From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 1 09:40:12 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 11:40:12 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Trumka on race and the elections Message-ID: <48BBD49C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Here's the Trumka link: http://grandrapidsprogressive.blogspot.com/2008/07/video-afl-cio.html This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 1 12:30:47 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:30:47 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Leonard Peltier letter on Obama Message-ID: <48BBFC97.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.counterpunch.org/peltier08282008.html August 28, 2008 An Open Letter to Barack Obama Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change By LEONARD PELTIER I have watched with keen interest and renewed hope as your campaign has mobilized millions of Americans behind your message of changing a political system that serves a small economic elite at the expense of the peoples of the United States and the world. Your election as president of the United States, where slaves and Indians were long considered less than human under the law, will undoubtedly constitute a historic moment in race relations in the United States. Yet symbolism alone will not bring about change. Our young people, black and Native alike, suffer from police brutality and racial profiling, underfunded schools, and discrimination in employment and housing. I sincerely hope your campaign will inspire some hope among our youth to struggle for a better future. I am, however, concerned that your recent statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers who fired 50 shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law. Until the law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes functioned to sustain and legitimize an inhuman institution. As I can testify from experience, the legal institutions of this nation are far from racial and political neutrality. When judges align with the repressive actions and policies of the executive branch, injustice is rationalized and cloaked in judicial platitudes. As you may know, I have now served more than three decades of my life as a political prisoner of the federal government for a crime I did not commit. I have served more time than the maximum sentence under the guidelines under which I was sentenced, yet my parole is continually denied (on the rare occasions when I am afforded a hearing) because I refuse to falsely confess. Amnesty International, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, my Guatemalan sister Rigoberta Menchu, and many of your friends and supporters have recognized me as a political prisoner and called for my immediate release. Millions of people around the world view me as a symbol of injustice against the indigenous peoples of this land, and I have no doubt that I will go down in history as one of a long line of victims of U.S. government repression, along with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket Square martyrs, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and others targeted by for their political beliefs. But neither I nor my people can afford to wait for history to rectify the crimes of the past. As a member of the American Indian Movement, I came to the Pine Ridge Oglala reservation to defend the traditional people there from human rights violations carried out by tribal police and goon squads backed by the FBI and the highest offices of the federal government. Our symbolic occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 inspired Indians across the Americas to struggle for their freedom and treaty rights, but it was also met by a fierce federal siege and a wave of violent repression on Pine Ridge. In 1974, AIM leader Russell Means campaigned for tribal chairman while being tried by the federal government for his role at Wounded Knee. Although Means was barred from the reservation by decree of the U.S.-client regime of Richard Wilson, he won the popular vote, only to be denied office by extensive vote fraud and control of the electoral mechanisms. Wilson's goons proceeded to shoot up pro-Means villages such as Wanblee and terrorize traditional supporters throughout the reservation, killing at least 60 people between 1973 and 1975. It is long past time for a congressional investigation to examine the degree of federal complicity in the violent counterinsurgency that followed the occupation of Wounded Knee. The tragic shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and one Native man also led not only to my false conviction, but also the termination of the Church Committee, which was investigating abuses by federal intelligence and law enforcement agents, before it could hold hearings on FBI infiltration of AIM. Despite decades of attempts by my attorneys to obtain government documents related to my case, the FBI continues to withhold thousands of documents that might tend to exonerate me or reveal compromising evidence of judicial collusion with the prosecution. I truly believe the truth will set me free, but it will also signify a symbolic break from America's undeclared war on indigenous peoples. I hope and pray that you possess the courage and integrity to seek out the truth and the wisdom to recognize the inherent right of all peoples to self-determination, as acknowledged by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. While your statements on federal Indian policy sound promising, your vision of "one America" has an ominous ring for Native peoples struggling to define their own national visions. If freed from colonial constraints and external intervention, indigenous nations might well serve as functioning models of the freedom and democracy to which the United States aspires. Yours in the struggle. Until freedom is won, Leonard Peltier # 89637-132 U.S.P. Lewisburg, P.O. Box 1000, Lewisburg, PA USA 17837 Special Note: Please Help Support the LPDOC for Leonard's Freedom As Leonard Peltier marks his 64th birthday on Sept. 12, the LPDOC is redoubling its efforts to win his freedom. We are planning an ambitious organizing drive in our new Fargo office to persuade North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, to investigate the federal government's role in the violent counterinsurgency on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1973-1976, the FBI's withholding of thousands of pages of documents related to the AIM activist, and the unfair federal trial in Fargo which led to Leonard's conviction in 1977. Leonard is suffering from partial blindness, diabetes, a heart condition, high blood pressure, and prostate problems. He needs your help. We need your help too, if we are to do the work that needs to be done to obtain justice for one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world. At the moment, we are barely keeping up with our rent and phone bills, our two full-time staff members are working without pay, and we badly need a new photocopier. Due to the damaging actions of a former LPDC employee, who removed valuable office equipment and contributor records, we are rebuilding our committee virtually from scratch. We have found an experienced volunteer editor for our Spirit of Crazy Horse newspaper, but in order to resume publication, we will need your support. If you are able to contribute $20 or more for this campaign, you will receive a free subscription to the newsletter to keep abreast on developments in Peltier's campaign and in Indian Country generally. Please contribute as generously as you are able, and also take the time to write and/or call Sen. Dorgan With your help, we can win Leonard's freedom from the same city in which it was taken away. Even if you are unable to contribute at this time, please send us your name and address to help us rebuild our list of supporters at the state and national level. Please send your donation to: LPDOC PO Box 7488 Fargo, ND 58106 701-235-2206 Thank You, Betty Ann Peltier-Solano, Executive Director Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Mon Sep 1 18:43:13 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 09:43:13 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Ignoring the advice of philosophy guides on Sartre, I delved a bit into his later work, Critique of DR. This was envisioned as a two-volume work, but the second one Sartre abandoned, and it was published in an unfinished state posthumously. The first volume was published in 1960. That is the year Camus died, and one year before the death of Merleau Ponty. Reading through some of Sartre's CDR, I find it striking for a couple of reasons. In the way the close arguments are made, it reads a lot like Deleuze-Guattari, especially in the almost sociological analysis of groups. No wonder then that so many within 'disciplines' (such as philosophers expecting a work of philosophy) found it undisciplined. It's interesting to compare his analysis of 'what is a science' with Piaget's (although most others would probably be more interested in the differences and similarties in their theories of mind and consciousness). CDR also reveals just how much of structuralism Sartre had 'taken on' in both senses of the term. He really does incorporate what he thinks is of value in structuralism (in part through exchanges with Levi Strauss). It is also important to remember that much of what is set down in CDR stems from not only Sartre's experience of the events of the 1950s, but also his academic exchanges with the likes of Levi-Strauss and Althusser. Here are a few links (with small excerpts) to what I read through yesterday. The last link is to a book (online) that is largely an 'intellectual history' of Sartre's attempt to reconcile existentialism with Marxism. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre2.htm excerpt>>Scientific research can in fact be unaware of its own principal features. Dialectical knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge of the dialectic. For science, there is not any formal structure, nor any implicit assertion about the rationality of the universe: Reason is developing and the mind prejudges nothing. In complete contrast, the dialectic is both a method and a movement in the object. For the dialectician, it is grounded on a fundamental claim both about the structure of the real and about that of our praxis. We assert simultaneously that the process of knowledge is dialectical, that the movement of the object (whatever it may be) is itself dialectical, and that these two dialectics are one and the same. Taken together, these propositions have a material content; they themselves are a form of organised knowledge, or, to put it differently, they define a rationality of the world. excerpt>>The Dialectic in Marx Marx's originality lies in the fact that, in opposition to Hegel, he demonstrated that History is in development that Being is irreducible to Knowledge, and, also, that he preserved the dialectical movement both in Being and in Knowledge. He was correct, practically. But having failed to re-think the dialectic, Marxists have played the Positivist game. Positivists often ask Marxists how they can claim, given that Marx had the good sense to realise that 'pre-history' had not yet come to an end, to detect the 'ruses' of History, the 'secret' of the proletariat, and the direction of historical development. For Positivists, prediction is possible only to the extent that the current order of succession re-enacts a previous order of succession; and so the future repeats the past. Hegel could have answered them by saying that he had only predicted the past, in that his history was finished and complete and that, as a matter of fact, the moment which posits itself for itself in the process of living History can only guess the future, as the truth of its own incompleteness, unknowable for it. The Marxist future, however, is a genuine future: it is completely new, and irreducible to the present. Nevertheless, Marx does make predictions, and long term rather than short term ones. But in fact, according to Positivist Rationalism, Marx had disqualified himself from doing this, and given that he himself was pre-historical and within prehistory, his judgements can have only a relative and historical significance ? even when they concern the past. Thus Marxism as dialectic must reject the relativism of the positivists. And it must be understood that relativism rejects not only vast historical syntheses, but also the most modest assertions of dialectical Reason: whatever we may say or know, however close we may be to the present or past event which we attempt to reconstitute in its totalising movement, Positivism will always deny us the right. It does not regard the synthesis of all knowledge as completely impossible (though it envisages it as an inventory rather than as an organisation of Knowledge): but it considers such a synthesis impossible now. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate, in opposition to Positivism, how, at this very moment, dialectical Reason can assert certain totalising truths ? if not the whole Truth.<< http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/racism-algeria.htm excerpt: >>A young soldier who 'did his military service' in Algeria (I am thinking of the heyday of colonialism, between 1910 and 1935) was himself ambivalent in his discovery of himself and of the Others: it was as an institutionalised being that he was there, in a given town, in a given barracks and even, in his 'free-time', in a particular street or brothel. But, at the same time, the living historical praxis of the African army (which presents itself as an apparatus of counter-violence) appeared to him through the repeated operations he was made to perform, the instructions he received: the a-temporal inertia of institutionalised Being is realised and produced through a historical, practical orientation. This orientation was determined by the relations between colonialists and the natives everywhere, which are reflected by news of military exercises, on a given morning, in a particular barracks at Blidah or Philippeville, both as an index of the universal tension and' as a concrete factor of it. The soldiers see this particular riot as the' sign which enables them to decipher the other signs which have appeared directly in their experience, and as the enemy action which will determine their immediate fate ('confined to barracks', 'despatched! with two other regiments, to restore order') or their long-term fate (insurrection is brewing, it will break out). Through such news, they are signified as agents of a common praxis (a repressive expedition, battles, etc.); in other words, they see themselves ? in so far as they have the power to unleash counter-violence ? as sovereign members of the sovereign. Since this sovereignty is, in effect, being rejected by the natives ? by the revolt in some other town ? it reverts to being the pure, common power of the individual and the group to rearrange the practical field unconditionally. And as this power is real and concrete only in so far as it is limited, in reciprocity, by that of the Other, it becomes here an abstract violence, through the decision to treat the colonised masses as objects. They have destroyed the relationship, according to the sovereign ideology, by suddenly rejecting military sovereignty: and by this action, they have put themselves outside the law. Thus the re-establishment of reciprocity presupposes a moment of pitiless violence, that is to say, of the bloody dissolution of native groups: for reciprocity takes place, for the sovereign, between two inertias, one of which is the pure, serial impotence of the native, while the other is the freely agreed passivity of the army which retains its force. The slightest regroupment, as a negation of serial inertia, is a breach of contract. But for the soldier, as institutionalised-being, the distant revolt gives a sort of negative unity to this molecular crowd, by defining (more or less exactly) the degree of tension between the troops and the colonised masses. It becomes wholly a group, or a possibility of producing armed groups, or an unfathomable sea concealing armed groups. Thus the point of application for counter-violence is really everywhere here, and the lived relationship between the soldier and the masses must everywhere be that of the sovereign to rebels. This means that the army, on the slightest suspicion, recognises itself in its entirety as a practical unit for repression, as an agent of the perpetual dissolution of communities in favour of serial alterity. Thus the impotence-revolt of the masses and the inertia-violence of the army both deserve the name of 'praxis-process'.<< excerpt: >>Or else we allow words their meanings, defining praxis as an organising project which transcends material conditions towards an end and inscribes itself, through labour, in inorganic matter as a rearrangement of the practical field and a reunification of means in the light of the end. Then the idea of struggle between classes must be given its fullest meaning; in other words, even in the case of economic development within one country, even though the gradual constitution of the proletariat is taking place among the poorest sections of the peasant class, and even though the worker 'freely' sells his labour power, exploitation must be inseparable from oppression, just as the seriality of the bourgeois class is inseparable from the practical apparatuses which it adopts for itself Economism is false because it makes exploitation into no more than a particular result, whereas this result could not be maintained, and the process of capital could not develop, if they were not sustained by the project of exploitation. And I certainly mean that it is capital which is expressed through the mouths of capitalists and which produces them as projects of unconditional exploitation. But on the other hand it is capitalists who sustain and produce capital and who develop industry and the credit system through their project of exploiting in order to realise a profit. This is the circularity which we have encountered everywhere. We shall meet with it again. But we must recall its movement in order to understand the bond between process and praxis. We shall shortly be inquiring what type of intelligibility this bicephalous being called struggle can have, especially when it involves not individual combat, but practical contradiction splitting every nation and the world. But, above all, we must return to this notion of 'class struggle': if it is a practico-inert structure (a passive contradictory reciprocity of conditioning), or if it is exis, the human order is strictly comparable to the molecular order, and the only historical Reason is positivist Reason, which posits the unintelligibility of History as a definite fact. But, on the other hand, if it is praxis through and through, the entire human universe vanishes into a Hegelian idealism. In order to get out of the difficulty, let us attempt to employ all the discoveries which our investigation has given us, at every level of formal complexity.<< http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/ >>For purposes of a provisional statement to help the reader orient himself as he proceeds, existential Marxism may be defined very loosely as follows: a non-Leninist Marxism that conceptualizes advanced industrial society in a way that points toward the possible elimination of its alienating structures; that looks to all the relations of daily life, not simply to relations of production, to make society intelligible; that picks up from existentialism the effort to capture human beings in the moment of their active creation of their world, in their subjectivity; and, finally, that rejects the attempt to have a closed theory complete within itself. << http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html >>A skeptical interviewer pressed Sartre on this point: how could individual acts possibly result in ordered structures? It was here that many concepts of history went astray, relying either on pre-established harmonies or the cunning of reason. Sartre was manifestly hard-pressed for an answer. He replied by outlining his projected second volume of the Critique, where he planned to show that "there is an institutional order which is necessarily?the product of masses of men constituting a social unity and which at the same time is radically distinct from all of them."[63] The next task for existential Marxism would be to integrate structuralism by showing how the order and decenteredness of structures cohabited the social field with subjects acting in dispersed, unconscious groups.<< >>From the structualist perspective, Sartre's Critique was a stunning case of historicism. Sartre could never articulate the structure of the practico-inert because it was referred back, for its intelligibility, to the social agent who constituted it. On the contrary, the unity of social structure, its systematic coherence, went beyond the agent's totalization. For Althusser, Sartre's concept of the practico-inert led to voluntarism. Sartre reduced structures too quickly to the historical action of totalizing individuals, without capturing the interior complexity and intricate play of structural unity. But Althusser went too far if he meant that Sartre was guilty of speculative historicism. For Sartre did not reduce the structure to a Hegelian externalization of the Idea. Further, Sartre's historical subjects were not contemplative but active, already immersed in the practico-inert. And, unlike Lukacs, his history was not absorbed in a subject-object reconciliation. By lumping Sartre with all other Hegelian Marxists, Althusser missed the crucial distinction: Sartre's historicism did not preclude structural analysis and was open for revision in that direction.[100] << From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Tue Sep 2 00:06:18 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:06:18 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: from Critique of Dialectical Reason. Jean-Paul Sarte 1960 The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre2.htm Section 1 of Sartre on totalization: I do not understand this conclusion: "In the end, this means that we are confronted once again with the need to establish the dialectic as the universal method and universal law of anthropology. And this amounts to requiring Marxists to establish their method a priori: whatever relations are investigated, there will never be enough of them to establish a dialectical materialism. Such an extrapolation ? that is, an infinitely infinite extrapolation ? is radically different from scientific induction." Beginning of section two: what does this mean? "The attempt to ground the Marxist dialectic on anything other than its content, that is to say, the knowledge which it provides, might be denounced as idealism. . . ." And this: "The supreme paradox of historical materialism is that it is, at one and the same time, the only truth of History and a total indetermination of the Truth. The totalising thought of historical materialism has established everything except its own existence. Or, to put it another way, contaminated by the historical relativism which it has always opposed, it has not exhibited the truth of History as it defines itself, or shown how this determines its nature and validity in the historical process, in the dialectical development of praxis and of human experience. In other words, we do not know what it means for a Marxist historian to speak the truth. Not that his statements are false ? far from it; but he does not have the concept of Truth at his disposal. In this way, Marxism presents itself to us, as ideologists, as an unveiling of being, and at the same time as an unanswered question as to the validity of this unveiling." The paragraph on physics is of some interest. I'm still not sure where this is going, though I can draw parallels with Adorno. I have my doubts that the following is true: "Scientific research can in fact be unaware of its own principal features. Dialectical knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge of the dialectic. For science, there is not any formal structure, nor any implicit assertion about the rationality of the universe: Reason is developing and the mind prejudges nothing. In complete contrast, the dialectic is both a method and a movement in the object. For the dialectician, it is grounded on a fundamental claim both about the structure of the real and about that of our praxis. We assert simultaneously that the process of knowledge is dialectical, that the movement of the object (whatever it may be) is itself dialectical, and that these two dialectics are one and the same. Taken together, these propositions have a material content; they themselves are a form of organised knowledge, or, to put it differently, they define a rationality of the world." The assertion about dialectic depends on what the object is, first of all. What the fuck does this mean: "The modern scientist sees Reason as independent of any particular rational system. For him, Reason is the mind as an empty unifier. The dialectician, on the other hand, locates himself within a system: he defines a Reason, and he rejects a priori the purely analytical Reason of the seventeenth century, or rather, he treats it as the first moment of a synthetic, progressive Reason. It is impossible to see this as a kind of practical assertion of our detachment; and equally impossible to make of it a postulate, or a working hypothesis." I suspect this is all crap: "Dialectical Reason transcends the level of methodology; it states what a sector of the universe, or, perhaps, the whole universe is. It does not merely direct research, or even pre-judge the mode of appearance of objects. Dialectical Reason legislates, it defines what the world (human or total) must be like for dialectical knowledge to be possible; it simultaneously elucidates the movement of the real and that of our thoughts, and it elucidates the one by the other. . . . " But perhaps Sartre himself does not agree with this. I'm not sure what to make of the section on Hegel, which seems to me to congrue with the prior characterization of dialectical reason, which I don't believe in. "Marx?s originality lies in the fact that, in opposition to Hegel, he demonstrated that History is in development that Being is irreducible to Knowledge, and, also, that he preserved the dialectical movement both in Being and in Knowledge. He was correct, practically. But having failed to re-think the dialectic, Marxists have played the Positivist game." I presume Sartre has CP Marxism in mind? Section 5: this is intriguing: "In particular, thought is both Being and knowledge of Being. It is the praxis of an individual or a group, in particular conditions, at a definite moment of History. As such, thought is subject to the dialectic as its law, just like the historical process, considered either as a whole or in its particular details. But it is also knowledge of the dialectic as Reason, that is, as the law of Being. But this presupposes an explanatory separation from dialectical objects, allowing us to unveil their movement. Is there not an inevitable contradiction between the knowledge of Being and the being of knowledge? The demonstration that thought, as Being, is carried along in the same movement as the whole of history, does not dissolve all contradictions. In fact it is precisely to this extent that thought is incapable of grasping itself in the necessity of its own dialectical development. " Sartre's first invocations of Marx make some sense, but then this: "It is dualist because it is monist. Marx?s ontological monism consisted in affirming the irreducibility of Being to thought, and, at the same time, in reintegrating thoughts with the real as a particular form of human activity. This monistic claim, however, appears as a dogmatic Truth. But we must distinguish it from conservative ideologies which are mere products of the universal dialectic: in this way thought as the vehicle of truth can recover what it has lost ontologically since the: collapse of idealism, and become a Norm of Knowledge. " The meaning is opaque to me. Section 6 appears to be a criticism of diamat. While I can guess what Sartre objects to, I find his writing (or the English translation) rather difficult to decipher. Section 7: of course dialectics of nature as presented in the notion of dialectical laws is complete nonsense. I'm not familiar with Naville's ideas, so the critique of them is new to me. Section 9 on the potential of a dialectic of nature is perspicacious. Sartre's critique reminds me of Althusser's critique of "expressive totality". Sartre's counter-claim: "if the dialectic exists, it is because certain regions of materiality are structured in such a way that it cannot not exist" Note also: " . . . no one can discover the dialectic while keeping the point of view of analytical Reason; which means, among other things, that no one can discover the dialectic while remaining external to the object under consideration." Did Sartre in fact have exchanges with Althusser in the 1950s? At 08:43 PM 9/1/2008, CeJ wrote: >Ignoring the advice of philosophy guides on Sartre, I delved a bit >into his later work, Critique of DR. This was envisioned as a >two-volume work, but the second one Sartre abandoned, and it was >published in an unfinished state posthumously. The first volume was >published in 1960. That is the year Camus died, and one year before >the death of Merleau Ponty. > >Reading through some of Sartre's CDR, I find it striking for a couple >of reasons. In the way the close arguments are made, it reads a lot >like Deleuze-Guattari, especially in the almost sociological analysis >of groups. No wonder then that so many within 'disciplines' (such as >philosophers expecting a work of philosophy) found it undisciplined. >It's interesting to compare his analysis of 'what is a science' with >Piaget's (although most others would probably be more interested in >the differences and similarties in their theories of mind and >consciousness). > >CDR also reveals just how much of structuralism Sartre had 'taken on' >in both senses of the term. He really does incorporate what he thinks >is of value in structuralism (in part through exchanges with Levi >Strauss). It is also important to remember that much of what is set >down in CDR stems from not only Sartre's experience of the events of >the 1950s, but also his academic exchanges with the likes of >Levi-Strauss and Althusser. > >Here are a few links (with small excerpts) to what I read through >yesterday. The last link is to a book (online) that is largely an >'intellectual history' of Sartre's attempt to reconcile existentialism >with Marxism. > >http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre2.htm > >excerpt>>Scientific research can in fact be unaware of its own >principal features. Dialectical knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge >of the dialectic. For science, there is not any formal structure, nor >any implicit assertion about the rationality of the universe: Reason >is developing and the mind prejudges nothing. In complete contrast, >the dialectic is both a method and a movement in the object. For the >dialectician, it is grounded on a fundamental claim both about the >structure of the real and about that of our praxis. We assert >simultaneously that the process of knowledge is dialectical, that the >movement of the object (whatever it may be) is itself dialectical, and >that these two dialectics are one and the same. Taken together, these >propositions have a material content; they themselves are a form of >organised knowledge, or, to put it differently, they define a >rationality of the world. > >excerpt>>The Dialectic in Marx > >Marx's originality lies in the fact that, in opposition to Hegel, he >demonstrated that History is in development that Being is irreducible >to Knowledge, and, also, that he preserved the dialectical movement >both in Being and in Knowledge. He was correct, practically. But >having failed to re-think the dialectic, Marxists have played the >Positivist game. Positivists often ask Marxists how they can claim, >given that Marx had the good sense to realise that 'pre-history' had >not yet come to an end, to detect the 'ruses' of History, the 'secret' >of the proletariat, and the direction of historical development. For >Positivists, prediction is possible only to the extent that the >current order of succession re-enacts a previous order of succession; >and so the future repeats the past. Hegel could have answered them by >saying that he had only predicted the past, in that his history was >finished and complete and that, as a matter of fact, the moment which >posits itself for itself in the process of living History can only >guess the future, as the truth of its own incompleteness, unknowable >for it. The Marxist future, however, is a genuine future: it is >completely new, and irreducible to the present. Nevertheless, Marx >does make predictions, and long term rather than short term ones. But >in fact, according to Positivist Rationalism, Marx had disqualified >himself from doing this, and given that he himself was pre-historical >and within prehistory, his judgements can have only a relative and >historical significance ? even when they concern the past. Thus >Marxism as dialectic must reject the relativism of the positivists. >And it must be understood that relativism rejects not only vast >historical syntheses, but also the most modest assertions of >dialectical Reason: whatever we may say or know, however close we may >be to the present or past event which we attempt to reconstitute in >its totalising movement, Positivism will always deny us the right. It >does not regard the synthesis of all knowledge as completely >impossible (though it envisages it as an inventory rather than as an >organisation of Knowledge): but it considers such a synthesis >impossible now. It is therefore necessary to demonstrate, in >opposition to Positivism, how, at this very moment, dialectical Reason >can assert certain totalising truths ? if not the whole Truth.<< > > > >http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/racism-algeria.htm > >excerpt: > >>A young soldier who 'did his military > service' in Algeria (I am thinking of the > heyday of colonialism, between 1910 and 1935) > was himself ambivalent in his discovery of > himself and of the Others: it was as an > institutionalised being that he was there, in a > given town, in a given barracks and even, in > his 'free-time', in a particular street or > brothel. But, at the same time, the living > historical praxis of the African army (which > presents itself as an apparatus of > counter-violence) appeared to him through the > repeated operations he was made to perform, the > instructions he received: the a-temporal > inertia of institutionalised Being is realised > and produced through a historical, practical > orientation. This orientation was determined by > the relations between colonialists and the > natives everywhere, which are reflected by news > of military exercises, on a given morning, in a > particular barracks at Blidah or Philippeville, > both as an index of the universal tension and' > as a concrete factor of it. The soldiers see > this particular riot as the' sign which enables > them to decipher the other signs which have > appeared directly in their experience, and as > the enemy action which will determine their > immediate fate ('confined to barracks', > 'despatched! with two other regiments, to > restore order') or their long-term fate > (insurrection is brewing, it will break out). > Through such news, they are signified as agents > of a common praxis (a repressive expedition, > battles, etc.); in other words, they see > themselves ? in so far as they have the power > to unleash counter-violence ? as sovereign > members of the sovereign. Since this > sovereignty is, in effect, being rejected by > the natives ? by the revolt in some other town > ? it reverts to being the pure, common power of > the individual and the group to rearrange the > practical field unconditionally. And as this > power is real and concrete only in so far as it > is limited, in reciprocity, by that of the > Other, it becomes here an abstract violence, > through the decision to treat the colonised > masses as objects. They have destroyed the > relationship, according to the sovereign > ideology, by suddenly rejecting military > sovereignty: and by this action, they have put > themselves outside the law. Thus the > re-establishment of reciprocity presupposes a > moment of pitiless violence, that is to say, of > the bloody dissolution of native groups: for > reciprocity takes place, for the sovereign, > between two inertias, one of which is the pure, > serial impotence of the native, while the other > is the freely agreed passivity of the army > which retains its force. The slightest > regroupment, as a negation of serial inertia, > is a breach of contract. But for the soldier, > as institutionalised-being, the distant revolt > gives a sort of negative unity to this > molecular crowd, by defining (more or less > exactly) the degree of tension between the > troops and the colonised masses. It becomes > wholly a group, or a possibility of producing > armed groups, or an unfathomable sea concealing > armed groups. Thus the point of application for counte >excerpt: > >>Or else we allow words their meanings, > defining praxis as an organising project which > transcends material conditions towards an end > and inscribes itself, through labour, in > inorganic matter as a rearrangement of the > practical field and a reunification of means in > the light of the end. Then the idea of struggle > between classes must be given its fullest > meaning; in other words, even in the case of > economic development within one country, even > though the gradual constitution of the > proletariat is taking place among the poorest > sections of the peasant class, and even though > the worker 'freely' sells his labour power, > exploitation must be inseparable from > oppression, just as the seriality of the > bourgeois class is inseparable from the > practical apparatuses which it adopts for > itself Economism is false because it makes > exploitation into no more than a particular > result, whereas this result could not be > maintained, and the process of capital could > not develop, if they were not sustained by the > project of exploitation. And I certainly mean > that it is capital which is expressed through > the mouths of capitalists and which produces > them as projects of unconditional exploitation. > But on the other hand it is capitalists who > sustain and produce capital and who develop > industry and the credit system through their > project of exploiting in order to realise a > profit. This is the circularity which we have > encountered everywhere. We shall meet with it > again. But we must recall its movement in order > to understand the bond between process and > praxis. We shall shortly be inquiring what type > of intelligibility this bicephalous being > called struggle can have, especially when it > involves not individual combat, but practical > contradiction splitting every nation and the > world. But, above all, we must return to this > notion of 'class struggle': if it is a > practico-inert structure (a passive > contradictory reciprocity of conditioning), or > if it is exis, the human order is strictly > comparable to the molecular order, and the only > historical Reason is positivist Reason, which > posits the unintelligibility of History as a > definite fact. But, on the other hand, if it is > praxis through and through, the entire human > universe vanishes into a Hegelian idealism. In > order to get out of the difficulty, let us > attempt to employ all the discoveries which our > investigation has given us, at every level of formal complexity.<< > >http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/ > > >>For purposes of a provisional statement to > help the reader orient himself as he proceeds, > existential Marxism may be defined very loosely > as follows: a non-Leninist Marxism that > conceptualizes advanced industrial society in a > way that points toward the possible elimination > of its alienating structures; that looks to all > the relations of daily life, not simply to > relations of production, to make society > intelligible; that picks up from existentialism > the effort to capture human beings in the > moment of their active creation of their world, > in their subjectivity; and, finally, that > rejects the attempt to have a closed theory complete within itself. << > > >http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/EM/chapter8.html > > > >>A skeptical interviewer pressed Sartre on > this point: how could individual acts possibly > result in ordered structures? It was here that > many concepts of history went astray, relying > either on pre-established harmonies or the > cunning of reason. Sartre was manifestly > hard-pressed for an answer. He replied by > outlining his projected second volume of the > Critique, where he planned to show that "there > is an institutional order which is > necessarily?the product of masses of men > constituting a social unity and which at the > same time is radically distinct from all of > them."[63] The next task for existential > Marxism would be to integrate structuralism by > showing how the order and decenteredness of > structures cohabited the social field with > subjects acting in dispersed, unconscious groups.<< > > >>From the structualist perspective, Sartre's > Critique was a stunning case of > historicism. Sartre could never articulate the > structure of the practico-inert because it was > referred back, for its intelligibility, to the > social agent who constituted it. On the > contrary, the unity of social structure, its > systematic coherence, went beyond the agent's > totalization. For Althusser, Sartre's concept > of the practico-inert led to > voluntarism. Sartre reduced structures too > quickly to the historical action of totalizing > individuals, without capturing the interior > complexity and intricate play of structural > unity. But Althusser went too far if he meant > that Sartre was guilty of speculative > historicism. For Sartre did not reduce the > structure to a Hegelian externalization of the > Idea. Further, Sartre's historical subjects > were not contemplative but active, already > immersed in the practico-inert. And, unlike > Lukacs, his history was not absorbed in a > subject-object reconciliation. By lumping > Sartre with all other Hegelian Marxists, > Althusser missed the crucial distinction: > Sartre's historicism did not preclude > structural analysis and was open for revision in that direction.[100] << From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 2 09:39:42 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:39:42 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <48BD25FF.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> Ralph Dumain 09/02/2008 2:06 AM >>> from Critique of Dialectical Reason. Jean-Paul Sarte 1960 The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre2.htm CB: This part sounds like an old thaxis thread: 6 The External Dialectic in Modern Marxism This difficulty has appeared insurmountable to modern Marxists. They have seen only one solution: to refuse to acknowledge thought itself as a dialectical activity, to dissolve it into the universal dialectic, and to eliminate man by dispersing him into the universe. This enables them to substitute Being for Truth. There is no longer knowledge in the strict sense of the term; Being no longer manifests itself in any way whatsoever: it merely evolves according to its own laws. The dialectic of Nature is Nature without men. There is therefore no more need for certainty, for criteria; even the attempt to criticise and establish knowledge becomes useless. Knowledge of whatever form is a relation between man and the world around him, and if man no longer exists this relation disappears. The source of this unfortunate approach is well known: as Whitehead said, a law begins by being a hypothesis and ends by becoming a fact. When we say that the earth revolves, we do not feel as though we are stating a theory, or that we are relying on a system of knowledge; we feel that we are in the presence of the fact itself, which immediately eliminates us as knowing subjects in order to restore to us our ?nature? as objects of gravitation. For anyone with a realist view of the world, knowledge therefore destroys itself in order to become the world, and this is true not only of philosophy but also of all scientific Knowledge. When dialectical materialism claims to establish a dialectic of Nature it does not present itself as an attempt at an extremely general synthesis of human knowledge, but rather as a mere ordering of the facts. And its claim to be concerned with facts is not unjustified: when Engels speaks of the expansion of bodies or of electric current, he is indeed referring to the facts themselves ? although these facts may undergo essential changes with the progress of science. This gigantic ? and, as we shall see, abortive ? attempt to allow the world to unfold itself by itself and to no one, we shall call external or transcendental, dialectical materialism (le materialisme dialectique da dehors ou transcendental). 7 The Dialectic of Nature It is clear that this kind of materialism is not Marxist, but still it is defined by Marx: ?The materialist outlook on nature means nothing more than the conception of nature just as it is, without alien addition?[from draft of Ludwig Feuerbach, by Engels]. On this conception, man returns to the very heart of Nature as one of its objects and develops before our eyes in accordance with the laws of Nature, that is, as pure materiality governed by the universal laws of the dialectic. The object of thought is Nature as it is, and the study of History is only a particular form of it: we must trace the movement that produces life out of matter, man out of primitive forms of life, and social history out of the first human communities. The advantage of this conception is that it avoids the problem: it presents the dialectic a priori and without justification, as the fundamental law of Nature. This external materialism lays down the dialectic as exteriority: the Nature of man lies outside him in an a priori law, in an extra-human nature, in a history that begins with the nebulae. For this universal dialectic, partial totalisations do not have even provisional value; they do not exist. Everything must always be referred to the totality of natural history of which human history is only a particular form. Thus all real thought, as it actually forms itself in the concrete movement of History, is held to be a complete distortion of its objects. It becomes a truth again only if it is reduced to a dead object, to a result; and thus a position outside man, and on the side of things, is adopted so that the idea can be seen as a thing signified by things rather than as a signifying act. In this way, that ?alien addition? which is man ? concrete, living man with his human relations, his true or false thoughts, his actions, his real purposes ? is removed from the world. An absolute object is put in his place: ?What we call a subject is only an object considered as the centre if particular reactions? [Pierre Naville]. The notion of truth is replaced by those of success or normality as applied to performances in tests: ?As the centre of more or less delayed reactions, the body performs movements which organise themselves as behaviour. This produces actions. (Thinking is an action. Suffering is an action). These actions can be regarded as ?tests?..., as trials?. [Naville] Thus we get back to the disguised scepticism of ?reflection?. But when everything has apparently culminated in sceptical objectivism, we suddenly realise that it has been imposed on us dogmatically, that it is the Truth of Being as it appears to universal consciousness. Spirit sees dialectic as the law of the world. Consequently we fall back into complete dogmatic idealism. Scientific laws are experimental hypotheses verified by facts; but at present, the absolute principle that ?Nature is dialectical? is not open to verification at all. You may claim that some set of laws established by scientists represents a certain dialectical movement in the objects of these laws, but you cannot prove it. [These remarks apply, of course, only to the dialectic conceived as an abstract and universal law of Nature. However, when the dialectic is applied to human history, it loses none of its heuristic value. Concealed, it directs the collection of facts; then it reveals itself by making them comprehensible, by totalising them. This comprehension reveals a new dimension of History, and finally, its truth, its intelligibility]. Neither the laws nor the ?great theories? will change, however you view them. Your problem is not whether light transmits energy particles to the bodies it illuminates, but whether the quantum theory can be integrated into a dialectical totalisation of the universe. You need not question the kinetic theory of gases; you need only see whether it weakens the totalisation. You are reflecting on Knowledge. And since the law discovered by the scientist, taken in isolation, is neither dialectical nor anti-dialectical (it is only a quantitative determination of a functional relation), the consideration of scientific facts (that is to say, of established laws) cannot furnish, or even suggest, a proof of the dialectic. Dialectical Reason can only be captured elsewhere, so that it can be forcibly imposed on the data of physics and chemistry. It is well known, in fact, that the notion of dialectic emerged in History along quite different paths, and that both Hegel and Marx explained and defined it in terms of the relations of man to matter, and of men to each other. The attempt to find the movement of human history within natural history was made only later, out of a wish for unification. Thus the claim that there is a dialectic of Nature refers to the totality of material facts ? past, present, future ? or, to put it another way, it involves a totalisation of temporality. It has a curious similarity to those Ideas of Reason which, according to Kant, were regulative and incapable of being corroborated by any particular experience. 8 Critique of the External Dialectic Thus a system of ideas is contemplated by a pure consciousness which has pre-constituted their law for them, though utterly incapable of justifying this ukase. But in order to grasp materiality as such, it is not sufficient to discuss the word ?matter?. Language is ambiguous in that words sometimes designate objects and sometimes concepts; and this is why materialism as such is not opposed to idealism. In fact, there is a materialist idealism which, in the last analysis, is merely a discourse on the idea of matter; the real opposite of this is realist materialism ? the thought of an individual who is situated in the world, penetrated by every cosmic force, and treating the material universe as something which gradually reveals itself through a ?situated? praxis. In the present case, we are evidently confronted with an idealism which has appropriated the vocabulary of science in order to express ideas of such poverty that one can see straight through them. But the important point is this: if you are hunting for the Truth (as a human undertaking) of the Universe, you will find it, in the very words you use, as the object of an absolute and constituting consciousness. This means that it is impossible to get away from the problem of Truth. Naville deprives his ?centres of delayed reactions? of the ability to distinguish between True and False; he imposes the dialectic on them without allowing them knowledge of it; but what he says thereby becomes an absolute truth without foundation. How can we accept this doubling of personality? How can a man who is lost in the world, permeated by an absolute movement coming from everything, also be this consciousness sure both of itself and of the Truth? It is true that Naville observes that ?these centres of reaction elaborate their behaviour according to possibilities which, at the level both of the individual and of the species, are subject to an unalterable and strictly determined development . . .?, and that ?experimentally established reflex determinations and integrations enable one to appreciate the narrowing margin within which organic behaviour can be said to be autonomous?. We obviously agree with this; but the important thing is Naville?s application of these observations, which inevitably leads to the theory of reflection, to endowing man with constituted reason; that is, to making thought into a form of behaviour strictly conditioned by the world (which of course it is), while neglecting to say that it is also knowledge of the world. How could ?empirical? man think? Confronted with his own history, he is as uncertain as when he is confronted by Nature, for the law does not automatically produce knowledge of itself- indeed, if it is passively suffered, it transforms its object into passivity, and thus deprives it of any possibility of collecting its atomised experiences into a synthetic unity. Meanwhile, at the level of generality where he is situated, transcendental man, contemplating laws, cannot grasp individuals. Thus, in spite of Naville, we are offered two thoughts, neither of which is able to think us, or, for that matter, itself: the thought which is passive, given, and discontinuous, claims to be knowledge but is really only the delayed effect of external causes, while the thought which is active, synthetic and desituated, knows nothing of itself and, completely immobile, contemplates a world without thought. Our doctrinaires have mistaken for a real recognition of Necessity what is actually only a particular form of alienation, which makes their own lived thinking appear as an object for a universal Consciousness, and which reflects on it as though it were the Thought of the Other. We must stress this crucial fact: Reason is neither a bone nor an accident. In other words, if dialectical Reason is to be rationality, it must provide Reason with its own reasons. From this point of view, analytical rationalism demonstrates itself, because, as we have seen, it is the pure affirmation ? at a quite superficial level ? of the bond of exteriority as permanent possibility. But let us see what Engels says about ?the most general laws? of ?the history of nature and human society?. It is this: ?... they can be reduced in the main to three: ? The law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; ? The law of the interpenetration of opposites; ? The law of the negation of the negation. ?All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought.... The mistake lies in the fact that these laws are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.? [Engels, Dialectics of Nature] Engels? uncertainty is revealed by his words, for abstraction is not the same as deduction. And how can universal laws be deduced from a set of particular laws? If you want a name, it can only be called induction. And as we have seen, the only dialectic one will find in Nature is a dialectic that one has put there oneself. But let us suppose for a moment that universal laws can actually be induced, that is to say, that they provide both a means of ordering scientific Knowledge and a heuristic procedure. For all that, they will remain only probabilities. Let us suppose, also, that their probability is very high and that, consequently, we are obliged to accept them as true. Where will this get us? To a discovery of the laws of Reason in the universe, like Newton?s discovery of the principle of gravitation. When Newton said ?Hypotheses non fingo?, he meant that while calculation and investigation permitted him to prove the de facto existence of gravitation, he would not try to establish it de jure, to explain it, to reduce it to some more general principle. Thus, to his contemporaries, rationality seemed to come to a halt with demonstrations and proofs; the fact in itself remained inexplicable and contingent. Science does not have to account for the facts that it discovers; it firmly establishes their existence and their relations with other facts. Later, the movement of scientific thought itself was to overthrow this hypothesis, for in contemporary physics gravitation is treated quite differently; without ceasing to be a fact, it is no longer the untranscendable final fact; it is part of a new conception of the universe and we know now that every contingent fact, however untranscendable it may appear, will be transcended in its turn, by other facts. But what are we to make of a doctrine which presents the laws of Reason in the same way as Newton presented those of gravitation? If someone had asked Engels: Why are there three laws rather than ten, or just one?; Why are the laws of thought these and not others?; Where do they come from?; Is there some more general principle from which they might be deduced, instead of appearing as having the contingency of a fact?; Is there some way of uniting them in an organised synthesis, and putting them in some order?; etc., he would probably have shrugged his shoulders and replied, like Newton, ?Hypotheses non fingo?. The upshot of this is paradoxical: Engels criticises Hegel for imposing the laws of thought on matter, but he does precisely the same himself, in that he expects the sciences to verify a dialectical reason which he discovered in the social world. But, in the historical and social world, as we shall see, there really is a dialectical reason; by transferring it into the ?natural? world, and forcibly inscribing it there, Engels stripped it of its rationality: there was no longer a dialectic which man produced by producing himself, and which, in turn, produced man; there was only a contingent law, of which nothing could be said except it is so and not otherwise. In short, Reason once more becomes a bone, since it is merely a fact and has no knowable necessity. It so happens that opposites interpenetrate. Rationality is merely a final and universal law; and therefore it is irrationality pure and simple. However one looks at it, transcendental materialism leads to the irrational, either by ignoring the thought of empirical man, or by creating a noumenal consciousness which imposes its law as a whim, or again, by discovering in Nature ?without alien addition? the laws of dialectical Reason in the form of contingent facts thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Tue Sep 2 19:15:36 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 10:15:36 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>Did Sartre in fact have exchanges with Althusser in the 1950s?<< That's a good question. Althusser's academic star really reaches zenith (in terms of publications) in the 1960s. But I think Althusser and Sartre were in frequent communication through the French Communist Party, but also connect academically over Althusser's early adaptation to structuralism as a way to contribute to Marxism. But I don't have enough of a 'life of Althusser' to say that with any authority. I thought the stuff I posted of Sartre putting his ideas of CDR into an analysis of colonialism was by far the most interesting of what I read. CJ From rasherrs at eircom.net Wed Sep 3 03:04:11 2008 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 10:04:11 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Afghan conflict Message-ID: It is clear that Western imperialist forces would now like to withdraw from Afghanistan after their huge miscalculation in their effort to expand their grip on the world. However this is not possible because the Karzi government would collapse following a withdrawal. Even greater instability would follow leading to the weakening of Western influence in Afghanistan and the surrounding area. This outcome would have dangerous repercussions for Pakistan thereby further endangering Western capital's interests. The original aim was to set up a strong stable regime in Afghanistan. This new state would serve as a hub for colonising neighbouring areas especially the ones that had been under the influence of the former Soviet Union. However Washington over-estimated its capacity for expansionism and consequently grossly miscalculated. Some other Western powers were not so sure of imperialism's capacity for this type of strategy. However they went along with it out of relative weakness. Paddy Hackett From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 3 10:33:14 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:33:14 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] DID A MISSISSIPPI RAID PROTECT RIGHTWING POLITICIANS? Message-ID: <48BE840A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> DID A MISSISSIPPI RAID PROTECT RIGHTWING POLITICIANS? By David Bacon TruthOut Feature http://www.truthout.org/article/did-a-mississippi-raid-protect-rightwing-politicians LAUREL, MS (8/31/08) -- On August 25, immigration agents swooped down on Howard Industries, a Mississippi electrical equipment factory, taking 481 workers to a privately-run detention center in Jena, Louisiana. A hundred and six women were also arrested at the plant, and released wearing electronic monitoring devices on their ankles, if they had children, or without them, if they were pregnant. Eight workers were taken to Federal court in Hattiesburg, where they were charged with aggravated identity theft. Afterwards Barbara Gonzalez, spokesperson for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), stated the raid took place because of a tip by a "union member" two years before. Other media accounts focused on an incident in which plant workers allegedly cheered as their coworkers were led away by ICE agents. The articles claim the plant was torn by tension between immigrant and non-immigrant workers, and that unions in Mississippi are hostile to immigrants. Many Mississippi activists and workers, however, charge the raid had a political agenda - undermining a growing political coalition that threatens the state's conservative Republican establishment. They also say the raid, which took place during union contract negotiations, will help the company resist demands for better wages and conditions. Jim Evans, a national AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi and a leading member of the state legislature's Black Caucus, said he believed "this raid is an effort to drive immigrants out of Mississippi. It is also an attempt to drive a wedge between immigrants, African Americans, white people and unions - all those who want political change here." Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), agreed that "this is political. They want a mass exodus of immigrants out of the state, the kind we've seen in Arizona and Oklahoma. The political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics, and what the electorate might look like in 20 years." In the last two decades, the percentage of African Americans in the state's population has increased to over 35%, and immigrants, who were statistically insignificant until recently, are expected to reach 10% in the next decade. Mississippi union membership has been among the nation's lowest, but since the early 1980s, workers have joined unions in catfish and poultry plants, casinos and shipyards, along with those at Howard Industries. Evans, other members of the Black Caucus, many of the state's labor organizations, and immigrant communities all see shifting demographics as the basis for changing the state's politics. Over the last seven years their growing coalition has proposed legislation to set up a Department of Labor (Mississippi is the only state without one), guarantee access to education for children of all races and nationalities, and provide drivers' licenses to immigrants. MIRA organized support in the state capitol for those proposals and Evans, who sponsored many of them, chairs MIRA's board. Earlier this year, however, the legislature passed, and Governor Haley Barbour signed, a law making it a state felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, punishable by 1-5 years in prison and $1,000-10,000 in fines. Employers are given immunity for employing workers without papers, so long as they vet new hires through an ICE database called E-Verify. It is still not known whether the people arrested at Howard Industries will be charged under the new state law. Evans says the law and the raid serve the same objectives. "They both just make it easier to exploit workers. The people who profit from Mississippi's low wage system want to keep it the way it is," he alleged. In the week before the raid, MIRA organizers received reports of a growing number of ICE agents in southern Mississippi. They began leafleting immigrant communities, warning them about a possible raid and explaining their rights should people be questioned about their immigration status. When agents finally showed up at the Howard Industries plant, many workers say they tried to invoke those rights, and warn others that a raid was in progress. One woman, later detained and then released to care for her child, began to call workers who had not yet come to the factory on her cell phone, warning them to stay away. "She first called her brother, and then began calling anyone else she could think of," explained her mother, who works in a local chicken plant. Both feared being identified publicly. "An agent grabbed her arm, and asked her what she was doing, so she went into the bathroom, and kept calling people until they took her phone away." Howard Industries, like most Mississippi employers, has a long record of opposing unions. Workers there chose representation by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on June 8, 2000, by a vote of 162-108. Employment at the plant, which manufactures electrical ballasts and transformers, grew considerably after the election, and the company now employs over 4000 workers at several locations in Mississippi. In 2002 it received a $31.5 million subsidy for expansion from the state government, and at one point state legislators were all given HI laptop computers. "The company is very well-connected politically," says Evans, who noted that its owners donated to the campaigns of former Democratic governor Ronnie Musgrove, and then to Mississippi's current Republican governor Haley Barbour. As it grew the company hired many immigrant Mexican and Central American workers, diversifying a workforce that was originally primarily African American and white. The company has declined to comment, and released a press statement that said, "Howard Industries runs every check allowed to ascertain the immigration status of all applicants for jobs. It is company policy that it hires only U.S. citizens and legal immigrants." During the organizing drive the union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging intimidation and violations of workers' rights. After the union and company agreed on a contract, more charges followed. NLRB Region 15 issued a complaint against the company for violating the union's bargaining rights. Roger Doolittle, attorney for IBEW Local 1317, says other charges allege that the company threatened a union steward for trying to represent workers in the plant. In June the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it intended to fine the company $123,000 for 36 violations of health and safety regulations at the Pendorf plant, where the raid took place, and another $41,000 in fines for a second Laurel location. Tension between the company and union increased after the collective bargaining agreement expired at the beginning of August. According to one immigrant worker, who was not detained because he worked on swing shift and did not want to be identified, the union was asking for a wage increase of $1.50/hour and better vacation benefits. Company medical benefits are also an issue among workers, he said, because family coverage costs over $100/week, putting it out of reach for most employees. Mississippi is a right-to-work state, and labor contracts cannot require that workers belong to the union. Instead, unions must continually try to sign workers up as members. In past years, according to other union sources, IBEW Local 1317 had a reputation as a union that did not offer much support to its immigrant members. According to the swing shift worker, who did not belong to the union, there were just a few hundred members at the Pendorf plant, and in negotiations the company used that low membership as a reason not to sign a new agreement. To increase its ability to negotiate a contract, Local 1317 began making greater efforts to sign up immigrant members. Spanish-speaking organizers were brought in, and they handed out leaflets in Spanish explaining the benefits of membership. They visited workers at home so they could talk about the union without being overheard or seen by company supervisors. According to the swing shift worker, many began to join, especially the immigrants who'd been hired most recently. IBEW's national newspaper, Electrical Worker, reported that over 200 had signed up last April, according to Local 1317's African-American business manager Clarence Larkin. "It's a constant process to keep the union alive and growing," he told the paper. That's when the plant was raided. Local 1317 will now have to try to negotiate a contract after the loss of many of its members, who were among those detained. Those members, who joined the union in hopes of better wages and treatment, instead have been imprisoned for days in Jena, Louisiana, a two-hour drive from Laurel. ICE spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez would not provide an estimate of how long they might be jailed, but said "the investigation of their cases is ongoing." The day after ICE agents stormed the factory MIRA began organizing meetings to provide legal advice, food and economic help. According to MIRA director Bill Chandler, Howard Industry representatives told detainees' families, and women released to care for children, that the company wouldn't give them their paychecks. On August 28 MIRA organizer Vicky Cintra led a group of workers to the Pendorf plant to demand their pay. Managers called Laurel police and sheriffs, who threatened to arrest her. After workers began chanting, "Let her go!" and news reporters appeared on the scene, the company finally agreed to distribute checks to about 70 people. The swing shift worker was so frightened by the raid that he hadn't gone back to work after almost a week, and wasn't sure he'd have a job waiting if he did. "Everyone is still really scared," he said. Doolittle agreed, and said that fear would affect more than just the workers taken away. "Workers get apprehensive anytime something like this happens," he said. "That's just human nature." Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, explained that "raids drive down wages because they intimidate workers, even citizens and legal residents. The employer brings in another batch of employees and continues business as usual, while people who protest get targeted and workers get deported. Raids really demonstrate the employer's power." The Hattiesburg American reported Friday that Howard Industries sent a letter to customers two days after the raid, assuring them that production would be back to normal by the end of the week, and noting that the company has not been charged. Spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez claimed ICE waited two years after receiving a call from a "union member" before conducting the raid, because "we took the time needed for our investigation." She declined to say how that investigation was conducted, or what led ICE to believe their tip had come from a union member. The picture of a plant in which union members were hostile to immigrants was reinforced after the raid by media accounts of an incident in which workers "applauded" as their coworkers were taken away. But on August 29, when Cintra and the braceleted women sat in front of the plant for a second day, demanding more paychecks, African American workers came up to them as they left work, embraced the women, and told them they supported them. "It's hard to believe that a two-year old phone call to ICE led to this raid, but whether or not the call ever took place, that possibility is a product of the poisonous atmosphere fostered by politicians of both parties in Mississippi," says MIRA director Chandler. "In the last election Barbour and Republicans campaigned against immigrants to get elected, but so did all the Democratic statewide candidates except Attorney General Jim Hood. The raid will make the climate even worse" During the 2007 election campaign the Ku Klux Klan organized a 500-person rally in Tupelo, and when MIRA organizer Erik Fleming urged Barbour to veto the bill making work a felony for the undocumented, he was attacked by state anti-immigrant organizations. Some state labor leaders have contributed to anti-immigrant hostility. After the Howard Industries workers, many of them union members, were arrested, state AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer told the Associated Press that he doubted that immigrants could join unions if they were not in the country legally. U.S. labor law, however, holds that all workers have union rights, regardless of immigration status. It also says unions have a duty to represent all members fairly and equally "This raid will just make us more determined," Evans declared. "We won't go back to the kind of racism Mississippi has known throughout its past." For more articles and images on immigration, see http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm Just out from Beacon Press: Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 3 13:37:20 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:37:20 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Venezuela: Nationalizations Aim to Make Industry Serve Peoples' Needs Message-ID: <48BEAF30.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOCIALIST VOICE Marxist Perspectives for the 21st Century www.socialistvoice.ca September 3, 2008 Venezuela: Nationalizations Aim to Make Industry Serve Peoples' Needs By Federico Fuentes. On August 27, Venezuelan President Hugo Ch?vez announced the end of negotiations with former owner Ternium over the nationalization of the Sidor steel factory, stating that the government would "take over all the companies that it has here," and that Ternium "can leave." .... Together with the announcements made earlier this year to take control of more than 30% of milk production and food distribution, and last year's decision to take majority control of the oilfields in the Orinoco Belt, these moves are part of a second wave of nationalizations, focused on industries related to production. Full article: This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jinigo at inscri.org.ar Wed Sep 3 12:34:16 2008 From: jinigo at inscri.org.ar (jinigo at inscri.org.ar) Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:34:16 -0300 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] IV International Conference of the SEPLA In-Reply-To: References: <48A1C16D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <426248.80428.qm@web50412.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48BED8A8.70201@inscri.org.ar> *http://sepla.argentina.icidac.org/ coloquiosepla at gmail.com* /Sociedad de Econom?a Pol?tica y Pensamiento Cr?tico Latinoamericano (SEPLA)/ /(SEPLA -- Latin American Society for Political Economy and Critical Thinking)/ * * *LATIN AMERICA**: new century scenarios.* *New challenges and transformation horizons.*** Between the 22^nd and 24^th October, at the Economic Sciences Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, the *IV International Conference of the SEPLA* will take place. More than 350 economists and experts from around the world will expose their papers on Latin America's present, in the context of the financial crisis unleashed in the United States and rising criticism in our region to the economic development plans that are imposed to us from the world economic order. _More than 250 papers from 16 countries_ were received -- including not only Latin American countries but also Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Sweden and the United Status. The Conference will receive teachers and investigators from, among others, the following institutions: *_Argentina_* Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) Universidad del Salvador (USAL) Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS) Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) Universidad Nacional de Luj?n (UNLu) Universidad Nacional de Quilmas (UNQui) Universidad Nacional de R?o Cuarto (UNRC) Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR) Universidad Nacional de San Mart?n (UNSaM) Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS) Escuelas de Econom?a Pol?tica (EsEP - UNLP y UBA) Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Banco Central de la Rep?blica Argentina (BCRA) Centro Cultural de la Cooperaci?n (CCC) Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES) Centro de Estudios de Poblaci?n Empleo y Desarrollo (CEPED) Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales (CEICS) Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Argentino (CENDA) CONICET Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) Economistas de Izquierda (EDI) Instituto Argentino para el Desarrollo Econ?mico (IADE) Instituto del Pensamiento Socialista Karl Marx (IPS) Revista Argentina "Circus" de Econom?a (Luj?n) *_Brasil_* 2 Centros Universitarios: Paran? y Patos de Minas 22 Universidades Federales y Estaduales Cr?tica Econ?mica Funda??o Getulio Vargas (FGV) Instituto Brasile?o de Geograf?a y Estad?stica (IBGE) Instituto de Pesquisa Econ?mica Aplicada (IPEA) Red de Estudios para el Desarrollo Celso Furtado Sociedad de Econom?a Pol?tica (SEP) *_M?xico, Colombia y Venezuela_* Instituto Tecnol?gico de Cd. Guzm?n (M?xico) Universidad Sim?n Bol?var (Venezuela) 6 Universidades Aut?nomas: Azcapotzalco, Iztapalapa, M?xico DF, Nuevo Le?n, Puebla y Xochimilco (M?xico) 2 Universidades Nacionales: Bogot? y Medell?n (Colombia) *_Europa_* Freie Universit?t de Berl?n (Alemania) Institut de recherche pour le D?veloppement (IRD) (Francia) Universidad de Gotemburgo (Suecia) Universidade de ?vora (Portugal) Universit?t de Hamburg (Alemania) Universit? de Par?s (Francia) *_Estados Unidos y Canad?_* Mount Holyoke College (Estados Unidos) University of Albany (Estados Unidos) University of Massachusetts (Estados Unidos) University of York (Toronto) (Canad?) *_Organizers:_* EsEP (Political Economy Schools) - UBA and UNLP EDI (Economistas de Izquierda -- Left Economists) IADE (Argentinean Institute for Economic Development) AGD-Econ?micas *_Avalan:_* CEIL-PIETTE (Conicet) (Argentina) - FLACSO (Argentina) CENDA (Center of Studies for Argentinean Development) (Argentina) Sociedad de Econom?a Pol?tica (Brasil) - Econom?a Cr?tica (M?xico) Econom?a Cr?tica (Chile) - Left Economists Network (Uruguay) "Cuadernos del Sur" Magazine (Argentina) - "Circus" Economy Magazine (Argentina) Luj?n Group of Research (Luj?n - Argentina) - Political Economy Studies Network (Rosario - Argentina) GEPEC (Group of Studies in Economic Policies) (Argentina) - IPS Karl Marx (Institute of Socialist Thinking) (Argentina) Colectivo Viceversa (Bah?a Blanca -- Argentina) - Political Economy Area, National University of General Sarmiento (Argentina) *http://sepla.argentina.icidac.org/ coloquiosepla at gmail.com* From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 3 14:53:37 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:53:37 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Claim that social movements go to DP to die is false when historical record examined Message-ID: <48BEC111.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Charles Brown ^^^^ CB: Come to think of it, it can be argued that the Civil Rights Movement debilitated the Democratic Party, given the success of the Nixon/Reagan Southern Strategy in pinning the Dem Party as the party of Black people with various degrees of white racists who shifted to the Reps, and have caused the Reps to dominate for almost 30 years. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- S. Artesian -clip- The discussion included the discussion of the fact that the "dramatic" movements of the 20th century originated outside that party, and when "moving" into it, which certainly does not mean that the rank and file of that movement participated in any way shape or form in the forming of program and policy of that party, the movement was debilitated. ^^^^ CB: Lets test this claim with respect to the Civil Rights Movement/anti-Jim Crow Movement of the 1950's and 60's. Did the Democratic Party debilitate the Civil Rights Movement or did the Democratic President and Congress pass Civil Rights statutes and Constitutional Amendments ? How about the women's suffrage movement ? How about the labor movement to legalize unions in the 1930's ? How about the anti-Vietnam war peace movement ? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 3 14:55:43 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:55:43 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Social movements don't die in the DP Message-ID: <48BEC18F.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yes, Charles, let's test that. In each and every case you mention--woman suffrage, civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement--the impetus to change came from people functioning independent of the electoral parties. As the movements grew stronger, they forced officeholders to make concessions. ^^^^ CB: Yes, and contrary to Sartesian's claim, none of these dramatic movements of the 20th Century was debilitated by the Democratic Party. So, his claim fails the tests of factual history. All of these movements succeeded to a substantial degree. In the case of the Vietnam war peace movement, it basically took over and "debilitated" the Democratic Party in 1972 with McGovern as the candidate whose main platform plank was end the Viet nam war. That debilitated the Dem Party , in the sense that Nixon won by a landslide. In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, it "took over" the Democratic Party in a large sense - federal civil rights laws passed, dozens of Black/ urban mayors and city council members, legislators winning office, and the Republicans instituting the "Southern Strategy" by which they basically won decades of Presidential elections based on identifying the Democratic Party with Black people ( the Civil Rights Movement) in the minds of various strains of racists. ^^^^ As an aside, it was the Democratic Party that provided the greater obstacle to woman suffrage in the heyday of the movement. And the Democratic Party was responsible for needing civil rights legislation in the first place, since it was the party that established and tightened segregationist standards as late as the 1950s. And the Democratic Party started and escalated the Vietnam War. ^^^^^ CB: Yea, there is a historical reversal of the roles of the Parties with FDR, fyi. At any rate, the women's suffrage movement was not debilitated by the Dem Party, as Sartisian claimed. It succeeded. ^^^^^^^ We're not discussing ancient history here. Have we forgotten? ^^^ CB: I think Sartisian said 20th Century. ^^^^^^^ ML This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 3 14:57:36 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:57:36 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Social movements don't die in the DP Message-ID: <48BEC200.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> - One think that the link to the comic below points out is that FDR, a Democrat, was the first president since Grover Cleveland in the Pullman Strike to use the military to break a strike. All gains made by working people have been won outside of the DP...I don't know if I've followed this thread closely enough but has anyone mentioned the old say, "The Democratic Party in the place where social movements go to die"? ^^^ CB: Yes, Sartesian is essentially saying that ( go to be debilitated) , but when we look at some historical facts it isn't an accurate generalization for the main social movements - women's suffrage, unionization of industrial labor, Civil Rights/anti-Jim Crow, Vietnam peace, modern women's lib . _None_ of them died in the Democratic Party. They all achieved significantly their historical goals. And in the case of the Civil Rights Movement it can be said that the Democratic Party sacrificed itself in a big sense in that the successful Republican Southern Strategy of the last 40 years is based on the Democratic Party support and actualization of the Civil Rights Movement, the complete opposite of this "old saying". ^^^^ http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vx_Yf3S3yJ8/SLMdeE25ztI/AAAAAAAAAFU/KVSIjLiSe64/s1600-h/General-Strike-%236asendoutth.gif Christopher Hutchinson This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Wed Sep 3 18:53:45 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 09:53:45 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Afghan conflict Message-ID: PH:>> It is clear that Western imperialist forces would now like to withdraw from Afghanistan after their huge miscalculation in their effort to expand their grip on the world. However this is not possible because the Karzi government would collapse following a withdrawal. Even greater instability would follow leading to the weakening of Western influence in Afghanistan<< Weakening of 'western' influence might be a stabilizing factor. Sort of like the death of Alexander the Great all over again? I have my doubts about your 'destablization' thesis. I'll review how the US national security state operates to get its huge, debt-funded budgets: 1. Never attack a country that can defend itself (hence the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, which have little or nothing to do with 9-11, other than they are a great way to distract people from the fact that a handful of guys with box cutters brought Rome to its knees for two days). 2. Never defend an ally that can't defend itself (hence Georgia). 3. Create foreign policy crises that justify spending 1 trillion plus dollars (of red ink) every year on 'national defense, security and intelligence'. The occupation of Iraq is immensely practical. It ties up US troops exactly where the DoD wanted to position them. The problem is Iraq resisted and resisted successfully. The Iraqis don't want the US there anymore. Even some of the more secular Kurds are waking up to the new reality. But it is not so much physical resistance anymore, it is the dawning reality that the US can't get a puppet government on its feet enough to become an oil exporter with a booming economy (Germany, Japan, S. Korea were supposed to be the models) rich enough to pay for a US occupation/protection scheme, with exclusive base deals and status of force agreements that make the 19th century look progressive. It isn't going to happen in any US-sponsored quasi-democratic structure, because IRAQ RESISTS. The problem with Afghanistan is similar, except it is the sort of place the US never wanted to have anything more than some air force and special forces bases. It's a landlocked country. It's largest ethnic group has cultural ties with Pakistan, but the easiest access to the place is got from the north. Putin's Russia isn't going to help this landlocked, airlift occupation. Nor is Iran. So it's impractical and hugely expensive, even with the NATO puppets helping to pay for it and run it (their problem is they are actually trying to do 'soldiering' there in conformance with NATO combat arms doctrine , instead of just dropping bombs on villages, so they are dying in fairly large numbers--that doesn't make NATO more humane than the US, but it does make them take casualties numbers that the Americans wouldn't tolerate ). The biggest reason why the 'surge' in Iraq has worked is everyone is hunkered down, waiting for the outcome of the US presidential campaign. That includes most importantly the US military. The only way they could make Afghanistan a lucrative war would be to get the country a sea port. I don't doubt that they will test the viability of a 'partial occupation' of Pakistan, but deep down they realize that would be near impossible. So they will look elsewhere to justify their budgets, if the occupation of Iraq project collapses under a Pres. Obama. Meanwhile, it does appear the DoD is making tentative responses to the possibility of Barrage Obomber as president--lots of bombing raids on remote Pakistan villages in 'hot pursuit' of TERRORISTS. I would look instead for the DoD to make huge efforts to salvage the occupied Iraq project, anyway they can. It's so much more lucrative than anything else they had going in the 1990s. CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 4 14:22:28 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:22:28 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Social movements don't die in the DP Message-ID: <48C00B43.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> There is a dogma on this group of left related lists that the US Democratic Party is the place where social movements go to "die". I just realized that this is in complete conflict with the historical record. Charles ^^^^ Social movements don't die in the DP Marvin Gandall JScotlive writes: > The simple truth is that the US 'white' ruling class views America's > blacks with such fear that the repression visited upon any radical black > social movement or voices that dares raise?their head is so fierce and > violent that without mass support from the white working class such a > movement has virtually zero chance of succeeding independent of the > mainstream. > Ultimately, the failure of black radical and social movement to sustain > and succeed is the failure of the white working class to offer active > solidarity with their struggle. =============================== Ruling classes always are fearful of mass discontent, and when it threatens to become destabilizing, they respond with concessions or repression or a combination of both. Actually, repression was much fiercer before the universal franchise, elections, the limited right to demonstrate and to strike, and other forms of bourgeois democracy were introduced as a safety valve. But, still, the most bloody repression was not sufficient to stop the masses in Russia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere from moving towards victorious revolutions when the system was unable to meet their most basic needs for economic and physical security. I think there were many whites who supported the civil rights struggle and others who were bitterly hostile to it. Working class whites in general, while oppressed in their own way, had already won the right to vote and other reforms that the blacks were seeking, and were not discriminated against in housing, employment, etc. The kind of unqualified solidarity you are demanding between privileged and less privileged sectors of the working class requires a much higher level of consciousness, perhaps a revolutionary consciousness. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 4 14:23:50 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:23:50 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Social Movements don't die in the DP Message-ID: <48C00B96.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> > Marvin Gandall wrote: > > struggle and > others who were bitterly hostile to it. Working class whites in general, > while oppressed in their own way, had already won the right to vote and > other reforms that the blacks were seeking, and were not discriminated > against in housing, employment, etc. The kind of unqualified > solidarity you > are demanding between privileged and less privileged sectors of the > working > class requires a much higher level of consciousness, perhaps a > revolutionary > consciousness.> > > Your argument of benign indifference among working class whites, in > the south as well as in northern cities such as Chicago and Boston, > is mistaken. Sure, many working class whites supported civil rights, > but among those who did not, it was due in no small part to the fact > that they saw their interests threatened directly by the erasure of > the color line at the level of employment. This was of course due to > racism, a racism which told them that what little job security and > benefits they had would be erased once blacks began competing for > their jobs. And at the mass psychological level, the white workers > needed to feel somehow better than the black workers to shore up > their identity as superior, because in most cases this psychological > feeling was all they had to distinguish them from the black workers, > given that the material benefits for participation in the system were > not exactly forthcoming, or were at best negligible. I think you > underestimate the pernicious effects of the color line on the minds > and behavior of white southern workers in particular, but also among > some northern whites whose racism was no less virulent. Who does not > remember the hostile reception MLK received in Chicago, or the anti- > busing reaction among the racists of Boston? > > And what political party in the south benefitted from jim crow over > the years? Johnson may have figured the realpolitic was in his favor > in the long run, but among white democrats at the local level in > southern towns and cities, the opposition to ending jim crow was > strong. The opposition was so strong that de facto segregation still > exists in towns and cities all across the south, as well as in the > north. =============================== I agree with this. I was replying in haste to the list comments directed my way before turning to other matters today, and did not lay as much stress as I could have on the material interests of the "privleged...sectors of the working class." Your post admirably fills in the gap. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 4 14:32:54 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:32:54 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ecuador Giving U.S. Air Base the Boot Message-ID: <48C00DB6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ecuador Giving U.S. Air Base the Boot By Joshua Partlow Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, September 4, 2008; A06 MANTA, Ecuador -- When U.S. officers stationed in this humid coastal city give reasons they should continue their decade-old airborne surveillance mission, they talk not only about fighting drug runners on the open seas but about the $71 million they've spent to renovate and maintain the city's airport, and the $6.5 million they inject each year into the local economy. But the government of Ecuador has decided, and Washington has apparently agreed, that one of the most important foreign outposts in the United States' war on drugs will close. The 450 U.S. Air Force personnel and contractors stationed at a military base that shares the airport's runway will be leaving next year. This decision reflects both the prevailing political climate here -- standing up to the United States tends to be widely popular -- and a new economic reality. With major projects underway in Manta by the Venezuelan government and a Hong Kong company, the U.S. dollars don't amount to much. President Hugo Ch?vez of Venezuela stood alongside President Rafael Correa of Ecuador in July to announce a jointly financed $6 billion oil refinery to be constructed on the outskirts of Manta. And Hong Kong-based Hutchison Port Holdings has begun building what will be among the largest deep-water ports on the west coast of South America, a $523 million project with piers, cranes, tuna-boat terminals, roads, and the capacity to eventually handle 1.6 million shipping containers a year at the continent's closest point to Asia. "The U.S. stopped being the benchmark of what is good for Latin America," said Gustavo Larrea, Ecuador's security minister. "Because Latin America did everything that the U.S. asked it to do and wasn't able to get out of poverty, the North American myth lost political weight." In the waning days of the Bush administration, governments in Latin America are rejecting many U.S.-funded programs, particularly anti- narcotics efforts, with rhetoric championing sovereignty and denouncing "imperialism" from the north. In Venezuela, anti-drug officials say, cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has deteriorated sharply. In Bolivia, coca farmers decided in June to expel the U.S. Agency for International Development from part of the country amid accusations that it was conspiring against President Evo Morales. The pushback resonates well politically in many parts of Latin America, where U.S. policies are often seen as security-obsessed Cold War vestiges or bitter economic pills forced down the throats of unwilling governments. The leading spokesman of such anti-Americanism is Ch?vez, but other South American leaders often join in. During his campaign for president, Correa said he would not renew a 10-year agreement reached with the United States in November 1999 that allowed the U.S. military to operate from the base at Manta. In late July, Ecuador's Foreign Ministry officially notified the United States that it must evacuate by November of next year. The air base serves as a launching pad for surveillance flights over the Pacific Ocean to spot seaborne drug traffic and over Colombia to spot unauthorized planes. According to U.S. figures, the missions resulted in the seizure of about 230 tons of cocaine in 2007. Whether the Americans stay or go "is a political thing," said Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Leonard, who recently completed a tour as commander of the U.S. contingent in Manta. "I don't think it's necessarily tied to our successes or the impact to the local folks. It's just a political thing." But Ecuadoran officials say there is little benefit in the base. For one, their country is a minor player in the Andean world of coca and cocaine production. And the U.S. surveillance flights do nothing to help them uncover drug labs hidden under vast stretches of forest canopy. "This is a problem for us of sovereignty," Larrea said. "It's as if we had a base in New York. This would be incomprehensible for North Americans." The original agreement was signed by President Jamil Mahuad shortly before street protests and a military revolt forced him from office in 2000. Many Ecuadorans say the terms heavily favored the Americans. The United States, for instance, does not pay rent for the base. The agreement was negotiated "in a moment of anguish" by a government that needed a loan from the International Monetary Fund but did not get it, said Adri?n Bonilla, director of FLACSO, a think tank in Quito, the Ecuadoran capital. "The political cost of a foreign base is very high. And the national need is very low," he said. "The political culture of Ecuador is very nationalistic. And it is mistrusting of the United States. . . . It's very popular to throw out the gringos from the Manta base." U.S. officials don't yet know where they might move after Manta. Colombia is often mentioned. In other neighboring countries, such as Panama, officials have publicly ruled out letting the Americans move in. The loss of Manta, according to State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, would leave a "serious gap" in the U.S. drug fight. But other officials, such as Leonard, say the U.S. planes could operate out of an existing base on the Caribbean island of Curacao for the time being and cover the same territory. "The success will be slightly less. But I still think we'll have the coverage out there," Leonard said. "It's not like it will just disappear." In Bolivia, the decision by the coca growers federation, still led by President Morales, to stop working with USAID in the Chapare region, was also motivated by a growing desire for self-determination. That part of Bolivia is home of the slogan "Long live coca, death to the Yankees." Residents express long-standing frustrations with U.S. efforts to eradicate the crop or persuade farmers to plant often- unviable alternatives. "The famous macadamia nut? The cardamom? These were very expensive projects that resulted in what? In nothing," said Felipe C?ceres, Bolivia's vice minister of social defense and a former coca grower. The USAID contingent, about 100 employees and contractors, whom C?ceres described as "all right-wingers," have left the Chapare. Morales has accused USAID of funding opposition groups to foment protests against him, allegations U.S. officials have denied. C?ceres said last month that the Bolivian government plans to "nationalize" the war on drugs in Bolivia by controlling for itself how the aid money is spent. While C?ceres praised the cooperation between his government and the DEA, he ridiculed USAID projects as wasteful spending that often came with burdensome conditions. From 1998 to 2003, Bolivian farmers could receive USAID funding for help planting other crops only if they eliminated all their coca, according to the Andean Information Network, a research group based in Bolivia. Other rules, such as the requirement that participating communities declare themselves "terrorist-free zones," simply irritated people, said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network. "Eradicate all your coca and then you grow an orange tree that will get fruit in eight years but you don't have anything to eat in the meantime? A bad idea," she said. "The thing about kicking out USAID, I don't think it's an anti-American sentiment overall" but rather a rejection of bad programs. Another factor cited by Bolivian officials is that the European Union and Venezuela have stepped in as major sources of development funding without so many strings attached. The E.U. has earmarked about $350 million for Bolivia for the period from 2007 to 2013. "Most importantly and in line with the Bolivian authorities, activities have not been made conditional on the eradication of coca," said an E.U. strategy paper on Bolivia from late last year. Meanwhile, U.S. aid for Bolivia's drug fight has been steadily dropping, C?ceres said, from more than $100 million a year during the 1990s to $26 million this year. This government has done the best job of fighting drugs, he said, "but each year we are getting less." To U.S. anti-drug officials, the impending loss of the base in Ecuador and the halt of USAID projects in the Chapare do not portend disaster but suggest a lack of commitment to halt the flow of cocaine. "I think it's a setback in the interests of the American people and the people of Ecuador and Bolivia," said John P. Walters, the White House drug policy chief. "But again, we respect the sovereign authority of the leadership of those countries, and we'll try to make the partnership work the best we can." Correspondent Juan Forero contributed to this report. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 5 12:52:35 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:52:35 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Republicans mock everyday people Message-ID: <48C147B2.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Charles -- Why would the Republicans spend a whole night of their convention attacking ordinary people? With the nation watching, the Republicans mocked, dismissed, and actually laughed out loud at Americans who engage in community service and organizing. Our convention was different. We gave the stage to everyday Americans who hunger for change and stepped up to make phone calls, knock on doors, and raise money in small amounts in their communities. You may have missed it, but we also showed the country a video with the faces and voices of those organizers, volunteers, and donors from every corner of the country. What you didn't hear from the Republicans at their convention is a single new idea about how to make the healthcare system work, get our economy moving for the middle class, or improve education. Just attacks -- on me, and on you. But what the McCain attack squad doesn't understand is that people like you -- who devote part of their busy lives to organizing and building their communities -- have the power to change this country. With your help, that's exactly what we're going to do. Thank you, Barack -----Original Message----- From: David Plouffe Subject: What you just saw Dear Charles -- I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response. I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign. But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process. You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed. Let's clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies. And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning. Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America. Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies. It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has supported more than 90 percent of the time. But you can send a crystal clear message. Thank you for joining more than 2 million ordinary Americans who refuse to be silenced. David David Plouffe Campaign Manager Obama for America This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 5 15:49:28 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:49:28 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Palin: Queen WASP of the US Bloody Empire Message-ID: <48C17129.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Yea, at first I thought there might be something to the analysis of Palin being able to appeal to ?regular? folks. But as it sunk in I?m thinking she?s a fake regular folk, and that will come out. She?s also like the Queen of the creatures in the movie ?The Alien?, the biggest monster of them all, or Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria, Queen Ants/WASP?S of the Bloody Empire. Yea, that?s it. Palin is a Queen WASP of the Bloody US Empire (with lipstick; do wasps have lips ? smile). Now that?s at the top of the Elite (E-light). Anyway, I bet there are dozens of videos of her talking passionately about real nutsy ,right-wing ,bizarro-fundamentalist stuff, specifically anti-women stuff. It should be possible to graphically illustrate that she?s an anti-woman woman, a Clarence Thomas of women, not to mention an anti-people person in general. Obama already started in on them that not knowing what a community organizer is shows the Reps are out of touch with everyday people, with real problems, like unemployment, underemployment, ends not meeting, lack of health care, etc. , real life in America. The Reps are ignorant of everyday economics, dismal science. Yes, and perhaps another way to say this is that Palin is pretty certainly a national chauvinist and racist, probably jingoist, in other words, a continuation of Bush. We don?t want another parochial ignoramus like him at number two of the biggest war machine in the history of the world. It?s dangerous for humanity. Her gun happiness suggests she is likely to more readily shoot off the US?s really big guns, i.e that she?s a militarist. What is her position on the war in Iraq ? Probably really dangerous. American recreational gun culture is a continuation of the racist tradition of armed attack on the Indigenous Peoples of America, enforcing the racist creed of ?the only good Indian is a dead Indian?. This American history of mass murder segues too easily into shooting and bombing other peoples , especially of color, around the world, which was what John McCain was doing when he was justly imprisoned by his victims in Vietnam. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From cburford at gn.apc.org Fri Sep 5 23:50:22 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2008 06:50:22 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ecuador Giving U.S. Air Base the Boot References: <48C00DB6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <001501c90fe4$7a0aad50$39ca8656@HPINVENT> | a new economic reality. With major projects underway in Manta by the | Venezuelan government and a Hong Kong company, the U.S. dollars don't | amount to much. Interesting. Independent of and in addition to, sympathy for the political aims of Venezuela, are we seeing here under later monopolistic capitalism, the importance of extremely large blocs of capital, which can withstand fluctuations in profitability. The fact that those blocs are closely tied to, and in fact coordinated by, central state policy, adds to the coherence of this argument. Venzuela, China. Chris Burford London ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" To: ; Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 9:32 PM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ecuador Giving U.S. Air Base the Boot | Ecuador Giving U.S. Air Base the Boot | By Joshua Partlow | Washington Post Foreign Service | Thursday, September 4, 2008; A06 | | MANTA, Ecuador -- When U.S. officers stationed in this humid coastal | city give reasons they should continue their decade-old airborne | surveillance mission, they talk not only about fighting drug runners | on the open seas but about the $71 million they've spent to renovate | and maintain the city's airport, and the $6.5 million they inject | each year into the local economy. | | But the government of Ecuador has decided, and Washington has | apparently agreed, that one of the most important foreign outposts in | the United States' war on drugs will close. The 450 U.S. Air Force | personnel and contractors stationed at a military base that shares | the airport's runway will be leaving next year. | | This decision reflects both the prevailing political climate here -- | standing up to the United States tends to be widely popular -- and a | new economic reality. With major projects underway in Manta by the | Venezuelan government and a Hong Kong company, the U.S. dollars don't | amount to much. | | President Hugo Ch?vez of Venezuela stood alongside President Rafael | Correa of Ecuador in July to announce a jointly financed $6 billion | oil refinery to be constructed on the outskirts of Manta. And Hong | Kong-based Hutchison Port Holdings has begun building what will be | among the largest deep-water ports on the west coast of South | America, a $523 million project with piers, cranes, tuna-boat | terminals, roads, and the capacity to eventually handle 1.6 million | shipping containers a year at the continent's closest point to Asia. | | "The U.S. stopped being the benchmark of what is good for Latin | America," said Gustavo Larrea, Ecuador's security minister. "Because | Latin America did everything that the U.S. asked it to do and wasn't | able to get out of poverty, the North American myth lost political | weight." | | In the waning days of the Bush administration, governments in Latin | America are rejecting many U.S.-funded programs, particularly anti- | narcotics efforts, with rhetoric championing sovereignty and | denouncing "imperialism" from the north. | | In Venezuela, anti-drug officials say, cooperation with the U.S. Drug | Enforcement Administration has deteriorated sharply. In Bolivia, coca | farmers decided in June to expel the U.S. Agency for International | Development from part of the country amid accusations that it was | conspiring against President Evo Morales. | | The pushback resonates well politically in many parts of Latin | America, where U.S. policies are often seen as security-obsessed Cold | War vestiges or bitter economic pills forced down the throats of | unwilling governments. | | The leading spokesman of such anti-Americanism is Ch?vez, but other | South American leaders often join in. | | During his campaign for president, Correa said he would not renew a | 10-year agreement reached with the United States in November 1999 | that allowed the U.S. military to operate from the base at Manta. In | late July, Ecuador's Foreign Ministry officially notified the United | States that it must evacuate by November of next year. | | The air base serves as a launching pad for surveillance flights over | the Pacific Ocean to spot seaborne drug traffic and over Colombia to | spot unauthorized planes. According to U.S. figures, the missions | resulted in the seizure of about 230 tons of cocaine in 2007. | | Whether the Americans stay or go "is a political thing," said Air | Force Lt. Col. Robert Leonard, who recently completed a tour as | commander of the U.S. contingent in Manta. "I don't think it's | necessarily tied to our successes or the impact to the local folks. | It's just a political thing." | | But Ecuadoran officials say there is little benefit in the base. For | one, their country is a minor player in the Andean world of coca and | cocaine production. And the U.S. surveillance flights do nothing to | help them uncover drug labs hidden under vast stretches of forest | canopy. | | "This is a problem for us of sovereignty," Larrea said. "It's as if | we had a base in New York. This would be incomprehensible for North | Americans." | | The original agreement was signed by President Jamil Mahuad shortly | before street protests and a military revolt forced him from office | in 2000. Many Ecuadorans say the terms heavily favored the Americans. | The United States, for instance, does not pay rent for the base. | | The agreement was negotiated "in a moment of anguish" by a government | that needed a loan from the International Monetary Fund but did not | get it, said Adri?n Bonilla, director of FLACSO, a think tank in | Quito, the Ecuadoran capital. | | "The political cost of a foreign base is very high. And the national | need is very low," he said. "The political culture of Ecuador is very | nationalistic. And it is mistrusting of the United States. . . . It's | very popular to throw out the gringos from the Manta base." | | U.S. officials don't yet know where they might move after Manta. | Colombia is often mentioned. In other neighboring countries, such as | Panama, officials have publicly ruled out letting the Americans move | in. The loss of Manta, according to State Department spokesman Sean | McCormack, would leave a "serious gap" in the U.S. drug fight. | | But other officials, such as Leonard, say the U.S. planes could | operate out of an existing base on the Caribbean island of Curacao | for the time being and cover the same territory. | | "The success will be slightly less. But I still think we'll have the | coverage out there," Leonard said. "It's not like it will just | disappear." | | In Bolivia, the decision by the coca growers federation, still led by | President Morales, to stop working with USAID in the Chapare region, | was also motivated by a growing desire for self-determination. That | part of Bolivia is home of the slogan "Long live coca, death to the | Yankees." Residents express long-standing frustrations with U.S. | efforts to eradicate the crop or persuade farmers to plant often- | unviable alternatives. | | "The famous macadamia nut? The cardamom? These were very expensive | projects that resulted in what? In nothing," said Felipe C?ceres, | Bolivia's vice minister of social defense and a former coca grower. | | The USAID contingent, about 100 employees and contractors, whom | C?ceres described as "all right-wingers," have left the Chapare. | Morales has accused USAID of funding opposition groups to foment | protests against him, allegations U.S. officials have denied. | | C?ceres said last month that the Bolivian government plans to | "nationalize" the war on drugs in Bolivia by controlling for itself | how the aid money is spent. While C?ceres praised the cooperation | between his government and the DEA, he ridiculed USAID projects as | wasteful spending that often came with burdensome conditions. | | From 1998 to 2003, Bolivian farmers could receive USAID funding for | help planting other crops only if they eliminated all their coca, | according to the Andean Information Network, a research group based | in Bolivia. Other rules, such as the requirement that participating | communities declare themselves "terrorist-free zones," simply | irritated people, said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean | Information Network. | | "Eradicate all your coca and then you grow an orange tree that will | get fruit in eight years but you don't have anything to eat in the | meantime? A bad idea," she said. "The thing about kicking out USAID, | I don't think it's an anti-American sentiment overall" but rather a | rejection of bad programs. | | Another factor cited by Bolivian officials is that the European Union | and Venezuela have stepped in as major sources of development funding | without so many strings attached. The E.U. has earmarked about $350 | million for Bolivia for the period from 2007 to 2013. "Most | importantly and in line with the Bolivian authorities, activities | have not been made conditional on the eradication of coca," said an | E.U. strategy paper on Bolivia from late last year. | | Meanwhile, U.S. aid for Bolivia's drug fight has been steadily | dropping, C?ceres said, from more than $100 million a year during the | 1990s to $26 million this year. This government has done the best job | of fighting drugs, he said, "but each year we are getting less." | | To U.S. anti-drug officials, the impending loss of the base in | Ecuador and the halt of USAID projects in the Chapare do not portend | disaster but suggest a lack of commitment to halt the flow of cocaine. | | "I think it's a setback in the interests of the American people and | the people of Ecuador and Bolivia," said John P. Walters, the White | House drug policy chief. "But again, we respect the sovereign | authority of the leadership of those countries, and we'll try to make | the partnership work the best we can." | | Correspondent Juan Forero contributed to this report. | | | | This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com | | _______________________________________________ | Marxism-Thaxis mailing list | Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu | To change your options or unsubscribe go to: | http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis | From cburford at gn.apc.org Fri Sep 5 23:59:21 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2008 06:59:21 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Republicans mock everyday people References: <48C147B2.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <002201c90fe5$b9c14bb0$39ca8656@HPINVENT> Aggressive contempt is a common feature of right-wing populist politics. Just holding a sense of democratic self-respect is a struggle. The text below, presumably by Obama's aides, seems to me not a bad partial answer to one aspect of that attack. (It is all cheeful fun if you are a competitive "hocky mum" rooting for your own kids, and putting on a bit of lipstick, but actually it is highly competitive and aggressive, when people need to cooperate together to face the global challenges, and take control of our lives again.) Psychological violence is the preparation for annihilating the importance of other people, the needs of 2/3 of the population, (some of whom may be seduced into the cheerful good clean fun of rooting for your own immediately family as if it is just a game of ice hockey.) Chris Burford London ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" To: Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 7:52 PM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Republicans mock everyday people | Charles -- | | Why would the Republicans spend a whole night of their convention | attacking ordinary people? | | With the nation watching, the Republicans mocked, dismissed, and | actually laughed out loud at Americans who engage in community service | and organizing. | | Our convention was different. We gave the stage to everyday Americans | who hunger for change and stepped up to make phone calls, knock on | doors, and raise money in small amounts in their communities. | | You may have missed it, but we also showed the country a video with the | faces and voices of those organizers, volunteers, and donors from every | corner of the country. | | What you didn't hear from the Republicans at their convention is a | single new idea about how to make the healthcare system work, get our | economy moving for the middle class, or improve education. | | Just attacks -- on me, and on you. | | But what the McCain attack squad doesn't understand is that people like | you -- who devote part of their busy lives to organizing and building | their communities -- have the power to change this country. | | With your help, that's exactly what we're going to do. | | Thank you, | | Barack | | | | -----Original Message----- | From: David Plouffe | Subject: What you just saw | | Dear Charles -- | | I wasn't planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what | I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a | response. | | I saw John McCain's attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They | lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a | part of this campaign. | | But worst of all -- and this deserves to be noted -- they insulted the | very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political | process. | | You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, | everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we | come together. | | Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's | experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more | than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and | been left behind when the local steel plants closed. | | Let's clarify something for them right now. | | Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch | politicians and their failed policies. | | And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions | of people have found that by coming together in their local communities | they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign | has been about from the beginning. | | Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's | promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community | organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's | suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's | happening today in church basements and community centers and living | rooms across America. | | Meanwhile, we still haven't gotten a single idea during the entire | Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class | so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies. | | It's now clear that John McCain's campaign has decided that desperate | lies and personal attacks -- on Barack Obama and on you -- are the only | way they can earn a third term for the Bush policies that McCain has | supported more than 90 percent of the time. | | But you can send a crystal clear message. | | | | Thank you for joining more than 2 million ordinary Americans who refuse | to be silenced. | | David | | David Plouffe | Campaign Manager | Obama for America | | | | This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com | | _______________________________________________ | Marxism-Thaxis mailing list | Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu | To change your options or unsubscribe go to: | http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Sep 7 10:21:01 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 12:21:01 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marginalism and the labor theory of value Message-ID: <20080907.122102.2864.3.farmelantj@juno.com> http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10202/1/MPRA_paper_10202.pdf ____________________________________________________________ Career Problems? Get a Fashion Design Education. Click Now. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3oIaxruqnMoWEUmAEQchgBnmS9ia81x187DIMLZRDFgqBqa1/ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 8 07:24:46 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:24:46 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Dear Message-ID: <48C4EF5E.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Charles -- This past week at the Republican convention, John McCain and his surrogates attacked Barack Obama and mocked the power of community organizing. They sneered at the idea that people like you can play a crucial role in turning this country around. The Republicans just don't get it. Our movement was built by ordinary people working together in their communities -- and that's how we're going to win on Election Day. We have a new tool called Neighbor to Neighbor that makes it easier than ever to connect with potential supporters in your community. It allows you to reach out to your fellow voters by making phone calls or knocking on doors -- the choice is yours. Learn more and start making a difference in your neighborhood right now: http://my.barackobama.com/n2n Barack is making history by competing in every corner of the country. It's an aggressive strategy, and only you can make it work. No one knows your community better than you -- and no one is better suited to strengthen our movement from the bottom up. No prior experience is required. Neighbor to Neighbor gives you a list of potential supporters in your community, suggested topics to talk about, and an easy way to report back on who you've contacted. With less than nine weeks till Election Day, we need to act now. Reach out in your community and build this movement for change: http://my.barackobama.com/n2n You've owned this campaign from the very start. By making a few phone calls or knocking on a few doors today, you'll own it more than ever before. Thanks, Jon Jon Carson National Field Director Obama for America --------------------------------------------------------------------- Paid for by Obama for America This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 8 07:48:46 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:48:46 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Racists: the worse the better ? Message-ID: <48C4F4FD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=951 Silver Lining Not All White Supremacists Oppose Black President By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok Intelligence Report Fall 2008 (Corbis) With the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate clinched, large sections of the white supremacist movement are adopting a surprising attitude: Electing America's first black president could be a very good thing. It's not that the assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who make up this country's radical right have suddenly discovered that a man should be judged based on the content of his character, not his skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white supremacists, and even some of those who pass for intellectual leaders of their movement, think that a black man in the Oval Office would shock white America, possibly drive millions to their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan victory. "He will make things so bad for white people that hopefully they will finally realize how stupid they were for admiring these jigaboos all these years," "Darthvader" wrote on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network (VNN) web forum. "I believe in the motto 'Worse is Better' and Obama certainly fits that description." Another poster on the same thread this summer chimed in with this: "I hope Obama wins because in four years, white people just might be pissed off enough to actually do something. ? White people aren't going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them. So things have to be worse for things to be better." "Oh man," enthused "Centimanus" on the white nationalist Stormfront website. "I am gleefully, sadistically looking forward to Obama as president. ? It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country." Added "Fulimnata": "To the average white man and woman, they could look at Obama and see plain as day that whites are not in control." Another message, from "TheLastOfMyKind," agreed: "Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black, muslim [sic] rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites throughout the nation." "Actually," said another poster, "if Obama were to win, it would be the best thing that ever happened to the Klan. They would have massive growth." And "TeutonicLegion" said that "a whole bunch of people will join us and find these boards" if Obama becomes president. The Leaders Weigh In Figures from the white supremacist establishment seem to agree with the crudely put sentiments of their followers. David Duke, the neo-Nazi and former Klan boss who is the closest thing the movement has to a real intellectual these days, sees clear advantages in an Obama victory in the fall. David Duke "Obama will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people," Duke wrote in an essay entitled "A Black Flag for White America" posted to his website this summer. "Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. ? Obama is the pain that let's [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let the American people know that there is a real cancer eating away at the heart of our country and Republican aspirin will not only not cure it, but only masks the pain and makes you think you don't need radical surgery. ? My bet is that whether Obama wins or loses in November, millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it." Richard Barrett, head of the Nationalist Movement, a Learned, Miss. -based white supremacist organization, sounded a similar note, telling the BBC: "The uprising of the American people for majority-rule and real-democracy has been building, but, with Obama turning the White House into the Black House, the upheaval will be overpowering." Barrett added, "The cataclysm will wake people up and the despotism will drive people to act, as never before." "Thomas Dixon Jr.," a Stormfront poster using the name of the racist author who wrote the classic novel The Clansman, put it like this: "As WLP [William Luther Pierce, the late leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance] would say? 