area -- AFSC, Peace Action, 
Green Party of MA (aka Green Rainbow Party) and some others. Not so much 
as the courtesy of a reply resulted from this effort - although the GRP 
at least posted a notice of the action. (It is entirely possible that 
some of these organizations might mention Cindy's action late enough and 
quickly enough so as to cover their derrieres while ensuring that  Obama 
will not be embarrassed by protesting crowds.) We here in the vicinity 
of Beantown are but a hop, skip and cheap ferry ride from Martha's 
Vineyard.   Same for NYC.  So we have a special obligation to respond to 
Cindy's call.
 
However, not everyone has failed to publicize the event. The 
Libertarians at Antiwar.com are on the job, and its editor in chief 
Justin Raimondo wrote a superb column Monday 

 on 
the  hypocritical treatment of Sheehan by the "liberal" establishment.  
(1) As Raimondo pointed out, Rush Limbaugh captured the hypocrisy of the 
liberal left in his commentary, thus:
 

"Now that she's headed to Martha's Vineyard, the State-Controlled
Media, Charlie Gibson, State-Controlled Anchor, ABC: 'Enough
already.' Cindy, leave it alone, get out, we're not interested,
we're not going to cover you going to Martha's Vineyard because our
guy is president now and you're just a hassle. You're just a
problem. To these people, they never had any true, genuine emotional
interest in her. She was just a pawn. She was just a woman to be
used and then thrown overboard once they're through with her and
they're through with her. They don't want any part of Cindy Sheehan
protesting against any war when Obama happens to be president."
 

Limbaugh has their number, just as they have his.  Sometimes it is quite 
amazing how well each of the war parties can spot the other's hypocrisy. 
But Cindy Sheehan is no one's dupe; she is a very smart and very 
determined woman who no doubt is giving a lot of White House operatives 
some very sleepless nights out there on the Vineyard.  Good for her.
 
Obama is an enormous gift to the Empire.  Just as he has silenced most 
of the single-payer movement, an effort characterized by its superb 
scholarship exceeded only by its timidity,  Obama has shut down the 
antiwar movement, completely in thrall as it is to the Democrat Party 
and Identity  Politics.   
 
Why exactly the peace movement has caved to Obama is not entirely 
clear.  Like the single-payer movement, it is wracked by spinelessness, 
brimming with reverence for authority and a near insatiable appetite to 
be "part of the crowd."  Those taken in by Obama's arguments that the 
increasingly bloody and brutal AfPak war is actually a "war of 
necessity," should read Steven Walt's easy demolition of that 
"argument."  
(2) 
Basically Obama's logic is the same as Bush's moronic rationale that "We

Re: [Marxism] to read?

[Ralph Johansen]

guava tree wrote:

//do people think reading volumes 2&3 of Capital is more valuable than 
reading the Grundrisse?


David Harvey, who conducts a most helpful 13-class video course online 
on Capital volume 1 (which I recently took and thereby gained a much 
better understanding of the book), recommends going on from volume 1 to 
read both volumes 2 and 3. This is because they are organized 
sequentially: volume 1 takes up the production process of commodities 
under the system of capital accumulation, volume 2 deals with the 
circulation of capital and volume 3 develops from there the problems of 
the reinvestment and redistribution of capital surplus. I'm now reading 
volume 2 for the first time, using the online MIA study guide which, 
while its authors recommended it for group study, seems useful for 
individual study. They supply the relevant textual references for the 
issues raised in the guide.

Harvey's The Limits to Capital (New edition 2006) is in good part an 
exposition of volume 3 and its problems. It is difficult to sort out, 
according to Harvey, as to the functions - in the process of 
realization, mobilization and reinvestment of surplus and reproduction 
of capital - of interest, the credit system, financial innovation, the 
state and its institutional structures, and not least the failure of 
Marx to complete his analysis of the role of international trade - and 
how these factors contribute to and have helped to surmount the many 
barriers to the cumulative growth of capital - the overcoming of these 
barriers being absolutely essential to the perpetuation of the system.