'What is bad for the system is good for us.'" "Obama," added "The Patriot" in the same thread, "would be better for our cause in the long run, no doubt about it." Other extremists writing on the topic think that having Obama as president would actually be preferable to Republican John McCain, who is widely seen by white supremacists as a sellout, particularly on the issue of nonwhite immigration into the United States. Paul Gottfried is a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., who has spoken repeatedly at conferences put on by American Renaissance, a racist journal whose editor describes blacks as "incapable of sustaining" civilization. At the 2008 American Renaissance conference, Gottfried said that he was sure Obama would overwhelm McCain among those attending the conference. "Better a black who is honest about who he is than a conservative who is really delivering the liberal agenda," Gottfried told a reporter. Richard Barrett, leader of the Nationalist Movement American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor had a slightly different take. He believes Obama will succeed as a kind of post-racial president: "I think he's got the right touch, absolutely the right touch? . He's an intelligent and serious man and he realizes that he cannot be a 'black' president." In Taylor's view, whites will vote for Obama because it will make them feel good about themselves. "For many whites, voting for Mr. Obama will be an act of high patriotism. Electing him will prove America is not 'racist,' and many whites believe that rising above 'racism' is America's sacred calling. One must never underestimate the importance to whites of feeling virtuous," Taylor wrote in a July essay, "Why Obama Will Win." Rocky Suhayda, head of the American Nazi Party, agreed. "White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally, I'd prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals? . Then, we have a black man, who loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married to a black woman? . That's the kind of negro that I can respect," Suhayda told Esquire. Death Threats and Violence Yet opinion on the radical right is far from unanimous on the topic of a potential Obama victory. Many more traditional racist extremists believe it would destroy the country and they oppose it mightily. "Worse is not better. It has already hit rock bottom. The next step is to round up all the whites and put them in concentration camps," wrote "White Shogun" on the Caste Football hate forum. "If you are in the same camp as I am, I will slap you for suggesting that we vote for Obama," he added. "Obama as president would do tremendous damage to the cause of maintaining the purity of the white race. Liberals would use him as an example to argue in schools, in churches, on TV, etc., 'Why if your daughter married a black, her child could one day grow up to become President ? like Obama!" wrote longtime white supremacist Ed Fields in his "segregationist" newsletter, The Truth at Last. "We are not going to vote our way out of this mess? . We should have retained that realization in the 'War Between the States,'" wrote "Ibere" on Stormfront. Others have more violent hopes. "Well, we all know what happened to the old JFK. I just hope it happens in the timing of RFK BEFORE he can take office," wrote "Johann Steffansson" in July on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network. Some of the most heated and apparently threatening anti-Obama talk appears to be on Internet sites that allow people to post messages anonymously ? not on sites run by white supremacists, who seem highly worried about attention from the Secret Service and other officials. One such site, JD Underground, is a list ostensibly devoted to lawyers. It has carried a particularly venomous and long-running thread that started in January. It is entitled, "Nigger President." "I'm hoping someone will do his public duty of putting a bullet through Obama's head," said a poster identified as "Kill Da Nigga." Another poster suggested "bring[ing] back lynchings" and concluded with a warning: "LOOK OUT NIGGER. THE KLAN IS GETTING BIGGER!!!!!!" And a third, using the screen name "amerikkkan," said only, "The deep south is making plans." Even the Southern Poverty Law Center's blog, Hatewatch, has received such anonymous threats against Obama. In April, "unknown" posted this: "ATTENTION, IF OBAMA BECOMES PRESEDANT [sic] I WILL KILL HIM MYSELF MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT." Anthony Griggs contributed to this story. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Mon Sep 8 08:03:45 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:03:45 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Racists: the worse the better ? In-Reply-To: <48C4F4FD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48C4F4FD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: I wonder if Paul Gottfried is the same Gottfried who wrote a book about postwar right-wing Hegelianism and who writes for TELOS. I guess I will need to do my homework. I doubt very much that the white supremacists will meet their objective, but certainly there will be race-baiting galore in the unlikely event that Obama becomes president. Obama will continue to distance himself from black America, but there's no underestimating the pathological stupidity of white people. I still doubt that racial scapegoating can go too far, but this is a new situation that reminds me of a certain brand of European paranoid anti-semitism. That is, if blacks are now seen to run things, which nobody but an idiot (or a few million of them) could believe, blacks could take the place of Jews in paranoid scenarios of who really runs things behind the scenes. I think scapegoating will take milder forms, but there's no telling how many white separatists stockpiling weapons and mercenary soldier magazines are out there. At 09:48 AM 9/8/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=951 >Silver Lining Not All White Supremacists Oppose >Black President By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok >Intelligence Report Fall 2008 (Corbis) >With the nomination of Barack Obama as the >Democratic presidential candidate clinched, >large sections of the white supremacist movement >are adopting a surprising attitude: Electing >America's first black president could be a very >good thing. It's not that the assortment of >neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who >make up this country's radical right have >suddenly discovered that a man should be judged >based on the content of his character, not his >skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white >supremacists, and even some of those who pass >for intellectual leaders of their movement, >think that a black man in the Oval Office would >shock white America, possibly drive millions to >their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war >that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan >victory. "He will make things so bad for white >people that hopefully they will finally realize >how stupid they were for admiring these jigaboos >all these years," "Darthvader" wrote on the >neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network (VNN) web forum. >"I believe in the motto 'Worse is Better' and >Obama certainly fits that description." Another >poster on the same thread this summer chimed in >with this: "I hope Obama wins because in four >years, white people just might be pissed off >enough to actually do something. White people >aren't goingg to do a thing until their toys are >taken away from them. So things have to be worse >for things to be better." "Oh man," enthused >"Centimanus" on the white nationalist Stormfront >website. "I am gleefully, sadistically looking >forward to Obama as president. It will be a >beautiful day when the masses look at the paper >and truly realize they have lost their own >country." Added "Fulimnata": "To the average >white man and woman, they could look at Obama >and see plain as day that whites are not in >control." Another message, from >"TheLastOfMyKind," agreed: "Could it be that the >nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of >unity in white voters? I would propose that this >threat of black, muslim [sic] rule may very well >be the thing that finally scares some sense back >into complacent whites throughout the nation." >"Actually," said another poster, "if Obama were >to win, it would be the best thing that ever >happened to the Klan. They would have massive >growth." And "TeutonicLegion" said that "a whole >bunch of people will join us and find these >boards" if Obama becomes president. The Leaders >Weigh In Figures from the white supremacist >establishment seem to agree with the crudely put >sentiments of their followers. David Duke, the >neo-Nazi and former Klan boss who is the closest >thing the movement has to a real intellectual >these days, sees clear advantages in an Obama >victory in the fall. David Duke "Obama will be >a signal, a clear signal for millions of our >people," Duke wrote in an essay entitled "A >Black Flag for White America" posted to his >website this summer. "Obama is like that new big >dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to >the doctor for some real medicine. Obamma is >the pain that let's [sic] your body know that >something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let >the American people know that there is a real >cancer eating away at the heart of our country >and Republican aspirin will not only not cure >it, but only masks the pain and makes you think >you don't need radical surgery. My bet is that >whetherr Obama wins or loses in November, >millions of European Americans will inevitably >react with new awareness of their heritage and >the need for them to defend and advance it." >Richard Barrett, head of the Nationalist >Movement, a Learned, Miss. -based white >supremacist organization, sounded a similar >note, telling the BBC: "The uprising of the >American people for majority-rule and >real-democracy has been building, but, with >Obama turning the White House into the Black >House, the upheaval will be overpowering." >Barrett added, "The cataclysm will wake people >up and the despotism will drive people to act, >as never before." "Thomas Dixon Jr.," a >Stormfront poster using the name of the racist >author who wrote the classic novel The Clansman, >put it like this: "As WLP [William Luther >Pierce, the late leader of the neo-Nazi National >Alliance] would say 'What is bad for the system >is good for us.'" "Obama,," added "The Patriot" >in the same thread, "would be better for our >cause in the long run, no doubt about it." Other >extremists writing on the topic think that >having Obama as president would actually be >preferable to Republican John McCain, who is >widely seen by white supremacists as a sellout, >particularly on the issue of nonwhite >immigration into the United States. Paul >Gottfried is a professor of humanities at >Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., who >has spoken repeatedly at conferences put on by >American Renaissance, a racist journal whose >editor describes blacks as "incapable of >sustaining" civilization. At the 2008 American >Renaissance conference, Gottfried said that he >was sure Obama would overwhelm McCain among >those attending the conference. "Better a black >who is honest about who he is than a >conservative who is really delivering the >liberal agenda," Gottfried told a reporter. >Richard Barrett, leader of the Nationalist >Movement American Renaissance Editor Jared >Taylor had a slightly different take. He >believes Obama will succeed as a kind of >post-racial president: "I think he's got the >right touch, absolutely the right touch . He's >an intelligent and serious man and he realizes >that he cannot be a 'black' president." In >Taylor's view, whites will vote for Obama >because it will make them feel good about >themselves. "For many whites, voting for Mr. >Obama will be an act of high patriotism. >Electing him will prove America is not 'racist,' >and many whites believe that rising above >'racism' is America's sacred calling. One must >never underestimate the importance to whites of >feeling virtuous," Taylor wrote in a July essay, >"Why Obama Will Win." Rocky Suhayda, head of the >American Nazi Party, agreed. "White people are >faced with either a negro or a total nutter who >happens to have a pale face. Personally, I'd >prefer the negro. National Socialists are not >mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is >almost dead, who declares he wants to fight >endless wars around the globe to make the world >safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who >supports the invasion of America by illegals . >Then, we have a black man, who loves his own >kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, >is married to a black woman . That's the kind >of negro that I can respect," Suhayda told >Esquire. Death Threats and Violence Yet opinion >on the radical right is far from unanimous on >the topic of a potential Obama victory. Many >more traditional racist extremists believe it >would destroy the country and they oppose it >mightily. "Worse is not better. It has already >hit rock bottom. The next step is to round up >all the whites and put them in concentration >camps," wrote "White Shogun" on the Caste >Football hate forum. "If you are in the same >camp as I am, I will slap you for suggesting >that we vote for Obama," he added. "Obama as >president would do tremendous damage to the >cause of maintaining the purity of the white >race. Liberals would use him as an example to >argue in schools, in churches, on TV, etc., 'Why >if your daughter married a black, her child >could one day grow up to become President ? like >Obama!" wrote longtime white supremaccist Ed >Fields in his "segregationist" newsletter, The >Truth at Last. "We are not going to vote our way >out of this mess . We should have retained that >realization in thhe 'War Between the States,'" >wrote "Ibere" on Stormfront. Others have more >violent hopes. "Well, we all know what happened >to the old JFK. I just hope it happens in the >timing of RFK BEFORE he can take office," wrote >"Johann Steffansson" in July on the neo-Nazi >Vanguard News Network. Some of the most heated >and apparently threatening anti-Obama talk >appears to be on Internet sites that allow >people to post messages anonymously ? not on >sites run bby white supremacists, who seem >highly worried about attention from the Secret >Service and other officials. One such site, JD >Underground, is a list ostensibly devoted to >lawyers. It has carried a particularly venomous >and long-running thread that started in January. >It is entitled, "Nigger President." "I'm hoping >someone will do his public duty of putting a >bullet through Obama's head," said a poster >identified as "Kill Da Nigga." Another poster >suggested "bring[ing] back lynchings" and >concluded with a warning: "LOOK OUT NIGGER. THE >KLAN IS GETTING BIGGER!!!!!!" And a third, using >the screen name "amerikkkan," said only, "The >deep south is making plans." Even the Southern >Poverty Law Center's blog, Hatewatch, has >received such anonymous threats against Obama. >In April, "unknown" posted this: "ATTENTION, IF >OBAMA BECOMES PRESEDANT [sic] I WILL KILL HIM >MYSELF MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT." Anthony Griggs contributed to this story. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 8 09:48:53 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:48:53 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Racists: the worse the better ? In-Reply-To: References: <48C4F4FD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48C51124.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> Ralph Dumain 09/08/2008 10:03 AM >>> I wonder if Paul Gottfried is the same Gottfried who wrote a book about postwar right-wing Hegelianism and who writes for TELOS. I guess I will need to do my homework. I doubt very much that the white supremacists will meet their objective, but certainly there will be race-baiting galore in the unlikely event that Obama becomes president. Obama will continue to distance himself from black America, but there's no underestimating the pathological stupidity of white people. I still doubt that racial scapegoating can go too far, but this is a new situation that reminds me of a certain brand of European paranoid anti-semitism. That is, if blacks are now seen to run things, which nobody but an idiot (or a few million of them) could believe, blacks could take the place of Jews in paranoid scenarios of who really runs things behind the scenes. I think scapegoating will take milder forms, but there's no telling how many white separatists stockpiling weapons and mercenary soldier magazines are out there. ^^^^^ Wonder if Palin was ever in a militia At 09:48 AM 9/8/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=951 >Silver Lining Not All White Supremacists Oppose >Black President By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok >Intelligence Report Fall 2008 (Corbis) >With the nomination of Barack Obama as the >Democratic presidential candidate clinched, >large sections of the white supremacist movement >are adopting a surprising attitude: Electing >America's first black president could be a very >good thing. It's not that the assortment of >neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who >make up this country's radical right have >suddenly discovered that a man should be judged >based on the content of his character, not his >skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white >supremacists, and even some of those who pass >for intellectual leaders of their movement, >think that a black man in the Oval Office would >shock white America, possibly drive millions to >their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war >that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan >victory. "He will make things so bad for white >people that hopefully they will finally realize >how stupid they were for admiring these jigaboos >all these years," "Darthvader" wrote on the >neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network (VNN) web forum. >"I believe in the motto 'Worse is Better' and >Obama certainly fits that description." Another >poster on the same thread this summer chimed in >with this: "I hope Obama wins because in four >years, white people just might be pissed off >enough to actually do something. ? White people >aren't goingg to do a thing until their toys are >taken away from them. So things have to be worse >for things to be better." "Oh man," enthused >"Centimanus" on the white nationalist Stormfront >website. "I am gleefully, sadistically looking >forward to Obama as president. ? It will be a >beautiful day when the masses look at the paper >and truly realize they have lost their own >country." Added "Fulimnata": "To the average >white man and woman, they could look at Obama >and see plain as day that whites are not in >control." Another message, from >"TheLastOfMyKind," agreed: "Could it be that the >nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of >unity in white voters? I would propose that this >threat of black, muslim [sic] rule may very well >be the thing that finally scares some sense back >into complacent whites throughout the nation." >"Actually," said another poster, "if Obama were >to win, it would be the best thing that ever >happened to the Klan. They would have massive >growth." And "TeutonicLegion" said that "a whole >bunch of people will join us and find these >boards" if Obama becomes president. The Leaders >Weigh In Figures from the white supremacist >establishment seem to agree with the crudely put >sentiments of their followers. David Duke, the >neo-Nazi and former Klan boss who is the closest >thing the movement has to a real intellectual >these days, sees clear advantages in an Obama >victory in the fall. David Duke "Obama will be >a signal, a clear signal for millions of our >people," Duke wrote in an essay entitled "A >Black Flag for White America" posted to his >website this summer. "Obama is like that new big >dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to >the doctor for some real medicine. ? Obamma is >the pain that let's [sic] your body know that >something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let >the American people know that there is a real >cancer eating away at the heart of our country >and Republican aspirin will not only not cure >it, but only masks the pain and makes you think >you don't need radical surgery. ? My bet is that >whetherr Obama wins or loses in November, >millions of European Americans will inevitably >react with new awareness of their heritage and >the need for them to defend and advance it." >Richard Barrett, head of the Nationalist >Movement, a Learned, Miss. -based white >supremacist organization, sounded a similar >note, telling the BBC: "The uprising of the >American people for majority-rule and >real-democracy has been building, but, with >Obama turning the White House into the Black >House, the upheaval will be overpowering." >Barrett added, "The cataclysm will wake people >up and the despotism will drive people to act, >as never before." "Thomas Dixon Jr.," a >Stormfront poster using the name of the racist >author who wrote the classic novel The Clansman, >put it like this: "As WLP [William Luther >Pierce, the late leader of the neo-Nazi National >Alliance] would say? 'What is bad for the system >is good for us.'" "Obama,," added "The Patriot" >in the same thread, "would be better for our >cause in the long run, no doubt about it." Other >extremists writing on the topic think that >having Obama as president would actually be >preferable to Republican John McCain, who is >widely seen by white supremacists as a sellout, >particularly on the issue of nonwhite >immigration into the United States. Paul >Gottfried is a professor of humanities at >Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., who >has spoken repeatedly at conferences put on by >American Renaissance, a racist journal whose >editor describes blacks as "incapable of >sustaining" civilization. At the 2008 American >Renaissance conference, Gottfried said that he >was sure Obama would overwhelm McCain among >those attending the conference. "Better a black >who is honest about who he is than a >conservative who is really delivering the >liberal agenda," Gottfried told a reporter. >Richard Barrett, leader of the Nationalist >Movement American Renaissance Editor Jared >Taylor had a slightly different take. He >believes Obama will succeed as a kind of >post-racial president: "I think he's got the >right touch, absolutely the right touch? . He's >an intelligent and serious man and he realizes >that he cannot be a 'black' president." In >Taylor's view, whites will vote for Obama >because it will make them feel good about >themselves. "For many whites, voting for Mr. >Obama will be an act of high patriotism. >Electing him will prove America is not 'racist,' >and many whites believe that rising above >'racism' is America's sacred calling. One must >never underestimate the importance to whites of >feeling virtuous," Taylor wrote in a July essay, >"Why Obama Will Win." Rocky Suhayda, head of the >American Nazi Party, agreed. "White people are >faced with either a negro or a total nutter who >happens to have a pale face. Personally, I'd >prefer the negro. National Socialists are not >mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is >almost dead, who declares he wants to fight >endless wars around the globe to make the world >safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who >supports the invasion of America by illegals? . >Then, we have a black man, who loves his own >kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, >is married to a black woman? . That's the kind >of negro that I can respect," Suhayda told >Esquire. Death Threats and Violence Yet opinion >on the radical right is far from unanimous on >the topic of a potential Obama victory. Many >more traditional racist extremists believe it >would destroy the country and they oppose it >mightily. "Worse is not better. It has already >hit rock bottom. The next step is to round up >all the whites and put them in concentration >camps," wrote "White Shogun" on the Caste >Football hate forum. "If you are in the same >camp as I am, I will slap you for suggesting >that we vote for Obama," he added. "Obama as >president would do tremendous damage to the >cause of maintaining the purity of the white >race. Liberals would use him as an example to >argue in schools, in churches, on TV, etc., 'Why >if your daughter married a black, her child >could one day grow up to become President - like >Obama!" wrote longtime white supremaccist Ed >Fields in his "segregationist" newsletter, The >Truth at Last. "We are not going to vote our way >out of this mess? . We should have retained that >realization in thhe 'War Between the States,'" >wrote "Ibere" on Stormfront. Others have more >violent hopes. "Well, we all know what happened >to the old JFK. I just hope it happens in the >timing of RFK BEFORE he can take office," wrote >"Johann Steffansson" in July on the neo-Nazi >Vanguard News Network. Some of the most heated >and apparently threatening anti-Obama talk >appears to be on Internet sites that allow >people to post messages anonymously ? not on >sites run bby white supremacists, who seem >highly worried about attention from the Secret >Service and other officials. One such site, JD >Underground, is a list ostensibly devoted to >lawyers. It has carried a particularly venomous >and long-running thread that started in January. >It is entitled, "Nigger President." "I'm hoping >someone will do his public duty of putting a >bullet through Obama's head," said a poster >identified as "Kill Da Nigga." Another poster >suggested "bring[ing] back lynchings" and >concluded with a warning: "LOOK OUT NIGGER. THE >KLAN IS GETTING BIGGER!!!!!!" And a third, using >the screen name "amerikkkan," said only, "The >deep south is making plans." Even the Southern >Poverty Law Center's blog, Hatewatch, has >received such anonymous threats against Obama. >In April, "unknown" posted this: "ATTENTION, IF >OBAMA BECOMES PRESEDANT [sic] I WILL KILL HIM >MYSELF MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT." Anthony Griggs contributed to this story. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 8 10:18:35 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:18:35 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Georgia GOP Congressman Calls Obama 'Uppity' Message-ID: <48C5181B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/04/georgia_gop_congressman_calls.html This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 8 11:08:28 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:08:28 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?From_the_Cuban_Underground=2C_a_Punk_R?= =?utf-8?q?ocker=E2=80=99s_Protest_Reverberates?= Message-ID: <48C523CD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/world/americas/06gorki.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin The Saturday Profile From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Mon Sep 8 11:20:52 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:20:52 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Georgia GOP Congressman Calls Obama 'Uppity' In-Reply-To: <48C5181B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48C5181B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: Only in America! It's a numbers game between opposing factions of whites. (And I suppose Hispanics, but I haven't checked on their current disposition.) There are those who will succumb to race-baiting, and those so furious at the Republicans they will vote for Obama despite their reservations. I know one person who was not going to vote at all but decided to vote for Obama after seeing what Sarah Palin was all about. I think, though, that all this indicates how precarious a situation we are in. The Bush administration has done so much damage that a number of Republicans are going for Obama, just as some Democrats will defect or not vote. This country has just been trashed over the past 8 years. Nixon was a bastard, Reagan was the Roosevelt of fascism, but the situation we are in now is so shameful I don't know how anyone can stand it. At 12:18 PM 9/8/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/04/georgia_gop_congressman_calls.html From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 8 12:08:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:08:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Georgia GOP Congressman Calls Obama 'Uppity' In-Reply-To: References: <48C5181B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48C531C8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Remarkably, I don't think this guy knows the racist connotation of what he said, unless he's just being an open kkk member. >>> Ralph Dumain 09/08/2008 1:20 PM >>> Only in America! It's a numbers game between opposing factions of whites. (And I suppose Hispanics, but I haven't checked on their current disposition.) There are those who will succumb to race-baiting, and those so furious at the Republicans they will vote for Obama despite their reservations. I know one person who was not going to vote at all but decided to vote for Obama after seeing what Sarah Palin was all about. I think, though, that all this indicates how precarious a situation we are in. The Bush administration has done so much damage that a number of Republicans are going for Obama, just as some Democrats will defect or not vote. This country has just been trashed over the past 8 years. Nixon was a bastard, Reagan was the Roosevelt of fascism, but the situation we are in now is so shameful I don't know how anyone can stand it. At 12:18 PM 9/8/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/04/georgia_gop_congressman_calls.html _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Tue Sep 9 00:26:57 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 15:26:57 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?windows-1252?q?From_the_Cuban_Underground=2C_a?= =?windows-1252?q?_Punk_Rocker=92s_Protest_Reverberates?= Message-ID: Someone tell that poor guy that the Miami Sound Machine needs a bongo player who can dance too. CJ From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Sep 9 07:17:58 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 09:17:58 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Baraka on Barack Message-ID: A good friend sent me the following article written last month by Amiri Baraka in his letter to the ?left? encouraging them to support Barack Obama and attacking many of the arguments presented by those radical leftists and progressives who view Barack as too much of an accomodationist. Some have even suggested that Obama supporters are, in a sense, being duped and that he offers little more than more of the same except in blackface. While I do respect their concerns, I couldn?t possibly disagree more strongly. I believe in the man, and I believe in what he?s trying to do and the change he represents just by virtue of who he is and the origins of his name. I believe those who would prefer to tear down Obama, claiming that we might as well settle for McCain because Obama isn?t going to be as progressive as we need him to be, are making a serious, serious mistake. I am thankful that Amiri Baraka feels the same way, and is willing to shout those views out loud and in print. Here is. ?d spot? The Parade of Anti-Obama Rascals We certainly know the animals of the right, the US Reich, the Foxes and Klan in Civilian clothes, e.g., O?Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh & Co., and certainly a coon or two. Tavis & Andy. Some people even came up with the slogan ? Strangle Rangel?. Happily, w/the departure of Bonnie & Clyde, more of these Negro retainers will replace their ? HillJig? buttons with the shit-eating grin of exposed Toms as they try to ease painlessly into at least the margin of the masses who support Obama . But I?m talking about another substantial pimple of soi disant, dare I say, intellectuals & self advertised radicals who are quite audible & wordy in opposition to Obama. You might say, ?but how is that, since now there is only the prisoner of war, McCain , who proves every time he opens his mouth that he is still a prisoner of the Viet Nam war? that Obama faces. McCain?s major campaign plank is that Americans need to keep dying in Iraq and our tax monies need to keep being fed to Halliburton and the other oilies and cronies. McCain also holds that we continue the Bush-type savaging of the US constitution by denying habeas corpus and the legal rights of prisoners in Guantanamo. Keep it open as a Bush-Cheney concentration camp. McCain also wants to maintain the widespread hatred of the US by the world, as well as making Bush? giveaway tax cuts for the super rich permanent. Here?s a charming character who on returning from Vietnam soon dumped his 1st wife who had been severely crippled in an automobile accident, to run off with, among others, a beer brewery heiress who could support his political barn storming. Here?s a man, who for all the media clap about him being ?an independent? is the spiritual follower of the man whose seat he sits in as Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. I mention all this because it is criminal for these people claiming to be radical or intellectual to oppose or refuse to support Obama. I hope we don?t have to hear about ?the lesser of two evils? from people whose foolish mirror worship would have us elect the worst of two evils. For those who claim radical by supporting McKinney or, brain forbid, the Nadir of fake liberalism, we should have little sympathy. As much as I have admired Cynthia McKinney, to pose her candidacy as an alternative to Obama is at best empty idealism, at worst nearly as dangerous as when the Nader used the same windy egotism to help elect Bush. The people who are supporting McKinney must know that that is an empty gesture. But too often such people are so pocked with self-congratulatory idealism, that they care little or understand little about politics (i.e. the gaining maintaining and use of power) but want only to pronounce , to themselves mostly, how progressive or radical or even revolutionary they are. Faced with the obvious that McKinney cannot actually do anything by running but put out lines a solid left bloc should put out anyway, their pre-joinder is that Obama will be running as a candidate of an imperialist party, or Imperialism will not let Obama do anything different or progressive?that he will do the same things any Democrat would do and that the Democrats are using Obama to draw young people to the Democratic party. Also that there is a sector of the bourgeoisie supports Obama to put a new face on the US as alternative to the Devil face Bush has projected as the American image. Some of these things I agree with, but before qualifying that let me say that no amount of solipsistic fist pounding about ?radical principles? will change this society as much as the election of Barack Obama will as president of the US. Not to understand this is to have few clues about the history of this country, its people, or the history of the Black struggle in the US. It is also to be completely at odds with the masses of the Afro-American people, let us say with the masses of black and colored people internationally. How people who claim to lead the people but who time after time tail them so badly must be understood. It is because they confuse elitism with class consciousness. And at this point, the US body politic has been taken too far in this present election campaign to easily dissolve this heavy challenge to its historic race & class exclusivity. The positive aspect of Hillary Clinton?s candidacy and commitment to work in the Obama campaign has certainly shredded some of the gender exclusivity as well, so that there is in reality a prospect that some substantive change can be made. Obama is the democratic nominee. Only repeats of the outright election theft of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 can put McCain in the white house. In 2 weeks, since the Democratic Party primaries ended, McCain?s poll numbers have dropped from a dead heat w/ Obama to trailing by 18 points. It is up to revolutionaries and progressives and radicals of all stripes to make it difficult for another larceny in November. We should agitate for serious disruption across this country and internationally if such a criminal attempt to steal the US presidency is mounted. For the so-called left and would be radicals (and some grinning idiots who say they don?t even care about politics) the McKinney gambit is to label oneself ?Quixote of the loyal opposition? to pipsqueak a hiss of disapproval at the rulers while being an enabler of the same. Neither McCain nor McKinney will help us. Only Obama offers some actual help. Even the dumbest things Obama has said re: Cuba and the soft shoe for Israel must be seen as the cost of realpolitik, that is he is not running for president of the NAACP and not to understand that those are the stances that must be taken in the present political context, even though we hold out to support what he said about initiating talks with the Cubans, the Palestinians . After years of Washington stupidity and slavish support for the Miami Gusanos and Israeli imperialism, there is in Obama?s raising of talks with the US Bourgeois enemies something that must be understood as the potential path for new initiative. It is the duty of a left progressive radical bloc to be loud and regular in our demands for the changes Obama has alluded to in his campaign. We must take up these issues and push collectively, as a Bloc, or he will be pushed inexorably to the right. Some people were grousing about the father?s day address and the stance he took lecturing Black men to actually become fathers not just disappearing sexual partners. But can anyone who actually lives in the ?hood, and has raised children there, really claim that what Obama said is somehow an ?insult to half a race?? We need to take up that idea of making Black men stand up and embrace fatherhood (a lifetime gig) as men and quit winking at the vanished baby makers that litter our community with fatherless children. This is where a great deal of the raw material comes from for the gangs that imperil our communities. As I answered one irate e-mailer who was pissed off at Obama for leveling that challenge, a Negro man killed my only sister, a Negro man killed my youngest daughter. I can?t give no mealy mouth slack about that. We need to Stand Up! Obama has addressed the Israeli lobby and the Gusano (anti Cuba) lobby. But where is the Black left and general progressive, radical and revolutionary lobby? That is the real job we need to address. We must bring something to the table. It is time for the left to really make some kind of Left Bloc to support Obama. I was at the Black Left meeting in North Carolina and had to argue with a group of folks who want to be revolutionary as heck with a Reconstruction Party supporting Cynthia McKinney. Though there was some good discussion, nothing concrete has been offered especially around the Obama campaign. There were even a few badly disguised nationalists, posing as part of the left who think such posturing somehow more revolutionary than getting Obama into the Oval Office and dealing with getting him there and the rocking and rolling that will go on in this country whether he makes it or not. We ought to be putting together a left bloc document that can be circulated as soon and as widely as possible and in Denver and depending on the circumstances, beyond. Using this as a means of drawing the excited masses to the left. We always knew that the Obama campaign had the potential to do this. And the closer we get to the convention and then the election even more excitement will be generated. We should not let our role be to stand on the sidelines and mumble how hip we are, we can?t be so hip we let this cross roads of US history pass us by and possibly even let the lobotomized Robocop of right wing Republicanism serve us up more Bush? it. I am sending this document right after I finish writing it to the Black Radical Congress who is meeting in St. Louis this weekend. I would hope it could be circulated. Amiri Baraka 6/21/08 _http://teamowens313.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/amiri-baraka-speaks-on-obama/_ (http://teamowens313.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/amiri-baraka-speaks-on-obama/) **************Psssst...Have you heard the news? There's a new fashion blog, plus the latest fall trends and hair styles at StyleList.com. (http://www.stylelist.com/trends?ncid=aolsty00050000000014) From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 9 07:53:58 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:53:58 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Baraka on Barack In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <48C647B5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Does Palin as demogogue pose a fascist danger: Republicans as National "Feminists" like National "Socialists" in Germany ? >>> 09/09/2008 9:17 AM >>> A good friend sent me the following article written last month by Amiri Baraka in his letter to the ?left? encouraging them to support Barack Obama and attacking many of the arguments presented by those radical leftists and progressives who view Barack as too much of an accomodationist. Some have even suggested that Obama supporters are, in a sense, being duped and that he offers little more than more of the same except in blackface. While I do respect their concerns, I couldn?t possibly disagree more strongly. I believe in the man, and I believe in what he?s trying to do and the change he represents just by virtue of who he is and the origins of his name. I believe those who would prefer to tear down Obama, claiming that we might as well settle for McCain because Obama isn?t going to be as progressive as we need him to be, are making a serious, serious mistake. I am thankful that Amiri Baraka feels the same way, and is willing to shout those views out loud and in print. Here is. ?d spot? The Parade of Anti-Obama Rascals We certainly know the animals of the right, the US Reich, the Foxes and Klan in Civilian clothes, e.g., O?Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh & Co., and certainly a coon or two. Tavis & Andy. Some people even came up with the slogan ? Strangle Rangel?. Happily, w/the departure of Bonnie & Clyde, more of these Negro retainers will replace their ? HillJig? buttons with the shit-eating grin of exposed Toms as they try to ease painlessly into at least the margin of the masses who support Obama . But I?m talking about another substantial pimple of soi disant, dare I say, intellectuals & self advertised radicals who are quite audible & wordy in opposition to Obama. You might say, ?but how is that, since now there is only the prisoner of war, McCain , who proves every time he opens his mouth that he is still a prisoner of the Viet Nam war? that Obama faces. McCain?s major campaign plank is that Americans need to keep dying in Iraq and our tax monies need to keep being fed to Halliburton and the other oilies and cronies. McCain also holds that we continue the Bush-type savaging of the US constitution by denying habeas corpus and the legal rights of prisoners in Guantanamo. Keep it open as a Bush-Cheney concentration camp. McCain also wants to maintain the widespread hatred of the US by the world, as well as making Bush? giveaway tax cuts for the super rich permanent. Here?s a charming character who on returning from Vietnam soon dumped his 1st wife who had been severely crippled in an automobile accident, to run off with, among others, a beer brewery heiress who could support his political barn storming. Here?s a man, who for all the media clap about him being ?an independent? is the spiritual follower of the man whose seat he sits in as Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. I mention all this because it is criminal for these people claiming to be radical or intellectual to oppose or refuse to support Obama. I hope we don?t have to hear about ?the lesser of two evils? from people whose foolish mirror worship would have us elect the worst of two evils. For those who claim radical by supporting McKinney or, brain forbid, the Nadir of fake liberalism, we should have little sympathy. As much as I have admired Cynthia McKinney, to pose her candidacy as an alternative to Obama is at best empty idealism, at worst nearly as dangerous as when the Nader used the same windy egotism to help elect Bush. The people who are supporting McKinney must know that that is an empty gesture. But too often such people are so pocked with self-congratulatory idealism, that they care little or understand little about politics (i.e. the gaining maintaining and use of power) but want only to pronounce , to themselves mostly, how progressive or radical or even revolutionary they are. Faced with the obvious that McKinney cannot actually do anything by running but put out lines a solid left bloc should put out anyway, their pre-joinder is that Obama will be running as a candidate of an imperialist party, or Imperialism will not let Obama do anything different or progressive?that he will do the same things any Democrat would do and that the Democrats are using Obama to draw young people to the Democratic party. Also that there is a sector of the bourgeoisie supports Obama to put a new face on the US as alternative to the Devil face Bush has projected as the American image. Some of these things I agree with, but before qualifying that let me say that no amount of solipsistic fist pounding about ?radical principles? will change this society as much as the election of Barack Obama will as president of the US. Not to understand this is to have few clues about the history of this country, its people, or the history of the Black struggle in the US. It is also to be completely at odds with the masses of the Afro-American people, let us say with the masses of black and colored people internationally. How people who claim to lead the people but who time after time tail them so badly must be understood. It is because they confuse elitism with class consciousness. And at this point, the US body politic has been taken too far in this present election campaign to easily dissolve this heavy challenge to its historic race & class exclusivity. The positive aspect of Hillary Clinton?s candidacy and commitment to work in the Obama campaign has certainly shredded some of the gender exclusivity as well, so that there is in reality a prospect that some substantive change can be made. Obama is the democratic nominee. Only repeats of the outright election theft of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 can put McCain in the white house. In 2 weeks, since the Democratic Party primaries ended, McCain?s poll numbers have dropped from a dead heat w/ Obama to trailing by 18 points. It is up to revolutionaries and progressives and radicals of all stripes to make it difficult for another larceny in November. We should agitate for serious disruption across this country and internationally if such a criminal attempt to steal the US presidency is mounted. For the so-called left and would be radicals (and some grinning idiots who say they don?t even care about politics) the McKinney gambit is to label oneself ?Quixote of the loyal opposition? to pipsqueak a hiss of disapproval at the rulers while being an enabler of the same. Neither McCain nor McKinney will help us. Only Obama offers some actual help. Even the dumbest things Obama has said re: Cuba and the soft shoe for Israel must be seen as the cost of realpolitik, that is he is not running for president of the NAACP and not to understand that those are the stances that must be taken in the present political context, even though we hold out to support what he said about initiating talks with the Cubans, the Palestinians . After years of Washington stupidity and slavish support for the Miami Gusanos and Israeli imperialism, there is in Obama?s raising of talks with the US Bourgeois enemies something that must be understood as the potential path for new initiative. It is the duty of a left progressive radical bloc to be loud and regular in our demands for the changes Obama has alluded to in his campaign. We must take up these issues and push collectively, as a Bloc, or he will be pushed inexorably to the right. Some people were grousing about the father?s day address and the stance he took lecturing Black men to actually become fathers not just disappearing sexual partners. But can anyone who actually lives in the ?hood, and has raised children there, really claim that what Obama said is somehow an ?insult to half a race?? We need to take up that idea of making Black men stand up and embrace fatherhood (a lifetime gig) as men and quit winking at the vanished baby makers that litter our community with fatherless children. This is where a great deal of the raw material comes from for the gangs that imperil our communities. As I answered one irate e-mailer who was pissed off at Obama for leveling that challenge, a Negro man killed my only sister, a Negro man killed my youngest daughter. I can?t give no mealy mouth slack about that. We need to Stand Up! Obama has addressed the Israeli lobby and the Gusano (anti Cuba) lobby. But where is the Black left and general progressive, radical and revolutionary lobby? That is the real job we need to address. We must bring something to the table. It is time for the left to really make some kind of Left Bloc to support Obama. I was at the Black Left meeting in North Carolina and had to argue with a group of folks who want to be revolutionary as heck with a Reconstruction Party supporting Cynthia McKinney. Though there was some good discussion, nothing concrete has been offered especially around the Obama campaign. There were even a few badly disguised nationalists, posing as part of the left who think such posturing somehow more revolutionary than getting Obama into the Oval Office and dealing with getting him there and the rocking and rolling that will go on in this country whether he makes it or not. We ought to be putting together a left bloc document that can be circulated as soon and as widely as possible and in Denver and depending on the circumstances, beyond. Using this as a means of drawing the excited masses to the left. We always knew that the Obama campaign had the potential to do this. And the closer we get to the convention and then the election even more excitement will be generated. We should not let our role be to stand on the sidelines and mumble how hip we are, we can?t be so hip we let this cross roads of US history pass us by and possibly even let the lobotomized Robocop of right wing Republicanism serve us up more Bush? it. I am sending this document right after I finish writing it to the Black Radical Congress who is meeting in St. Louis this weekend. I would hope it could be circulated. Amiri Baraka 6/21/08 _http://teamowens313.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/amiri-baraka-speaks-on-obama/_ (http://teamowens313.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/amiri-baraka-speaks-on-obama/) **************Psssst...Have you heard the news? There's a new fashion blog, plus the latest fall trends and hair styles at StyleList.com. (http://www.stylelist.com/trends?ncid=aolsty00050000000014) _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From yvescoleman at wanadoo.fr Tue Sep 9 09:54:14 2008 From: yvescoleman at wanadoo.fr (yves coleman) Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:54:14 +0200 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Baraka on Barack In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I think people can vote for whoever they want...but I don't want to hear their complains about the negative results of their votes afterwards ! Are "Realpolitik" and pushing Party X or Mr Y to do something they will never do, are these tactics worth the trial ? The problem as usual is the impotence, small size and small influence of the Revolutionary Left everywhere. Some people think there are shortcuts and they have THE solution. They are wiser and they will fool the capitalist class. Well let's see the historical results of their shortcuts. These shortcuts have been practiced for more than a century with no results whatsover anywhere. The idea that if we dont chose the lesser evil the worse evil may win is not new on the political field. It's the argument the Stalinists and Social democrats use at every election in France. It's an eternal problem for any revolutionary party or group who is not big enough on the electoral ground to make any difference. With this kind of reasoning, I should have voted Mitterrand against Giscard in 1981, and for the SP candidate in the following elections, and Chirac against Le Pen. Or to take a more dramatic example I shoud have voted for the German Communist Party against Hitler as Baraka likes to use antifascist metaphors. Or I should have entered the French CP dominated resistance and help them have a strike-breaking policy after defeating "fascism" with the major help of American imperialism. And if I was in Venezuela I would today support Chavez against its most reactionary opponents. In Cuba I would support Castro, etc. And in "imperialist Israel" I would support the Hamas. If an individual wants to make these choices, I can only tell him don't complain about the results and stop presenting your indivual choice as the most sophisticated revolutionary tactics. You dont think it's worth fighting for revolutionary politics, that's fine. But dont accuse me to be an agent of imperialism, fascism, racism, etc. if I choose another option. If a political group who claims to have an original and specific view about history, class struggle, imperialism, socialism, etc. supports actively this kind of position, I can only say this group should enter the party it is supporting: enter the Socialist party in France, the Venezuelan party in Venezuela, the Hamas in Palestine, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Baas in Irak, the CCP Party in Cuba, the Democratic Party in the USA, the Talibans in Afghanistan, etc. Actually that's what many leftists have done in the past and are doing or supporting. Have they ever succeeded to "push"these parties or movements to the Left ? Not until now. Can one can dream they will succeed this time ? I have strong doubts about it. Real Politik has a heavy price both in international politics and in domestic politics. The interesting question for me is rather : why is Baraka so desperate to pay this price ? That's a more interesting question than debating about if one should vote or not for Obama (1). Generally when political people make these choices, they have a whole reasoning in mind, hidden practical ambitions, or illusions the situation may radically change, etc. That's at least what I have always seen in discussions inside the Left from the leftists who supported the NLF or the Cultural Revolution and predicted it will bring socialism, to those who support Chavez, the Hamas, the Hezbollah or even the Talibans today. I don't know what Baraka's politics are but his position can be understood for me, living in France, only if we discuss about his more general framework and field of activity in the USA. If you see him as a reference of thought maybe you could indicate me some sources on the Net ? I have a collection of his writings but I read only half of the book and stopped, seing no interest in continuing my reading. Maybe I missed something very important so "as I dont wont to die stupied" (a say in French) please help me to. (1) All the bourgeois medias in France support Obama. So supporting Obama is not really a political issue here. It's the Official Truth and Politics. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 10 10:26:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:26:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] 16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq Message-ID: <48C7BCDF.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> 16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:48:50 GMT Sixteen US troops from the a unit of the Airborne Division have committed suicide inside a military base in Iraq, security sources say. Iraqi security sources have revealed that 21 US troops had committed suicide inside a former Iraqi air force base 27 days ago, Fars News Agency reported on Monday. According to the sources, the 21 troops were treated in a hospital but only five soldiers have survived and they are in a critical condition. Security officials said they used potent narcotics to kill themselves. The troops' motivations for suicide are not known but according to Iraqi sources the servicemen belonged to a unit of the US Airborne Division that was behind the massacre of several Iraqi families-- mostly women and children-- in northern Baghdad, said Ali al-Baghdadi an Iraqi security official. The suicides took place in the soldiers' dormitory after the dinner time. "The bodies of the US troops became misshapen such a way that they looked like 5000-year mummies," said a witness. According to Iraqi officials' estimates, some 600 US troops, including senior officers, have committed suicide in Iraq since the invasion of the country in 2003. Half of the suicide attempts have been successful. SB/DA This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 10 10:54:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:54:06 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fwd: Mass suicide of american troops ? References: <48C7C1A1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48C7C36D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Louis Proyect : This item strikes me as bogus. Greg McDonald wrote: > 16 US troops commit suicide in Iraq > Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:48:50 GMT > Sixteen US troops from the a unit of the Airborne Division have > committed suicide inside a military base in Iraq, security sources Well I certainly hope you are correct, Louis. I got the article from an Iranian source, below, and have not been able to find any other source to support the claim. Greg This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 10 12:51:31 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:51:31 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Constantine's Sword Message-ID: <48C7DEF3.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> From: Louis Proyect ------------------ With its seamless blend of compelling autobiographical material and laser-sharp political analysis of Christian fundamentalism past and present, ?Constantine?s Sword? impressed film critics almost universally when it was released last year. This was one of those rare occasions when the movie was even better than the praise lavished on it. Now available on Netflix and other venues through the auspices of First Run Features, a distribution company specializing in bold independent fiction and documentary film, this movie is an absolute must for anybody concerned about the growing influence of rightwing Christian sects on the body politic today, including the world?s most powerful and sinister sect: the Catholic Church. Based on narrator and co-script writer James Carroll?s 750 page book of the same name, the documentary flows from the personal and political transformation of a most unlikely critic of organized religion. Born in 1939, Carroll had two passions as a youth: the Air Force and the Catholic Church. As a teenager, he had the same passion for Jesus Christ that others his age had for Mickey Mantle. His father was Joseph P. Carroll, a working-class Irish Catholic Chicagoan who went to night school after his shift in the stockyards ended. After getting a college degree, he went to work for the FBI as an Elliot Ness type gang-buster. His crime-fighting renown attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force which recruited him as a Lieutenant General to head up their newly formed top-secret intelligence-gathering unit after WWII. General Carroll was the Pentagon official responsible for alerting President Kennedy to Cuban missile bases in 1962, thus unleashing a chain of events that came close to ushering in nuclear Armageddon. James Carroll?s mother probably would have been ready for Armageddon given her fanatical devotion to the Catholic Church. In 1959 he accompanied his mother on a trip to Trier in Germany in order to witness a rare unveiling of the robe that Christ allegedly worn during the crucifixion. This garment was the theme of the cheesy 1953 movie titled ?The Robe?, excerpts of which are seen in the documentary. I distinctly remember Victor Mature as a muscle-bound convert to the Cross. As Carroll explains, the Cross was not the original symbol of the Christian church. In its earliest years, it was the fish or the loaf of bread that symbolized eternal life, an altogether positive image in comparison to the blood-soaked icon that inspired Mel Gibson and the Roman Emperor Constantine as well. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/constantines-sword/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 10 13:17:53 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:17:53 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] epublican Philosophy: Handouts to the Rich, Not "You're on Your Own" Message-ID: <48C7E521.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/08/republican_philosophy_handouts/ Republican Philosophy: Handouts to the Rich, Not "You're on Your Own" By Dean Baker - September 8, 2008, 8:50AM The polls haven't been looking good lately. Part of this is simply erratic movements in polls and some post-convention bounce for the Republicans. But part of the story is real. The Republicans have again managed to paint the Democrats as wimps. While some of this is just vicious/racist garbage (e.g. Rudy Giuliani's complaints that the Dems don't talk about "Islamic terrorism) some of the wimp riff was handed to them by the Dems. Specifically the "you're on your own" theme that Senator Obama and his campaign have seized upon. The Republicans are no more about "you're on your own" than the Dems. They just think that the government is there to give a helping hand to rich people. This can be shown in one policy area after another. When they designed a Medicare drug benefit in 2003 the Republicans didn't say "you're on your own." They said how can we design this thing to put as much money as possible in the pockets of the drug companies and insurance industry? When the Republicans signed sweetheart contracts with Halliburton and Blackwater, they weren't saying "you're on your own." They were saying how can we put as much public money as possible into the hands of our friends? And when the Republicans pushed the bankruptcy reform act in 2005, they didn't tell the credit card industry "you're on your own." They told the banks that they would use the power of the government to help them collect on their bad loans, in order to help boost their profits. When it comes to being a wimp, Senator McCain tops the charts. He has repeatedly shown a willingness to use the power of the government to help the rich and powerful. Senator McCain can be a tough guy when it comes to standing up to retirees who are dependent on their Social Security and Medicare. He can also stand tough against kids trying to pay for a college education. But when the rich and big corporations come calling; Senator McCain is prepared to serve. When we say that Senator McCain and the Republicans are about "you're on your own" we flatter them immensely and paint ourselves as losers. The Republicans want the government to interfere in the economy every bit as much as Democrats. The difference is that the Republicans want the government to intervene to make the rich even richer. print share PERMALINK | RECOMMEND THIS (12) Advertisement Comments (31) This may have been news in 1840 or 1880 or in 1929 BUT this Standard Operating Procedure now. Milton Freidman is THE lying sack of crap that Adam Smith warned us about in the Wealth of Nations. We doomed to repeat becuase we go out of our ways to fail to remember. Posted by Richard L. Adlof September 8, 2008 9:06 AM | Reply | PermalinkAdditionally, you should understand that this is a selling point to the majority of American's who dream of being wealthy w/o the 'work hard' part. 'Every-person' knows that they are simply the next rich person in waiting. The problem is that our ecomonic system as presently constituted is designed to limit the number folk who become wealthy . . . I believe we will have a great impact, if liberals/progressives punch the to great truths: 1. Republicans lie. 2. Republicans steal. Even the Rapturian rabble can get that this in outside 'good'. Posted by Richard L. Adlof September 8, 2008 9:16 AM | Reply | PermalinkWell, I have to agree. We should tell the banks and GSE's and marginal homeowners that they are on their own. Along with the housing industry, corporate farmers, unions, and every country that has one of our 704 overseas bases. Posted by shooter242 September 8, 2008 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink airgun177, I'm baaack!! Sorry, about those sled dogs. I was sure you would go to the citation and feel like your leash had been jerked. I never dreamed you would expose yourself as a credulous bozo by complaining. So you're also an expert on economics? Really? I'm sure Dean would be interested in your real views. So don't hide behind irony. Open the raincoat. Cheers, z2v (No actual sled dogs were harmed in the PWNING of airgun177 at Lawyers, Troopergate, and Questions.) Posted by zeno2vonnegut September 8, 2008 12:08 PM | Reply | Permalink If you've got something to contribute to the thread, zeno2vonnegut, great. Otherwise, take it outside! Posted by Ellen September 8, 2008 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink Ellen, Sorry if troll-hunting annoys you as much or more than trolls. I understand your point. Actually, higher taxes on the investing class and lower taxes on us, the spending classes, helps the economy. Over the last century, stock market returns, inflation-adjusted but ignoring dividends, averaged 7.4% under Democrats and only 3.8% under Republics. Posted by zeno2vonnegut September 8, 2008 11:07 AM Posted by zeno2vonnegut September 8, 2008 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink (No actual sled dogs were harmed in the PWNING of airgun177 at Lawyers, Troopergate, and Questions.) It never occurred to me that someone would be adolescent enough to use the idea of slaughtered dogs to bait a response and then crow about it. It's sad and sick and stupid. All of which earns you an "ignore" from here on in. With all the intelligent people present on the blogosphere I certainly don't need to waste time with someone like you. To Ellen: Thanks, and I hope they get the avatars back up. Yours is quite striking. Posted by shooter242 September 8, 2008 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink ag155, Yours is quite striking. Wait until you see mine! I'd give yours a bone. Cheers, z2v Posted by zeno2vonnegut September 9, 2008 1:22 AM | Reply | Permalink To: Both of you From: Your own Miss Manners Subj: Flaming Msg: Knock it off! Posted by Ellen September 8, 2008 2:41 PM | Reply | PermalinkGee Shooter, but if we closed all those 704 overseas bases, the child prostitution industries in all those countries would collapse overnight. Without GI Joe, who is going to buy all that 13 year old poontang? Of course Unions are already on their own, been cut adrift for forty years now. And Marginal homeowners have long since gotten that message. So I guess you're halfway home. Posted by DGValdron September 8, 2008 9:54 AM | Reply | PermalinkDean, I believe the "You're On Your Own" (YOYO) mantra is meant to apply to We the People, who ostensibly ARE the government and for whom it ought to be working (at least in theory). In other words, in contrast to the way thing should be, the Republicans tell the little guy "you're on your own". The Democratic mantra that is the opposite is that "We're All In This Together". I haven't heard that line expressed as much as the YOYO line just recently, but I think it makes a nice contrast. I don't dispute any of your facts, Dean. I guess you're point is that you don't think the slogan sells very well. I don't have a strong opinion about that -- I think the words are quite descriptive of the reality, however. -- ARG Posted by ARG in Chicago September 8, 2008 9:56 AM | Reply | PermalinkMcCain is the Great White Hope, the aged white warrior with his bible thumping priestess who will get the Republican Party and ergo the country back on the path set by God. That is what the Bush04 crowd seems to believe. Posted by NobleCommentDecider September 8, 2008 11:01 AM | Reply | PermalinkOf course McCain and the Republicans are all about the rich. Part of the problem is that the Democrats to some extent are too. They talk a good game on occasion but when push comes to shove will not play the 'class war' card. The narrative of the American Dream has been changed. What the American Dream is now about is all of us having the potential to become the next Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, with enough hard work and a little luck that is...as the billionaires laugh themselves silly all the way to the bank. America is no longer a country of free people it is a country where freedom is defined as the right of the few to make as much as they can...and anything said to the contrary is considered 'un-American'. When did unregulated capitalism become equivilant to freedom? Milton Friedman, whose name Richard Adlof mentioned earlier, was one of the architects...along with his compatriots like Alan Greenspan, the man mostly responsible for the mess we have now. Friedman was able to hijack and corrupt the Libertarian movement, basically a socialist movement up to that point, by saying it is the right of any individual to make as much money as he/she can...and effort to regulate the economy was tantamount to infringing on all of our civil rights. An economic position the republicans and their fat cat corporate benefactors seized on and ran with. Now anyone who suggests that unfettered capitalism is bad is an anti-American Commie or Socialist. But of course the D's won't stand up and fight because to some extent they buy into Friedman's economic vision...why else were Rubin in Clinton's cabinet and Alan Greenspan, Freidman's protege, allowed to continue being the steward of the US economy for all 8 years of the Clinton administration. So why would the D's as a party fight against something that right now they really believe in and profit from almost as muchas the R's? So nobody is interested in changing the narrative... It is an Orwellian Ponzi scheme in its rationale...letting the rich have more actually doesn't mean you'll have less, it means you'll have the opportunity to have more and therefore less is more. And the American people to some degree buy into this nonsense. P.T. Barnum was right...there is a sucker born every minute. Posted by Libertine September 8, 2008 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink I agree with you on Greenspan being the man mostly responsible for the mess we have now. It was his responsibility to keep the economy from going into meltdown. However, I think you need to include Congress as well. Specifically the repug Senate in 1999, and a bill introduced by Gramm that basically gutted the Glass-Segal Act. Nine years later, we can see why it was written and should have been kept on the books. Posted by Moad Dib September 8, 2008 5:19 PM | Reply | Permalink Sure...I agree Congress too. And, implicitly, didn't Clinton have to sign off on its repeal also? So what would be the chances that if Obama wins, and the Congress is controlled by the D's, that a new act like Glass will be passed? Posted by Libertine September 8, 2008 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink The Glass Steagal Act repeal has nothing to do with the current mess. Mortgage securitization (which is what lies at the root of the trouble) began years before GS was repealed. Posted by JonF311 September 10, 2008 6:47 AM | Reply | Permalink Well,now -- and without being an expert -- It seems to me that the too-big-to-fail Wall Street commercial banks wouldn't have been parking so much (if any) MBS and other securitized financial instruments on their balance sheets if it weren't for the investment bankers' promises that they'd be selling the garbage lickety-split -- "Hey; you're talkin' 'bout my bonus; just hold your horses; any minute now, we'll sell it to some fool." Only they ran out of fools. Under Glass-Steagall those investment bankers wouldn't have been there, right? Posted by Ellen September 10, 2008 7:33 AM | Reply | Permalink And just for the record will I seem to be focusing on the D's role in all of this. Bottom line is the R's who make this corporate welfare scheme a top priority...the D's just seem not to be able to resist the urge to help 'the cause'. Posted by Libertine September 8, 2008 6:13 PM | Reply | PermalinkGreat topic and good comments. To Dean's point of the official slogans of the D's and R's and its relationship to making a decision on how the D's (Obama) have to fight back, I think that he will fight back in many ways. I think the grassroot activists and upper-income activists will attack the Republican messages head on and tough, and I also think it is important for the D's (Obama) to attack this stuff at its face value and in public (I think the debates could be overwhelming for Obama and Biden but I fear the "Victimization" card that McCAin will surely play if he looks bad. On the other hand what worked for JFK vs NIxon may be interpreted differently by our current culture and maybe not to the same conclusions. However, I think Obama can back up his compelling argument as an agent of change vs McCain who has been there for 25yrs and provide specifics about how his policies will affect the 95% of us he wants to give a general tax break to. Posted by JoshQuasimoto September 8, 2008 4:02 PM | Reply | PermalinkDean's shortcoming is his extreme parochialism -- he sees rich v. poor but always as Americans. If he weren't such a dyed-in-the-wool conventional macroeconomist, he'd be looking abroad and telling China, Japan, and the oil exporters -- those countries that benefited from our middle class's willingness to go into debt to support those foreigners' mercantilist fantasies* -- that they're going to be the ones to take the haircuts. No bailouts! Go get 'em, Dean! * A current account deficit must be financed by borrowing. If the country's government and businesses don't borrow enough, then, it's left to the consumer which in this case means home mortgages, car loans, and credit card debt. Posted by Ellen September 8, 2008 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink Ellen, I don't think a current account deficit implies borrowing and especially don't think it implies intra-national transfers. As I understand it, the US current account deficit means we buy more goods and services from foreigners than they buy from us. Often we sell them debts. Sometimes we sell Rockefeller Center or Hawaii or Budweiser. I don't see the connection between inter and intra national asset transfers you think exist. I don't deny a secondary linkage, but it's not like terms balancing on opposite sides of one equation. There are two different equations. Posted by zeno2vonnegut September 9, 2008 4:09 AM | Reply | Permalink Sell for dollars, you wind up with dollars. While there's a small dollar market outside the U.S. which has been around for 30+ years, almost all dollars earned by foreigners and not used to buy American goods and services must be invested in U.S. assets. You're right to say they can buy assets other than bonds but central banks which wind up with most of the money can't and desirable assets for sale to private foreign investors other than debt are too little to soak up the deficit (and too, try buying Unocal if you're CNOOC). Thus, we (governments, businesses, and households) have to soak up foreign earnings by borrowing them. Quaere: Had we kept a tighter rein on mortgage and consumer lending, who knows how low the interest rate on government and corporate bonds might have gone as foreign buyers squeezed into those markets as the only port in the storm. And that's why I say they should suffer a bit, now, because they got a windfall -- higher agency debt interest rates which they wouldn't have gotten if we'd been sensible (They've eaten our lunch in manufacturing and oil imports; they don't get dinner -- excess interest rates -- too). Posted by Ellen September 9, 2008 7:30 AM | Reply | Permalink Ellen, We're in agreement that most of the current account deficit winds up buying debt. I thought that most of the debt, particularly that bought by central banks, was US Treasuries. Where I am still either in disagreement or confusion is the tightness of the link to consumer debt. Can the the Treasury just not print up more debt to soak up the deficit? Also warning foreigners that the US government is going to go Bear-Stearns on them would be suicidal because if the US ever offers 90 cents on a dollar of treasuries, we're toast. The foreigners (UBS, etc) are already taking a market-delivered haircut on CDO's. Posted by zeno2vonnegut September 9, 2008 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink As far as I know (I don't have a link; doubtless, wikipedia will have something), the powers that be don't "print money" any longer. When the government (Treasury) needs money to pay its creditors, the FRB issues a bond and credits the Treasury's account in an equal amount (the UST writes a check to Lockheed, Mrs. Not-Got-Rocks, etc. to pay its bills). The FRB, then, sells that bond to the domestic and/or foreign public (including foreign central banks) or in the worst case holds on to it itself. But there's always a bond (increased debt) involved. A week or so ago (no link) the head of the Chinese central bank (it owns $387 billion of GSE debt)warned us not to allow the GSEs to default -- to the substantial harm of investors. He recognized some haircut was understandable implying only a large one would cause him to go on strike. But neither China nor the speculators like PIMCO took any haircut at all. Posted by Ellen September 9, 2008 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink Why is this man smiling? You'd be smiling too if the government had just made your firm $1.7 billion in one day by bailing out Freddie and Fannie. Posted by Ellen September 9, 2008 7:35 AM | Reply | Permalinker, it appears Obama is not taking your advice Obama: Recession could delay rescinding tax cuts Posted by Lamont September 8, 2008 4:32 PM | Reply | Permalink Tiffany & Co. shares soar near 6% on Obama's announcement of his new "Outreach to the Wealthy" plan. Posted by Ellen September 8, 2008 4:49 PM | Reply | PermalinkDean, It's more than that. Look at the bail outs in the financial markets. They're not bail outs. They're doing exactly what they refuse to do with universal health coverage. They're socializing the market. And the financial market has fought tooth and nail for years to keep the government regulation out, but need their help to keep from drowning in their own sea of debt they created. Perhaps it may be a blessing if Obama doesn't win this time. Let McCain get it so everything will fall down on him. Posted by Moad Dib September 8, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink Everything will fall down on the average American, and one might say they may well deserve it after electing Bush twice. No matter how much the Bush Base hates taxes the bills are piling up and will be paid, primarily by the middle class and those on fixed incomes if McCain gets elected. Posted by NobleCommentDecider September 8, 2008 11:34 PM | Reply | PermalinkThe mantra of the Republican/Conservative is: Deregulation spurs competition. The reality is that deregulation spurs monopolyism. Posted by we r all husseins September 9, 2008 9:17 AM | Reply | PermalinkI thought YOYO was Jared Bernstein's tag line. Posted by Aatos September 10, 2008 3:50 AM | Reply | Permalink Post a Comment This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 10 14:42:34 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:42:34 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper) Message-ID: <48C7F8F9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is ?Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean? September 5, 2008 /*by Charley James -*/ ?So Sambo beat the bitch!? This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama?s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination. According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat?s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively. ?It was kind of disgusting,? Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the ?lower 48? about life near the North Pole. Then, almost with a sigh, she added, ?But that?s just Alaska.? Racial and ethnic slurs may be ?just Alaska? and, clearly, they are common, everyday chatter for Palin. Besides insulting Obama with a Step-N?-Fetch-It, ?darkie musical? swipe, people who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska?s Aboriginal people as ?Arctic Arabs? - how efficient, lumping two apparently undesirable groups into one ugly description - as well as the more colourful ?mukluks? along with the totally unimaginative ?f**king Eskimo?s,? according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed for this article. But being openly racist is only the tip of the Palin iceberg. According to Alaskans interviewed for this article, she is also vindictive and mean. We?re talking Rove mean and Nixon vindictive. No wonder the vast sea of white, cheering faces at the Republican Convention went wild for Sarah: They adore the type, it?s in their genetic code. So much for McCain?s pledge of a ?high road? campaign; Palin is incapable of being part of one. more: http://www.laprogressive.com/2008/09/05/alaskans-speak-in-a-frightened-whisper-palin-is-%25E2%2580%259Cracist-sexist-vindictive-and-mean%25E2%2580%259D/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 11 14:38:13 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:38:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Amiri Baraka Message-ID: <48C94975.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiri_Baraka Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka addressing the Malcom X Festival in San Antonio Park, Oakland, California Born October 7, 1934 (1934-10-07) (age 73) Newark, New Jersey (U.S.) Occupation Actor, teacher, theater director/producer, writer, activist Nationality American Writing period 1961 - Present Genres Poetry, Drama Influences[show] Richard Wright Influenced[show] John S. Hall Official website Amiri Baraka (born October 7, 1934) is an American writer of poetry, drama, essays and music criticism. Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 1934 - 1965 1.3 1966 - 1980 1.4 1980 - today 2 Controversy 3 Works 4 Film Appearances 5 References 6 External links [edit] Biography [edit] Early life Baraka, a convert to Islam,[1] was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended Barringer High School.[2] His father, Coyette LeRoi Jones, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator, and his mother, Anna Lois (n?e Russ), was a social worker.[3][4][5][6][7] In 1952, he changed his name to LeRoi Jones. In 1967 he adopted the African name Imamu Ameer Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka. [edit] 1934 - 1965 Baraka studied philosophy and religious studies at Rutgers University, Columbia University and Howard University without obtaining a degree. In 1954 he joined the US Air Force, reaching the rank of sergeant. After an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist led to the discovery of Soviet writings, Baraka was put on kitchen duty and given a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty. The same year he moved to Greenwich Village working initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time he came into contact with the incipient movement of Beat Poets that was going to have a powerful influence on his early poetry. In 1958, Jones founded Totem Press, which published such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The same year he married Hettie Cohen and with her became joint editor of the Yugen literary magazine (until 1963). In 1960 he went to Cuba, a visit that initiated his transformation into a politically active artist. In 1961 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note was published, followed in 1963 by Blues People: Negro Music in White America - to this day one of the most influential volumes of jazz criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning Free Jazz movement. His acclaimed controversial [8] play[disambiguation needed]Dutchman premiered in 1964 and received an Obie Award the same year. After the assassination of Malcolm X, Baraka broke free from the Beat Poets. He left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem, considering himself at that time a black cultural nationalist.[citation needed] Later, Hettie Cohen, in her autobiography How I Became Hettie Jones (1996), claimed that Baraka had mistreated her during the time of their marriage. [edit] 1966 - 1980 In 1966, Baraka married his second wife who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967 he became a lecturer at San Francisco State University. In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for illegally carrying a weapon and resisting arrest during riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and sentenced to three years in prison. Shortly afterwards an appeals court threw out the sentence. The same year his second book of jazz criticism Black Music came out, a collection of previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In 1970 he strongly supported Kenneth Gibson's candidacy for mayor of Newark; Gibson was elected the city's first Afro-American Mayor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka courted controversy by penning some strongly anti-Jewish poems and articles, similar to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam. Around 1974, Baraka distanced himself from Black nationalism and became a Marxist and a supporter of anti-imperialist third world liberation movements. In 1979 he became a lecturer at SUNY - Stony Brook for the Africana Studies Department, and was greatly admired by his students. The same year, after altercations with his wife, he was sentenced to a short period of compulsory community service. Around this time he began writing his autobiography. In 1980 he denounced his former anti-semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-zionist. [edit] 1980 - today In 1984 Baraka became a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure.[citation needed] In 1987, together with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, he was a speaker at the commemoration ceremony for James Baldwin. In 1989 he won an American Book Award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes Award. In 1990 he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 was a supporting actor in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth. Baraka collaborated with hip hop group The Roots on the song "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)" on their 2002 album Phrenology. In 2003, Baraka's daughter Shani, age 31, was murdered in Piscataway Township, New Jersey. In 2006, Baraka regained both fame and infamy when he was listed in David Horowitz's book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. [edit] Controversy Baraka's writings have generated controversy over the years, particularly his use of often-violent imagery directed towards (at various times) women, gay people, white people, and Jews. Critics of his work have alternately described such usage as ranging from being vernacular expressions of Black oppression to outright examples of racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism that they perceive in his work.[9][10][11] The following is a typical example cited, from a 1965 essay: Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank. ? The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped.[12] Amiri Baraka was New Jersey?s Poet Laureate at the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks. He wrote a poem titled "Somebody Blew Up America"[13] about the event. The poem was controversial and highly critical of racism in America, and includes angry depictions of public figures such as Trent Lott, Clarence Thomas, and Condoleezza Rice. The poem also contains lines claiming Israel's involvement in the World Trade Center attacks: Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away? [...] Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion Baraka has said that he believed Israelis (and President George W. Bush) were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, citing what he described as information that had been reported in the American and Israeli press and on Jordanian television. He denies that the poem is anti-Semitic, and points to its accusation, which is directed against Israelis, rather than Jews as a people.[14][15] The Anti-Defamation League was amongst the critics who denounced the poem as anti-Semitic.[16], though Baraka and his defenders to defined his position as Anti-Zionism. After this poem's publication, Governor Jim McGreevey tried to remove Baraka from the post, only to discover that there was no legal way to do so. In 2003, after legislation was passed allowing him to do so, McGreevey abolished the NJ Poet Laureate title. In response to legal action filed by Baraka, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that state officials were immune from such suits, and in November 2007 the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal of the case.[17] [edit] Works Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961 Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963 Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964 The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965 Home: Social Essays, 1965 Tales, 1967 Black Magic, poems, 1969 Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969 It's Nation Time, poems, 1970 Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971 Hard Facts, poems, 1975 The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978 Poetry for the Advanced, 1979 reggae or not!, 1981 Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984 The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984 The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987 Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995 Wise, Why?s Y?s, essays, 1995 Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996. Somebody Blew Up America, 2001 Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006 [edit] Film Appearances Motherland (film) (2009) Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) .... Himself The Black Candle (2008) Corso: The Last Beat (2008) Oscene (2007) .... Himself Turn Me On (2007) (TV) .... Himself Revolution '67 (2007) .... Himself Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007) Retour ? Gor?e (2007) .... Himself The Pact (2006) .... Himself The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) .... Himself 500 Years Later (2005) (voice) .... Himself Hubert Selby Jr: It'll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) .... Himself Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) .... Himself Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) .... Himself Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) .... Himself Strange Fruit (2002) .... Himself Pi?ero (2001) .... Himself Bulworth (1998) .... Rastaman Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960-95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) .... Himself Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) .... Himself Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) .... Himself One P.M. (1972) [edit] References ^ The Cambridge handbook of American literature, By Jack Salzman, Cameron Bardrick, pg.16 ^ Message from Amiri Baraka, New Jersey and Newark Schools' Poet Laureate, dated July 1, 2003, accessed April 13, 2007. "Now, in an attempt to prevent my appearance at Barringer High School (my alma mater) June 30, to give the Commencement Address, they threatened to picket Barringer and otherwise cause disruption." ^ Amiri Baraka Biography (1934-) ^ culturebase.net | The international artist database | Amiri Baraka ^ PAL: Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones (1934- ) ^ Kjali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka - Part I ^ Amiri Baraka ^ Amazon.com: Dutchman: Movies & TV: Shirley Knight,Al Freeman Jr.,Frank Lieberman,Robert Calvert (II),Howard Bennett,Sandy McDonald,Dennis Alaba Peters,Keith James,Devon Hall,Anthony Harvey (II) ^ David L. Smith . Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art . boundary 2. Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 235-254. ^ Charles H. Rowell. An Interview With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Callaloo. Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 444-463. ^ Marlon B. Ross . Camping the Dirty Dozens: The Queer Resources of Black Nationalist Invective. Callaloo. Vol. 23, No. 1, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender: Literature and Culture (Winter, 2000), pp. 290-312. ^ Jerry Gafio Watts. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. NYU Press, 2001. pg 332 ^ Amiri Baraka, on line. ^ Katherine Stevens, "Baraka refutes criticism. Controversial N.J. poet laureate denies accusations of racism", Yale Daily News (February 25, 2003) ^ Jeremy Pearce, "When poetry seems to matter", The New York Times (February 9, 2003) ^ Anti-Defamation LeagueAMIRI BARAKA: IN HIS OWN WORDS ^ via Associated Press. "Newark: Court Will Not Hear Poet?s Lawsuit", The New York Times, November 14, 2007. Accessed November 26, 2007. [edit] External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Amiri BarakaWorks by or about Amiri Baraka in libraries (WorldCat catalog) Baraka at IMDB homepage of Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka in the German National Library catalogue Amiri Baraka Discography Project Modern American Poetry Page: Amiri Baraka 1984 interview with Amiri Baraka by Don Swaim at Wired for Books John Derybshire review Amiri Baraka Multimedia Directory - Kerouac Alley Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiri_Baraka" Categories: African American writers | African American dramatists and playwrights | African American essayists | African American poets | American Poets Laureate | Barringer High School alumni | Beat writers | Beat Generation | Civil rights activists | Jazz writers | American music critics | American Marxists | American Muslims | People from Newark, New Jersey | 1934 births | Living people | Converts to Islam Hidden categories: Articles with links needing disambiguation | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2008 | Articles with unsourced statements since July 2008 ViewsArticle Discussion Edit this page History Personal toolsLog in / create account Navigation Main page Contents Featured content Current events Random article Search Interaction About Wikipedia Community portal Recent changes Contact Wikipedia Donate to Wikipedia Help Toolbox What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Printable version Permanent link Cite this page Languages Dansk Deutsch Espa?ol Fran?ais Italiano ????? Simple English Sloven?ina Svenska This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Sep 12 10:32:24 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:32:24 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Rosenberg transcripts raise possibility of perjury Message-ID: Rosenberg transcripts raise possibility of perjury By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080912/ap_on_go_ot/rosenberg_case From no-reply at colorofchange.org Fri Sep 12 10:29:35 2008 From: no-reply at colorofchange.org (James Rucker, ColorOfChange.org) Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:29:35 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Call now to stop Georgia from killing Troy Davis Message-ID: Tomorrow, Georgia may decide to execute an innocent man. [] [] [] Call the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, and ask them to grant clemency to Troy Davis: 404-651-6599. Dear Ralphellectual, In just over a week, Georgia may execute an innocent man. Can you make a call right now to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to ask them to spare the life of Troy Anthony Davis? Troy Davis was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of a police officer in Savannah; a murder he maintains he did not commit. There was no physical evidence against him and the weapon used in the crime was never found. The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony that was full of inconsistencies. Since then, all but two of the state's non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted their testimony. Many have sworn in affidavits that police pressured or coerced them into testifying or signing statements. Former FBI director William Sessions told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Serious questions have been raised about Davis' guilt. It would be intolerable to execute an innocent man." The State Board of Pardons and Paroles is meeting today to decide Troy Davis' fate. Can you call them right now and ask them to spare his life? Call (404) 651-6599 and tell them you are for clemency or commutation for Troy Davis because you don't want Georgia to make the mistake of executing an innocent man. Once you've called, please let us know by sending an email to calls at colorofchange.org. Then, please pass this on to your friends and family--Troy Davis needs all the help he can get. Last summer, the day before Troy Davis' original execution date of July 17, 2007, ColorOfChange.org members flooded the phone lines of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles asking for clemency for Troy Davis. The board granted him a stay of execution stating, "the board will not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused." The Georgia Supreme Court and US Supreme Court have refused to hear new evidence in the case--ensuring that doubts about his guilt will always remain. Once again, Troy Davis' life is in the hands of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles. They are meeting today to decide whether to move forward with his execution. Every ounce of pressure will be needed to reverse the course of this injustice. Can you take a moment to call the board and ask them to commute the death sentence of Troy Davis? Call (404) 651-6599 and tell them to grant Troy Davis clemency or commute his sentence. Then let us know you called by sending an email to calls at colorofchange.org. Thanks and Peace, -- James, Gabriel, Clarissa, Andre, Kai, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team September 12th, 2008 For more information about the Troy Davis case, please click on the links below. 1. "Troy Davis -- Finality over Fairness," Amnesty International USA http://tinyurl.com/42z2tp 2. "Davis execution scheduled; 7 witnesses have recanted," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9/03/08 http://tinyurl.com/68r5e5 3. "As execution nears, last push from inmates' supporters," New York Times, 7/15/07 http://tinyurl.com/6xou5x 4. "Execution of Georgia man near despite recantations," Washington Post, 7/16/07 http://tinyurl.com/699lvl 5. "New Round for Davis," Savannah Morning News, 7/18/07 http://savannahnow.com/node/327610 ---------- Subscription Management: This is a message from ColorOfChange.org. To remove yourself from our list, click here: http://colorofchange.org/subscription/?id=1783-143990 . To change your email address or update your contact info, send an email to subscriptions at colorofchange.org. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.6.21/1668 - Release Date: 9/12/2008 6:56 AM From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat Sep 13 08:31:55 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:31:55 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper) Message-ID: Sarah Palin and Me September 6, 2008 by Charley James ? Anonymous sources are the bane of a reporter?s existence, and have been at least since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used them extensively to unmask Watergate and topple Richard Nixon. Frankly, writing as someone who has been covering news since the late 1960s for everything from local newspapers to major market TV and radio stations to a major business newsweekly, journalists don?t like citing anonymous sources any more than much of the public likes reading pieces that quote people without attribution. Alas, more often than not, the reality is that in a highly-explosive story such as my piece about Sarah Palin published here on Friday, granting anonymity may be the only way to get a source to agree to be interviewed. So I am not surprised that a number of readers who wrote comments about the article raised questions about my sources. It has happened before, especially when I tackled a subject that raises a lot of dust, and it will happen again. Although I won?t reveal any sources ? I honor promises of anonymity ? let me explain how the story unfolded and sources came to my attention as I did the reporting. Desperately Seeking Lucille When Palin?s name began leaking out the morning of Aug. 30, I sent an e-mail to an old friend from childhood who has been teaching in Alaska since he finished far too much graduate school, basically asking, ?Who is Sarah Palin when it?s not raining and what was she before?? He wrote back with not just a lengthy, invective-filled diatribe against her and the horse she rode in on but also a link to a 63-page vetting report on Palin he said was done up some time ago by Alaska Democrats. After reading it ? information in the dossier goes all the way back to 2002 ? I wrote again asking if he knew people I could contact for a possible article. A short list of names was provided, including Lucille the Waitress, the much-discussed and oft-doubted woman who seems to have drawn the largest number of questions from commentators on the article. And how does he know her? Well, like many people living on minimum wage and tips, Lucille holds a second job which, in this case, includes cleaning my friend?s family home every other week. Lucille was the first person I interviewed. In her late 50s or early 60s, she was nervous even though I provided her with my friend?s name and suggested she call him first to verify who I am. She decided to proceed with the interview, which lasted about 10 minutes. Assuming she knew nothing about having to put an interview ?off the record? or on a ?not for attribution? basis before the interview starts. I asked Lucille if I could use her name in my article. She let me use her first name but not her last because she said she was afraid she might be fired. I called my friend after the interview and, relating what?d said, asked if she was trustworthy. I was assured that, ?It?d be easier for Lucille to hunt bears bare handed than to tell a lie.? My old pal?s role in the story ends at this point. Legwork Starting with the small handful of other possible sources provided to me, I began dialling. Some people would talk, others wouldn?t; some would refer me on to other possible interview subjects, others told me to go forth, be fruitful and multiply, in much coarser language before slamming the phone in my ear. In other words, I relied on what reporters have always relied upon to unearth a story: Legwork, or what it was called about a hundred lifetimes ago when I was first starting out. More accurately, I used my phone. To answer one person who penned a comment to the original piece, this is how someone who grew up in Middle America, visited Alaska once in his life and now lives in Canada could do reporting on a story based up there. Flat rate long distance plans have worked wonders for journalism. As I?ve been doing for 40 years, when I?d finish interviewing one source I? d ask them if they knew anyone else I might call. Thus, one source frequently begat a second which, often, begat a third. Thus, a picture of Sarah Palin began to emerge and the result was Alaskans Speak. Do I wish more people would have spoken to me on the record and for attribution? Absolutely. Do I regret writing a piece that relied upon so many anonymous sources? Not one bit. by Charley James Charley James is an American journalist, author and essayist who lives in Toronto. Reprinted with permission from The Progressive Curmudgeon **************Psssst...Have you heard the news? There's a new fashion blog, plus the latest fall trends and hair styles at StyleList.com. (http://www.stylelist.com/trends?ncid=aolsty00050000000014) From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Sep 13 10:29:13 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 12:29:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic Message-ID: <20080913.122914.1464.1.farmelantj@juno.com> Louis Proyect posted the following announcement on his Marxmail list concerning the latest issue of the journal Cultural Logic. I found the article by Hristos Verikukis "Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism ," to be quite interesting. Verikukis basically convicts Popper of having been inconsistent in the way he defined and applied his concept of falsifiability as a criterion for demarcating science from non-science. Popper, according to Verikukis, was much stricter about defining falsifiability when applying to Marxism (which Popper claimed was not falsifiable and hence, not science) than he was when applying to his own situationalist brand of social science, where he embraced what he called the Principle of Rationality, which he variously described as being not falsifiable, or was falsified but still in some sense true. Anyway, I think that Verikukis's article dovetails with the criticisms that other writers like Cornell philosopher Richard W. Miller have made of Popper's critique of Marxism. http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Verikukis.pdf ------------------------------- http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/2007.html Tenth-Anniversary Issue (The current issue files are in pdf format. Click below to download the latest version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader.) Articles (Names listed alphbetically) Roland Boer "Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg" Philip Bounds "George Orwell and the Dialogue with English Marxism" Paula Cerni "The Age of Consumer Capitalism" Stephen C. Ferguson II "Social Contract as Bourgeois Ideology" Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov "Nicolai Bukharin's First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka" Catherine Gouge "'Amibivalent Technologies' of American Citizenship" Bruno Gulli "Early Plenitude: An Essay on Sovereignty and Labor" Katerina Kolozova "The Project of Non-Marxism: Arguing for 'Monstrously' Radical Concepts" John Maerhofer "Aim? C?asare and the Crisis of Aesthetic and Political Vangardism " Michael Mikulak "Cross-pollinating Marxism and Deep Ecology: Towards a Post-humanist Eco-humanism" Terence Patrick Murphy "From Alignment to Commitment: The Early Work of James Kelman" Ronald Paul ""To turn the whole world upside-down': Women and Revolution in The Non-Stop Connolly Show " Philip Tonner "Freud, Bentham: Panopticism and the Super-Ego" Hristos Verikukis "Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism " Reviews Ivan Ca?adas Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe David Hursh Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine and Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire Howard Pflanzer Robert Roth, Health Proxy Louis Proyect Amazing Grace Charlie Samuya Veric, Tamara Powell, and John Streamas E. San Juan, Jr., Balikbayang Mahal Poetry Christopher Barnes Poems Dave Bruzina "Boom" and "The Committee Dissolves" Iftekhar Sayeed Poems George Snedeker "The History Lesson" and Other Poems Contributors ____________________________________________________________ Click to book your dream cruise. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3nL6YUeBPZAIuI1yXxoKuJ5StDtktH1OsawsJnwwmbvS1doF/ From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Sep 13 20:05:11 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:05:11 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Death of Peter Camejo Message-ID: <20080913.220512.1464.5.farmelantj@juno.com> http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-camejo14-2008sep14,0,5153282 .story From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 09:32:03 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:32:03 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Get the conversation back on track Message-ID: <48CE47B6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Charles -- There's so much at stake in this election -- fixing our economy, solving the energy crisis, dealing with climate change, and restoring America's position in the world. You and I know that. But John McCain is trying to distract voters from the real issues. And he's willing to take the low road by making cheap personal attacks and lying outright about Barack and his record. It's up to each of us to talk to voters across the country and make sure they know what this election is really about -- especially in a battleground state like yours. We have an exciting new tool called Neighbor to Neighbor that makes it easy to talk to potential supporters in your community about Barack and the issues that matter. Help get the conversation back on track today by knocking on doors or making phone calls: http://my.barackobama.com/n2n Nothing is more powerful than having undecided voters hear from ordinary people. And right now, that's needed more than ever. No prior experience is required. Neighbor to Neighbor gives you a list of potential supporters, suggested topics to talk about, and an easy way to report back on who you've contacted. With less than eight weeks until Election Day, we can't allow voters to lose focus on the big issues and get swept up by the smears and lies coming out of the McCain campaign. Reach out to fellow voters now and grow this movement for change: http://my.barackobama.com/n2n Thanks, Jon Jon Carson National Field Director Obama for America This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 09:33:04 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:33:04 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] video Message-ID: <48CE47F3.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gwqEneBKUs This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 10:16:22 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:16:22 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?Boggs=3AChange_is_finally_possible?= =?utf-8?b?4oCd?= Message-ID: <48CE5219.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Change is finally possible? By Grace Lee Boggs Special to The Michigan Citizen The morning after Obama?s speech at the Democratic Party convention, I received the following hope-filled email from Rob Biko, the young African American who is the executive director of the League of Young Voters and organizes Milwaukee youth in the Campaign Against Violence (CAV). Two months ago I met with Biko and League field organizers at a small dinner in Ann Arbor. His response to the Denver convention is on the League?s website theleague.com with a call for comments. ?I was one of the 80,000 people,? writes Biko, ?who packed into Invesco Field to see Barack Obama claim the Democratic Presidential Nomination last night. It is hard for me to believe that a man of African ancestry is this close to becoming the President of the United States. I have to be honest: while I knew last night would be an extraordinary historical landmark, I did not expect to leave Denver as a proud and joyful American. But I did. ?Last night, for the first time in my adult life, I waved an American Flag. It was just a little thing; a stick and fabric symbol, the same kind ancient veterans in immaculate uniforms hand out on the Fourth of July. In my hand, it felt as light as air. It was something to be careful with. ?I wasn?t waving the Red, White and Blue because I am a Democrat, Republican or Independent. This wasn?t about party; it was a personal celebration, shared by the 80,000 different Americans who crammed into that stadium. We came because we see this election as a chance to shrug off the partisanship of politics as usual. We came to display our pride, together. ?I waved that flag because I believe that change is finally possible in our country. For too long the people who form the bedrock of our nation have been left out of the American Dream. Our greatest leaders have been murdered and destroyed, our institutions broken. We, our friends and families, work ourselves to the bone to make ends meet and can expect each day to simply be more of the same. ?After last night?s historic event, I woke up convinced that we can realize our beautiful dream. It wasn?t the candidate that changed me. It wasn?t the speech. It was the faces of those around me showing me that we, as Americans, are sick of the status quo. We are tired of inequality. We are ready to step up to be leaders in the greatest tradition of the men and women who placed this flag, this land, into our hands. ?I believe we have what it takes to tackle the contradictions that continue to divide us. We can truly become the ?Change Generation.? We face problems unprecedented in human history, and we must meet them as brothers and sisters. We are going to have to work harder every day, to convince the skeptical, and demonstrate the power of the Beloved Community over and over again. If we want it, we can do it. Last night we proved it.? It was not Obama?s policies (which aren?t that different from those of other Democrats) which inspired this fervent response from Biko. Nor was it Obama?s charisma. What inspired it, I believe, was participating in and witnessing the drama of the Democrats nominating an African American for president on the 45th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, thus demonstrating before the eyes of the world the power of grassroots organizing. The Denver convention was more than politics as usual. Because it was art, drama, theatre, it unleashed in its viewers and participants new transformative energies, new and powerful visions of what is possible, going beyond the identity politics of the Sixties, beyond Black vs. white and v.v.; beyond rejection to projection, and beyond victim vs. villain thinking, e.g. in the loving partnership of Michelle and Barack. Even Bill Clinton had a role in this drama. His speech not only sanctified his own presidency but disclosed why a section of the power structure supports Obama ? to improve our image in the world. These transformative energies at the grassroots level are our best hope in this period when the government in D.C. has essentially become dysfunctional. I?ll have more to say about this next week. http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=77&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=6453&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 11:55:33 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:55:33 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Urban Agenda presented to Barack Obama Message-ID: <48CE6958.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Urban Agenda presented to Barack Obama By Detroit City Councilmember JoAnn Watson - Full Employment Plan built on green jobs, small entrepreneur service-based sector, public investment to re-employ heads of households; tax credits for small business. - National Moratorium on Foreclosures for a 24-month period to allow families to re-tool their finances and creditworthiness; with HUD matching people in need to vacant homes for $1. - Universal Single Payer Health Care - Mandatory Equitable Financing of Public Education and measures to eradicate disparity and disincentives. - Tuition-Free Community College policy for students in need. - Zero-Waste National Policies, renewable energy and alternative energy national policies. - Establishment of Cabinet Office to promote peace and a cabinet office to respect and honor all cultures, ethnicities, faiths, life choices, and non-biased immigration policies. - Media Incubators to Create a New Paradigm for electronic and print communication nationally, locally to remediate Kerner Commission findings. - Promote Council of Elders around the nation so that youth and their parents can access guidance and wisdom in times of crisis rather than resorting to police and the court system. - Food Stamps Made Available upon request to any American citizen without bureaucratic bottlenecks. - Implementation of Mass Transit Network to connect citizens to jobs, recreation, cultural and tourist destinations as is accessible in the nation?s largest cities. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 13:06:39 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:06:39 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Julianne Malveaux Message-ID: <48CE7A03.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Barack Obama: Change and expectations By Julianne Malveaux NNPA Columnist http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=76&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=&wpage=&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com Senator Barack Obama had an impossible task ahead of him as he accepted the Democratic Party?s nomination for President on Thursday night. He had to define himself, said some. Outline his differences with Senator John McCain, said others. Pick up the baton being passed from civil rights leaders on the historic 45th anniversary of the March on Washington, still others said. Outline a policy agenda. Inspire. Pay tribute and offer respect to the Clintons. Mobilize Democrats who were not that sure of him. Get a post-convention bounce and get back to leading in the polls. For all his rhetorical brilliance, there were high expectations and too many tasks for one human being to accomplish in a mere 45 minutes. I listened intently, checklist in hand, hoping that Senator Obama could meet expectations. In some ways, he did. He laid out a policy agenda. He talked about ways he differed from his Republican opponent, John McCain. He contrasted the world as it might be with the way this world is. He showed extraordinary acumen for lifting up working Americas ? nurses and janitors and mid-level managers like his grandmother. There was much to praise in the Obama speech. But it didn?t grab me. At a convention where people were begging to be wowed, he offered prose, not poetry. At a convention where tears flowed freely from the weight of history, Obama neglected to invoke the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King by name. To be sure, Dr. King was invoked by his son, Martin III and his daughter, Bernice. And many other platform speakers. And Obama should not be forced to mention King as if participating in a litany. But if Hillary Rodham Clinton could emotionally and authentically mention Harriet Tubman, couldn?t the man who has implied that he is the inheritor of the dream bother to mention Dr. Martin Luther King more explicitly than as ?a preacher from Georgia.? Some folks say that Obama didn?t have to invoke King, and that he, indeed, should not have. Some said that in order to reassure majority America, any explicit mention of race, and of Dr. Martin Luther King, should be avoided. But Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an American hero, not an African American hero. Perhaps the acknowledgement was implicit. Barack Obama?s tribute to working class people is, in many ways, a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who stood for people at the bottom, not at the top. He talked about the uncashed check, the broken promised and crippled dreams. In speaking of living wages, of workers who would cut their own hours so that friends could work, of people like his mother who struggled for health insurance, Barack Obama embraced King?s people if he didn?t explicitly acknowledge the dreamer himself. Still, Barack Obama?s speech didn?t sing, nor did it exceed expectations. Given the multiple hurdles he faced, he could not possibly clear all of them. But Obama was strong, forceful, focused, policy-oriented, and an agent of change. He fumbled on the baton being passed from the leaders of the civil rights movement, he fully embraced the mantle of change, of social and economic justice. In the next nine weeks, he will have opportunities to steady the fumble while wrapping himself in the mantle, to meet enough expectations to not only achieve an electoral victory, but also to be the leader that keeps promises to all of the people. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 13:11:33 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:11:33 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Boddi: Fwd: [lbo-talk] Maverickism/Fascism References: Message-ID: <48CE7B28.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> This is by former Thaxis list member Boddi Satva ( Buddha ? smile). CB ^^^^^ As we all know, fascisms - from plain old warlordism to more subtle "one party democracy" - are highly cultural because they depend on symbolism. On this basis, we must come to the surprising conclusion that George W. Bush cannot possibly be an American fascist because he just looks too much like what Americans already think of when they think of "fascist". If you read Bill Kristol's piece in the NY Times today, you got a hint of what American fascism would sound like - and look like. And you even know the name it will take: Maverickism. Bull-headedness, daring and "independence" are higly valued by Americans - whether they end in disaster or not. We Americans are the progent of idiot pioneers who dashed into the wilderness on a whim of inspiration. Or, rather, we are the progeny of those who took their land, belongings and even dined on their flesh on the shores of Donner Lake when these haphazard idiots failed, starved and died. We are the land of people who lead their fellow citizens off the well-traveled trail and into the wilderness with a story of inspiration, then leave them behind and go back to civilization, the aspirants money safely in pocket. With more people in jail than China and India combined, it is safe to say that America is a criminal country. A "maverick" is a sad sort of symbolic pawn of a criminal culture - a cultural "stalking horse" - but more on that later. Now we have three "mavericks" in or aspiring to the highest places in government - McCain, Palin and Petraeus. McCain is a third-generation insider who has taken a story of getting shot down, doing what the North Vietnamese bid of him to embarrass America and then bravely following regulations and waiting his turn like everyone else into an epic of victimhood and heroism. Palin is a stalking horse for the most-corrupt Republican arty organization in America - the Alaska Republicans, and Petraeus is a smart general who has shown a capacity as a ruthless charlatan - effectively giving himself a combat valor medal without combat valor (bronze star w/ V device) that his many of his own soldiers who died while actually in combat did not get; changing the regulations to redefine participation on combat so the fact that he war a combat infantryman's badge he never earned would not be noticed; arming Iraqis who then killed American soldiers with those arms just to meet his numbers quota on "standing up" the Iraqi army; and obviously paying the Sunni "Awakening" not to kill Shiites so he could secure the former allies of Saddam some of their lost power and make the war seem won until the election. All three of them, of course, are perfect, complete and even proud tools of the Republican machine but they have crowned themselves with the new American title: Maverick. Again, this is what American fascism will sound like. The maverick is a great symbol for them too. The maverick - or feral horse - is the sad symbol of tragic and cruel irresponsibility coming out of the American land grab in its West. These storied symbols of the western U.S., hailed for their majesticiness, are actually smallish horses who are over-populated, sickly and disgusting to see and would be rounded up and dispatched humanely but for the self-important, idiot protests of exactly same kind of American women who fall for the Palin ploy, interestingly. -- peace, boddi http://financialroadtosocialism.blogspot.com/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 13:29:00 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:29:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Film about Water Struggle in Detroit, at UM on Sep 16 Tuesday References: <908b689f0809142159n2edfd727p5b7362b11da46d67@mail.gmail.com> <908b689f0809142201m2c681098yf39d2c842766e6e9@mail.gmail.com> <908b689f0809150032h5ace9cf2ue773526e5731a858@mail.gmail.com> <908b689f0809150036p1b2d1ccdnf80103c8cf070b67@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <48CE7F40.