Harvey lays out a lot of this very rapidly and succinctly in his CUNY 
lecture in November 2008 on The Enigma of Capital (available in audio 
form on Wikipedia). There he also briefly elaborates on the importance 
of the Grundrisse, which in its central parts also covers the notion of 
potential limits and barriers to the accumulation of capital, resulting 
crises and the manner in which they are transcended or circumvented. (Or 
not?)

Ralph


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[Marxism] US now has more US mercenaries than troops in Afganistan

[Ralph Johansen]

[By the end of the year, Obama will have almost 150,000 troops and 
mercenaries in Afghanistan, compared to 250,000, and counting, now in 
Iraq. It's another almost fool-proof way to continue to privatize 
government functions, ronin under the guise of "security contractors" 
and non-combatant service personnel. We already know that KBR and others 
are not just there to serve up snacks. As police forces, foreign troop 
training advisors or supplements, bodyguards, piloting armed 
reconnaissance planes and other military duties, they're effectively 
unlawful combatants under the Geneva conventions - with awesome, 
sci-fi-powerful weaponry. They are licensed by the State Department, 
they are contracting with foreign governments, training soldiers and 
reorganizing militaries in Nigeria 
, Bulgaria 
, Taiwan 
, and Equatorial Guinea 
. The PMC industry is 
now worth well over $100 billion a year. The sub-plot is 
unaccountability, covert atrocities: drones, satellite surveillance, 
private contractors, mercenaries, mega-corporate boondoggling, more 
sophisticated Pentagon-financed r&d, embedded journalists (if any, in a 
collapsing news market).  How can the liberals object, much less even 
have an inkling as to what's going on there? Don't even have to pile the 
wounded and body bags at military hospitals and installations.  All the 
WSJ et al can report if they so choose is how many, not what they're 
doing there, in those remote mountains and poppy fields. What gruesome, 
My Lai massacre-type stories are  developing for a Seymour M. Hersh-type 
or probing foreign reporter to tell some day - well after the event.  
And this form of off-the-charts warfare is endlessly expandable, in all 
corners of the strategically necessary planet.

Or ... is a bloated contractor presence also a form of Neo-Keynesianism, 
in a Depression plus Endless Wars? A new boondoggle CCC: contractor 
'conservation' corps, with Pentagon cover, and with no need to fight it 
out in the Congress, even or especially with Republicans since all 
districts benefit, and it's not even colorably welfare?]


Afghanistan Contractors Outnumber Troops Despite Surge in U.S. Deployments 
More Civilians Are Posted in War Zone; Reliance Echoes the Controversy 
in Iraq
By AUGUST COLE 
Wall Street Journal
August 22, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125089638739950599.html

Even as U.S. troops surge to new highs in Afghanistan they are 
outnumbered by military contractors working alongside them, according to 
a Defense Department census due to be distributed to Congress -- 
illustrating how hard it is for the U.S. to wean itself from the large 
numbers of war-zone contractors that proved controversial in Iraq.

The number of military contractors in Afghanistan rose to almost 74,000 
by June 30, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 U.S. soldiers on the 
ground at that point. As the military force in Afghanistan grows 
further, to a planned 68,000 by the end of the year, the Defense 
Department expects the ranks of contractors to increase more.

The military requires contractors for essential functions ranging from 
supplying food and laundry services to guarding convoys and even 
military bases -- functions that were once performed by military 
personnel but have been outsourced so a slimmed-down military can focus 
more on battle-related tasks.

The Obama administration has sought to reduce its reliance on military 
contractors, worried that the Pentagon was ceding too much power to 
outside companies, failing to rein in costs and not achieving desired 
results.

President Obama has repeatedly called defense contractors to task since 
taking office. "In Iraq, too much money has been paid out for services 
that were never performed, buildings that were never completed, 
companies that skimmed off the top," he said during a March speech.