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Film about Water Struggle in Detroit, at UM on Sep 16 Tuesday I wrote up a preview of the film. Feel free to use it for publicizing the screening. It's at: This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 13:34:20 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:34:20 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] IUF Global Meat Unions Conference Message-ID: <48CE8080.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> IUF Global Meat Unions & apos; Conference Outlines Organizing Strategies, Priorities/private equity update The IUF's 2nd Global Meat Conference took place in Eastbourne, UK from June 23-24, 2008, following up the 1st Conference held in Toronto, Canada in 2002. Sixty participants from 22 different unions in 17 countries in all regions of the world took part in the conference. http://www.iuf.org/den5261 Six months after the private equity fund CapVest announced the organizational merger of their frozen and chilled food (largely seafood) operations - Findus, Young's, and the Seafood Company, operating as FoodVest - FoodVest was picked up by the UK -based buyout fund Lion Capital. Lion Capital's acquisition of the largest European frozen seafood operation makes it the market leader in the sector, with 2007 sales of over GBP 1 billion (USD 1.85 billion) - beating out Bird's Eye/Igloo, Unilever's former frozen food division sold to buyout fund Permira in 2006 for EUR 1.9 billion (USD 3 billion). FoodVest employs more than 6,000 people at 20 sites in 7 countries. http://tinyurl.com/5nvrf9 IUF secretariat To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank e-mail message to: iufen-unsubscribe at unionlists.org.uk This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 15:07:02 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:07:02 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Palin's Project List Message-ID: <48CE963A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Palin's Project List Totals $453 Million McCain Campaign Says Record Shows Drop in Requests By LAURA MECKLER and JOHN R. WILKE September 15, 2008; Page A5 Last week, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, hadn't sought earmarks or special-interest spending from Congress, presenting her as a fiscal conservative. But state records show Gov. Palin has asked U.S. taxpayers to fund $453 million in specific Alaska projects over the past two years. These projects include more than $130 million in federal funds that would benefit Alaska's fishing industry and an additional $9 million to help Alaska oil companies. She also has sought $4.5 million to upgrade an airport on a Bering Sea island that has a year-round population of less than 100. Getty Images Gov. Sarah Palin sought more than $130 million in federal funds for the Alaskan fishing industry. Sen. McCain has made the battle against earmarks and wasteful spending a centerpiece of his campaign. He has never sought earmarks for his state of Arizona and vows to veto pork-barrel spending bills that come to his desk as president, saying these projects should go through normal budget review. And he derides the argument that states often make: that they're funding important projects. "If they're worthy projects they can be authorized and appropriated in a New York minute," he explained on his campaign bus earlier this year, before Gov. Palin joined the ticket. "If they're worthy projects I know they'd be funded." During an appearance Friday on ABC's "The View," Sen. McCain said Gov. Palin shared his views, and hasn't sought congressional earmarks. "Not as governor she hasn't," he said.< In fact, in the current fiscal year, she is seeking $197 million for 31 projects, the records show. In the prior year, her first year in office, she sought $256 million for dozens more projects ranging from research on rockfish and harbor-seal genetics to rural sanitation and obesity prevention. By comparison, her predecessor, Gov. Frank Murkowski, sought more than $350 million in his last year in office. The McCain campaign said Sunday that Gov. Palin's overall record is one of fiscal discipline. "Her record is cutting the number of earmark requests from the previous administration sizably," said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, and she has vetoed wasteful state spending. As for Sen. McCain's televised comments on Friday, Mr. Bounds added, "If he gave viewers a mistaken impression, it certainly wasn't intentional." In an interview with ABC News on Friday, Gov. Palin herself suggested she no longer seeks earmarks for her state. "The abuse of earmarks, it's un-American, it's undemocratic, and it's not going to be accepted in a McCain-Palin administration. Earmark abuse will stop." When pressed about her record as governor, she said: "We have drastically, drastically reduced our earmark request since I came into office. This is what I've been telling Alaskans for these years that I've been in office, is no more." Alaska's success with earmarks is due in part to the power of Sen. Ted Stevens, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The state's earmark requests stand out in part because its state government is among the wealthiest in the U.S. Flush with oil and gas royalties, it doesn't impose income or sales taxes. In fact, money flows the other way: Every man, woman and child this year got a check for $3,200. The McCain campaign has also come under fire for saying on the stump and in TV ads that Gov. Palin killed the controversial "Bridge to Nowhere," a $223 million earmark linking the mainland to a sparsely populated island. In fact, she supported the project initially and killed it after it was widely criticized and Congress allowed the state to use the funds for other projects. On the campaign trail, Gov. Palin has repeatedly attacked Sen. Obama on earmarks. "Our opponent has requested nearly one billion dollars in earmarks in three years. That's about a million for every working day," she said at a rally in Albuquerque, N.M. Sen. Barack Obama requested a total of $860 million in earmarks in his Senate years, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. That doesn't include $78 million for projects that were national in scope and had been requested by many lawmakers. Sen. Obama halted all earmark requests in fiscal 2009. It is difficult to compare Sen. Obama's earmark record with Gov. Palin's -- their states differ in size, for instance, and the two candidates play different roles in the process. But using the same calculation that the McCain campaign uses, the total amount of earmarked dollars divided by the number of working days while each held office (assuming a five-day workweek, every week, for both), Gov. Palin sought $980,000 per workday, compared with roughly $893,000 for Sen. Obama. Mr. Bounds, the McCain campaign spokesman, called this an "apples and oranges comparison" because Sen. Obama sought more than Gov. Palin and because she cut earmark requests. Writ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 15:13:03 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:13:03 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Chavez accuses U.S. of restarting plans to kill him Message-ID: <48CE97A3.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-09/11/content_9920055.htm Xinhua News Agency September 11, 2008 Chavez accuses U.S. of restarting plans to kill him CARACAS - ...Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of restarting plans to murder him. The socialist president...alleged that America was planning to bomb the Miraflores Palace or the studio from where he broadcasts his Sunday TV and radio program "Hello, President." Chavez's latest denouncement of the U.S. came during the inauguration ceremony of a medical center in Flores de Catia, in the west of Caracas. "The plans to kill me are reactivated, and the Yankee forces are looking for active militaries and pilots to bomb Miraflores, or the Sunday program Hello, President," Chavez said in the speech, which was televised. According to Chavez, during the attempt his enemies will paint Venezuelan flags on their aircraft to disguise themselves as being part of a popular revolution. Chavez said the plans to murder him resulted from the despair of "the empire" since the popularity of his government has reached almost 80 percent. "I guarantee you they cannot defeat us. However, I am making this responsible call to the Venezuelan people to alert you, because the expectations of the pitiyankees (U.S. sympathizers) would be smashed," Chavez added. Chavez also said his political rivals planned to utilize the governors' and mayoral elections on Nov. 23 to attack his government, to make the people believe the Bolivarian revolution has failed. =========================== Stop NATO http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato To subscribe, send an e-mail to: stopnato-subscribe at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages http://lists.topica.com/lists/ANTINATO/read ============================== This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 15:13:38 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:13:38 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Venezuela kicks out U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Message-ID: <48CE97C6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Venezuela kicks out U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: "A-List" Subject: [A-List] BREAKING: Venezuela kicks out U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela From: "Tony B." Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:39:52 -0400 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BREAKING: VENEZUELA KICKS OUT US AMBASSADOR TO VENEZUELA: This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 15 15:16:40 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:16:40 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Chicago School's long descent Message-ID: <48CE987B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> The Chicago School's long descent By Michael Hudson As a graduate of the University of Chicago (1959) and also of its Laboratory School (1955-56), I think my experience there confirms the picture portrayed by Henry Liu in his wonderful essay last week on Milton Friedman and the "Money Matters Controversy". (See Friedman's misplaced monument, Sep 5.) My introduction to the University of Chicago (UC) was via the Manhattan Project around 1948. I lived in Chicago neighborhood of Kenwood, just north of Hyde Park. We rented the top floor of our house to a physicist, Shuki Hayashi, who worked on the project at Stagg Field, under whose bleachers the project's atomic pile still continued. To bring me to the Lab School, he would put me on his bike (a Raleigh DL-1 28-incher) and drive me up to the field. Only much later in my life was I left to wonder what has been more dangerous to humanity: the A-bomb or Chicago School monetarism? My father was a labor leader and we often had UC professors over to the house for discussions in the early 1950s. In contrast to today, the Chicago faculty from the 1930s through early 1960s included such men as Maynard Krueger (a vice presidential candidate on the Socialist Party ticket behind Norman Thomas), and Rexford Tugwell, a Roosevelt brain truster and former governor of Puerto Rico (and protege of Simon Patten). The post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky told me that it was Krueger who converted him to socialism. Minsky later became the godfather of the present post-Keynesian faculty providing an alternative to Chicago-style monetarism at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, where I now teach. Today, the Chicago School is known for its censorial intolerance. The first thing the "Chicago Boys" did in Chile after 1974, for example, was to close down every economics and social science department in the country, except at the Catholic University where they had a foothold with "the brick", ie Friedmanite doctrine. All this was foreshadowed at the Lab School in the 1950s. Its social science teacher Curtis Edgett posted a long banner up in his room saying "Give 'em all what the Rosenbergs got". I thought he meant communists, but on talking privately with him, some of my classmates and I discovered that he meant Jews. In class, he regularly called me a "commie". (One of our texts was Mein Kampf.) There was a real Stalinist in the class. We always argued, and he called me a fascist. It was in fact at the Lab School that I recruited a number of leaders of the Young Peoples' Socialist League (Shachtmanites). It was the only time in my life where I was the voice of reason in the middle. The Lab School at the time stopped at 10th grade, and students went directly to the college. However, I wasn't accepted in 1954 to the university on graduating from 10th grade. I was told that Mr Edgett had turned in the names of myself and a number of my friends to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI(as "commies" and sent copies to the college. There was a ruckus, and the Lab School added on an extra grade to help resolve matters, and I was accepted to UC the following year, and took the "comprehensives" to skip the first two years, so no time really was lost. But one of my schoolmates chose to enroll in Shimer, a secondary college that UC set up. About a decade ago, when he managed to get his FBI file, it turned out that Shimer's dean continued to file regular FBI reports on him, his friends and classmates. My own field changed from chemistry to history and German literature, and I never took an economics class there. I believe that professors Tugwell and Krueger were in the political science department, not the business school. Although I never went near the Business School in my four years at UC, although I subsequently took a PhD in economics elsewhere, I do remember that the business school students I met were about the only students who regularly wore suits and neckties on campus. They had the reputation for being somewhat dense. One encounter in particular is memorable. There was a party, and one of business school students was coming on to an attractive woman. The next day or so, I asked him how things went. "She was so dumb," the guy said. "She even gave me the wrong phone number. It turned out to be the Fire Department." "What was her name?" I asked. "Martha Washington, she said," he replied. To me, this was one of my first examples of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out): the unthinking acceptance of anything as a fact. After graduation, my only contact with the UC Business School occurred indirectly, after I became the balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan in the mid-1960s. My boss, John Deaver, was a protege of Milton Friedman, who had recommended him to David Rockefeller. On one fateful Friday, I was having lunch with John Exter of Citibank, who told me that earlier in the day his bank had sold sterling short when Harold Wilson had said there was no way he would devalue. Deaver had advised Chase that Wilson had staked his reputation on preserving sterling's exchange rate. It turned out that Chase had bought the sterling that Citibank had sold, in effect. In the aftermath, I was told that Rockefeller finally told Deaver over a golf meeting that he had a good future as an economics professor. Instead, Deaver went to work for GM, which quickly (in about three months, I think) fired him and put his assistant in charge; then, Deaver went to Philips Endhoven, where his tenure also was short. Chase decided to merge the Economic Research department (where I worked) into "Public Relations and Publications" under John Wilson. As it adopted Chicago School economics, it was used only for rhetoric, not for actual internal bank decisions. The same thing happened at Citibank. Wall Street came to use Chicago monetarism only as lobbying rhetoric, not as real analysis. One friend of mine who became a sociology instructor at Chicago told me that he began one class trying to explain whether there was such a thing as an ideology of the vested interests might be. "That's what we're here to learn," a student replied. The upshot may help promote public relations and turn economic analysis into euphemism. But it is not much help in understanding how the real world works. Milton Friedman has said famously - perhaps infamously - that "There is no such thing as a free lunch." But the economy today is all about how to get a free lunch. That is what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all about, and what government bailouts of the financial sector tend to be about. The most important reason why it is against business' true long-term interest to support a Friedman Center that supports economic euphemism is that it degrades economic thought into ideological rhetoric, not real analysis. So I was glad to sign the petition that Professor Lincoln is circulating deploring the Friedman Center. And glad to read Henry Liu's article explaining how destructive a role it may play. Michael Hudson is professor of economics at University of Missouri - Kansas City. His professional work has largely been involved in applying flow-of-funds and balance-of-payments statistics to forecast interest rates, capital and real estate markets. Academically, his focus has been on financial history and a history of debt from Sumerian times. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends. His numerous publications include Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (ed with Marc Van De Mieroop), CDL Press, Baltimore, 2001. Friedman's misplaced monument (Sep 5,'08) 1. Seven years on, three big 9/11 lies 2. Secrets of the Taliban's success 3. US's 'good' war hits Pakistan hard 4. A comedy of areas 5. India throws open a $100bn nuclear bazaar 6. Civilians caught in Sri Lanka's 'clean war' 7. US warned over raids in Pakistan 8. Paulson placates China, Russia for now (24 hours to 11:59pm ET, Sep 10, 2008) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Tue Sep 16 16:59:49 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:59:49 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Chicago School's long descent Message-ID: Hudson is a babbler. Why not just say it in about 20 words? The Greenspan Bubble is finally coming undone and no one really knows what to do about it. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Tue Sep 16 17:12:48 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:12:48 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic Message-ID: That seems like such a weak way to attack the position--personal inconsistency. Is it really even a current debate? In the analytic tradition, after Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper--on what is a science and how it works--is thoroughly demolished. In the non-philosophical 'mainstream', Marxism is usually attacked as a form of political philosophy leading to totalitarian states that are in conflict with 'human nature' and the 'progress of freedom'. Most people have never followed the 'philosophy of science' critiques anyway. The wider discussion worth having would be about experimental methods, quantification and knowledge claims since the social sciences have pursued the former two and yet rely mostly on ideologically predisposed argument and academic status and little else to make knowledge claims, none of which have any hope of generalizing. CJ From farmelantj at juno.com Tue Sep 16 18:32:10 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:32:10 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic Message-ID: <20080916.203210.664.2.farmelantj@juno.com> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:12:48 +0900 CeJ writes: > That seems like such a weak way to attack the position--personal > inconsistency. > > Is it really even a current debate? In the analytic tradition, > after > Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper--on what is a science and how it > works--is thoroughly demolished. Some of the Analytical Marxists were interested in this issue. Richard Miller addressed it in his book, *Analyzing Marx*, Some of the other Analytical Marxists did too, like Daniel Little in his *The Scientific Marx* and William Shaw in in his *Marx's Theory of History*. Both Little and Shaw used Lakatos to answer Popper, while Miller drew upon Kuhn and Feyerabend. Remember that classical Marxism always insisted that it was a science. Marx, as we might recall, called his brand of socialism, scientific socialism. Karl Popper, among other things, attempted to explode what he saw as the scientific pretentions of Marxism. Popper's attitude is summarized here: http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiabil ity.html > > In the non-philosophical 'mainstream', Marxism is usually attacked > as > a form of political philosophy leading to totalitarian states that > are > in conflict with 'human nature' and the 'progress of freedom'. Popper of course argued those things too, but he believed that it was Marxism's ability at convincing people that it was a genuine science that helped persuade people to go along with it. > Most > people have never followed the 'philosophy of science' critiques > anyway. > > The wider discussion worth having would be about experimental > methods, > quantification and knowledge claims since the social sciences have > pursued the former two and yet rely mostly on ideologically > predisposed argument and academic status and little else to make > knowledge claims, none of which have any hope of generalizing. > > CJ > ____________________________________________________________ Give back to your community. Click here to start a new career as a Police officer. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3mAL8MjxxY5xwKBHqUDoxgpiALmiIkSwcipkJ7CxAMY0djGp/ From jannuzi at gmail.com Tue Sep 16 20:06:01 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:06:01 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>Remember that classical Marxism always insisted that it was a science.<< So did Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. So did a lot of things trying to get people to follow them. So did a lot of people or fields trying to get people to believe that they were espousing a TRUTH. Most likely 'classical Marxism' included a lot of different opinions about what a science is and how Marxism was a science. I think the postmodern reality of science is something like: if a specified field's academics call their research 'science' and they successfully politic to get funding to produce lots of 'results' in scholarly, peer-reviewed articles, then it's a science. Special attention given to experiments and analysis and interpretation of results. Science is whatever gets money to be science. Until this or that particular ideological andor discoursal bubble are over and done with, and the academic horde move onto some other hobby horse to ride. And then there is the emergence of political economy (i.e., history + economics + political science) as academic fields with pretense to scientific status, in a rationalist sense and even in an empiricist sense, if not in a strictly experimental sense. The problems with Popper's high brow establishment critique of Marxism include: 1. Popper is subsequently shown to be doubtful about what sorts itself out to be science by other philosophers of science. 2. Even if you accept Popper's criteria, you can then apply it to show that establishment social sciences don't actually attain to science status either. Little wonder then that people who like to claim what they do is SCIENCE throw around the charge of PSEUDO-SCIENCE against rival approaches or fields that might compete with them for finite resources. And little wonder they don't like to apply the same standards (however flawed or incomplete or misleading they were in the first place) to their own academic pursuits. I still think one key issue that would be fruitful to examine more closely is how knowledge claims emerge from experimental methods and research. In the case of social sciences and education, you very quickly see how fraught with absurdities these enterprises are. For example, the use of parametric statistics on 'intangible objects' (like quantification of 'motivation') and unstable, non-normed populations. Or confusion of cause-effect (or simply correlation of effect 1 with effect 2). Over-interpretation of epiphenomena. Then take a look at how most such knowledge claims never attain practical knowledge status other than the ways in which they dominate the discourse of grad. schools where degrees are got and careers are made. This then leads to issues like: is all knowledge that we use to operate in the world derived from controlled experiments written up and published in scholarly journals? I think if that were the case, the world would be mostly all that is NOT the case. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Tue Sep 16 20:18:43 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:18:43 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>Popper of course argued those things too, but he believed that it was Marxism's ability at convincing people that it was a genuine science that helped persuade people to go along with it.<< Perhaps this helps explain his somewhat negative relationship with the contemporaneous logical positivists? At any rate, my point was this is how Popper is remembered in 'popular memory', if he is remembered at all. A sort of forerunning foot soldier (along with Hayek and Rand) for reigning Miltonfriedmanism. Camus's anti-Hegelian and anti-Marxist essay, The Rebel, at least still stands as great literature. CJ From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Sep 17 04:36:56 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:36:56 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: <20080913.122914.1464.1.farmelantj@juno.com> References: <20080913.122914.1464.1.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: Thanks for the reference, which fits into my current investigation of the Positivist Dispute. I need a reference to Richard W. Miller's critique of Popper. At 12:29 PM 9/13/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: >Louis Proyect posted the following announcement >on his Marxmail list concerning the latest issue >of the journal Cultural Logic. I found >the article by Hristos Verikukis >"Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism ," >to be quite interesting. Verikukis basically convicts >Popper of having been inconsistent in the way >he defined and applied his concept of falsifiability >as a criterion for demarcating science from >non-science. Popper, according to >Verikukis, was much stricter about >defining falsifiability when applying >to Marxism (which Popper claimed >was not falsifiable and hence, not science) >than he was when applying to his >own situationalist brand of social >science, where he embraced what >he called the Principle of Rationality, >which he variously described as being >not falsifiable, or was falsified but >still in some sense true. Anyway, >I think that Verikukis's article >dovetails with the criticisms that >other writers like Cornell philosopher >Richard W. Miller have made of >Popper's critique of Marxism. > >http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Verikukis.pdf >------------------------------- >http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/2007.html >Tenth-Anniversary Issue > >(The current issue files are in pdf format. Click below to download >the latest version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader.) > >Articles >(Names listed alphbetically) > >Roland Boer >"Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg" > >Philip Bounds >"George Orwell and the Dialogue with English Marxism" > >Paula Cerni >"The Age of Consumer Capitalism" > >Stephen C. Ferguson II >"Social Contract as Bourgeois Ideology" > >Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov >"Nicolai Bukharin's First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka" > >Catherine Gouge >"'Amibivalent Technologies' of American Citizenship" > >Bruno Gulli >"Early Plenitude: An Essay on Sovereignty and Labor" > >Katerina Kolozova >"The Project of Non-Marxism: >Arguing for 'Monstrously' Radical Concepts" > >John Maerhofer >"Aim? C?asare and the Crisis of Aesthetic and Political Vangardism " > >Michael Mikulak >"Cross-pollinating Marxism and Deep Ecology: >Towards a Post-humanist Eco-humanism" > >Terence Patrick Murphy >"From Alignment to Commitment: >The Early Work of James Kelman" > >Ronald Paul >""To turn the whole world upside-down': >Women and Revolution in The Non-Stop Connolly Show " > >Philip Tonner >"Freud, Bentham: Panopticism and the Super-Ego" > >Hristos Verikukis >"Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism " > >Reviews > >Ivan Ca?adas >Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe > >David Hursh >Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine >and >Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of >Empire > >Howard Pflanzer >Robert Roth, Health Proxy > >Louis Proyect >Amazing Grace > >Charlie Samuya Veric, Tamara Powell, and John Streamas >E. San Juan, Jr., Balikbayang Mahal > > >Poetry > >Christopher Barnes >Poems > > >Dave Bruzina >"Boom" and "The Committee Dissolves" > > >Iftekhar Sayeed >Poems > > >George Snedeker >"The History Lesson" and Other Poems > > >Contributors From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Sep 17 05:16:13 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:16:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It's not a current debate, but the effects of Popper's position persist. Furthermore, there are a number of Popperians. I know a bunch of them here in Washington and via the Internet. They are either social democrats, liberals, or libertarians. My conclusion from dealing with them is that, like many other liberals, they dwell in an ideological world of make-believe. For all of their advocacy of criticism, they remain remarkably uncritical about the central issues. And for this reason, the mentality as well as the methodology involved, remain a current concern. Furthermore, Popperian epistemology replicates the problem of epistemology in general: its purely formalist approach renders it practically useless. Adorno, not always clearly, addresses this problem in his contributions to the Positivist Dispute (Positivismusstreit). There is some secondary literature in English on the Positivismusstreit, but it seems to have largely disappeared down the memory hole. Yet it remains pertinent to the ideologies of science today. Furthermore, there is the current deliberation on analytical and continental philosophy in the Anglo-American world. 'Continental philosophy' is an artificial construct designed to exclude Marxism while now selectively allowing certain figures into the realm of philosophical consideration. But the Positivismusstreit already embodied this confrontation of two traditions when it was initiated 47 years ago! Popper and the Frankfurt School embodied the most illustrious currents of both camps. Analysis of what was at stake in that debate is far more interesting to me than all the BS wasted on coming to terms with 'continental philosophy' from the standpoint of the analytic perspective, and conversely, attempts of the latter to colonize the former. At 07:12 PM 9/16/2008, CeJ wrote: >That seems like such a weak way to attack the position--personal >inconsistency. > >Is it really even a current debate? In the analytic tradition, after >Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper--on what is a science and how it >works--is thoroughly demolished. > >In the non-philosophical 'mainstream', Marxism is usually attacked as >a form of political philosophy leading to totalitarian states that are >in conflict with 'human nature' and the 'progress of freedom'. Most >people have never followed the 'philosophy of science' critiques >anyway. > >The wider discussion worth having would be about experimental methods, >quantification and knowledge claims since the social sciences have >pursued the former two and yet rely mostly on ideologically >predisposed argument and academic status and little else to make >knowledge claims, none of which have any hope of generalizing. > >CJ > >_______________________________________________ >Marxism-Thaxis mailing list >Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu >To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Sep 17 04:12:02 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:12:02 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The last and third last paragraphs are worth following up on; the rest is kinda silly. But I will follow up on the various references. As it happens, I've been cross-posting on Popper and Adorno on 3-4 different listservs. It might be overdoing it to add this one. Eventually I should convert my running commentary into a web page. But in any case, here are some references on my web site. I'm in the process of reading: Adorno, Theodor W.; et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976. On my web site see: Title pages, contents, index of sources http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/contents.html and: Adorno, Theodor W. "On the Logic of the Social Sciences," pp. 105-122. http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/adorno-logic.html and I've scanned three fourths of Adorno's introduction (pages 1-49 of 67): http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/adorno-intro1.html Some of the secondary literature on the Positivismusstreit is included in my bibliography: Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, Frankfurt School, Marxism, McCarthyism & American Philosophy: Selected Bibliography . . . mostly under the section "Popper & the Frankfurt School". See also: Alker, Hayward R.. Jr. "Logic, Dialectics, Politics: Some Recent Controversies," in Dialectical Logics for the Political Sciences; guest editor, Hayward R. Alker, Jr. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), pp. 65-94. (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities; v. 7) http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/poznan5.html I'm now reading: Frisby, David. "The Popper-Adorno Controversy: the Methodological Dispute in German Sociology," Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 2, June 1972, 105-119. I need to look up: Holub, Robert C. JURGEN HABERMAS: CRITIC IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE. New York: Routledge, 1991. At 10:06 PM 9/16/2008, CeJ wrote: > >>Remember that classical Marxism always insisted >that it was a science.<< > >So did Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science. So did a lot of things >trying to get people to follow them. So did a lot of people or fields >trying to get people to believe that they were espousing a TRUTH. > >Most likely 'classical Marxism' included a lot of different opinions >about what a science is and how Marxism was a science. > >I think the postmodern reality of science is something like: if a >specified field's academics call their research 'science' and they >successfully politic to get funding to produce lots of 'results' in >scholarly, peer-reviewed articles, then it's a science. Special >attention given to experiments and analysis and interpretation of >results. > >Science is whatever gets money to be science. Until this or that >particular ideological andor discoursal bubble are over and done with, >and the academic horde move onto some other hobby horse to ride. > >And then there is the emergence of political economy (i.e., history + >economics + political science) as academic fields with pretense to >scientific status, in a rationalist sense and even in an empiricist >sense, if not in a strictly experimental sense. > >The problems with Popper's high brow establishment critique of Marxism >include: 1. Popper is subsequently shown to be doubtful about what >sorts itself out to be science by other philosophers of science. 2. >Even if you accept Popper's criteria, you can then apply it to show >that establishment social sciences don't actually attain to science >status either. > >Little wonder then that people who like to claim what they do is >SCIENCE throw around the charge of PSEUDO-SCIENCE against rival >approaches or fields that might compete with them for finite >resources. And little wonder they don't like to apply the same >standards (however flawed or incomplete or misleading they were in the >first place) to their own academic pursuits. > >***I still think one key issue that would be fruitful to examine more >closely is how knowledge claims emerge from experimental methods and >research. In the case of social sciences and education, you very >quickly see how fraught with absurdities these enterprises are. For >example, the use of parametric statistics on 'intangible objects' >(like quantification of 'motivation') and unstable, non-normed >populations. Or confusion of cause-effect (or simply correlation of >effect 1 with effect 2). Over-interpretation of epiphenomena. > >Then take a look at how most such knowledge claims never attain >practical knowledge status other than the ways in which they dominate >the discourse of grad. schools where degrees are got and careers are >made. > >*** This then leads to issues like: is all knowledge that we use to >operate in the world derived from controlled experiments written up >and published in scholarly journals? I think if that were the case, >the world would be mostly all that is NOT the case. > >CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 17 07:15:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:15:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Michigan voters Message-ID: <48D0CAC9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Dear Charles -- Here in Michigan, we know that elections can be decided by a mere handful of votes. That's why we want to make sure that every last eligible voter in the state is able to make their voice heard this November. And as supporters of this movement for change, it's up to us to not only make our own voices heard, but to see to it that as many people as possible have a say in the political process. Michigan has special rules about who can vote absentee, and it's crucial that we get the word out to those who are eligible. In Michigan, you can vote absentee if you are: * Age 60 years old or older * Unable to vote without assistance at the polls * Expecting to be out of town on Election Day * Unable to attend the polls due to religious reasons To find out more information, download the absentee vote request form, or encourage others who are eligible to vote absentee, please visit Michigan's Absentee Vote Center: http://mi.barackobama.com/MIabsentee Thanks, Amy Amy Chapman Michigan State Director Obama for America P.S. -- If you are a student, be aware of Michigan's special rules for first-time voters who live away from home. To find out more, visit our registration rules page: This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Sep 17 06:30:27 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:30:27 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This post makes no sense to me. Most of the original logical positivists were leftists, but I'm not convinced that this would explain Popper's critique of them. Popper paradoxically rebels against empiricism and scientism while himself perpetuating their tradition. Popper may no longer be in vogue in philosophy of science but I doubt he is remembered now only for his anti-Marxist diatribes, though I can think of someone who places his significance in The Open Society and Its Enemies. At 10:18 PM 9/16/2008, CeJ wrote: > >>Popper of course argued those things too, but he believed >that it was Marxism's ability at convincing people that it >was a genuine science that helped persuade people to >go along with it.<< > >Perhaps this helps explain his somewhat negative relationship with the >contemporaneous logical positivists? > >At any rate, my point was this is how Popper is remembered in 'popular >memory', if he is remembered at all. A sort of forerunning foot >soldier (along with Hayek and Rand) for reigning Miltonfriedmanism. > >Camus's anti-Hegelian and anti-Marxist essay, The Rebel, at least >still stands as great literature. > >CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 17 07:21:20 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:21:20 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Who you callin' a baby's Mama ? Message-ID: <48D0CC16.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Valeria sent me this . Charles -------------- Forwarded Message: -------------- From: "James "TANK" Nelson" To: xyzass1313 at bellsouth.net (James E Nelson) Subject: FW: Palin's Daughter's Black Baby Daddy? Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:12:15 +0000 ? -- "Happiness keeps You Sweet, Trials keep You Strong, Sorrows keep You Human, Failures keeps You Humble, Success keeps You Glowing, but Only God keeps You Going!" This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 17 07:27:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:27:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Palin Message-ID: <48D0CD71.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Alaska Women Reject Palin? Rally is HUGE! 14 09 2008 I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena?ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage. After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect. The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It?s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally ?a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots?, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages. So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ?Drill Baby Drill? crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I?d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it?s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren?t sent by Eddie Burke, we?ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing ?socialist baby-killing maggot? haters. It?s a good thing I wasn?t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody?s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs. Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn?t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn?t happen here. Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn?t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high. So, if you?ve been doing the math? Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin?s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say. http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 17 08:00:55 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:00:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: <20080913.122914.1464.1.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: <48D0D55C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> Ralph Dumain 09/17/2008 6:36 AM >>> Thanks for the reference, which fits into my current investigation of the Positivist Dispute. I need a reference to Richard W. Miller's critique of Popper. At 12:29 PM 9/13/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: >Louis Proyect posted the following announcement >on his Marxmail list concerning the latest issue >of the journal Cultural Logic. I found >the article by Hristos Verikukis >"Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism ," ^^^^ CB: However, "double standard" is an _ad hominem_ argument at the first level in the sense that even if Popper's situationalist social science is not science, Marxism might also not be a science for the reason that Popper says. The question is does Popper's falsibiability criterion derive from his situationalist social science Also, there is or are falsibiability statements for Marxism meeting Popper's falsibiability criterion. ^^^^ >to be quite interesting. Verikukis basically convicts >Popper of having been inconsistent in the way >he defined and applied his concept of falsifiability >as a criterion for demarcating science from >non-science. Popper, according to >Verikukis, was much stricter about >defining falsifiability when applying >to Marxism (which Popper claimed >was not falsifiable and hence, not science) >than he was when applying to his >own situationalist brand of social >science, where he embraced what >he called the Principle of Rationality, >which he variously described as being >not falsifiable, or was falsified but >still in some sense true. Anyway, >I think that Verikukis's article >dovetails with the criticisms that >other writers like Cornell philosopher >Richard W. Miller have made of >Popper's critique of Marxism. > >http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Verikukis.pdf >------------------------------- >http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/2007.html >Tenth-Anniversary Issue > >(The current issue files are in pdf format. Click below to download >the latest version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader.) > >Articles >(Names listed alphbetically) > >Roland Boer >"Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg" > >Philip Bounds >"George Orwell and the Dialogue with English Marxism" > >Paula Cerni >"The Age of Consumer Capitalism" > >Stephen C. Ferguson II >"Social Contract as Bourgeois Ideology" > >Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov >"Nicolai Bukharin's First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka" > >Catherine Gouge >"'Amibivalent Technologies' of American Citizenship" > >Bruno Gulli >"Early Plenitude: An Essay on Sovereignty and Labor" > >Katerina Kolozova >"The Project of Non-Marxism: >Arguing for 'Monstrously' Radical Concepts" > >John Maerhofer >"Aim? C?asare and the Crisis of Aesthetic and Political Vangardism " > >Michael Mikulak >"Cross-pollinating Marxism and Deep Ecology: >Towards a Post-humanist Eco-humanism" > >Terence Patrick Murphy >"From Alignment to Commitment: >The Early Work of James Kelman" > >Ronald Paul >""To turn the whole world upside-down': >Women and Revolution in The Non-Stop Connolly Show " > >Philip Tonner >"Freud, Bentham: Panopticism and the Super-Ego" > >Hristos Verikukis >"Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism " > >Reviews > >Ivan Ca?adas >Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe > >David Hursh >Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine >and >Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of >Empire > >Howard Pflanzer >Robert Roth, Health Proxy > >Louis Proyect >Amazing Grace > >Charlie Samuya Veric, Tamara Powell, and John Streamas >E. San Juan, Jr., Balikbayang Mahal > > >Poetry > >Christopher Barnes >Poems > > >Dave Bruzina >"Boom" and "The Committee Dissolves" > > >Iftekhar Sayeed >Poems > > >George Snedeker >"The History Lesson" and Other Poems > > >Contributors _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 17 14:09:47 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:09:47 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Who you callin' a baby's Mama ?: 4 pregnant teenagers crucified in Sweden References: <8bcf09496d7724f45010f942001a67cb@aidoh.dk> Message-ID: <48D12BD1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Forwarded: Unsubscription, see bottom To the info list and the press *At our workshop we?re now coming back to normalcy after our Color Orange Campaign. *Today we have crucified 4 teenagers in copper, mounted them on trolleys and sent them to Sweden together with 10 activists. They will join a crusade at the European Social Forum (ESF) in Malm? from 17 to 21 September where 20,000 grassroots are expected. We have pressed 12,000 posters with the teenagers to be handed out to the activists. *The sculptures will highlight the crusade of USA and the Pope against contraception and sexual education. See the press release below and at: www.aidoh.dk/esf2008 Here you?ll also find a series of photos of the preparations at our workshop, to be used free of charge. *You?ll find a global presentation of the art happening ?In the Name of God? at: www.aidoh.dk/InTheNameOfGod Best autumn greetings Jens Galschiot ********** Press release 17 September 2008 ***** 4 Pregnant Teenagers Crucified at the ESF ***** At the European Social forum in Malm?, Sweden 4 teenagers will be crucified on 4 metre high crosses of copper. The 4 sculptures created by Danish Jens Galschiot. They will join a crusade at the ESF in Malm? from 16 to 21 September, where up to 20,000 grassroots rally to discuss how to get a clout on the global development. * The sculptures are being made ready (crucified and mounted on trolleys) at Galschiot?s workshop in Odense, Denmark. Together with 12,000 posters they will be carried to Sweden to highlight the crusade against contraception and sexual education led by the USA and the Vatican. * The art happening is titled In the Name of God. The project is an artistic comment to the extreme Bible fundamentalists - with President Bush and the Pope in the lead - who preach sexual abstinence until marriage as the only method to avoid HIV contamination and unwanted pregnancy. * They will bomb back sexual education and ban information on contraception that they see as an invitation to voluptuousness. In the same token the Roman Catholic church asserts that contraption is impermissible according to the biblical doctrines, so they advocate the absurd allegation that only ?unprotected sex? is admissible. The consequences may be disastrous for the proliferation of AIDS an STD?s and so the result will be increased suffering, Jens Galschiot says and continues: The sculpture is not a comment on the issue of abortion or stem cells, but should be seen as an artistic advocacy for the right to contraception and unprejudiced sexual education. * The sculpture is not a global accusation against Christianity. On the contrary, I admire those Christians who take the Gospel?s claim of charity seriously - and act accordingly. I think that progressive Christians should dissociate themselves from the abuse of ?their? God for the sake of a reactionary contraception policy. * Also the women?s movement have plenty of reasons to keep a watchful eye on this new trend towards puritanism and sex-phobia that will seize any opportunity to roll back the women?s struggle to the Victorian Era, the artist concludes. * The pregnant teenagers have travelled a lot. One has been displayed in front of the Cathedral of Copenhagen in co-operation with the Lutheran dean. - Two joined huge demonstrations in the streets of Nairobi and were subsequently crucified on a stadium in front of 60,000 activists. - one has been banned at the ?Voice against Poverty? rally in London - Another has spent a year supporting Nicaraguan women?s campaign against the country?s extremely restrictive legislation on abortion - every year 200 women loose their lives due to the ban of therapeutical abortion. - In all places where they have been displayed, the pregnant teenagers have fanned a heated debate. The artist is envisaging exhibitions of the sculptures in USA, Poland, the EU Parliament and the Vatican. * The pregnant teenager symbolizes innocence. The child that has been led astray due to ignorance, impulsiveness or maybe is the victim of rape is mercilessly exposed to the ultimate punishment. The association to Jesus as the innocent sacrificial lamb is apparent. *************** More information: Information, free photos of the Teenagers in Malm?: www.aidoh.dk/esf2008 General information about the project: www.aidoh.dk/InTheNameOfGod Contact to the Danish activists in Malm?: Pia +45 2762 1991, Mikkel +45 2984 8242 European Social Forum 2008: www.esf2008.org Artist: Jens Galschiot, Banevaenget 22, DK-5270 Odense N, Denmark Tel.: +45 6618 4058, mobile: +45 4044 7058, e-mail: aidoh at aidoh.dk Photos: www.polfoto.dk This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From farmelantj at juno.com Wed Sep 17 20:16:45 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:16:45 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic Message-ID: <20080917.221652.5580.0.farmelantj@juno.com> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:36:56 -0400 Ralph Dumain writes: > Thanks for the reference, which fits into my > current investigation of the Positivist Dispute. > > I need a reference to Richard W. Miller's critique of Popper. Miller covers Popper and positivism in *Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History ( Princeton University Press, 1984). See pp. 236-240, where Miller advances an alternative account of the falsification of scientific theories. Also, pp. 292-301 where he discusses confirmation and attempts to provide an alternative account to the one provided by both the positivists and Popper. Also see pp 304-313 for his discussion of positivists and politics. Jim F. > > At 12:29 PM 9/13/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: > > >Louis Proyect posted the following announcement > >on his Marxmail list concerning the latest issue > >of the journal Cultural Logic. I found > >the article by Hristos Verikukis > >"Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism > ," > >to be quite interesting. Verikukis basically convicts > >Popper of having been inconsistent in the way > >he defined and applied his concept of falsifiability > >as a criterion for demarcating science from > >non-science. Popper, according to > >Verikukis, was much stricter about > >defining falsifiability when applying > >to Marxism (which Popper claimed > >was not falsifiable and hence, not science) > >than he was when applying to his > >own situationalist brand of social > >science, where he embraced what > >he called the Principle of Rationality, > >which he variously described as being > >not falsifiable, or was falsified but > >still in some sense true. Anyway, > >I think that Verikukis's article > >dovetails with the criticisms that > >other writers like Cornell philosopher > >Richard W. Miller have made of > >Popper's critique of Marxism. > > > >http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Verikukis.pdf > >------------------------------- > >http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/2007.html > >Tenth-Anniversary Issue > > > >(The current issue files are in pdf format. Click below to > download > >the latest version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader.) > > > >Articles > >(Names listed alphbetically) > > > >Roland Boer > >"Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg" > > > >Philip Bounds > >"George Orwell and the Dialogue with English Marxism" > > > >Paula Cerni > >"The Age of Consumer Capitalism" > > > >Stephen C. Ferguson II > >"Social Contract as Bourgeois Ideology" > > > >Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov > >"Nicolai Bukharin's First Statement of Confession in the Lubianka" > > > >Catherine Gouge > >"'Amibivalent Technologies' of American Citizenship" > > > >Bruno Gulli > >"Early Plenitude: An Essay on Sovereignty and Labor" > > > >Katerina Kolozova > >"The Project of Non-Marxism: > >Arguing for 'Monstrously' Radical Concepts" > > > >John Maerhofer > >"Aim? C?asare and the Crisis of Aesthetic and Political Vangardism > " > > > >Michael Mikulak > >"Cross-pollinating Marxism and Deep Ecology: > >Towards a Post-humanist Eco-humanism" > > > >Terence Patrick Murphy > >"From Alignment to Commitment: > >The Early Work of James Kelman" > > > >Ronald Paul > >""To turn the whole world upside-down': > >Women and Revolution in The Non-Stop Connolly Show " > > > >Philip Tonner > >"Freud, Bentham: Panopticism and the Super-Ego" > > > >Hristos Verikukis > >"Popper's Double Standard of Scientificity in Criticizing Marxism > " > > > >Reviews > > > >Ivan Ca?adas > >Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe > > > >David Hursh > >Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine > >and > >Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo, Pedagogy and Praxis in the > Age of > >Empire > > > >Howard Pflanzer > >Robert Roth, Health Proxy > > > >Louis Proyect > >Amazing Grace > > > >Charlie Samuya Veric, Tamara Powell, and John Streamas > >E. San Juan, Jr., Balikbayang Mahal > > > > > >Poetry > > > >Christopher Barnes > >Poems > > > > > >Dave Bruzina > >"Boom" and "The Committee Dissolves" > > > > > >Iftekhar Sayeed > >Poems > > > > > >George Snedeker > >"The History Lesson" and Other Poems > > > > > >Contributors > > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > > ____________________________________________________________ Meditate on the best. Find great yoga mats for less by clicking now! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3n58mpyTk08WEh4Vy6E0XusjzcttMsSIzqV418Hb6A0lyRpP/ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 18 07:43:00 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:43:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?another__attempted_coup_against_Ch?= =?utf-8?b?w6F2ZXo6?= Message-ID: <48D222A4.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> An important speech by journalist and former vice president of Venezuela Jos? Vicente Rangel, exposing the conspiracy to stage another coup against Ch?vez: http://www.radiomundial.com.ve/yvke/noticia.php?11826 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 18 11:34:21 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:34:21 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] 1908 Message-ID: <48D258DD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Claude L?vi-Strauss (pronounced [klod levi st?os]; born November 28, 1908) is a French anthropologist. Levi-Strauss will be one hundred years old this year. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 18 12:26:49 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:26:49 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Stan Goff gets religion Message-ID: <48D26529.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Good thing about Stan Goff is he is likely to be in the John Brown/Frederick Douglass/Sojourner Truth/Malcolm X tradition of religious practice. Charles This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 18 12:34:37 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:34:37 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber Message-ID: <48D266FD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Louis Proyect Walter Lippmann wrote: > Cuba is the subject on which I choose to focus my political > work. It's at the heart of my interests, though hardly the > only one. Your posts on Cuba would have more credibility if you didn't appear to be such a slavish follower of every public utterance. When Fidel Castro (and Hugo Chavez) spoke nonsense about 9/11, you parroted their analysis without ever giving any indication that you had thought seriously about the whole question. ^^^ CB: Trouble with this is that its question begging: You haven't demonstrated that your thinking on 9/11 is better than that of Fidel Castro and Chavez. Given the historical record on most issues, I'll take Castro and Chavez's thinking first. Absolute anti-conspiracism is not superior thinking. It is refusal to think. "Think for yourself" is a Kantian , liberal mantra. The criticism "so and so doesn't think for himself" is a liberal taunt , not an indication of better thinking. Two heads are better than one. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 18 13:09:00 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:09:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre and Althusser Message-ID: <48D26F0C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Sartre, Althusser and the ontology of everyday lifeJean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser have at- ... Both Sartre and Althusser attempt to inte- ... ogies of Sartre and Althusser is that Sartre for- ... www.springerlink.com/index/M73V0777QJ2704GK.pdf - Similar pages by G Snedeker - 1984 - Related articles - All 2 versions Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to AlthusserExistential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser Book by Mark Poster; 1975. Read Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Thu Sep 18 16:33:43 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:33:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber In-Reply-To: <48D266FD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <306906.61568.qm@web50404.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Call me a Kantian liberal then. I acknowledge the "linguistic division of labor," as Hilary Putnam (then in PL) called the need to defer to real expertise that any given person necessarily lacks. If I want to learn about medicine, I consult a doctor, if something is wrong with my car, I take it to a mechanic, when my computer doesn't work, I call tech support (or my wife), when I have to do my taxes, I take it my accountant. I hope that when you have a legal problem you refer it to a lawyer. Etc. I also agree with Charles that two heads are better than one in the sense that often, if there is mutual consultation even amoing the relatively ignorant, but especially among people with different relevant expertise, or both, we often get better results than trying to think up stuff all by ourselves alone, maybe unless we are Kant. Knowledge is a social process. That is wht we have departmentys and acvademies of science, seminars and conferences, bull sessions and get togethers. And, Al Gore bless it :->, the internet. (I just showed a mystified student how to find the local court rules in three steps with google, knowning nothing more than the name of the court.) BUT none of this means that any two heads are better than one. Heydsrich and Himmler together are worse, unless what youi want is to figure out how to kill millions. But that's a bad example, they were real experts in something bad. Two ignorant heads are nothing to defer to. If, for example, you took me, a civil litigator and criminal defense attorney and law prof who teaches mostly procedure, and my hall neighbor, an intellectual property scholar, and put to us a question about the collapse ofg Mayan civilization, you'd be lucky to get half-baked speculations misremembered from Jared Diamond, who may or may not know anything himself, even though he sounds pretty good. I have absolutely to reason to think that whatever real expertise and knowledge in government that Castro and Chavez have leaves me any reason whatsoever to think they they, individually or collectively, have anything illuminating to say about 9/11. Maybe, conceivably, they have intelligence sources that give them information, and with a truckload of salt I might listen to a Cuban or Venezualian intelligence analyst who had special knowledge of the shadow world of terrorism, and I include in that many US government activities. But I'd want to see the cards on the table. I wouldn't take their word for it without support. given that they might have a special interest in belief in certain propositions that might or might not be true. Frankly, I don't take my _doctor's_ word for what's wrong with me without some explanation or at least explanation of why I couldn't have an explanation. I recall in grad school, after my dad had had a heart attack, having an EKG, I went for the results and the Dr leafed through the paper, a bunch of squiggles, and said, Your heart is fine. I asked, how could you tell? He picked up a fat treatise from his desk and said, For me to explain in a meaningful way, you'd have to understand THIS. OK, I'll buy that, I said. Anyway, I guess it depends on which two heads are better for what and what's in those heads as wella s what goes on between them, whether they are better than one. --- On Thu, 9/18/08, Charles Brown wrote: > From: Charles Brown > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Thursday, September 18, 2008, 1:34 PM > Louis Proyect > > Walter Lippmann wrote: > > Cuba is the subject on which I choose to focus my > political > > work. It's at the heart of my interests, though > hardly the > > only one. > > Your posts on Cuba would have more credibility if you > didn't appear to > > be such a slavish follower of every public utterance. When > Fidel Castro > > (and Hugo Chavez) spoke nonsense about 9/11, you parroted > their > analysis > without ever giving any indication that you had thought > seriously about > > the whole question. > > ^^^ > CB: Trouble with this is that its question begging: You > haven't > demonstrated that your thinking on 9/11 is better than that > of Fidel > Castro and Chavez. Given the historical record on most > issues, I'll take > Castro and Chavez's thinking first. Absolute > anti-conspiracism is not > superior thinking. It is refusal to think. > > "Think for yourself" is a Kantian , liberal > mantra. The criticism "so > and so doesn't think for himself" is a liberal > taunt , not an indication > of better thinking. > > Two heads are better than one. > > > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl > plc. www.surfcontrol.com > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 19 11:18:34 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:18:34 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism Message-ID: <48D3A6B1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ September 18, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/business/worldbusiness/18rescue.html?ref=b usiness PARIS ? Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, free-market capitalism? In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to A.I.G., the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, it has also likely undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad. ?I fear the government has passed the point of no return,? said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. ?We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.? While they acknowledge the shock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout package for A.I.G. on top of earlier government support for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac has stunned even European policy makers accustomed to government intervention in the economy. ?For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful opportunity to invoke the American example,? said Mario Monti, the former antitrust chief at the European Commission. ?They will say that even the standard-bearer of the market economy, the United States negates its fundamental principles in its behavior.? Mr. Monti noted that past financial crises in Asia, Russia, and Mexico brought government to the fore, ?but this is the first time it?s in the heart of capitalism, which is enormously more damaging in terms of the credibility of the market economy.? In France, where the government has long supported the creation of national champions and worked actively to protect select companies from the threat of foreign takeover, politicians were quick to point out the paradox of what is essentially the nationalization of the largest American insurance company. ?Today the actions of American policy makers illustrate the need for economic patriotism,? said Bernard Carayon, a lawmaker of President Nicolas Sarkozy?s center-right governing party, UMP. ?I congratulate them.? For the ?evangelists of the market this is a painful lesson,? he added. We?re entering ?an era where we have much more regulation and where the public and the private sector will mix much more.? In Asia, the Washington-led bailouts have stirred bitter memories of the very different approach the United States government and the International Monetary Fund pushed during the economic crises there a decade ago. When the I.M.F. pledged $20 billion to help South Korea survive the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, one of the conditions it imposed was that the Korean government allow ailing banks and other companies to collapse rather than bail them out, recalls Yung Chul Park, a professor of economics at Korea University in Seoul who was deeply involved in the negotiations with the I.M.F. While Mr. Park says the current crisis is different ? it?s global rather than restricted to one region like Asia ? ?Washington is following a different script this time.? ?I understand why they do it,? he added. ?But they?ve lost credibility to some extent in pushing for opening up overseas markets to foreign competition and liberalizing economies.? The ramifications of the rescue of A.I.G. will be felt for years within the United States, too, not just abroad. That?s because it was a very different kind of company than Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which enjoyed government sponsorship as mortgage finance providers, or Bear Stearns, which was regulated by the federal government. ?This was an insurance company that wasn?t federally regulated,? said Gary Gensler, who served as a top official in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration. Nor did A.I.G. have access to Federal Reserve funds or deposit insurance, like a commercial bank. ?We?re in new territory,? Mr. Gensler added. ?This is a paradigm shift.? A.I.G. is also in a different league both by virtue of the breadth of its businesses and its extensive overseas operations, especially in Asia. What?s more, it fell into something of a regulatory gap under the current rules. While the company, based in New York, is better known for selling conventional products like insurance policies and annuities overseen by state regulators in the United States, it is also deeply involved in the risky, opaque market for derivatives and other complicated financial instruments, which operates largely outside any regulation. Along with the threat to the plain-vanilla insurance policies held by millions of ordinary consumers, it was the looming threat posed by these arcane financial instruments that prompted Washington to act and bailout A.I.G. Mr. Chernow, who has written extensively about the efforts of J. P. Morgan to steady the economy in 1907 before the creation of the Federal Reserve, echoed Mr. Gensler?s conclusion. ?It?s pure crisis management,? Mr. Chernow said. ?It?s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They?re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight.? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 19 14:49:57 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:49:57 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama and the Palin Effect Message-ID: <48D3D83C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Obama and the Palin Effect By Deepak Chopra Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin?s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper. She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of ?the other.? For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don?t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin?s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision. Look at what she stands for: - Small town values ? a nostaligic return to simpler times disguises a denial of America?s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism. - Ignorance of world affairs ? a repudiation of the need to repair America?s image abroad. - Family values ? a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don?t need to be needed. - Rigid stands on guns and abortion ? a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree. -n Patriotism ? the usual fallback in a failed war. - ?Reform? ? an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn?t fit your ideology. Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from ?us? pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of ?I?m all right, Jack,? and ?Why change? Everything?s OK as it is.? The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing 40 years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness. Obama?s call for higher ideals in politics can?t be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow ? we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Sep 19 19:58:16 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:58:16 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>This post makes no sense to me. Most of the original logical positivists were leftists, but I'm not convinced that this would explain Popper's critique of them. Popper paradoxically rebels against empiricism and scientism while himself perpetuating their tradition.<< Why doesn't that surprise me? However, I will point out that I don't think the LPs excluded normative sciences. In fact, their whole project was an ambitious, naive normative undertaking. And so some, including LPs, were optimistic that scientific socialism was such an undertaking, especially if you think a socialist government is doing a better job dealing with the great depression. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Sep 19 20:07:20 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:07:20 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: CB:>> However, "double standard" is an _ad hominem_ argument at the first level in the sense that even if Popper's situationalist social science is not science, Marxism might also not be a science for the reason that Popper says. The question is does Popper's falsibiability criterion derive from his situationalist social science .Also, there is or are falsibiability statements for Marxism meeting Popper's falsibiability criterion.<< Good points all CB. Or that Popper's critiques of Marxism and Freudians might be irrefutable but he was personally inconsistent in how he applied his methods--possibly for personal reasons (he knew who to stand on and he knew who to thank). Popper saw the LPs epistemology as unworkable and supposed he had come up with something better. I think Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend show he didn't. Which brings me back to that old debate of : Is Marxism a Science? And I would say anyone asking the question ought to first answer what do they mean by 'science'? I see Marx as one of the founders of modern social science (especially those that attempt to deal with 'social collectivities'), for better or worse (often better). And insights, theories, concepts, etc. AFTER Marx have been incorporated into social scientific pursuits, regardless of this label 'Marxist'. And in the case of the label, we see some examples here on the list, such as Althusser (structuralist Marxism) and Sartre (whatever you want to call that work 'Critique' that we were discussing). CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Sep 19 21:22:47 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:22:47 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: RD:>>'Continental philosophy' is an artificial construct designed to exclude Marxism while now selectively allowing certain figures into the realm of philosophical consideration. << Well it could be used to point out a few interesting historical trends. One, Marx developed as a German philosopher, and the French, with their own social scientific and radical traditions, tended to ignore the Germans, until the 20th century. Perhaps simply because the Germans mostly wrote in German? Two, it comes about because of the profound differences in higher education systems across Europe, the UK and then, later, the US. At any rate, I never saw the construct 'continental philosophy' as excluding Marx. At university in the US, I often saw it used to dismiss Marx as a philosopher along with many of the continentals post-Kant (we spent much of the term on Descartes and Kant and blew through Marx in a few minutes in a History of Philosophy class). I soon saw the contradiction, however, of starting 'modern anglo-analytic philosophy' with a continental who was mostly obscure when he was doing his best work, namely Frege. And for those who held up Frege while dismissing Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, and Heidegger as metaphysical nonsense, they seemed to have ignored the similarities of training--and even interests in terms of philosophical problems. I think the biggest reason why Frege was ignored is because he pissed people off and alienated possible benefactors unnecessarily, much the same way the largely obscure genius Peirce did. Or perhaps maybe he was just one of many who was doomed to get no recognition, but Russell discovered him. And as for that anti-philosophy/anti-metaphysical stance, I quickly saw it as one way in which Marxists got hoist on their own petard. And that started with Marx himself. So mainstream economics in the US and UK dismissed Marx as a minor 19th century economist, often over 'quantification' issues. And mainstream philosophy in the US dismissed him as a minor Hegelian who got switched on Feuerbach and materialism. The biggest problem with the concept 'continental philosophy' excluding Marx though would be at least two-fold. (1) The old man's enshrined disclaimers notwithstanding, Marxism largely develops as philosophy (and textual exegesis, which brings to mind the continental love of hermeneutics), (2) and much of that philosophy is continental in geography (I'm thinking of Frankfurt School, Sartre, Althusser, Deleuze, Guattari, Negri, etc. without much effort being required). It just took a century for it to take real root in France. It isn't helped much by Europeans being as ignorant of the US and UK as the latter are of Europe. RD >>It's not a current debate, but the effects of Popper's position persist. Furthermore, there are a number of Popperians. I know a bunch of them here in Washington and via the Internet. They are either social democrats, liberals, or libertarians.<< Which overall system of thought, approach to political economy, has better predicted the current financial crisis in the US-dominated world economy? CJ From cburford at gn.apc.org Sat Sep 20 03:45:45 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 10:45:45 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Centralization of credit References: <48D3A6B1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <9609A40F99E94C6BADDAA928550A71E8@HPINVENT> Are latest developments a move towards the centralization of credit if only out of recognition of how interconnected the national and global credit system is, even if the precise words of the Communist Manifesto have not been implemented in the direct mechanical and unequivocal way that was envisaged in 1948 - "Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. " Of course everything depends on the balance of power, initiative and influence, over the new bipartisan arrangements. For whom? - is this all being done - remains a key question, and will be disputed territory. Chris Burford London ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" To: ; Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 6:18 PM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism | Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism | By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ | September 18, 2008 | http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/business/worldbusiness/18rescue.html?ref=b | usiness | | PARIS ? Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, | free-market capitalism? | | In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to A.I.G., the troubled | insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about | the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, | it has also likely undercut future American efforts to promote such policies | abroad. | | ?I fear the government has passed the point of no return,? said Ron Chernow, | a leading American financial historian. ?We have the irony of a free-market | administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration | would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.? | | While they acknowledge the shock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the | bailout package for A.I.G. on top of earlier government support for Bear | Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac has stunned even European policy makers | accustomed to government intervention in the economy. | | ?For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful | opportunity to invoke the American example,? said Mario Monti, the former | antitrust chief at the European Commission. ?They will say that even the | standard-bearer of the market economy, the United States negates its | fundamental principles in its behavior.? | | Mr. Monti noted that past financial crises in Asia, Russia, and Mexico | brought government to the fore, ?but this is the first time it?s in the | heart of capitalism, which is enormously more damaging in terms of the | credibility of the market economy.? | | In France, where the government has long supported the creation of national | champions and worked actively to protect select companies from the threat of | foreign takeover, politicians were quick to point out the paradox of what is | essentially the nationalization of the largest American insurance company. | | ?Today the actions of American policy makers illustrate the need for | economic patriotism,? said Bernard Carayon, a lawmaker of President Nicolas | Sarkozy?s center-right governing party, UMP. ?I congratulate them.? | | For the ?evangelists of the market this is a painful lesson,? he added. | | We?re entering ?an era where we have much more regulation and where the | public and the private sector will mix much more.? | | In Asia, the Washington-led bailouts have stirred bitter memories of the | very different approach the United States government and the International | Monetary Fund pushed during the economic crises there a decade ago. | | When the I.M.F. pledged $20 billion to help South Korea survive the Asian | financial crisis of the late 1990s, one of the conditions it imposed was | that the Korean government allow ailing banks and other companies to | collapse rather than bail them out, recalls Yung Chul Park, a professor of | economics at Korea University in Seoul who was deeply involved in the | negotiations with the I.M.F. | | While Mr. Park says the current crisis is different ? it?s global rather | than restricted to one region like Asia ? ?Washington is following a | different script this time.? | | ?I understand why they do it,? he added. ?But they?ve lost credibility to | some extent in pushing for opening up overseas markets to foreign | competition and liberalizing economies.? | | The ramifications of the rescue of A.I.G. will be felt for years within the | United States, too, not just abroad. | | That?s because it was a very different kind of company than Fannie Mae or | Freddie Mac, which enjoyed government sponsorship as mortgage finance | providers, or Bear Stearns, which was regulated by the federal government. | | ?This was an insurance company that wasn?t federally regulated,? said Gary | Gensler, who served as a top official in the Treasury Department during the | Clinton administration. Nor did A.I.G. have access to Federal Reserve funds | or deposit insurance, like a commercial bank. | | ?We?re in new territory,? Mr. Gensler added. ?This is a paradigm shift.? | | A.I.G. is also in a different league both by virtue of the breadth of its | businesses and its extensive overseas operations, especially in Asia. | | What?s more, it fell into something of a regulatory gap under the current | rules. | | While the company, based in New York, is better known for selling | conventional products like insurance policies and annuities overseen by | state regulators in the United States, it is also deeply involved in the | risky, opaque market for derivatives and other complicated financial | instruments, which operates largely outside any regulation. | | Along with the threat to the plain-vanilla insurance policies held by | millions of ordinary consumers, it was the looming threat posed by these | arcane financial instruments that prompted Washington to act and bailout | A.I.G. | | Mr. Chernow, who has written extensively about the efforts of J. P. Morgan | to steady the economy in 1907 before the creation of the Federal Reserve, | echoed Mr. Gensler?s conclusion. | | ?It?s pure crisis management,? Mr. Chernow said. ?It?s the Treasury and the | Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on | how financial failures will be handled in the future. They?re afraid to | articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen | every day with no end in sight.? | | | | | | | | | This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com | | _______________________________________________ | Marxism-Thaxis mailing list | Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu | To change your options or unsubscribe go to: | http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis | From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 20 07:12:47 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:12:47 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism Message-ID: What McCain proposes seems similar to what is already in place in Japan. However, the government here certainly didn't nationalize any insurance companies that I know of during that crisis in the late 90s. It nationalized banks. A few observations from what I noticed of the Japanese experience: 1. Nationalization was limited to duff banks, most notably credit banks. 2. Much of the crisis was contrived; banks were forced into nationalized status because of failures to meet new international standards. They weren't really bankrupt in most cases. 3. The Japanese government seems to have miscalculated about the willingness even eagerness with which predatory US capital (private equity, investment banks, listed financial conglomerates like GE, etc) moved in to take over real estate holdings, loan portfolios, soon-profitable banks (once capital ratios were boosted), etc. 4. This also went hand in hand with another contrived crisis. The government increased the cost of national health insurance cover while decreasing the extent of that cover. So this created a huge market in supplemental coverage got from American and European insurance giants, who were given access to this market. For example, AIG. The biggest question I have about this governmental role in the US markets is HOW ARE THEY GOING TO FLOAT THAT MUCH MORE DEBT? W. Europe, E. Asia, and the oil exporting states are going to have to buy one hell of a lot more US bonds. The knock on effects are going to knock the world market for years to come. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 20 07:17:56 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 22:17:56 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > 1. Nationalization was limited to duff banks, most notably credit banks. I should have added that, unlike the banks, a slew of insurance companies really did go bankrupt, with policy holders taking the brunt of it. The other insurance companies that got to take over the bankrupt ones got mostly sweetheart deals (as with the bank takeovers). CJ From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat Sep 20 07:23:13 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:23:13 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] White Privilege and President election 2008 Message-ID: *This is Your Nation on White Privilege* September, 14 2008*By Tim Wise* (Tim Wise is a nationally and internationally known writer/journalist, and the author of "White Like Me.") btw, ________________________ For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. - White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because 'every family has challenges,' even as black and Latino families with similar 'challenges' are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay. - White privilege is when you can call yourself a 'fuckin' redneck,' like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll 'kick their fuckin' ass,' and talk about how you like to 'shoot shit' for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug. - White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action. - White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're 'untested.' - White privilege is being able to say that you support the words 'under God' in the pledge of allegiance because 'if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me,' and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the 'under God' part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals. - White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was 'Alaska first,' and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful. - White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist. - White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a 'second look.' - White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt. - White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America. - White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a 'trick question,' while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced. - White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a 'light' burden. - And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole 'change' thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain. White privilege is, in short, the problem. Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008),and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull.For review copies or interview requests, please reply _topublicity at softskull.com_ (mailto:topublicity at softskull.com) **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat Sep 20 10:57:48 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:57:48 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Too Big to Fail versus Moral Hazard Henry C.K. Liu Message-ID: _http://henryckliu.com/page169.html_ (http://henryckliu.com/page169.html) Too Big to Fail versus Moral Hazard By Henry C.K. Liu The end of the Cold War and the global eclipse of socialist tenets have left US faith in market fundamentalism with the aura of a natural philosophy. The US calls her system capitalist democracy. In doing so, care is taken to distinguish democracy from equalitarianism. Conceptually, while the Declaration of Independence claims that ?all men are created equal?, the nation that live by it readily accepts the premise that men do not create wealth equally. The US system rejects social democracy which aims to reduce glaring economic disparity between people. The US system claims it promotes equality of opportunities rather than equality of rewards. It believes that the logic of the market is the most equitable arbitrage. Free-marketeers decry intimate relationships between government, finance and business and oppose even corporatism as an adjunct to the welfare state. They believe that the market?s unforgiving rules of selecting and rewarding winners and penalizing losers are inherently fair, efficient and necessary for maximizing overall economic growth. It is obscene that when they are punished by market forces for their wayward manipulation that they call for government help for themselves in the name of the common good. The trouble with this view of free market capitalism is that it is a fallacy to assume that truly free markets can exist without regulation. Markets are always constrained by local customs and rules, unequal conditions and unequal information access by participants. In fact, markets come into existence through artificial construction by initial participants with rules that subsequent participants must observe as an admission price. These artificial rules generally favor the market founders and put later comers at a perpetual disadvantage. World Trade Organization (WTO) rules are the latest visible examples. Often the only option left to late comers is to start alternative markets hoping that they will enjoy the very privileges and advantages they oppose in existing markets. Thus all markets require a wide range of regulations to check and balance their inherent march toward inequality and unfairness. Trade, by definition, is based on mutually balanced weaknesses. Mutual strength leads only to conflict, and unequal strength leads to conquest of the weak. **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From Waistline2 at aol.com Sat Sep 20 11:00:07 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:00:07 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] China's imploding US ally (AIG history) Message-ID: . Asia Times, Sep 18, 2008 China's imploding US ally By Richard Komaiko and Chris Stewart * Maurice Greenberg The collapse of US insurance giant AIG and its US$85 billion takeover by the US government on Tuesday takes the US financial crisis right to the heart of China's development as a capitalist country. AIG, the world's sixth-largest company by assets and biggest insurer, according to the Forbes Global 2000 list for 2007, is one of the few US institutions to be founded in China, its roots dating from 1919 when Cornelius Vander Starr, a veteran of World War I, founded a small insurance company in Shanghai called American Asiatic Underwriters, later to become AIG. More famously, Starr's successor, Maurice R Greenberg, built relations with China's leadership from 1975, his first visit to the country predating by several years the revolutionary moves by Deng Xiaoping to open up China to Western influences. In this, Greenberg proved himself a master of developing guanxi, a term summarized as "connections" and now recognized as holding the key to successful development of business in China. According to Benjamin A Shobert, reviewing Robert Buderi and Gregory T Huang's book of that name, "guanxi is commonly perceived as partnering and understood to focus the attention of Westerners on the great importance that the Chinese put on relationships. To most Westerners guanxi emphasizes personal relationships in contrast to the contractual, non-relational business practices common in America. "While a portion of the word's meaning can simply be seen as stressing relationships, the authors emphasize that a better understanding of the word is to emphasize four things: trust, favor, dependence and adaptation - the last what the authors call 'patience and cultivation'." Greenberg's patience and cultivation of relations with China's leaders saw him play a key role in building links between the US and China, while his company had a front-runner's view as it and China metamorphosed into leading players in the global business world. Starr was the initial path breaker. When he set up shop in Shanghai, there were many other Westerners selling insurance in the city, then as now the country's financial hub. But these potential rivals almost exclusively concentrated their efforts on selling to other Westerners. Starr realized that the Chinese people themselves represented a vast and underserved market for insurance, with relatively low risks. This insight would enable him to become one of the wealthiest men in the world. Within 10 years, Starr had established offices across China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indochina, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur. In 1926, he opened his first office in the United States. The growth of his company was temporarily disrupted by the Chinese civil war and the general turmoil in East Asia. In 1939, Starr moved the headquarters of his corporate empire to the Empire State - New York. From there, his company and fortune grew many fold. In 1962, Starr appointed Greenberg to head AIG's then failing North American operations. In a remarkable display of business prowess, Greenberg turned the unit around, a feat that encouraged Starr to name him his successor before passing away in 1968. Starr bequeathed all his wealth to the C V Starr Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the United States, with over $3 billion in assets. Greenberg became the chairman of this foundation while also assuming the reins at AIG. Under his leadership, the company prospered while he himself became one of the kingpins of American foreign policy. In 1977, he became a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, arguably America's most influential think-tank, and over the next three decades he would hold numerous leadership positions in the council, culminating in 1997 with the founding of the Greenberg Chair. Today, the Greenberg Chair "is the senior person directly responsible for the substantive content and management" of the think-tank. Greenberg has also been a member of the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange; a former chairman, deputy chairman and director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; a member of the US-China Business Council; the chairman of the Asia Society; and a member of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations to the President of the United States. With all of these roles, plus his control over the resources of the Starr Foundation and the American International Group, Greenberg's power to shape America's foreign policy was rivaled only by Citizen Kane. Greenberg's foreign policy views were heavily influenced by two factors. One was his experience in World War II of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. The other was the legacy of Starr's love for China. This latter factor would ultimately play an enormous role in shaping America's policy toward China for more than a quarter of a century. In all of his actions and with all of his influence, Greenberg exercised a sanguine desire to foster reconciliation and cooperation between the United States and the People's Republic of China. The impact of this desire can be seen in the fingerprint that Greenberg has left on academic and policy institutions around the United States. At his discretion, the Starr Foundation has funded numerous fellowships with the Asian Cultural Council, donated $300,000 to Columbia University's East Asian Library and considerably more to Berkeley's C V Starr East Asian Library. Most recently, Greenberg and the Starr Foundation each donated $25 million to Yale University to create the Maurice R Greenberg Yale-China Initiative. Greenberg's lobbying efforts were a driving factor behind America's decision to support China's admission to the World Trade Organization, which it officially joined in November 2001. Undoubtedly, a fair amount of the credit for the creation of an American policy environment that is favorable to China is due to Greenberg and the resources that were generated by AIG. AIG's own development in China took various, often ground-breaking, forms. China America Insurance Company was formed in 1980 as a 50-50 joint venture between AIG companies and the People's Insurance Company of China (PICC), the first joint venture between a foreign insurance organization and PICC. Personal ties with future leaders were also forged. In 1990, AIG financed and chaired a financial services conference in Shanghai to assist then city mayor and later country premier Zhu Rongji in introducing the international financial community to investment opportunities in Shanghai. Two years later, AIG unit American International Insurance (AIA) established a branch office in Shanghai, to become the first foreign-owned life and non-life insurance business to receive a license from the People's Bank of China. In 1995, AIG companies won licenses to extend operations to Guangzhou, the key city in the country's efforts to open up to the outside world of commerce, and a year later it secured a lease allowing it to return in 1998 to the Shanghai Bund, home of C V Starr's original Shanghai insurance companies. In 2003, by which time AIG's presence in the country extended to several provinces, the insurer acquired a 9.9% stake in PICC Property and Casualty (PICC P&C) when the Chinese company listed in Hong Kong. In 2005, as the Chinese government continued to ease its grip on the financial sector, AIG Private Bank became the first foreign private bank to receive approval to open a representative office in Shanghai. One immediate effect of AIG's collapse could be on PICC P&C's stock price, which would be at risk if AIG liquidated its stake, Citigroup analyst Bob Leung said in a research note on Tuesday. Chinese insurers also face a greater counter-party risk from the collapse of AIG than from Lehman Brothers, the other US financial giant that crumpled in the past few days. Lehman, which has filed for bankruptcy has significant exposure in Asia. "Given the very low life insurance accession rate in Asia, "if AIG loses its A- rating or its situation worsens significantly, we expect the financial impact to affect mainly P&C insurers," Leung wrote. S&P lowered AIG's long-term counterparty rating to 'A-' on Monday. China's insurance regulator declared that AIG businesses in the country were sound, echoing statements from the rest of the region. This is however a big concern going forward, given the large market share that AIG commands in many Asian markets, and the sheer volume of domestic securities that it holds across the region. Other insurers in China meanwhile may gain from AIG's loss. "China Life, with a strong balance sheet and limited non-yuan asset exposure (less than US$3 billion and mainly in H-stock [Hong Kong listed shares] and cash) has the strongest balance sheet of all regional insurers and is likely to benefit from a 'flight to quality' perspective," Leung wrote. The sudden decline of AIG may lead to a reduced influence of the company in international affairs, and a cut in the amount of resources that are lavished on America's foreign policy establishment for the purpose of encouraging China-friendly policy. As it is, Greenberg's path finding and influential role in China has already been superceded to a large extent by the huge influx of other Western business leaders, notable among them Henry Paulson, who as chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs spent much time and effort building his own relations with the present Chinese leadership. Paulson's appointment as US Treasury Secretary in 2006 came at a time of simmering tensions between Washington and Beijing over China's reluctance to strengthen its currency and rein in the growing trade surplus it enjoyed with the US. Demands for faster appreciation of the yen continue, but their tenor has become less strident since Paulson took up his government post, with the focus on relations changing through the Strategic Economic Dialogue to broader long-term bilateral economic interests. Ironically, while the US Federal Reserve played the dominant role in bailing out AIG this week, it was Paulson holding key strings of power in Washington while Maurice Greenberg sat on the sidelines. In 2005, Greenberg was accused of financial malfeasance. In the ensuing scandal, he was ousted from his leadership role at AIG. Nonetheless, he retained direct ownership of 39 million shares of AIG stock, and an additional 243 million shares through the investment company that he still controls, C V Starr and Co. At the beginning of this year, his shares were worth $15.8 billion. By the close of the market on Tuesday afternoon, they were worth a little more than $1 billion. The links that Greenberg had cultivated over the decades with the Chinese community certainly are also looking frayed when it comes to trust in AIG products in the wake of this week's collapse. As Chan Akya reports in Asia Times Online on Wednesday ( Waiter, there's a banker in my soup), panic-stricken policyholders lined up all day on Wednesday in Singapore to surrender their policies to secure redemption value. In Hong Kong, where AIG is the largest life insurer with more than 26% of the market and more than 1.9 million policies sold, more than 1,700 people canceled their insurance policies with AIG on Tuesday. On Wednesday, some 170 policy holders rushed to AIG headquarters to cut their insurance or investments. The Hong Kong government has demanded AIG seek approval before it removes any asset out of the territory. One 50-year-old woman at the hectic commercial and retailing center of Causeway Bay said she decided to surrender her insurance policy today as she was worried AIG's business might be affected. "I was supposed to pay premiums this month but I don't want to take any risk now. I am so afraid that I will lose all my money here. To keep as much money as I have in my pocket, I surrender the policy now," she said. --------------------------------------------- With further reporting by Olivia Chung, senior Asia Times Online reporter in Hong Kong. Richard Komaiko researches Sino-American relations, economic policy, terrorism and national security. He holds a degree in economics from the University of Illinois and has studied Chinese language and culture at the University of Illinois, University of Chicago and the Beijing Institute of Education. Chris Stewart is the Asia Times Online Business Editor = **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 20 18:48:35 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 09:48:35 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Too Big to Fail versus Moral Hazard Henry C.K. Liu Message-ID: What particular insights did that article yield? How little HCKL knows about the US? If you read the rhetoric of many of the elite who get access to publish, you see something different: 1. America is a republic founded on the principle of subsidiarity. 2. The role of the federal government is to run foreign policy and the military. Yes, the ruling elite are caught on using the federal government and other somewhat more elusive entities to try and manage the current crisis. But what is most interesting is so far just how inconsistent they have been in doing it. They seem to have repossessed Freddie and Fannie because it was the federal government that actually created them in the first place. They interfered in AIG because of its size and diversity, and they don't want another Enron or Tyco. That point is tricky because AIG actually already underwent an 'Enron', whereby Hank Greenberg was forced out of control of the conglomerate. The last thing the feds would want is the AIG can of beans to be re-opened. They themselves might get blamed for it going under. Meanwhile the rest of the world has to be wondering why the only thing that won't get (in effect) nationalized in the US are savings banks (or institutions that act as savings banks). Now what seems to be taking place is Bush-Paulson asking the rest of the world to bear the immediate costs of all this federal intervention in financial markets because the creditor nations are going to have to hold the debt the US issues to cover it. Just as they have asked to float the wars of occupation, the expansion of the US military, the previous credit bubble, etc. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 20 19:00:08 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:00:08 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] AIG--more than just an insurance company Message-ID: AIG was one of the great gaijin god entities that strutted around post-bubble Japan. I think their most profitable racket was the supplemental health insurance sold by 'American Home Direct'. Their Japan division was making huge amounts of money until US management got the brilliant idea of offloading the US branch's debt to the world divisions. Meanwhile my non-profit supplemental health insurance cooperative just got taken over by Zurich Int'l. Here in Japan it never ends because the two dominant parties still think Japan is behind because its institutional investors only got 3-5% returns in the past decade, and not the world-beating American standards of 12-20%. One hopes the current events catch up and penetrate the ideological cloud, but that would asking capitalism to think. They are going to go ahead and try to float a privatization of the Japan Postal Savings and Insurance systems too. More about AIG in Japan. http://www.aig.com/home_348_92815.html http://www.aiginvestments.com/AIG/Funds/Funds+List/Equity/Asia/asia_japan_horizon.htm http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1828278/ http://books.google.com/books?id=pYIJE1KBTegC&pg=PA193&lpg=PA193&dq=AIG+in+Japan&source=web&ots=XxooGJLAeE&sig=jZsUtqVdoGRb_fR2tC31mh37Wmk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 20 20:08:42 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:08:42 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] AIG--more than just an insurance company In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Did Greenberg get Spitzer before Spitzer got him? And will Spitzer now get blamed for the demise of AIG? Interesting that this should be one of Spitzer's last crusades. No wonder I got my cliched metaphors so crossed. Can of worms. Spill the beans. Not can of beans. I really doubt that the federal government wants much scrutiny into the last years of AIG. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R._Greenberg#Fraud_allegations Fraud allegations On March 15, 2005, AIG's board forced Greenberg to resign from his post as Chairman and CEO under the shadow of criticism from Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York State. On May 26, 2005, as part of a series of actions against leaders of large corporations, Spitzer filed a complaint against Greenberg, AIG, and Howard I. Smith (ex-CFO of AIG) alleging fraudulent business practice, securities fraud, common law fraud, and other violations of insurance and securities laws. After a subsequent investigation, however, all criminal charges were dropped, and Greenberg was not held responsible for any crimes. The State Attorney General's office however is still pursuing Mr. Greenberg in civil court for many of these same criminal allegations. [edit] Criminal charges Greenberg's public statements show that he found the Spitzer investigation to be very troubling. He maintained his innocence throughout the investigation, and alluded to the possibility that Eliot Spitzer might be conducting a high-profile witch-hunt in the interests of furthering his political ambitions (Spitzer did indeed seek, and win, the governorship of New York in 2007, but resigned one year later due to involvement in a prostitution scandal). [edit] Civil charges Spitzer did, however, bring civil charges against Greenberg, though he dropped two of the six initial charges in September, 2006.[3] Greenberg's attorney claimed vindication with the dropping of the two charges, but Spitzer's office maintained that the four remaining charges are the core of the State's original charges. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14704060/ Two charges against AIG's Greenberg dropped Spitzer aide says four left concerning deception are 'heart of the case' updated 6:09 p.m. ET Sept. 6, 2006 ALBANY, N.Y. - New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has dropped two of six civil charges against former American International Group CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg and another former executive of the company, a top Spitzer attorney said Wednesday. Greenberg's legal team said that "the most explosive and financially significant claims" had been dropped. Spitzer said he will still pursue the most serious accusations involving deceptive accounting claims, but will drop charges that became moot after AIG settled a case brought by Spitzer against the company, paid some restitution and adopted accounting reforms. Story continues below ?advertisement "The heart of the case remains," said David Brown, chief of Spitzer's Investment Protection Bureau. The two dropped charges involved a scheme Spitzer said was intended to make investment income look like underwriting income, strengthening AIG's financial picture. The other claim alleged that Greenberg and former AIG chief financial officer Howard Smith were part of a scheme to hide workers' compensation payments. Spitzer's Republican opponent for governor called the action proof of a "the phony nature of many cases pursued by Eliot Spitzer." "It's a steady, but sure unraveling of this bogus case," said Republican candidate for governor John Faso. He notes the case began with claims of criminal and civil charges and a threat of an indictment against the company. The remaining charges involve what Spitzer said was a plot to "mislead the investing public about the profitability of AIG and its skill at underwriting," Brown said. David Boies, lead lawyer for Greenberg, said in the statement that he appreciated that Spitzer "has now decided to drop these key claims from the complaint." "We are confident that when all the facts are out, the remaining claims, which relate to accounting disputes involving much smaller amounts than the claims that are being dropped, will also be dismissed," he added. Boies also said that "to the extent that the remaining accounting disputes affected AIG's financial statements at all, most of the effect is attributable to accounting decisions that were undisputedly reviewed with, and approved by, AIG's current management." New York-based AIG, one of the world's largest insurance companies, announced in February that it would pay $1.64 billion to resolve allegations that it used deceptive accounting practices to mislead investors and regulatory agencies. The deal _ believed to be the largest concluded by regulators with a single company _ also required the company to change its business practices to ensure proper accounting procedures in the future. The settlement did not cover Greenberg, who resigned in March 2005 as chairman and chief executive officer and pledged to fight the Spitzer action in court. Greenberg was replaced as chief executive by Martin Sullivan, who oversaw two restatements of AIG's earnings back to 2000. The revisions knocked some $2 billion off shareholders' equity and nearly $4 billion off its profits. Greenberg's chief spokesman, Howard Opinsky, repeated that Greenberg's actions as AIG chief "were legal, based on sound business judgment and in the best interests of AIG shareholders." Opinsky said AIG shareholders "are owed an explanation as to why $1.6 billion in company funds were spent to settle allegations that do not withstand scrutiny." The statement issued by Greenberg's legal team also quoted Vincent Sama and Andrew Lawler, lead lawyers for Smith, as saying: "We are pleased by this development and are confident that, after all the facts are considered, the remaining claims will be dismissed." A Spitzer spokesman insisted that the lawyers for Greenberg and Smith were overstating the significance of the dropped charges, which he described as a routine action. "It's outrageous and ridiculous and a reading of the amended complaint shows their claim is ridiculous," said Darren Dopp, spokesman for Spitzer who faces a Democratic primary for governor on Tuesday against Tom Suozzi, the Nassau County executive. (c) 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 20 21:08:04 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:08:04 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] AIG--I think it owns our ports! Message-ID: Didn't see this in the Atimes piece (which looks somewhat like a summary lifted from wikipedia anyway), but this item sure shows just how connected AIG is with the Bush regime. And I can't help but comment, wow, AIG's run on the Dow Industrials was something like a glorious 4 years! It would be interesting to do a comparison and contrast of AIG with HSBC--the British-Chinese banks that always seems to misplace my money when I wire it to them. At any rate, here we see AIG acting like a private equity firm. When will these guys ever learn? If you want to be private equity, don't publicly list. That way guys like Spitzer can't come after you and do a 'Tyco' job on you. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2006-12-11-dubai-ports_x.htm AIG unit to buy Dubai company's U.S. ports Updated 12/12/2006 12:53 AM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this DUBAI (Reuters) ? State-owned Dubai Ports World said on Monday that it had agreed to sell its U.S. port operations to an American International Group unit after relinquishing control to allay concerns about U.S. national security. DP World will conclude its deal with AIG Global Investment Group in the first quarter, the Gulf Arab company's chief executive, Mohammad Sharaf, told Reuters. He declined to give a value for the deal. DP World took over facilities at six major U.S. ports when it acquired Britain's Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation for $6.8 billion in February, becoming the world's third-largest container port operator. "We have reached a deal covering 100% of the U.S. assets," Sharaf said Monday. "It will be a cash deal." Jamal Majid Bin Thaniah, group chief executive of Dubai Ports and Jebel Ali Free Zone Authority, which includes DP World, in October told U.K. publication Lloyd's List that the company expected the winning bid price to exceed $700 million, or about 10% of the price it paid for P&O. AIG declined to comment on the price it had agree to pay for P&O's U.S. port business. Publicly traded U.S. companies are bound to reveal the price of acquisitions if they are deemed material, or significant to the company's capital base. AIG Global Investment Group, part of American International Group, the world's largest insurer, has more than $635 billion in assets. AIG would not come under disclosure requirements if the price is about $700 million, as it would for larger purchases. AIG Global Investment Group has a track record of investments in various infrastructure businesses, including power, waste and water operations, it said. DP World agreed to sell its P&O facilities in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Tampa and New Orleans after U.S. lawmakers threatened to block the company, saying they feared giving a state-owned Arab company control of U.S. port terminals would pose a threat to national security. With a political firestorm threatening to become a diplomatic crisis, DP World announced it would sell P&O's U.S. assets at the behest of Dubai's ruler and hold them separately until a suitable buyer could be found. Those arrangements would remain in place until the deal was completed and cleared by regulators, Sharaf said. The forced capitulation of a government-controlled company in the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. ally and frequent port of call for American warships, reinforced Arab concerns that their U.S. assets could be targeted for security reasons. Some Arab investors said at the time the uproar smacked of racism. U.S. critics of the deal, including Democrats and members of President Bush's Republican Party, note that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers came from the UAE and that the country once recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. Click for Restrictions. Posted 12/11/2006 9:51 AM ET From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun Sep 21 06:55:49 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 08:55:49 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Too Big to Fail versus Moral Hazard Henry C.K. Liu Message-ID: In a message dated 9/20/2008 8:49:51 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, jannuzi at gmail.com writes: What particular insights did that article yield? >> How little HCKL knows about the US? If you read the rhetoric of many of the elite who get access to publish, you see something different: 1. America is a republic founded on the principle of subsidiarity. 