In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to hire 30,000 
civilian officials during to cut the percentage of contractors in the 
Pentagon's own work force, and last month he told an audience of 
soldiers that contractor use overseas needed better controls.

Military contractors' personnel for a time outnumbered U.S. troops in 
Iraq. The large contractor force was accompanied by issues ranging from 
questionable costs billed to the government to shooting of civilians by 
armed security guards. A September 2007 shooting incident involving 
Blackwater Worldwide guards working for the U.S. State Department, in 
which 17 Iraqis were killed, forced the U.S. to aggressively rework 
oversight of security firms.

Yet in Afghanistan as in Iraq, the Pentagon has found that the military 
has shrunk so much since the Cold War ended that it isn't big enough to 
sustain operations without using companies to directly support military 
operations.

"Because of t

[Marxism] Africa: Improvement and the socialized white man's burden

[Ralph Johansen]

"This country is a time bomb," says Dirk Haarmann, reaching for his 
black laptop. "There is no time to lose,"

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,642310,00.html


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Re: [Marxism] Chris Hedges: Nader was right

[Ralph Johansen]

To a friend of 45 years in Florida, copied to list:

Somewhere I read - maybe I sent it to you - it was an excellent talk in 
SF by Mike Davis whom I am more or less paraphrasing - that after the 29 
crash, despite the crisis in people's lives, there was no automatic 
guarantee that massive layoffs and hunger would become a political 
issue. Whatever their ideological  shortcomings, It took several years 
of a committed, tightly disciplined, virtually kamikaze movement of 
Young Communist League cadre, withstanding truncheons, tear gas and 
jailings, to organize and spearhead protest demonstrations and strikes 
sufficient to alert the media to the fact that there were people out 
there suffering severely from the effects of a full-blown Depression. 
Until then, as is the case now, I'm told that the media ignored it. That 
in turn brought in FDR and the New Deal - but even that didn't take off 
until almost the last year of FDR's first term.

Where that might come from this time, with the working class lacking any 
effective organs of unity and the socialist alternative so recently 
discredited, and a level of what Nader describes as almost Bangladesh 
passivity, is the question that begs for a positive answer. At some 
point it seems as if the total delegitimation of the present way of 
doing things, with wealth continuing to pile up at the high end at the 
expense of all the others in an openly, heedlessly corrupt system where 
capital accumulation no longer serves the majority and which leaves more 
and more people jobless, homeless and the safety net broken, the 16 to 
25 year olds among us may somehow give vent to their wrath, in sheer 
righteous desperation, and the bounds of apathy may explode.  In LA a 
few years ago there were massive protests, schools emptied onto the 
streets across the barrios, Latinos of first, second and third 
generation protesting the (later ruled unconstitutional) Prop 187. 
There's enormous anger and distress growing, people losing everything 
they've worked for, workplace security, housing, education, health care, 
social safety net, future prospects, all slipping away.

And on the subject of California, in the midst of the fiscal debacle 
here, while  Arnie the Terminator and the legislature under the 
Democrats have been gutting social services to a Mississippi level in a 
state which still has unparalleled technological and productive 
capabilities and vast wealth, and what was once the finest education 
system in the US - Krekorian the Democratic assemblyman from Burbank 
sneaked through without hearings in the dead of night tax cuts for his 
film and aircraft and sundry other megacorporate friends of what is 
estimated as almost $900 billion over seven years, with only 8 Democrats 
voting against it. And while California has maybe the most powerful 
assemblage in the Congress of any state in at least the last 100 years, 
the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration are letting the 
state go down the sluiceways, fiddling while California burns.

With massive deficits, imports collapsing, China and others balking at 
the US continuing to print money like no tomorrow and threatening to 
cash in their Treasuries, the industrial heart of the US economy 
hollowed out and converted to a centralized, inflexible, increasingly 
oligarchical state-buttressed finance and low-paid service economy, how 
can there be a perception among the suites that there's wiggle room, 
sufficient productive activity for so much as even a partial, stop-gap 
Keynesian style solution?

Then most importantly there's the deteriorating environment, which only 
the most ideologically blinded can still deny and the depths of which no 
one yet knows, and for which there don't seem to be any viable solutions 
in a profit-driven, competitive world economy, where anything like 
effective cutting back, diversion of resources and long-term planning 
and cooperation across national boundaries appears hopelessly improbable.

So, for a positive bit - this time, if it should come to that, we might 
not settle for the old patchwork liberal corporate solutions, nor even 
the authoritarian alternative that the corporate state might get behind. 
Although I know that you, as a confirmed cynic, repeatedly choose to 
think that nothing is learned and nothing gained over time from our 
experiences, except the worst. We can hope and trust and above all work 
for the best, and we'll find out, should we live so long.


emil...@aol.com wrote:
> So, 100% agreement.  The people I know are not a good statistical 
> sample, but the most common thread is total disgust, yet passive 
> acceptance.  Comments like..."I'll never again work in a campaign, 
> give money, trust a candidate"...are pervasive. Nader, like Henry 
> Wallace, will be forgotten by almost everyone, but is a prophet in his 
> time.
>  
>  
>  
> In a message dated 8/10/2009 4:05:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
> mdriscol...@charter.net writes:
>
> Na

[Marxism] Is the US on the Brink of Fascism?

[Ralph Johansen]

Brow-furrowing Question of the Day: Despite what "legitimate scholars in 
the field" might think, why would this be considered a liberal, not 
marxist, analysis - which contains within it enough meat for frenzy but 
not enough for clarity and program? Or "proper parenting"?

["Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended 
to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which 
liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Elsewhere, he refines this further as "a form of political behavior 
marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or 
victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in 
which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in 
uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons 
democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without 
ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external 
expansion." Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most 
legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be 
referring to here. ]

 


  Is the US on the Brink of Fascism? 

Friday 07 August 2009
by: Sara Robinson 

*The Campaign for America's Future* 


All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives 
watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist 
rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and 
violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself 
powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new 
outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on 
right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried 
readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we 
there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and 
Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our 
maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of 
reassurance. "We...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change 
course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty 
of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as 
this looks: no -- we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied 
on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's 
pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 
1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued 
that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their 
rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature 
democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages 
that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the 
whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to 
our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain 
signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we 
just weren't seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's 
suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a 
while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there 
right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and 
are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now 
looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value 
American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing 
now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are 
allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.

*What Is Fascism?*

The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so 
long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." 
Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting 
Paxton's essential definition of the term:

 "Fascism is a system of political authority and social order
intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities
in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and
decline."

Elsewhere, he refines this further as:

 "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation
with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by
compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a
mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in
uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons
democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and
without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and
external expansion."

Jonah Goldberg aside

[Marxism] Der Spiegel interviews Zalaya

[Ralph Johansen]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,639791,00.html#ref=nlint


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[Marxism] Iran: Whose Side are You On?

[Ralph Johansen]

Iran: Whose Side are You On?
by William Bowles
Creative-i
July 27, 2009
 
I have been reading, with much despair and a deal of consternation, the 
torrent of 'analysis' coming out of 'left' field about which, if any, 
side to support in the ongoing struggles in Iran and, at the end of the 
day, a good deal more is revealed about the 'left' in the West than the 
situation in Iran.

Typically, the 'left' has much 'advice' to offer Iran, yet the real 
issue for us, here in the 'developed' world is what are we going to do 
about our governments. Yet such arrogance is not new, it has its roots 
in the ideology of racism which unfortunately permeates all of us here 
in the so-called developed world. We look outward instead of inward, 
where the issues we really need to confront, reside. Let the Iranian 
people get on with sorting out their own ruling class, they don't need 
us to 'guide' them.

Full: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23149.htm VIA cord 
macguire 

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