2. The role of the federal government is to run foreign policy and the military. << Comment Actually, it was my understanding that the Civil War in America unfolded on the basis of the political struggles fought between North and South over the role of the Federal Government and whom economic interest the "Feds" would protect. This form of struggle erupted over tariffs and what projects would be funded by public money; projects like the Erie Canal and creating transportation routes running east-west. That is to say, the Northern industrial interest versus the economic and political polices of the Slave Oligarchy. America was founded by ideological groups professing various religious and sectarian interest. This means that there is always various ideological groupings putting forth their believe systems which in many instances have very little to do with confronting concrete issues of the day. One may espouse an ideology that says the role of the Federal government is to run foreign policy and the military, but the reality is that intense struggle always take place over the role of the federal government (all branches) in the life of the American peoples. Even in my life time the role of the federal government within the state of the United States of North America has been a sharp struggle, involving issues such as the Voting Rights Act 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, regulation and deregulation. Before this time frame the role of the federal government was the arena of sharp and intense struggle before and during the Roosevelt years. I have in mind the "US National Housing Act" enacted on June 27, 1934, as one of several economic recovery measures of the New Deal to get the nation out of the Great Depression. As a communist, my own feelings and political posture (sectarian ideology) is that the role of the Federal government should be to ensure that every single individual in America has access to socially necessary means of life as a birth right. rather than as a right based on ones ability to sell their labor ability for wages. I have been a serious reader and student - if you will, of the writings of Henry C.K. Liu, since roughly 2001. Henry has of course tracked the path of the current financial crisis for the better part of the past 10 years. I have in mind his September 14, 2002 article (five years ago): "Perils of the debt-propelled economy." Thus, his recent article on AIG is read and put forth in the context of a decade of Mr. Liu's writings on the new financial architecture or what some call our new form of financial-industrial imperialism. Further, I tend to support the various political and practical programs of action Mr. Liu's advocates in the face of the dominating role of the new financial architecture, including his call for an international "Labor Cartel" and the extremely militant and radical call for a system of "sovereign birth rights" (credits) as the accounting method to ensure that every single human being on earth realize access to socially necessary means of life, even if they have no money. Consider Mr. Liu's July 21, 2008 article: Failure of Central Banking leads to Debt Capitalism Self Destruction " In a period of less than a year, what had been described by US authorities as a temporary financial problem related to the bursting the housing bubble has turned into a full fledge crisis in the very core of free market capitalism. A handful of analysts have been warning for years that the wholesale deregulation of financial markets and the wrong-headed privatization of the public sector during the last two decades will threaten the viability of free market capitalism. Yet ideological neoliberal fixation remain firmly imbedded in US ruling circles, fertilized by irresistible campaign contributions from profiteers on Wall Street, methodically purging regulatory agencies of all who tried to maintain a sense of financial reality. This ideology of ?market knows best? has allowed the nation to slip into an unsustainable joyride on massive debt giddily assumed by all market participants, ranging from supposedly conservative banks, investment banks and other non-bank financial institutions, industrial corporations, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and individuals. The once dynamic US economy has turned itself into a system in which it is difficult to find any institution, company or individual not over its head with speculative debt. Undercapitalized capitalism, also known as debt capitalism, has been the engine of growth for the US debt bubble in the last two decades. This debt capitalism cancer is caused by a failure of central banking. " (end quote) In America, much of our fight for human dignity and for socially necessary means of life being made a birth right, is ideological, especially at this stage of the social crisis. Without question, Mr. Liu is firmly on the ideological side of the most poverty stricken and oppressed of the proletarian masses in America and indeed the world. Peace WL **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Sun Sep 21 08:03:02 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:03:02 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Positivist Dispute (Positivismusstreit) - 9 Message-ID: In re: Adorno, Theodor W.; et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976. http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/contents.html Pages 50-67 (of 67) of Adorno's introduction have been appended to the previously uploaded file: http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/adorno-intro1.html Those of you who have read the first 3/4 of the text can search for "[49/50]" to pick up where you left off. This completes the digitization of Adorno's introductory essay. From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon Sep 22 07:50:17 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:50:17 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] "shadow banking system" unravelling Message-ID: (Shadow banking system = new non-banking financial architecture?) _http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/622acc9e-87f1-11dd-b114-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_ch eck=1_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/622acc9e-87f1-11dd-b114-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1) The shadow banking system is unraveling By Nouriel Roubini Published: September 21 2008 17:57 | Last updated: September 21 2008 17:57 Last week saw the demise of the shadow banking system that has been created over the past 20 years. Because of a greater regulation of banks, most financial intermediation in the past two decades has grown within this shadow system whose members are broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity groups, structured investment vehicles and conduits, money market funds and non-bank mortgage lenders. Like banks, most members of this system borrow very short-term and in liquid ways, are more highly leveraged than banks (the exception being money market funds) and lend and invest into more illiquid and long-term instruments. Like banks, they carry the risk that an otherwise solvent but liquid institution may be subject to a self­fulfilling and destructive run on its ­liquid liabilities. But unlike banks, which are sheltered from the risk of a run ? via deposit insurance and central banks? lender-of-last-resort liquidity ? most members of the shadow system did not have access to these firewalls that ­prevent runs. A generalised run on these shadow banks started when the deleveraging after the asset bubble bust led to uncertainty about which institutions were solvent. The first stage was the collapse of the entire SIVs/conduits system once investors realised the toxicity of its investments and its very short-term funding seized up. The next step was the run on the big US broker-dealers: first Bear Stearns lost its liquidity in days. The Federal Reserve then extended its lender-of-last-resort support to systemically important broker-dealers. But even this did not prevent a run on the other broker-dealers given concerns about solvency: it was the turn of Lehman Brothers to collapse. Merrill Lynch would have faced the same fate had it not been sold. The pressure moved to Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs: both would be well advised to merge ? like Merrill ? with a large bank that has a stable base of insured deposits. The third stage was the collapse of other leveraged institutions that were both illiquid and most likely insolvent given their reckless lending: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG and more than 300 mortgage lenders. The fourth stage was panic in the money markets. Funds were competing aggressively for assets and, in order to provide higher returns to attract investors, some of them invested in illiquid instruments. Once these investments went bust, panic ensued among investors, leading to a massive run on such funds. This would have been disastrous; so, in another radical departure, the US extended deposit insurance to the funds. The next stage will be a run on thousands of highly leveraged hedge funds. After a brief lock-up period, investors in such funds can redeem their investments on a quarterly basis; thus a bank-like run on hedge funds is highly possible. Hundreds of smaller, younger funds that have taken excessive risks with high leverage and are poorly managed may collapse. A massive shake-out of the bloated hedge fund industry is likely in the next two years. Even private equity firms and their reckless, highly leveraged buy-outs will not be spared. The private equity bubble led to more than $1,000bn of LBOs that should never have occurred. The run on these LBOs is slowed by the existence of ?convenant-lite? clauses, which do not include traditional default triggers, and ?payment-in-kind toggles?, which allow borrowers to defer cash interest payments and accrue more debt, but these only delay the eventual refinancing crisis and will make uglier the bankruptcy that will follow. Even the largest LBOs, such as GMAC and Chrysler, are now at risk. We are observing an accelerated run on the shadow banking system that is leading to its unravelling. If lender-of-last-resort support and deposit insurance are extended to more of its members, these institutions will have to be regulated like banks, to avoid moral hazard. Of course this severe financial crisis is also taking its toll on traditional banks: hundreds are insolvent and will have to close. The real economic side of this financial crisis will be a severe US recession. Financial contagion, the strong euro, falling US imports, the bursting of European housing bubbles, high oil prices and a hawkish European Central Bank will lead to a recession in the eurozone, the UK and most advanced economies. European financial institutions are at risk of sharp losses because of the toxic US securitised products sold to them; the massive increase in leverage following aggressive risk-taking and domestic securitisation; a severe liquidity crunch exacerbated by a dollar shortage and a credit crunch; the bursting of domestic housing bubbles; household and corporate defaults in the recession; losses hidden by regulatory forbearance; the exposure of Swedish, Austrian and Italian banks to the Baltic states, Iceland and southern Europe where housing and credit bubbles financed in foreign currency are leading to hard landings. Thus the financial crisis of the century will also envelop European financial institutions. The writer, chairman of Roubini Global Economics (_www.rgemonitor.com_ (http://www.rgemonitor.com) ), is professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon Sep 22 07:53:15 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:53:15 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Putin: "change architecture of financial system" Message-ID: <_http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=13094201&PageNum=0_ (http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=13094201&PageNum=0) > Putin calls for changing the architecture of the international financial system 20.09.2008, 17.56 SOCHI, September 20 (Itar-Tass) -- Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for changing the architecture of the international financial system. "We all need to think about changing the architecture of international finances and diversifying risks. The whole world economy cannot depend on one money-printing machine," Putin said at the final press conference after a meeting of the Russian-French bilateral commission on cooperation in Sochi on Saturday. "This is a very serious issue that should be addressed in a calm, attentive and working manner without haste together with our colleagues from Europe and America," Putin said. "This issue should be considered not in a confrontation-like way but very benevolently in order to find the most acceptable ways for the development of the world economy and world finances." French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said he would put forth several initiatives within days for dealing with the world financial crisis. He said it was not possible yet to say whether France or Europe has survived the financial crisis. He believes it necessary to strengthen control and bring more transparency into cooperation between fiscal authorities of different countries. "We will be working on this together in the next couple of weeks," he said. **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon Sep 22 07:57:22 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:57:22 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Goldman, Morgan Stanley Bring Down Curtain on an Era Message-ID: Goldman, Morgan Stanley Bring Down Curtain on an Era (Update1) By Christine Harper and Craig Torres Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The Wall Street that shaped the financial world for two decades ended last night, when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley concluded there is no future in remaining investment banks now that investors have determined the model is broken. The Federal Reserve's approval of their bid to become banks ends the ascendancy of the securities firms, 75 years after Congress separated them from deposit-taking lenders, and caps weeks of chaos that sent Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy and led to the rushed sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp. ``The decision marks the end of Wall Street as we have known it,'' said William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ``It's too bad.'' Goldman, whose alumni include Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary presiding over a $700 billion bank bailout, and Morgan Stanley, a product of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that cleaved investment and commercial banks, insisted they didn't need to change course, even as their shares plunged and their borrowing costs soared last week. By then, it was too late. As financial markets gyrated --the Dow Jones Industrial Average whipsawed 1,000 points in the week's last two days -- and clients defected, executives at the two firms concluded they had no choice. The Federal Reserve Board met at 9 p.m. yesterday and considered applications delivered that day, said Michelle Smith, a spokeswoman for the central bank. The decision was unanimous, she said. `Blood in Water' ``There's blood in the water in the industry and the sharks are circling,'' Peter Kovalski, who helps oversee about $10 billion at Alpine Woods Capital Investors LLC, said at the end of last week. ``It all comes down to perception and the current trust within the community.'' Morgan Stanley rose 4.1 percent to $28.33 by 11:16 a.m. in German trading, after jumping 21 percent in New York on Sept. 19. Goldman declined 1.2 percent to $128.28 in Germany, after surging 20 percent three days ago in New York. Wall Street hasn't had such a shakeup since the 1980s, when firms including Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns Cos. went public and London's financial markets were altered forever with the so- called Big Bang reforms implemented in 1986. Bear Stearns disappeared in March, when it was bought by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The announcement paves the way for the two New York-based firms, both of which will now be regulated by the Fed, to build their deposit base, potentially through acquisitions. That will allow them to rely more heavily on deposits from retail customers instead of using borrowed money -- the leverage that led to the undoing of Bear Stearns and Lehman. Depositors Rule Morgan Stanley has taken $15.7 billion of writedowns and losses on mortgage-related securities and other types of loans since the credit crunch started last year. Goldman's tally stands at about $4.9 billion. While both companies have remained profitable and avoided money-losing quarters suffered by Lehman and Merrill Lynch, their revenue from sales and trading and investment banking has been declining this year. ``Deposit-banking is king right now,'' said David Hendler, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York. ``It's the only meaningful critical-mass way to make money.'' Morgan Stanley may feel it has more time to contemplate alternatives to the deal that it began to shape last week with Wachovia Corp., said Tony Plath, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. `Certainty' ``This means Morgan Stanley is reassessing its plan for a merger with Wachovia,'' Plath said. ``Morgan Stanley is going to try to go it alone, and I expect it will try to buy a bank with a market-to-book ratio that is next to nothing. It means they are walking away from Wachovia.'' Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest securities firm until this week, had $36 billion of deposits and three million retail accounts at the end of August. The company plans to convert its Utah-based industrial bank into a national bank. ``This new bank holding structure will ensure that Morgan Stanley is in the strongest possible position,'' Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Mack, 63, said in a statement last night. ``It also offers the marketplace certainty about the strength of our financial position and our access to funding.'' Goldman, the largest and most profitable of the U.S. securities firms, will become the fourth-largest bank holding company. The firm already has more than $20 billion in customer deposits in two subsidiaries and is creating a new one, GS Bank USA, that will have more than $150 billion of assets, making it one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S., the firm said in a statement last night. The firm will increase its deposit base ``through acquisitions and organically,'' Goldman said. Citigroup, JPMorgan ``Goldman Sachs, under Federal Reserve supervision, will be regarded as an even more secure institution with an exceptionally clean balance sheet and a greater diversity of funding sources,'' Lloyd Blankfein, 54, Goldman's chairman and CEO, said in the statement. The Washington-based Fed is the primary regulator of bank- holding companies, which are firms that own or control banks. Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan are bank- holding companies regulated by the Fed. Securities firms, by contrast, had been regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC's future becomes dimmer with the change in Goldman and Morgan Stanley's structures. Less Risky ``You can't kiss goodbye to the last two important investment banks without noting that the house is empty,'' said David Becker, a former SEC general counsel who is now a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Washington. ``It's a downward spiral where the less significant the population you regulate, the less your available resources.'' The change is also likely to lead to less risk-taking by the companies and possibly lower pay for their employees. Both Goldman and Morgan Stanley held more than $20 of assets for every $1 of shareholder equity, making them dependent on market funding to operate. Goldman, in particular, has been remarkable for the high bonuses it pays to its employees. Goldman's CEO and two co- presidents were each paid more than $67 million last year. ``They're going to have to protect their deposit bases by law, and the days of high leverage are gone,'' said Charles Geisst, a finance professor at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, who wrote ``Wall Street: A History.'' ``The days of the big bonuses are gone.'' To contact the reporter on this story: Christine Harper in New York at _charper at bloomberg.net_ (mailto:charper at bloomberg.net) . _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list _pen-l at lists.csuchico.edu_ (mailto:pen-l at lists.csuchico.edu) _https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l_ (https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l) **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Mon Sep 22 09:19:30 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:19:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic [Popper vs Marx] In-Reply-To: <20080916.203210.664.2.farmelantj@juno.com> References: <20080916.203210.664.2.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: I may have Shaw's book buried somewhere, but I'm not sure. Could you provide the complete bibliographic and page references? I've had The Scientific Marx sitting on my shelves for years, but I never looked at it. The chapter on falsifiability (on Popper, and also E. P. Thompson) is worth looking at. Little views Marx as doing science rather than dialectical philosophy. Little advises not to take a scientist's explicit methodological claims at face value, but look at their actual scientific practice to determine their implicit methodology and accompanying philosophy. Newton is a prime example here. I don't have Miller's book, but I'm guessing I should add it to the section of my bibliography on Popper & Marx. I will do same with Little. I'm tempted to scan the section on falsifiability. At 08:32 PM 9/16/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: > >On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:12:48 +0900 CeJ writes: > > That seems like such a weak way to attack the position--personal > > inconsistency. > > > > Is it really even a current debate? In the analytic tradition, > > after > > Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper--on what is a science and how it > > works--is thoroughly demolished. > >Some of the Analytical Marxists were interested in this issue. >Richard Miller addressed it in his book, *Analyzing Marx*, >Some of the other Analytical Marxists did too, like Daniel Little >in his *The Scientific Marx* and William Shaw in >in his *Marx's Theory of History*. >Both Little and Shaw used Lakatos to answer Popper, >while Miller drew upon Kuhn and Feyerabend. > >Remember that classical Marxism always insisted >that it was a science. Marx, as we might recall, >called his brand of socialism, scientific socialism. >Karl Popper, among other things, attempted to >explode what he saw as the scientific pretentions >of Marxism. Popper's attitude is summarized >here: >http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiabil >ity.html > > > > > In the non-philosophical 'mainstream', Marxism is usually attacked > > as > > a form of political philosophy leading to totalitarian states that > > are > > in conflict with 'human nature' and the 'progress of freedom'. > >Popper of course argued those things too, but he believed >that it was Marxism's ability at convincing people that it >was a genuine science that helped persuade people to >go along with it. > > > Most > > people have never followed the 'philosophy of science' critiques > > anyway. > > > > The wider discussion worth having would be about experimental > > methods, > > quantification and knowledge claims since the social sciences have > > pursued the former two and yet rely mostly on ideologically > > predisposed argument and academic status and little else to make > > knowledge claims, none of which have any hope of generalizing. > > > > CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 22 10:30:40 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:30:40 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Friday Note: Don't Mourn, Organize! References: <32938054.1221859342542.JavaMail.www@app309> Message-ID: <48D78FEF.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=yPcogRTqxj3FqrBllIVO4g.. September 19, 2008 ========================== Dear Charles, If you're following the election news as closely as I am, you're probably finding a lot of reasons to holler at your TV. How about Todd Palin refusing a subpoena from the legislative committee investigating "Troopergate" in Alaska, and Sarah Palin ducking requests to testify with claims of "executive privilege" (sound familiar?) -- haven't we had enough of executive branch officials insisting they're above the law? Or maybe for you it's the sight of the "get government out of the way" Republicans suddenly claiming that they're the ones to bring more effective government oversight to Wall Street. So much for free-market fundamentalism! Or maybe it's the implication by the McCain- Palin campaign with their "Country First" signs that anyone who does not support their ticket is not patriotic! Another thing that is making me furious is that people may be kept from casting their vote. Our affiliate People For the American Way Foundation has been documenting and mobilizing opposition to voter suppression efforts around the country -- but conservative officials keep finding new ways to try to keep some voters away from the polls. In Michigan -- a key presidential battleground state -- the Republican Party is training people to challenge voters at the polls, and is even planning to try to deny voters the chance to cast a ballot if their home has gone into foreclosure. It's disgusting, but it's only part of a much bigger picture -- we're seeing official efforts in other key states like Virginia, Ohio and Florida to find reasons to knock people off the voting rolls. Whatever is driving you to distraction this week, keep in mind labor organizer Joe Hill's famous admonition: "Don't mourn, organize!" There's a huge amount of exciting organizing People For and other progressive groups are doing right now -- and a lot of ways for you to get involved in these last few weeks before the election. First and foremost you should VOTE and take at least five friends to the polls with you. If your state lets you vote early, do it. But don't stop there. Here are three other things you can do to keep the White House and Supreme Court out of the hands of the radical Religious Right: 1. Get your ringside seats on October 2 when "Amtrak Joe" debates "Mooseburger Sarah" ... Host a People For vice presidential debate watch party with your friends. We have been documenting Sarah Palin's record of extremism, and we're going to keep it up -- we'll help you host a great party and send people off with new ammunition for their conversations with friends and family. Sign up at http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=4t5RwUCrhW5eD5mXu9blEg.. . 2. Volunteer some of your time to a progressive campaign during the next six weeks. Campaigns need help with voter identification and turnout, and in a close election year, this kind of ground work is vitally important -- and it's a fun way to get to know others in your community who share your political passions. Soon we will have a complete list of the candidates who are endorsed by the People For the American Way Voters Alliance. 3. Be on the front lines to protect voting rights and democracy. We can help you find a way to volunteer in key states on or before Election Day. Sign up here: http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=29YLfZD_SOITWEID0TH-kQ.. . Let's make sure that on November 5, we're tired but elated! All the best, Kathryn Kolbert, President P.S. Are you doing something new this election year that you've never done before? Do you have a creative idea for energizing people to take action? Let me know and we'll share some of your stories. You could inspire someone else to take the next step -- and you could help turn the tide! E-mail me at Kathryn at pfaw.org. ------- People For the American Way depends on the support of its members. Help make sure America lives up to the promise of freedom and equality for all by funding the work of People For with a gift today. http://site.pfaw.org/site/R?i=L3qcm9vmhwYfiu37v2SXHg.. ------- This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 22 10:46:07 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:46:07 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Mounting Fears Shake World Markets Message-ID: <48D7938F.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Mounting Fears Shake World Markets As Banking Giants Rush to Raise Capital By _TOM LAURICELLA_ (http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=TOM+LAURICELLA&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND) , _LIZ RAPPAPORT_ (http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=LIZ+RAPPAPORT&ARTICLESEARCHQ UERY_PARSER=bylineAND) and _ANNELENA LOBB_ (http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=ANNELENA+LOBB&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND) * _Article_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs=article) * _Slideshow_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_slideshow) * _Interactive Graphics_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_interactive) * _Comments_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_comments) more in _Markets Main_ (http://online.wsj.co m/public/page/news-financial-markets-stock.html) ? * _Email_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) * _Printer Friendly_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) * Share: * _Yahoo Buzz_ (http://buzz.yahoo.com/article/wsj/http: //online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html) (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) * _MySpace_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) * _Digg_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) * (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) _Text Size_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#) * Fear coursed through the U.S. financial system on Wednesday, as hope for a resolution to the year-old credit crisis faded. Stocks tumbled, concern grew about which financial firm would fall next, and investors rushed toward the safe haven of government bonds in the wake of the collapse of _Lehman Brothers Holdings_ (http://on line.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=leh) Inc. and the crisis at insurer _American International Group_ (http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=aig) . _View Interactive_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_interactive-DJ080917CloseBig) (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_interactive-DJ080917CloseBig) The market turmoil is doing more than inflicting losses on investors. Borrowing costs for U.S. companies have skyrocketed, and the debt markets have become nearly inaccessible to all but the most creditworthy borrowers. The desperation was especially striking in the market for U.S. government debt, long considered the safest of investments. At one point during the day, investors were willing to pay more for one-month Treasurys than they could expect to get back when the bonds matured. Some investors, in essence, had decided that a small but known loss was better than the uncertainty connected to any other type of investment. That's never happened before. In a special government auction on Wednesday, demand ran so high that the Treasury Department sold $40 billion in bills, far beyond what it needed to cover the government's obligations. "We've seen crisis. We've seen recession. But we've not seen the core of the financial system shaken like this," says Joseph Balestrino, a portfolio manager at Federated Investors. "It's just crazy." A 449-point selloff took the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its lowest level in almost three years, leaving it 23% below where it stood a year ago. Volume on the New York Stock Exchange was the second highest in history, falling just shy of the record set on Tuesday. The VIX, a widely watched measure of market volatility that is often referred to as the "fear index," hit its highest level since late 2002. In Europe, stock markets lost roughly 2% of their value. In Russia, the scene of recent massive declines, trading on the country's major exchanges was halted for the second day in a row, this time only an hour and a half into the session. Gold prices rose 9% to $846.60 an ounce amid the global turmoil. In early trading Thursday, Tokyo stocks were down 3.2%, among other declining markets in the region. _View Slideshow_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_slideshow-SLIDESHOW08-SB122170313812750883) (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169684690350209.html?mod=djemTMB#articleTabs_slideshow-SLIDESHOW08-SB122170313812750883) "Forget about retail investors, all the pros are scared," says one broker. "People have no idea where to put their money." For now, "if you have cash, you're going to put it in the short-term, most liquid stuff you can," says Steve Van Order, fixed-income strategist for Calvert Asset Management. Adding to the fear was a loss in a prominent money-market fund, the Reserve Primary Fund, which held Lehman Brothers debt. It was the first time since 1994 that such a fund, which is supposed to be as safe as a bank account, had lost money. The loss was made worse by a run on the fund. Over two days, investors pulled more than half of their assets from the fund, once valued at $64 billion. "This is a panic situation" in the bond markets, says Charles Comiskey, head of U.S. government-bond trading in New York at HSBC Securities USA Inc. Riskier assets were sold off. Yields on bonds issued by financial companies hit a record high of about six percentage points above U.S. Treasurys. In the market for credit-default swaps -- essentially insurance against default on assets tied to corporate debt and mortgage securities -- fears increased on Wednesday about whether counterparties would be able to honor their agreements. Investors tried to reduce their exposures to two more big players in the market, _Goldman Sachs Group_ (http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=gs) Inc. and _Morgan Stanley_ (http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=ms) . That sent the cost of protection on both Wall Street firms soaring to new highs. In the stock market, the pressure on financial firms continued, with Morgan Stanley stock dropping 24% and Goldman Sachs shares losing 14%. Investors say the government takeover of AIG and Lehman's bankruptcy filing are evidence that the situation is grimmer than all but the most pessimistic had expected. Problems have spread from complex debt markets tied directly to the housing market into plain-vanilla corporate bonds. More on the Crisis * _Morgan Stanley in Talks With Wachovia_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122168156315148901.html?mod=article-outset-box) * _Worst Crisis Since '30s, No End in Sight_ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169431617549947.html?mod=article-outset-box) * _Bad Bets and Cash Crunch Hurt AIG _ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122169483999349991.html?mod=article-outset-box) * _Complete Coverage: Wall Street in Crisis_ (http://online.wsj.com/page/wall-street-in-crisis.html) "Another front is opening," says Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of fixed-income research at Barclays Capital. Some people fear that the dwindling ranks of investment banks, coming at a time when commercial banks are pulling back on their own use of capital, will prolong the credit crunch. "It's unclear who is going to be a credit provider going forward, and if having fewer credit providers means higher costs of borrowing going forward," says Basil Williams, chief executive of hedge-fund manager Concordia Advisors. Ordinarily, bondholders are better protected from losses than stock investors. But the events of the past two weeks have shown that they are vulnerable, too. The Federal Reserve's rescue of AIG doesn't protect the company's bondholders. That's because the deal, which consists of a high-priced loan to the company from the government, requires AIG to pay the Treasury before current bondholders. If AIG can't raise enough cash by selling assets, bondholders won't be fully repaid. As a result, despite the Fed lifeline, some AIG debt is changing hands at just 40 cents on the dollar, less than half of the price one week ago. Now that Lehman has defaulted on its debt, its senior bonds are worth as little as 17 cents on the dollar, traders say. That's spilled over to other financial names seen as under stress. Bonds of Morgan Stanley are trading at around 60 cents on the dollar. Goldman Sachs's bonds are trading at prices in the range of 70 cents on the dollar. Associated Press A trader rubs his eyes as he works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street stumbled again Wednesday, with anxieties about the financial system still running high even after the government bailed out insurer AIG. As bond prices dropped, their yields rose. The spread between yields on corporate bonds and safe U.S. Treasurys have blown out to the widest levels traders have seen in years. On Wednesday, yields on investment-grade corporate bonds were more than four percentage points higher than comparable Treasury bonds, according to Merrill Lynch. Junk bonds ended the day more than nine percentage points over Treasurys, approaching the 2002 high of 10.6 percentage points, according to Merrill. Short-term debt markets, where companies borrow overnight or in periods up to one year, have dried up. The money-market-fund managers who normally buy such short-term debt have suffered losses on their holdings of debt in Lehman Brothers and other financial institutions. If companies can't borrow in the short-term debt markets, they may be forced to draw down on their revolving credit lines, yet another drain on banks' dwindling capital. The Lehman bankruptcy also pressured the market for leveraged loans, which are used by private-equity firms to finance buyouts. When the firm attempted to sell some of its loan holdings earlier this week, prices dropped toward 85 cents on the dollar, according to Standard & Poor's Leveraged Commentary & Data. The damage has gone beyond banks and brokerages. Ford Motor Credit Co., the finance arm of _Ford Motor_ (http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=f) Co., paid 7.5% for Tuesday-night overnight borrowings, says one trader. Typically, the rate for such debt would be about one-quarter percentage point over the federal-funds rate, which is currently 2%, he says. Even for companies considered of the safest credit quality, the cost of overnight debt is rising. _General Electric_ (http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=ge) Co. was forced to pay 3.5% for overnight borrowing on Wednesday, the trader says. In normal times, GE, which has the highest debt rating, would have to pay the equivalent of the federal-funds rate. "There's no evident catalyst for ending the pain," says Guy Lebas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery in Philadelphia.- This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon Sep 22 16:50:36 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:50:36 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Mushroom Cloud over Wall Street: "authority non reviewable" (section 8) Message-ID: Mushroom Cloud over Wall Street By Mike Whitney "One bank to rule them all; One bank to bind them..." 21/090/08 "ICH " -- - These are dark times. While you were sleeping the cockroaches were busy about their work, rummaging through the US Constitution, and putting the finishing touches on a scheme to assert absolute power over the nation's financial markets and the country's economic future. Industry representative Henry Paulson has submitted legislation to congress that will finally end the pretense that Bush controls anything more than reading the lines from a 4' by 6' teleprompter situated just inches from his lifeless pupils. Paulson is in charge now, and the coronation is set for sometime early next week. He rose to power in a stealthily-executed Bankster's Coup in which he, and his coterie of dodgy friends, declared martial law on the US economy while elevating himself to supreme leader. "All Hail Caesar!" The days of the republic are over. Section 8 of the proposed legislation says it all: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Right; "non-reviewable" supremacy. Congress, of course, is more than eager to abdicate whatever little authority they have left. They're infinitely grateful for their purely ceremonial role, the equivalent of Caligula's horse, albeit, with considerably less dignity. Has even one senator spoken out against this madness, which--according to informal internet polls--is resoundingly rejected by the voters? Does it concern the members of congress at all, that the present financial crisis was brought on by the proliferation and sale of trillions of dollars of mortgage-banked garbage which were fraudulently represented as Triple A rated bonds by the very same people who now claim to need unprecedented and dictatorial powers to fix the problem? Or are they more worried that the steady torrent of contributions which flows from Wall Street to congressional campaign coffers will be inconveniently disrupted if they fail to ratify this latest assault on democratic governance? The House of Representatives is one big steaming dungheap that should be leveled and turned into an amusement park instead of a taxpayer-funded knocking shop. What a pathetic collection of cowards and scumbags. Bloomberg News: " "The Bush administration sought unchecked power from Congress to buy $700 billion in bad mortgage investments from financial companies in what would be an unprecedented government intrusion into the markets. Through his plan, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson aims to avert a credit freeze that would bring the financial system and the world's largest economy to a standstill. The bill would prevent courts from reviewing actions taken under its authority. "He's asking for a huge amount of power,'' said Nouriel Roubini an economist at New York University. ``He's saying, `Trust me, I'm going to do it right if you give me absolute control.' This is not a monarchy." (Bloomberg) The banksters own this country, always have; only now they've decided to strip away the curtain and reveal the ghoulish visage of the puppet-master. It ain't pretty. Paulson decided that the financial markets needed an emergency trillion dollar face-lift just weeks before his former business partners at G-Sax were dragged off to the chopping block. Was that the reason? Everyone on Wall Street knew that the bulls-eye had already been ripped from Lehman's bloody back and was about to be fastened on Goldman's. Now, it looks like they will escape their day of reckoning due to Paulson's eleventh-hour reprieve. Nice touch, eh? From farmelantj at juno.com Mon Sep 22 18:52:09 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:52:09 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic [Popper vs Marx] Message-ID: <20080922.205210.5400.0.farmelantj@juno.com> On Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:19:30 -0400 Ralph Dumain writes: > I may have Shaw's book buried somewhere, but I'm not sure. Could you > > provide the complete bibliographic and page references? William H. Shaw, *Marx's Theory of History* (Stanford University Press, 1978). The discussion of Popper, Lakatos, falsifiability and research programs appears in the last chapter of the book, pp. 149-168. > > I've had The Scientific Marx sitting on my shelves for years, but I > > never looked at it. The chapter on falsifiability (on Popper, and > also E. P. Thompson) is worth looking at. Little views Marx as doing > > science rather than dialectical philosophy. Little advises not to > take a scientist's explicit methodological claims at face value, but > > look at their actual scientific practice to determine their implicit > > methodology and accompanying philosophy. Newton is a prime example > here. > > I don't have Miller's book, but I'm guessing I should add it to the > > section of my bibliography on Popper & Marx. I will do same with > Little. I'm tempted to scan the section on falsifiability. > > At 08:32 PM 9/16/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: > > > >On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:12:48 +0900 CeJ writes: > > > That seems like such a weak way to attack the > position--personal > > > inconsistency. > > > > > > Is it really even a current debate? In the analytic tradition, > > > after > > > Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper--on what is a science and how it > > > works--is thoroughly demolished. > > > >Some of the Analytical Marxists were interested in this issue. > >Richard Miller addressed it in his book, *Analyzing Marx*, > >Some of the other Analytical Marxists did too, like Daniel Little > >in his *The Scientific Marx* and William Shaw in > >in his *Marx's Theory of History*. > >Both Little and Shaw used Lakatos to answer Popper, > >while Miller drew upon Kuhn and Feyerabend. > > > >Remember that classical Marxism always insisted > >that it was a science. Marx, as we might recall, > >called his brand of socialism, scientific socialism. > >Karl Popper, among other things, attempted to > >explode what he saw as the scientific pretentions > >of Marxism. Popper's attitude is summarized > >here: > >http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiabi l > >ity.html > > > > > > > > In the non-philosophical 'mainstream', Marxism is usually > attacked > > > as > > > a form of political philosophy leading to totalitarian states > that > > > are > > > in conflict with 'human nature' and the 'progress of freedom'. > > > >Popper of course argued those things too, but he believed > >that it was Marxism's ability at convincing people that it > >was a genuine science that helped persuade people to > >go along with it. > > > > > Most > > > people have never followed the 'philosophy of science' > critiques > > > anyway. > > > > > > The wider discussion worth having would be about experimental > > > methods, > > > quantification and knowledge claims since the social sciences > have > > > pursued the former two and yet rely mostly on ideologically > > > predisposed argument and academic status and little else to > make > > > knowledge claims, none of which have any hope of generalizing. > > > > > > CJ > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > > ____________________________________________________________ Save on Trade Schools - Click here. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3oLavvCUeEaPmZXxZ6baz5wOvk6j6U8V14ISV6NrESvBBTfL/ From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Mon Sep 22 22:11:29 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:11:29 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic [Popper vs Marx] In-Reply-To: <20080922.205210.5400.0.farmelantj@juno.com> References: <20080922.205210.5400.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: Thanks. I've added this reference to my bibliography. Now on my web site: Little, Daniel. The Scientific Marx. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. See "Falsifiability and Adhocness" (pp. 177-186) in chapter 7, "Falsifiability and Idealism" (pp. 177-195). At 08:52 PM 9/22/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: >On Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:19:30 -0400 Ralph Dumain ><rdumain at autodidactproject.org> >writes: > > I may have Shaw's book buried somewhere, but I'm not sure. Could you > > > > provide the complete bibliographic and page references? > >William H. Shaw, *Marx's Theory of History* >(Stanford University Press, 1978). The discussion >of Popper, Lakatos, falsifiability and research >programs appears in the last chapter of the >book, pp. 149-168. > > > > > I've had The Scientific Marx sitting on my shelves for years, but I > > > > never looked at it. The chapter on falsifiability (on Popper, and > > also E. P. Thompson) is worth looking at. Little views Marx as doing > > > > science rather than dialectical philosophy. Little advises not to > > take a scientist's explicit methodological claims at face value, but > > > > look at their actual scientific practice to determine their implicit > > > > methodology and accompanying philosophy. Newton is a prime example > > here. > > > > I don't have Miller's book, but I'm guessing I should add it to the > > > > section of my bibliography on Popper & Marx. I will do same with > > Little. I'm tempted to scan the section on falsifiability. > > > > At 08:32 PM 9/16/2008, Jim Farmelant wrote: > > > > > >On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:12:48 +0900 CeJ > <jannuzi at gmail.com> writes: > > > > That seems like such a weak way to attack the > > position--personal > > > > inconsistency. > > > > > > > > Is it really even a current debate? In the analytic tradition, > > > > after > > > > Lakatos and Feyerabend, Popper--on what is a science and how it > > > > works--is thoroughly demolished. > > > > > >Some of the Analytical Marxists were interested in this issue. > > >Richard Miller addressed it in his book, *Analyzing Marx*, > > >Some of the other Analytical Marxists did too, like Daniel Little > > >in his *The Scientific Marx* and William Shaw in > > >in his *Marx's Theory of History*. > > >Both Little and Shaw used Lakatos to answer Popper, > > >while Miller drew upon Kuhn and Feyerabend. > > > > > >Remember that classical Marxism always insisted > > >that it was a science. Marx, as we might recall, > > >called his brand of socialism, scientific socialism. > > >Karl Popper, among other things, attempted to > > >explode what he saw as the scientific pretentions > > >of Marxism. Popper's attitude is summarized > > >here: > > > > ifiabi>http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiabi >l > > >ity.html > > > > > > > > > > > In the non-philosophical 'mainstream', Marxism is usually > > attacked > > > > as > > > > a form of political philosophy leading to totalitarian states > > that > > > > are > > > > in conflict with 'human nature' and the 'progress of freedom'. > > > > > >Popper of course argued those things too, but he believed > > >that it was Marxism's ability at convincing people that it > > >was a genuine science that helped persuade people to > > >go along with it. > > > > > > > Most > > > > people have never followed the 'philosophy of science' > > critiques > > > > anyway. > > > > > > > > The wider discussion worth having would be about experimental > > > > methods, > > > > quantification and knowledge claims since the social sciences > > have > > > > pursued the former two and yet rely mostly on ideologically > > > > predisposed argument and academic status and little else to > > make > > > > knowledge claims, none of which have any hope of generalizing. > > > > > > > > CJ > > _______________________________________________ > > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > > > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > > > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Tue Sep 23 09:23:59 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:23:59 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Balance-sheet of U.S. imperialism Message-ID: Interrnational Viewpoint IV Online magazine : IV404 - September 2008 Decline and change Balance-sheet of U.S. imperialism Gilbert Achcar http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1520 From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 23 13:18:31 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:18:31 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why Obama is always calm Message-ID: <48D908C8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22observer.html The New York Times September 22, 2008 Editorial Observer Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race By BRENT STAPLES It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated "uppity niggers" and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples. The term "uppity" was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood. Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye -- and argued with them about things that mattered -- were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible. This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche -- and the national language -- to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency. A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as "uppity" in response to a reporter's question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear. The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. -- and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama's lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. "That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," he said. In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed "disrespectful," the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters. In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being "disrespectful" to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear. The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways. Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement -- or a phrase -- that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone. These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 06:57:38 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:57:38 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Will Uncle Sam take on bad car loans? Message-ID: <48DA0103.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> ill Uncle Sam take on bad car loans? _Donna Harris_ (mailto:dharris at crain.com) and _Harry Stoffer_ (mailto:hstoffer at crain.com) Automotive News | September 23, 2008 - 2:45 pm EST WASHINGTON -- Should taxpayer dollars be used to buy up bad car loans? A financial trade association says yes. The idea arose today amid reports of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to broaden a $700 billion federal cleanup of bad debt, which is expected to focus primarily on home mortgages. The car-loans question is separate from the $25 billion in government loans being sought by the auto industry to help retool plants to build fuel-efficient vehicles. Congress is considering up to $7.5 billion in funding to begin financing those loans. But amid the mortgage meltdown enveloping Wall Street, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association says the U.S. Treasury Department should have ?maximum flexibility? to decide how best to restart credit markets, association spokesman Travis Larson said. His group, representing banks, securities firms and asset management companies, is not prejudging whether securitized auto loans should be in the program, but Treasury should have the option, he said. Other troubled debt includes student loans, home equity loans and credit cards. The American Financial Services Association is asking Congress to allow auto finance companies and other institutions to tap the $700 billion bailout fund designed for the troubled mortgage industry. The trade association, based here, also is proposing that automobile loans be classified as ?troubled assets? along with home mortgages. ?The goal behind all this is liquidity," American Financial Services Association spokeswoman Lynne Strang told Automotive News. ?It's not that auto loans are performing badly. But what's happening in the mortgage business is affecting liquidity, particularly in the secondary markets (where auto loans are bundled and sold as securities). We want auto finance companies to be able to raise the money they need to finance more auto purchases." Strang said the association's proposal is designed to help all its members --which cut across a variety of industries, not just automotive. The Wall Street Journal reported today that some automotive finance companies are lobbying to be included specifically in the proposed bailout, which would be the biggest government intervention in private markets since the Great Depression. Michele Lieber, GMAC?s vice president for government relations, declined comment. GMAC spokeswoman Gina Proia would say only that the company supports action to bring stability to credit markets. GMAC has had losses both in its mortgage business and in auto lending. In 2006 General Motors sold 51 percent of GMAC to Cerberus Capital Management LP, a private equity firm. Cerberus also owns Chrysler LLC and its captive finance company. Bill Himpler, executive vice president of federal affairs for the American Financial Services Association, said, ?The ripple effect of the credit crunch in the mortgage sector has brought the nation's finance companies' ability to secure credit lines from investors to a virtual standstill.? He added, ?If they are not explicitly included in the definition of a ? financial institution,? these companies will be placed at a distinct disadvantage to the types of institutions explicitly enumerated in the legislative language in their ability to access the liquidity needed to continue to lend to consumers.? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 07:58:30 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:58:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Soldiers Revolution Message-ID: <48DA0F47.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> From Feral Scholar blog: http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/09/14/open-letter-to-christian-us-troops-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/#comment-255469 That was moving, thank you Mr. Goff - wish I had read it while I was on active duty. Thought I?d share my letter with you - A Soldiers Revolution I joined the Army in the early months of 2001; my patriotism led me to the recruiter?s office. I had grown up in awe of my grandfathers and their stories of World War II, and their reminiscing became my dreams. When I got to basic training I did not talk about missing home like the other recruits around me, I felt at home in ways I never had before. The weeks after 9/11 found me in Kosovo, serving under NATO command, part of C co 3/7 Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, patrolling the border with Macedonia as part of our duties. We had ammunition to defend ourselves with and the authority to apprehend anyone crossing the border illegally. I will get back to why these details are important later. Fast forward to 2003, I am rolling across the desert in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle, part of the spearhead into Iraq, there to enforce U.N. resolutions. Other than those first three weeks of ?Shock and Awe? what I remember most about Iraq was the people. Crowds of kids wanting to know about Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, open-minded adults wanted to know about our social freedoms, and ninety some percent of Iraqis just wanted to raise their families in peace and did not hesitate to tell us. I really fell in love with the Iraqi people. My platoon and I played soccer with some of those crowds of kids, we had dinner and shared food with families in their homes, we even went to a few house parties, and my lieutenant and I spent one very memorable afternoon swimming in an irrigation ditch with five young women. It is all of them I think of when anyone tells me we need to turn the Middle East into a sheet of glass or that all Muslims are our enemies. I remember thinking on this briefly when I was there, but more so since I?ve returned, usually when I?m day dreaming, but what we were doing when we were doing our jobs, patrolling the streets, conducting road block vehicle searches, bodily searching individuals, and searching houses, couldn?t be helping our long range plans for winning hearts and minds. I really have to wonder, how long would it take me to move from a position of thanks for my despotic government being removed to feeling like I lived in a conquered and occupied country if I saw foreign troops on the streets of my hometown everyday? Add to this our having bases and troops in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, ( I may have missed a few, we have approximately 700 bases in 130 countries) our Navy of their coast, our fighter jets in their sky?s , the CIA in business with monarchs, dictators and thugs, and our State Department treating their leaders like irresponsible children, it?s no wonder moderate Muslims takes to the streets shouting ? Death to America? and a minority takes action against us. I would expect we would be doing the same thing if say, China had bases on our soil, and her Navy patrolled our coastline and Chinese fighter jets streaked across our sky. In short, this is all hard to admit, but our actions do have consequences. To do nothing in the face of foreign tyranny on our soil would be Un-American and unimaginable. The Chinese would brand me a ?terrorist? would you? Fast forward again to the present day, I am out of active duty, and in the Army Reserves. (I wanted to stay active duty, but my wife said I would be single, so we had a compromise.)To be honest the reserves bored me to tears and I didn?t feet like I was giving anything back to my country, so I looked into getting attached to a National Guard unit on our border with Mexico for a tour or two. However, when I learned they don?t have the authority to apprehend illegal border crossers and can only call up our overworked and overstretched border patrol when they spot illegal activity, I got myself in trouble again by thinking - about what I had done in Kosovo and about what I knew our military had done to our own people in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina (disarmed law abiding civilians only trying to protect themselves when the police had failed to do so). To add insult to injury, our Guardsmen and women on our own border don?t have ammunition and have on several documented occasions actually had to retreat when facing fire from Mexican paramilitary groups. Now why would I want to sign up for that? To be witness to the violation of America?s sovereignty? I asked questions, and never got anything close to an answer with any logic behind it. No one in the Executive branch of our government is doing anything about it, and it made me wonder why I am even in the Army at all. All of this is why I am leaving the Army, Its not an easy decision for me to make, with seven years already under my belt, I had planned on proudly serving twenty, but I can not in clear conscience continue serving a government that governs in an unconstitutional manner. Congress has abandoned it?s responsibilities and needs a refresher course in just what their job is, I urge everyone to read Article one Section eight of the constitution where it is spelled out in plain language. The Presidents powers are very limited and found in Article two Section two, we need to remind anyone who takes that office of that limitation. When I took an oath to serve, upholding the Constitution comes above all else, as a soldier I can no longer do that when our civilian leadership runs roughshod over that very same document. Why are we the world?s policeman when our own country is being openly violated? Why are we borrowing money hand over fist from nations not exactly our friends, just to spend it on our out of control foreign policy? These are questions more people need to start asking, or the discussion will become a moot point as we as a nation will be economically and morally bankrupt. I am starting to feel like the powers that be do not have America?s interests in mind at all, it is starting to feel like our ruin is their objective. America is crumbling, yet I love her far too much to watch her fall apart. Join me, its not to late to turn things around. Educate yourself concerning the crushing debt we are now under and the history of nations who took this path that we are now on. I hope to put the uniform on again one day, when the only time the American military goes to war is when our freedom and sovereignty is in jeopardy, and not the interests of global corporations, a politician?s personal desire to make a mark in the history books, or to prevent potential ambiguous threats from materializing; we do not hang people because we think they may commit crime in the future, and we should never again do so to another nation, no matter how much we detest their leaders and their policies. Our founding fathers were wise men, I suggest we start conducting ourselves in foreign affairs in a way that does them honor. When America once again stands up for itself, and ends this madness of empire, then I can feel the pride of serving again. Thank you and God Bless. Zak Carter http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/09/14/open-letter-to-christian-us-troops-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/#comment-255469 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 08:10:19 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:10:19 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Soldier's Revolution Message-ID: <48DA120C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Add to this our having bases and troops in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, ( I may have missed a few, we have approximately 700 bases in 130 countries) our Navy off their coast, our fighter jets in their sky?s , the CIA in business with monarchs, dictators and thugs, and our State Department treating their leaders like irresponsible children, ^^^^ CB: Exactly, and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles on land and in submarines with nuclear wars heads, 10 of thousands of them, while threatening to build Star Wars Missile Defense systems, (why wouldn?t they easily be Offensive systems ?) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 08:28:01 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:28:01 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] No to Wall Street bailout! Message-ID: <48DA1632.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/econ-s22.shtml No to Wall Street bailout! The socialist answer to the financial crisis Statement of the Socialist Equality Party National Committee 22 September 2008 The Socialist Equality Party and its presidential and vice presidential candidates, Jerome White and Bill Van Auken, unequivocally oppose the plan to bail out Wall Street with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds announced by the Bush administration and embraced by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership. The plan, which is being rushed through Congress for passage this week, is the response of the government and the entire political establishment to what is acknowledged to be the greatest economic crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929. It calls for an unprecedented transfer of public funds to the major banks and the American financial elite at the expense of the broad mass of the people. Both the plan itself and the manner in which it is being imposed are deeply undemocratic. Exploiting the breakdown in US and global financial markets, the financial aristocracy, which is responsible for the crisis, is exercising its control over the government, both political parties, and the media to implement policies of the most far-reaching character without any genuine debate or discussion. As in the aftermath of 9/11, it is seeking to utilize the crisis to push through policies that would otherwise be considered entirely unacceptable. None of the measures being carried out changes the underlying causes of the financial meltdown, nor will they resolve the crisis. At most, they will only postpone the day of reckoning. None of those who control the banks and finance houses are being held accountable, and not a penny is being allocated to provide relief for millions of working class families who are losing their homes, their jobs, and their livelihoods as a result of the frenzied speculation that led to the crisis. Make no mistake: The working people, who are the victims of the financial parasitism of the ruling elite, will foot the bill to bail out those who have enriched themselves by plundering the social wealth. The massive expansion of budget deficits and the national debt as a result of this plan will be used to justify a brutal assault on basic social programs, education, housing and the wages, jobs, pensions, and health benefits of the working class. The government has pegged the cost of the program?by which the US Treasury will purchase virtually worthless mortgage-backed assets from banks and other financial institutions?at $700 billion. This sum already represents the biggest corporate bailout in world history. It is larger than the annual budget for Social Security and the combined annual outlay for Medicare and Medicaid. It has been estimated that such an expenditure translates to a cost for each US family of approximately $10,000. Combined with the stated cost of other corporate bailouts and related outlays carried out over the past several weeks?$200 billion in the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $85 billion in the takeover of the insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG), $50 billion to insure money market funds, and $200 billion in Treasury transfers to the Federal Reserve Board?the $700 billion handout to the banks exceeds the total allotment for all discretionary spending, excluding the Pentagon, for fiscal year 2009. In fact, the figure of $700 billion is a huge underestimation of the ultimate cost of the Wall Street rescue plan. The New York Times noted Monday that the decision of the Bush administration to extend its purchase of securities to foreign-based banks that operate in the United States?carried out under pressure from global institutions that hold massive amounts of US debt?will substantially drive up the cost of the program. The text of the four-page ?Legislative Proposal for Treasury Authority to Purchase Mortgage-Related Assets,? published Saturday by the New York Times, reveals the profoundly anti-democratic and open-ended nature of the scheme. The first provision establishes the unlimited and unilateral authority of the Treasury secretary, an unelected official, to order the use of taxpayer funds to purchase whatever ?mortgage-related? securities, at whatever price, at whatever amount and from whatever financial institutions he chooses. It states that the secretary?currently Henry Paulson, the multi-millionaire former CEO of Goldman Sachs?is ?authorized to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, on such terms and conditions as determined by the secretary, mortgage-related assets from any financial institution...? This is followed by a provision stipulating that the Treasury secretary?s authority under the act is ?without limitation.? A further provision authorizes the Treasury secretary to enter into contracts with the banks ?without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts.? In other words, to ignore established law concerning public contracts. The proposal states that the government will designate ?financial institutions? to operate the bailout program. This means that the government will hand over management of the program to some of the very corporations that are responsible for the crisis and which stand to profit directly or indirectly from the bailout. Congress, under the proposal, will be relegated to receiving semi-annual reports from the Treasury Department. It will have no real power of oversight or control. The proposal gives the Treasury secretary unchecked authority to resell assets the department has taken off of the hands of the banks. This means that the banks will profit on both ends of the deal?they will be relieved of massive debts and will then be able to buy back the securities at fire-sale prices after the housing market has restabilized. The text states that the Treasury secretary?s authority to purchase mortgage-related assets will be limited to $700 billion ?at any one time.? In other words, he will be able to buy more worthless assets after having sold back some of those previously purchased?rendering the supposed $700 billion limit fictitious. Under ?Termination of Authority,? the proposal declares a two-year limit, but includes certain exemptions that will, in practice, enable the Treasury to extend the duration of the program indefinitely. The proposal calls for a $700 billion increase in the statutory limit on the national debt, raising it to $11.315 trillion. It then defines ?mortgage-related assets? so broadly as to potentially cover everything from trillions of dollars in bonds to the estimated $62 trillion unregulated market in so-called ?credit default swaps.? Perhaps the most extraordinary provision reads as follows: ?Decisions by the secretary pursuant to the authority of this act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.? This flagrantly unconstitutional provision establishes the unelected Treasury secretary as a law unto himself, beyond the control or oversight of Congress, other executive agencies or the courts. Two things need to be said of this provision: It makes overt what is normally hidden behind the trappings of American democracy?that is, the dictatorship of finance capital?and it implicitly acknowledges that what is being proposed is a violation of law. Why else insist that no one be allowed to challenge it in court? That Obama and the entire Democratic Party leadership have lined up to endorse this windfall for the richest people in the country explodes their pretensions to offering an alternative to Bush and McCain and underscores the total subordination of both parties to the financial elite. The bailout plan, devised by and for the most powerful sections of the American capitalist class, exposes all of the lies and myths that have been promulgated to defend the profit system: the claim that multimillion-dollar paychecks for corporate executives, vast profits for speculators, and ever-widening social inequality are justified because the capitalists must be compensated for their ?risk-taking?; the mantra that social problems cannot be solved by ?throwing money? at them, and that, at any rate, there is no money for jobs, housing, health care or education; the constant invocations against ?big government.? It demonstrates the class character of the government and the policies and decisions it takes, and the existence, behind the trappings of democracy, of a plutocracy?the rule of the rich. The real source of the financial crisis is not and cannot be discussed by any of the official institutions or any of the political representatives of big business, whether Republican or Democratic. It is the capitalist system itself, which has for decades sought to overcome its fundamental contradictions by engaging in ever more parasitic and fraudulent forms of financial manipulation?piling up debt while dismantling the productive infrastructure of society. American capitalism has become the global leader in the creation of personal wealth for the ruling elite entirely separated from the creation of real value in the process of production. The current economic breakdown, which threatens the world?s people with catastrophe, is the inevitable result. The alternative to the naked dictatorship of capital and the impoverishment of the working people is socialism. The Socialist Equality Party insists that if the resources of the American people must be mobilized to avert an economic catastrophe, then the American working people should assume control of the financial institutions and use them for the common good, not corporate profit and personal enrichment. We propose that the major banks and financial institutions be nationalized and turned into public utilities, operated under the democratic control of the working population. The vast financial resources that they control must be used to provide decent education, housing, health care, retirement benefits and good-paying jobs for all. This should be carried out without compensation to their former owners, while securing the deposits and savings of working people and small business owners. The billions of dollars in social wealth diverted into the private accounts of speculators and bankers must be recovered, to be used for the expansion of social programs that benefit the masses. There must be a public accounting of the fraud and corruption that have fueled the crisis, and those responsible must be held accountable, including by means of criminal prosecution. The books of the major banks, financial firms, insurance companies and hedge funds must be opened to public examination, to lay bare illegal and socially destructive activity. The Socialist Equality Party and its candidates for president and vice president, Jerome White and Bill Van Auken, advocate the creation of a workers? government?a government of, by and for the working class?to carry out emergency measures to resolve the crisis in the interests of working people, including a halt to all foreclosures and repossession of homes, the creation of millions of public works jobs, a ban on wage-cutting and layoffs, and an enormous expansion in public services. We issue an urgent appeal to all those who oppose the bankrupting of society for the benefit of the financial elite, who wish to defend the interests of working people, and who see the need for a socialist alternative to the two parties of big business: Support the SEP election campaign and its candidates, Jerome White and Bill Van Auken. Join the Socialist Equality Party. See Also: US government to bail out Wall Street [20 September 2008] Obama?s response to financial meltdown: Deception and subservience to Wall Street [19 September 2008] No return to the 1930s! For the public ownership of the banks! Statement by SEP presidential candidate Jerome White [17 September 2008] US Federal Reserve announces $85 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG [17 September 2008] The Wall Street crisis and the failure of American capitalism [16 September 2008] This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 09:01:13 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:01:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] a message from "Nigeria" Message-ID: <48DA1DFB.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Pen-l From: "Jim Devine" SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP DEAR AMERICAN: I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE. I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU. I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAMM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% SAFE. THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED. PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO WALLSTREETBAILOUT at xxxxxxxxxxxx SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO PROTECT THE FUNDS. YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 09:08:15 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:08:15 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] My rescue plan Message-ID: <48DA1FA0.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> My rescue plan -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: pen-l at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [Pen-l] Re: My rescue plan From: "Julio Huato" Jim wrote: > (you meant "trillion" for the "million" in the last line, right?) Yes, thank you! That and other corrections are incorporated in the latest version of my plan, here on my blog: http://juliohuato.wordpress.com/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Sep 24 09:40:25 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:40:25 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Given the extremes of Marxology between the philosophic/humanistic on the one side and scientism on the other, the intent of Marx viz. science is not easily decidable. I would venture that Marx's analysis exists on several levels or in several dimensions simultaneously, and that it is scientific in part and part something else. Note that Daniel Little isolates Marx's analysis of political economy as scientific from Marx's overall oeuvre and viewpoint. Patrick Murray's book on Marx's philosophy of science should also be consulted. My attention is elsewhere, so my mind is rather stale on this subject. At 10:07 PM 9/19/2008, CeJ wrote: >CB:>> However, "double standard" is an _ad hominem_ argument at the >first level in the sense that even if Popper's situationalist social >science is not science, Marxism might also not be a science for the >reason that Popper says. >The question is does Popper's falsibiability criterion derive from his >situationalist social science .Also, there is or are falsibiability >statements for Marxism meeting Popper's falsibiability criterion.<< > >Good points all CB. > >Or that Popper's critiques of Marxism and Freudians might be >irrefutable but he was personally inconsistent in how he applied his >methods--possibly for personal reasons (he knew who to stand on and he >knew who to thank). > >Popper saw the LPs epistemology as unworkable and supposed he had come >up with something better. I think Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend show he >didn't. > >Which brings me back to that old debate of : Is Marxism a Science? And >I would say anyone asking the question ought to first answer what do >they mean by 'science'? >I see Marx as one of the founders of modern social science (especially >those that attempt to deal with 'social collectivities'), for better >or worse (often better). >And insights, theories, concepts, etc. AFTER Marx have been >incorporated into social scientific pursuits, regardless of this label >'Marxist'. And in the case of the label, we see some examples here on >the list, such as Althusser (structuralist Marxism) and Sartre >(whatever you want to call that work 'Critique' that we were >discussing). > >CJ From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Sep 24 12:42:44 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:42:44 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Positivist Dispute (Positivismusstreit) - 13 Message-ID: In re: Adorno, Theodor W.; et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976. Title pages, contents, index of sources http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/contents.html There are three contributions by Adorno in this volume. With this web page I have now digitized all of them: Theodor W. Adorno, Sociology and Empirical Research From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 13:13:01 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:13:01 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism Message-ID: <48DA58FC.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism CeJ jannuzi What McCain proposes seems similar to what is already in place in Japan. However, the government here certainly didn't nationalize any insurance companies that I know of during that crisis in the late 90s. It nationalized banks. A few observations from what I noticed of the Japanese experience: 1. Nationalization was limited to duff banks, most notably credit banks. ^^^ CB: What does "duff" mean ? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 13:56:04 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:56:04 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Letter to a Marxmail subscriber Message-ID: <48DA6314.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> andie nachgeborenen Call me a Kantian liberal then. I acknowledge the "linguistic division of labor," as Hilary Putnam (then in PL) called the need to defer to real expertise that any given person necessarily lacks. If I want to learn about medicine, I consult a doctor, if something is wrong with my car, I take it to a mechanic, when my computer doesn't work, I call tech support (or my wife), when I have to do my taxes, I take it my accountant. I hope that when you have a legal problem you refer it to a lawyer. Etc. ^^^ CB: Yes, here, it is the issue that Castro is an expert observer and analyst of US imperialism , including its high level conspiracies. He proves his expertise in practice by surviving them. Chavez survived them too. I would not just defer to them. But would treat their thinking as expert testimony in my thinking. In the end, I am the ultimate judge for me. I don't think for myself by myself. But I _judge_ for myself. This is a correction of Kant: _Judge_ for yourself. ^^^^^^^ ^^^ I also agree with Charles that two heads are better than one in the sense that often, if there is mutual consultation even amoing the relatively ignorant, but especially among people with different relevant expertise, or both, we often get better results than trying to think up stuff all by ourselves alone, maybe unless we are Kant. Knowledge is a social process. That is wht we have departmentys and acvademies of science, seminars and conferences, bull sessions and get togethers. And, Al Gore bless it :->, the internet. (I just showed a mystified student how to find the local court rules in three steps with google, knowning nothing more than the name of the court.) BUT none of this means that any two heads are better than one. Heydsrich and Himmler together are worse, unless what youi want is to figure out how to kill millions. But that's a bad example, they were real experts in something bad. Two ignorant heads are nothing to defer to. If, for example, you took me, a civil litigator and criminal defense attorney and law prof who teaches mostly procedure, and my hall neighbor, an intellectual property scholar, and put to us a question about the collapse ofg Mayan civilization, you'd be lucky to get half-baked speculations misremembered from Jared Diamond, who may or may not know anything himself, even though he sounds pretty good. ^^^^ CB: I probably have more expertise than Diamond in anthropology. However, his _Guns, Germs and Steel_ is worthwhile and a popular authority, and a _confession_ of the Western world of its world historic crimes, so I like it as a source. ^^^^ ^^^^ I have absolutely to reason to think that whatever real expertise and knowledge in government that Castro and Chavez have leaves me any reason whatsoever to think they they, individually or collectively, have anything illuminating to say about 9/11. Maybe, conceivably, they have intelligence sources that give them information, and with a truckload of salt I might listen to a Cuban or Venezualian intelligence analyst who had special knowledge of the shadow world of terrorism, and I include in that many US government activities. But I'd want to see the cards on the table. I wouldn't take their word for it without support. given that they might have a special interest in belief in certain propositions that might or might not be true. ^^^^^ CB: Yes, definitely, all witnesses' testimony, expert and other wise, must be weighed for bias and other indicia of veracity. ^^^^^ Frankly, I don't take my _doctor's_ word for what's wrong with me without some explanation or at least explanation of why I couldn't have an explanation. I recall in grad school, after my dad had had a heart attack, having an EKG, I went for the results and the Dr leafed through the paper, a bunch of squiggles, and said, Your heart is fine. I asked, how could you tell? He picked up a fat treatise from his desk and said, For me to explain in a meaningful way, you'd have to understand THIS. OK, I'll buy that, I said. Anyway, I guess it depends on which two heads are better for what and what's in those heads as wella s what goes on between them, whether they are better than one. ^^^^^^^ CB: Well, get a second opinion with doctors too. Of course, two times zero is zero. But in general, don't just think for yourself by yourself. Think for yourself with others. Ultimately, at our age, you have to trust yourself, most of the time. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 14:05:52 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:05:52 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic Message-ID: <48DA6560.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> CeJ jannuzi at gmail.com Which overall system of thought, approach to political economy, has better predicted the current financial crisis in the US-dominated world economy? CJ ^^^^ CB: Marxism certainly maintains that in general capitalism cannot escape economic crises forever, though there is no claim of ability to predict the exact timing of crisis. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 14:24:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:24:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Too Big to Fail versus Moral Hazard Henry C.K. Liu Message-ID: <48DA69A8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> CeJ jannuzi Now what seems to be taking place is Bush-Paulson asking the rest of the world to bear the immediate costs of all this federal intervention in financial markets because the creditor nations are going to have to hold the debt the US issues to cover it. Just as they have asked to float the wars of occupation, the expansion of the US military, the previous credit bubble, etc. CJ ^^^^ CB: My nickname for Michael Hudson's "Superimperialism" is " Got-the-world-on-a-string-sittin'-on-a-rainbow-got-the-string-tied-around-my-finger capitalism" Ive got the world on a string Writer(s): harold arlen/t. koehler Ive got the world on a string Im sitting on a rainbow Got the string around my finger What a world, what a life - Im in love Ive got a song that I sing I can make the rain go Any time I move my finger Lucky me, cant you see - Im in love Lifes a wonderful thing As long as I hold the string Id be a silly so-and-so If I should ever let her go This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 14:40:17 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:40:17 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cultural Logic Message-ID: <48DA6D71.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ralph Dumain Given the extremes of Marxology between the philosophic/humanistic on the one side and scientism on the other, the intent of Marx viz. science is not easily decidable. I would venture that Marx's analysis exists on several levels or in several dimensions simultaneously, and that it is scientific in part and part something else. Note that Daniel Little isolates Marx's analysis of political economy as scientific from Marx's overall oeuvre and viewpoint. Patrick Murray's book on Marx's philosophy of science should also be consulted. My attention is elsewhere, so my mind is rather stale on this subject. ^^^ CB: How about The Theses on Feuerbach as a sort of precis on how to proceed "in unity" of humanism and science. So, Marxism is both. Below is section from _Ludwig Feuerbach_ where Engels attempts to distinguish yet unite natural and social science. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch04.htm But what is true of nature, which is hereby recognized also as a historical process of development, is likewise true of the history of society in all its branches and of the totality of all sciences which occupy themselves with things human (and divine). Here, too, the philosophy of history, of right, of religion, etc., has consisted in the substitution of an interconnection fabricated in the mind of the philosopher for the real interconnection to be demonstrated in the events; has consisted in the comprehension of history as a whole as well as in its separate parts, as the gradual realization of ideas ? and naturally always only the pet ideas of the philosopher himself. According to this, history worked unconsciously but of necessity towards a certain ideal goal set in advance ? as, for example, in Hegel, towards the realization of his absolute idea ? and the unalterable trend towards this absolute idea formed the inner interconnection in the events of history. A new mysterious providence ? unconscious or gradually coming into consciousness ? was thus put in the place of the real, still unknown interconnection. Here, therefore, just as in the realm of nature, it was necessary to do away with these fabricated, artificial interconnections by the discovery of the real ones ? a task which ultimately amounts to the discovery of the general laws of motion which assert themselves as the ruling ones in the history of human society. In one point, however, the history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature. In nature ? in so far as we ignore man?s reaction upon nature ? there are only blind, unconscious agencies acting upon one another, out of whose interplay the general law comes into operation. Nothing of all that happens ? whether in the innumerable apparent accidents observable upon the surface, or in the ultimate results which confirm the regularity inherent in these accidents ? happens as a consciously desired aim. In the history of society, on the contrary, the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim. But this distinction, important as it is for historical investigation, particularly of single epochs and events, cannot alter the fact that the course of history is governed by inner general laws. For here, also, on the whole, in spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature. The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws, and it is only a matter of discovering these laws. Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history. Thus it is also a question of what the many individuals desire. The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. Partly they may be external objects, partly ideal motives, ambition, ?enthusiasm for truth and justice?, personal hatred, or even purely individual whims of all kinds. But, on the one hand, we have seen that the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended ? often quite the opposite; that their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical forces which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors? The old materialism never put this question to itself. Its conception of history, in so far as it has one at all, is therefore essentially pragmatic; it divides men who act in history into noble and ignoble and then finds that as a rule the noble are defrauded and the ignoble are victorious. hence, it follows for the old materialism that nothing very edifying is to be got from the study of history, and for us that in the realm of history the old materialism becomes untrue to itself because it takes the ideal driving forces which operate there as ultimate causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving forces. This inconsistency does not lie in the fact that ideal driving forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their motive causes. On the other hand, the philosophy of history, particularly as represented by Hegel, recognizes that the ostensible and also the really operating motives of men who act in history are by no means the ultimate causes of historical events; that behind these motives are other motive powers, which have to be discovered. But it does not seek these powers in history itself, it imports them rather from outside, from philosophical ideology, into history. Hegel, for example, instead of explaining the history of ancient Greece out of its own inner interconnections, simply maintains that it is nothing more than the working out of ?forms of beautiful individuality?, the realization of a ?work of art? as such. He says much in this connection about the old Greeks that is fine and profound, but that does not prevent us today from refusing to be put off with such an explanation, which is a mere manner of speech. When, therefore, it is a question of investigating the driving powers which ? consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very often unconsciously ? lie behind the motives of men who act in history and which constitute the real ultimate driving forces of history, then it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole people, and again whole classes of the people in each people; and this, too, not merely for an instant, like the transient flaring up of a straw-fire which quickly dies down, but as a lasting action resulting in a great historical transformation. To ascertain the driving causes which here in the minds of acting masses and their leaders ? to so-called great men ? are reflected as conscious motives, clearly or unclearly, directly or in an ideological, even glorified, form ? is the only path which can put us on the track of the laws holding sway both in history as a whole, and at particular periods and in particular lands. Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much upon the circumstances. The workers have by no means become reconciled to capitalist machine industry, even though they no longer simply break the machines to pieces, as they still did in 1848 on the Rhine. But while in all earlier periods the investigation of these driving causes of history was almost impossible ? on account of the complicated and concealed interconnections between them and their effects ? our present period has so far simplified these interconnections that the riddle could be solved. Since the establishment of large-scale industry ? that is, at least since the European peace of 1815 ? it has been no longer a secret to any man in England that the whole political struggle there pivoted on the claims to supremacy of two classes: the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie (middle class). In France, with the return of the Bourbons, the same fact was perceived, the historians of the Restoration period, from Thierry to Guisot, Mignet, and Thiers, speak of it everywhere as the key to the understanding of all French history since the Middle Ages. And since 1830, the working class, the proletariat, has been recognized in both countries as a third competitor for power. Conditions had become so simplified that one would have had to close one?s eyes deliberately not to see in the light of these three great classes and in the conflict of their interests the driving force of modern history ? at least in the two most advanced countries. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Sep 24 14:43:30 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:43:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Centralization of credit Message-ID: <48DA6E31.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org Are latest developments a move towards the centralization of credit if only out of recognition of how interconnected the national and global credit system is, even if the precise words of the Communist Manifesto have not been implemented in the direct mechanical and unequivocal way that was envisaged in 1948 - "Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. " Of course everything depends on the balance of power, initiative and influence, over the new bipartisan arrangements. For whom? - is this all being done - remains a key question, and will be disputed territory. Chris Burford London ^^^^^ CB: We like to say it's an objective process preparing the way for mass subjective consciousness to follow. In _Imperialism_ , Lenin analyzes monopolization as an objective preparation for socialism, as well. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 25 07:22:05 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:22:05 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Barack's a giant crusher; Goliath will fall Message-ID: <48DB583C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> McCain is panicking in the Bank Panic of 2008, because he feels the bourser's pain very closely, reflects it directly. Queen Elizabeth Victoria cannot save him even with all her mighty charm , her frontiers-woman fierceness. Goliath's father was a warrior. His father's father was a warrior. He is of an hereditary warrior's elite, Annapolis grad, Big man on earth. Barack will rock him with the sling vote. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Sep 25 08:48:44 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:48:44 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Young Karl Marx Message-ID: This is new to me. Anyone seen this book? Leopold, David. The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xiii, 315 p. Contents: Acknowledgements; A note on language, references, and translation; 1. Introduction; 2. German philosophy; 3. Modern politics; 4. Human flourishing; 5. Epilogue; Bibliographical note. Publisher description: The Young Karl Marx is an innovative and important new study of Marx's early writings. These writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but they also present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works. An erudite yet accessible discussion of Marx's influences and targets frames the author's critical engagement with Marx's account of the emergence, character, and (future) replacement of the modern state. This combination of historical and analytical approaches results in a sympathetic, but not uncritical, exploration of such fundamental themes as alienation, citizenship, community, antisemitism, and utopianism. The Young Karl Marx is a scholarly and original work which provides a radical and persuasive reinterpretation of Marx's complex and often misunderstood views of German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 25 09:55:24 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:55:24 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] UMW plans work stoppage over NRA filming Message-ID: <48DB7C2B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> September 23, 2008 UMW plans work stoppage over NRA filming Union says film crew tried to get negative comments on Obama Union leaders say a National Rifle Association film crew tried to coerce West Virginia miners into bad-mouthing Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on camera, and that the union plans a brief work stoppage in protest. By The Associated Press Union leaders say a National Rifle Association film crew tried to coerce West Virginia miners into bad-mouthing Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on camera, and that the union plans a brief work stoppage in protest. The United Mine Workers will call for the stoppage at CONSOL's Blacksville No. 2 mine next week, UMW President Cecil Roberts said Monday at a news conference with representatives of Obama's West Virginia campaign in Charleston. Roberts said the union, which has endorsed Obama for president, is unhappy that CONSOL allowed the camera crew to ask miners leading questions about the candidate such as: "What do you think about losing your Second Amendment rights?" "This, I think, is an attempt to try to twist the facts here," Roberts said. "We're just hoping people aren't misled." The NRA has not endorsed a candidate. But it is sharply critical of Obama, calling him a "lying rabble rouser" on its Web site and claiming he has supported numerous anti-gun measures. Hunting and shooting are time-honored pursuits in West Virginia and gun ownership has been a pivotal issue in recent presidential elections. In 2000, then-NRA President Charlton Heston rallied members during a speech in Beckley a week before the election. Four years later, the NRA used billboards, 30-minute television infomercials and mailings in West Virginia as part of a $20 million national campaign to expose Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as what the NRA called the "Cape Cod fraud." The gun lobby is gentler with Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has called the Arizona senator "a friend to gun owners." The NRA denied the union's charges. "This is an effort by the Obama campaign to try and shift the focus away from Barack Obama's abysmal record on guns," spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. "I checked with our crew that was out there and they said they didn't coerce anyone." However, Blacksville miners Jim Toothman and Ken Foyles described it differently September 23, 2008 UMW plans work stoppage over NRA filming Union says film crew tried to get negative comments on Obama Union leaders say a National Rifle Association film crew tried to coerce West Virginia miners into bad-mouthing Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on camera, and that the union plans a brief work stoppage in protest. By The Associated Press Page 2 of 2 Toothman says a mine manager asked him to go outside to speak with the NRA, without warning him he'd be interviewed by a woman on camera. "She tried to lead me into how to word the answers," Toothman said. "I ended the conversation about that point." Foyles never went on camera after watching the crew coach a co-worker's answers about her "concerns" about Obama. "It was my impression they wanted me to bash Barack Obama," Foyles said. A CONSOL spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Roberts called Obama a "great defender" of the right to keep and bear arms and said running mate Joe Biden is a gun owner. "None of us believe that Barack Obama is going to take anyone's guns," Roberts said. A UMW official said the union represents 450 of the 500 employees at the mine in Monongalia County. The underground mine produces about 5 million tons of coal a year. UMW contracts allow "memorial periods," which halt production by allowing members an unpaid day off. The Obama campaign, which turned away a camera crew working for the NRA from the news conference, released a one-page sheet outlining the Illinois senator's support for the right to bear arms. Union leaders say a National Rifle Association film crew tried to coerce West Virginia miners into bad-mouthing Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on camera, and that the union plans a brief work stoppage in protest. The United Mine Workers will call for the stoppage at CONSOL's Blacksville No. 2 mine next week, UMW President Cecil Roberts said Monday at a news conference with representatives of Obama's West Virginia campaign in Charleston. Roberts said the union, which has endorsed Obama for president, is unhappy that CONSOL allowed the camera crew to ask miners leading questions about the candidate such as: "What do you think about losing your Second Amendment rights?" "This, I think, is an attempt to try to twist the facts here," Roberts said. "We're just hoping people aren't misled." The NRA has not endorsed a candidate. But it is sharply critical of Obama, calling him a "lying rabble rouser" on its Web site and claiming he has supported numerous anti-gun measures. Hunting and shooting are time-honored pursuits in West Virginia and gun ownership has been a pivotal issue in recent presidential elections. In 2000, then-NRA President Charlton Heston rallied members during a speech in Beckley a week before the election. Four years later, the NRA used billboards, 30-minute television infomercials and mailings in West Virginia as part of a $20 million national campaign to expose Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry as what the NRA called the "Cape Cod fraud." The gun lobby is gentler with Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has called the Arizona senator "a friend to gun owners." The NRA denied the union's charges. "This is an effort by the Obama campaign to try and shift the focus away from Barack Obama's abysmal record on guns," spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. "I checked with our crew that was out there and they said they didn't coerce anyone." However, Blacksville miners Jim Toothman and Ken Foyles described it differently. Toothman says a mine manager asked him to go outside to speak with the NRA, without warning him he'd be interviewed by a woman on camera. "She tried to lead me into how to word the answers," Toothman said. "I ended the conversation about that point." Foyles never went on camera after watching the crew coach a co-worker's answers about her "concerns" about Obama. "It was my impression they wanted me to bash Barack Obama," Foyles said. A CONSOL spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Roberts called Obama a "great defender" of the right to keep and bear arms and said running mate Joe Biden is a gun owner. "None of us believe that Barack Obama is going to take anyone's guns," Roberts said. A UMW official said the union represents 450 of the 500 employees at the mine in Monongalia County. The underground mine produces about 5 million tons of coal a year. UMW contracts allow "memorial periods," which halt production by allowing members an unpaid day off. The Obama campaign, which turned away a camera crew working for the NRA from the news conference, released a one-page sheet outlining the Illinois senator's support for the right to bear arms. More Articles in News ? Previous Page 1 | 2 | ? Previous Article in News Next Article in News ? Advertiser 22 Comments on "UMW plans work stoppage over NRA filming" Post a comment YOU MUST FOLLOW THESE RULES TO POST A COMMENT: Keep it clean. Comments that are obscene, sexually explicit, racist or offensive will be removed. If you wouldn?t say it to your mother, don?t post it here. Be civil. Don?t threaten to hurt anyone. Personal attacks, insults or harassment of any kind are subject to removal. Be truthful. Don?t lie about a situation or person. Keep it brief. Keep your comment to one post. Redundant or multiple posts in a row aren?t allowed. Stay on task. Stick to the topics relevant to the story and discussion. Don?t post links to sites other than wvgazette.com. Let us know about offensive comments. Click the ?Report Abuse? button if you think a comment is against the rules. Registered email address: Please describe your problem: The e-mail address that you supply will only be used for identification. Type the two words:Type the eight numbers:Incorrect. Try again. Username: Anonymous or Login/RegisterHaving trouble registering? 0 / 1000 Type the two words:Type the eight numbers:Incorrect. Try again. If you are having an issue registering or submitting a comment, please contact webmaster [at] wvgazette.com with a full description of your problem. By posting a comment, you agree to follow our terms of use. You are solely responsible for your own posts. Although wvgazette.com and The Charleston Gazette do not have an obligation to monitor comments, we reserve the right at all times to check the posts and remove any material we consider to be a violation of our policy. Click here to read our full terms of use policy. Report a violation or offensive comment.[X] Close 0 / 150 Posted By: Anonymous (10 hours ago)Report Abuse All of you are right to be concerned about loosing your guns. If McCain gets in, after another 4 years of Bush policies, you will need somthing to shoot yourself with Posted By: Anonymous (15 hours ago)Report Abuse go ahead and shut all the mines.........dumbacrats are for the non-working,welfair'public-housing inter city drug dealers and single babie making machines ............. vote Obama if you want more welfair and taxes for the working man to pay for his intercity projects...........i have a dream Posted By: Anonymous (20 hours ago)Report Abuse Cecil roberts could shut down every umwa coal mine in operation. and I dont think it would effect the us one bit. The umwa no longer has the bargaining power it had 30 yrs. ago. Posted By: Anonymous (22 hours ago)Report Abuse Last part of the letter Gottlieb stated. ?But we are going to remind America?s 90 million voting gun owners every day that Reid stalls a vote on this bill. We will remind gun owners that thousands of their fellow citizens are being snubbed because some powerful Democrats want to talk out of both sides of their mouths on a fundamental right. Well, they?ve talked long enough. Now it?s time for Democrats to show some backbone. Prove you support Second Amendment rights, or prove you don?t and take your chances Nov. 4.? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 25 09:56:40 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:56:40 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] RAILROADING IMMIGRANTS Message-ID: <48DB7C77.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> RAILROADING IMMIGRANTS By David Bacon The Nation, October 6, 2008 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/bacon Research support for this article was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation TUCSON, AZ (9-17-08) -- A special Federal District court convenes every day at one PM in Tucson. All the benches, even the jury box, are filled with young people whose dark brown skin, black hair and indigenous features are common in a hundred tiny towns in Oaxaca or Guatemala. Their jeans, tee shirts and cheap tennis shoes show the dirt and wear from the long trek through north Mexico, three days walking across the desert, and nights sleeping at the immigration detention center on the Davis Monthan Air Base. Presiding over one court session in June, Judge Jennifer Guerin called these defendants before her in groups of eight. They walked up in tiny waddling steps, heavy chains binding their ankles and wrists to their waists. Judge Guerin recited a litany of questions, translated into Spanish through headphones. "You've been charged with illegal entry, a criminal offense...at trial you would have the subpoena power of the court...you have certain rights," she intones. At the end she asks anyone who doesn't understand to stand up. No one does. She asks if they plead guilty. After a moment in which her question is translated, seventy voices mumble "Si." Leaving the courtroom a young woman stumbles, eyes streaked with tears. A public defender tells the judge her feet are covered with blisters from walking through the wilderness. A boy looking no older than 13 or 14 searches the room with his eyes as he's led away, perhaps seeking a friend or relative. No one seems older than 30, and most are much younger. They are today's border crossers - the mostly-indigenous youth of southern Mexico and Central America. They all plead guilty to a Federal criminal charge. Sentences run from time served to six months in a Federal lockup run by Corrections Corporation of America. According to the Spanish news agency EFE, this new court process, dubbed Operation Streamline, convicted 5187 migrants from January 14 to June 10 of this year. Isabel Garcia, who heads Derechos Humanos, a leading immigrant rights organization in southern Arizona, says the current daily quota of 70 chained defendants will soon be raised to 100 - 50 tried on one shift, and 50 on another. Twenty-one new federal prosecutors will handle the surge, with CCA detention facilities to house it. A new bureaucracy is growing rapidly, thanks to drastic changes in immigration enforcement. In past decades, migrants were treated very differently when caught without papers. They were allowed to leave voluntarily, or deported after being found guilty of an administrative infraction, the equivalent of a parking ticket. Today's migrants have become criminals. The features pioneered in Tucson's courtroom - serious Federal criminal charges, mass trials of defendants in chains, and incarceration - are becoming standard features of immigration raids from Postville, Iowa, to Los Angeles, California. State laws now supplement Federal statutes, and Federal, state and local authorities cooperate closely to bring a large variety of criminal charges against migrants. Working without papers has become the most serious crime of all. The vast increase in workplace raids under the Bush administration, however, is motivated by more than a zeal for enforcing the law, or even placating the nativist wing of the Republican Party. Enforcement is part of a pressure campaign designed to win passage of immigration reform centered on guest worker programs. In November, 2006, 1282 workers were detained by hundreds of heavily armed ICE agents in military garb at six Swift and Co. packinghouses. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff then told reporters that raids would show Congress the need for "stronger border security, effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.'' Bush wants, he said, "a program that would allow businesses that need foreign workers, because they can't otherwise satisfy their labor needs, to be able to get those workers in a regulated program." This spring, in a New York Times interview, Chertoff elaborated: "We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot." His carrot is the prospect of massive contract labor programs for business. The sticks are the chains in the Tucson courtroom. According to Garcia, each day's defendants are less than 10 percent of those picked up on the Arizona border. "They're making an example of them to create a climate of fear," she charges. "We are a laboratory. The model they're developing in Arizona is coming everywhere." Garcia's warnings have made her a target of rightwing talk radio hosts, who routinely urge listeners to call the county executive to get her fired from her job as a public defender. But in Postville, Iowa, where Tucson's assembly-line justice was transplanted virtually intact, her warning was accurate. On May 12 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents swooped down on workers at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant. Twenty minutes after the shift started, Maria Rosala Mejia Marroquin saw people running past the line where she stood cutting up chicken breasts, shouting that the migra was in the plant. She ran too, and in a dark warehouse tried to squeeze between huge boxes. "Men came in with flashlights. One pointed a gun in my face, shouting 'No one will escape!'" she remembered. When she was interrogated, she told agents she had a daughter in childcare, but lied to keep them from knowing where the babysitter lived, fearing she'd be picked up as well. Agents finally strapped an electronic monitoring device onto her ankle, telling her she had to wait for a hearing. Her brother Luz Eduardo was taken with 388 others to the National Cattle Congress, a livestock showground in Waterloo, two hours away. In a makeshift courtroom they went in chains before a judge who'd helped prosecutors design Tucson-style plea agreements five months before the raid even took place. In order to get a job at Agriprocessors, workers had given the company Social Security numbers that were either invented, or belonged to someone else. The judge and prosecutor told workers they'd be charged with aggravated identity theft, which carries a two-year prison jolt, and held without bail. If they pleaded guilty to misusing a Social Security number, however, they would serve just five months, and be deported immediately afterwards. "They told [my brother] if he signed the papers they'd deport him, but it was a lie," Mejia says. "He didn't know he was agreeing to criminal charges, and now he's been in prison in Kansas for months." Translation into Spanish was provided, but according to Elida Tuchan, who was also arrested, about half the detainees speak only Cachiquel, an indigenous language from San Miguel Due?as, their Guatemalan hometown. "They felt terrorized, that everything was against them. They didn't understand anything about the process or their rights." To the workers, deportation became desirable. Anacleta Tajtaj was also braceleted, while her husband was deported and three brothers went to prison. "Our family in Guatemala was eating because of us. Now they'll go hungry," she lamented. It cost them each 33,000 quetazales (about $4000) to get to the U.S., a huge sum in San Miguel Due?as, requiring them to mortgage homes and farms. "Now we just want to go back. Everything here is a crime - all the normal things like working." Tajtaj and the other women can't go home yet, however. Three months after the raid they didn't even have dates for their first hearing. "They can't work, they have no way to pay rent or buy food, their husbands or brothers are in prison or deported, and they're being held up to ostracism in this tiny town," says Luz Maria Hernandez, who heads the support network for 48 braceleted women at Postville's St. Bridget's Catholic Church. "This is a form of psychological punishment." Ostracism has become a common element of workplace raids. Women released for so-called humanitarian reasons to care for children become isolated and dependent on friends and relatives. In Los Angeles,, women braceleted after a raid at the Micro Solutions electronics plant on February 7 were shunned by their own roommates, who left them and their children facing eviction. A challenge by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles finally won removal of the bracelets after three months, but the support network of immigrant rights groups is not as strong in northern Iowa. Workplace raids are sweeping the country. According to Secretary Chertoff, "arrests in worksite cases have jumped from a total of 850 in 2004 to 4,940 last year, including 863 arrests based on criminal charges." From January 1 to May 31, 2008 alone, ICE had arrested 3000 people for immigration violations, and 875 more on criminal charges. In June among those arrested were 160 workers at Action Rags in Houston, 32 farm workers for Boss 4 Packing in Heber, California, and nine workers at water parks in Arizona. In May "cops and guns and badges and everything" were used to detain 16 workers at San Diego's French Gourmet bakery, according to Rod Coon, company vice-president. The same month, 25 construction laborers were picked up in Florida working on the Lee County Jail. April saw raids detaining 28 landscapers in El Paso, 24 construction workers in Little Rock, 63 taco makers at El Balazo restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area, 22 restaurant workers on Maui, 33 laborers on the federal courthouse project in Richmond, Virginia, 20 workers at Shipley's Do-Nuts in Texas, and 45 workers at a Mexican restaurant chain in several states. This two-month snapshot is an incomplete count of smaller worksite enforcement actions, which go on constantly, along with frequent raids on street-corner day laborers. But in addition to Postville, large raids have also become much more frequent. Worksite enforcement, in turn, is used to dramatize Bush reform proposals that come from some of the country's largest corporations. In 1999 a group of corporate trade associations, in industries employing large numbers of immigrant workers, formed the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition because U.S. industry, it said, faced a huge labor shortage. "Part of the solution," EWIC announced, "involves allowing companies to hire foreign workers to fill the essential worker shortages." The group, headed by the US Chamber of Commerce, includes the American Meat Institute, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (Wal Mart, among others), the National Council of Chain Restaurants, and other industry associations. While EWIC doesn't contribute money directly to political campaigns, any politician its lobbyists visit know EWIC member industries give plenty. In the 2000 election cycle, for instance, the meat processing industry gave $1,292,877 -- $145,520 to Democrats and $1,143,107 to Republicans. So far in 2008, the restaurant industry has already given $7,361,945 ($2,918,797 / $4,427,704). In an August 2001 letter to Bush, EWIC argued for "a temporary worker framework that provides a role for such workers whose labor is needed in the US." A 2002 Cato Institute report, authored by Daniel T. Griswold, said "the experience of the bracero program demonstrates that workers prefer the legal channel." A huge temporary visa program "should be created that would allow Mexican nationals to remain in the United States to work for a limited period." EWIC and its member associations immediately greeted the report. The National Restaurant Association warned that restaurants faced "a worker shortage of 1.5 million jobs," and said the plan "would give employers greater opportunities to fill these jobs." The Bush administration issued its own proposals a year and a half later, and they were identical to those in the report. Cato's ties to the media helped guest worker proposals achieve greater legitimacy. When the Institute asserted that industries face a tremendous labor shortage, rather than a corporate unwillingness to pay higher wages to attract workers, much of the media treated it as fact. Cato and EWIC members shared an aversion to minimum wages. Rob Rosado, director of legislative affairs for the American Meat Institute, said "We don't want the government setting wages [in guest worker programs.] The market determines wages." EWIC's ideas were embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans. The McCain/Kennedy, Hegel/Martinez and STRIVE bills all shared a similar architecture. They established large guest worker programs, allowing corporations and contractors to recruit hundreds of thousands of workers a year outside the country, on temporary visas that would force them to leave if they became unemployed. To force workers to come only as guest workers, and to stay in the program once they were in the U.S., the bills all mandated a tighter border to make crossing without papers more difficult, and beefed-up employer sanctions to make it impossible to hold a job without a guest worker visa. In the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s, many workers simply remained in the U.S., working under the table until they found a way to get a permanent visa. Many workers in current guest worker programs also stay in the country as undocumented immigrants, even though getting permanent status has become almost impossible. The enforcement provisions sought to cut off that option. "Enforcement is not an issue you can separate from guest worker programs," says Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. An SPLC report, Close to Slavery, documents extensive abuse of workers in current programs, and the benefit to employers of a workforce with few rights, whose vulnerable status makes organizing to raise wages difficult. "Immigration enforcement is structurally necessary for these programs," she explains. Most comprehensive bills also contained legalization provisions for currently undocumented people, but would have imposed fines and long waiting periods from 11 to 18 years, during which time applicants would be as vulnerable as ever. Employers, however, would be immune to employer sanctions for employing them, while recruiting new workers through guest worker programs. A much more liberal immigration bill sponsored by Congress member Sheila Jackson Lee and members of the Congressional Black Caucus was dismissed as "politically unrealistic" because it contained no guest worker program. EWIC anchored an alliance with immigration lawyers, establishment civil rights organizations and several unions. John Gay, representing the National Restaurant Association in EWIC, became board chair of the National Immigration Forum, a powerful mainstream immigration lobbying group in Washington. Tamar Jacoby, former staffer at the rightwing Manhattan Institute, was one of the coalition's most prominent spokespeople. Today she has organized a new corporate lobby, ImmigrationWorks, that includes EWIC, National Council of La Raza, the National Restaurant Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. One key affiliate, the Federation of Employers and Workers of America, calls itself "the national voice of the existing legal guest worker programs," and represents industry associations that push for them. After Congress failed to pass a guest worker/enforcement/legalization package, the administration began to implement its enforcement proposals through increased raids. "But we would have had raids with those bills too, because of their enforcement and funding provisions," says Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. The administration also used the bills' failure as a pretext for relaxing restrictions on current guest worker programs. ICE Director Julie Myers told the Detroit Economic Club in April that "the administration has both streamlined the H2-A [agricultural guest worker visa] application process and has given U.S. employers more flexibility... These changes will make it easier for agricultural employers to hire foreign temporary or seasonal labor to harvest crops." It also allowed employers seeking H2-B guest workers to simply "attest" that they'd tried to find local workers, rather than have the Department of Labor certify that they'd made a real effort. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the AFL-CIO and immigrant rights groups have bitterly opposed these changes. Employers have generally supported them. "We see employers on the Hill all the time, saying they have to have guest workers. At one hearing they had to open extra rooms to accommodate all the lobbyists," Bauer fumes. "And support is coming, not just from Republicans, but from Democrats like Barbara Mikulski, Zoe Lofgren, Ted Kennedy and even John Conyers." Making it a crime for an undocumented person to hold a job is made possible by the Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed in 1986. Prior to that, workers could be deported for being in the U.S. without a visa, but working itself was not a crime. The then-Immigration and Naturalization Service conducted some workplace raids, but immigrants were either forced to leave the country voluntarily, or held for deportation hearings. They could make bail. In the late 1970s, the INS and others began seeking laws to make it illegal for people without papers to work, and for employers to hire them. They argued that if people could not work legally, they would leave. The INS campaigned for passage of IRCA (then the Simpson-Mazzoli and Simpson-Rodino bills), with a wave of raids called Operation Jobs. Agents would arrest workers in a factory, and go to the local unemployment office to hold a press conference. With reporters and unemployed workers in tow, they'd return to the raided factory, claiming they'd "created" jobs. They would then demand that Congress pass sanctions. Raids became more difficult after the INS was sued by Molders Union Local 164 and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in the early 1980s. After the suit was won, agents had to stop their practice of locking workers in a factory, interrogating foreign-looking people about their legal status, and instead were required to have warrants naming specific individuals. Then IRCA's passage made it a federal offense for an employer to hire someone without immigration papers, and for that person to hold a job. Job applicants now have to provide two pieces of identification to show their status, and a Social Security number. By inspecting employer hiring records, INS agents can come up with the names of workers to put on warrants for a raid. Immigrants didn't go home, however. Defenders of sanctions ignored the ongoing displacement of people by structural adjustment programs in Mexico and other developing countries, reinforced by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the NAFTA years, over six million Mexicans came to live in the U.S. Since relatively few visas are available for legal immigration, most came without them. Although Bush officials claim worksite enforcement hardly existed before the present administration, the current wave actually started in the Clinton era. The Social Security Administration began sending letters to employers listing employees' names and numbers that didn't match SSA records. Employers were then left free (and often encouraged) to assume that the reason for the mismatch was that the workers were undocumented. After numerous employers used the letters to fire activist workers during union campaigns, unions and immigrant advocates convinced SSA to include language in the letters warning employers not to construe a mismatch as evidence of lack of immigration status. Nevertheless, although no count has ever been made, thousands of undocumented workers have lost their jobs because of the letters. In 1999, using Social Security numbers in Operation Vanguard, INS agents sifted through the names of 24,310 workers in 40 meatpacking plants throughout Nebraska. They then sent letters to 4,762, demanding they report to INS agents at their jobs. A thousand did, of whom 34 were arrested and deported. The rest, over 3500 people, were forced to find new jobs. One of Operation Vanguard's architects, INS Dallas District Director Mark Reed, claimed success, saying the operation was really intended to pressure Congress and employer groups to support guest worker legislation. "We depend on foreign labor," he declared. "If we don't have illegal immigration anymore, we'll have the political support for guest workers." Reed and the INS also conducted more traditional raids during those years, seizing workers for deportation at Nebraska Beef, Montfort Packing, Tyson Foods, and other plants. Social Security grew so uncomfortable with the use of its database for immigration enforcement that after Operation Vanguard the agency refused to make it available for similar operations in other states. Today, however, ICE seems to have regained access to the files, and now uses mismatches to identify workers for raids, and to charge them with criminal offenses. Meanwhile, the money paid by undocumented workers under bad numbers reached $586 billion in 2006. Since those workers may never collect benefits based on those earnings (which go into the Earnings Suspense File), they are contributing a huge subsidy to the retirement of all Social Security recipients. Worksite enforcement actions accelerated enormously after George W. Bush took office. Following the 9/11 attacks, raids dubbed Operation Tarmac targeted airports around the country, leading to the firing and deportation of hundreds of mostly food service workers. After the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the new Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took over from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, and more raids followed. The administration used worksite enforcement actions to dramatize its call for comprehensive immigration reform (the shorthand name given by Washington groups to the bills combining guest workers, increased enforcement and legalization). On April 10, 2006, the first huge immigrant rights march took place in Los Angeles, protesting House passage of the Sensenbrenner bill (HR 4437) the previous December, which would have made undocumented status a federal felony. On April 19, 1187 workers were arrested at plants of IFCO Systems North America, Inc. in New York, Texas, Wisconsin and Massachusetts. Then in December, after the Senate passed an immigration bill more in line with administration proposals, ICE mounted probably the largest workplace raid in U.S. history, detaining 1282 workers at six Swift and Co. packinghouses. The administration's drive was dramatized by other large-scale, highly publicized worksite sweeps. They included the arrest of 81 plastics workers at Iridium Industries in Poconos, Pennsylvania, 136 chicken workers at George's Processing in Missouri, 165 workers at Portland's Fresh Del Monte produce plant, 327 workers at the Michael Bianco leather factory in New Bedford, and 200 janitors for Rosenbaum-Cunningham International in 17 states. Once the comprehensive reform proposals died in Congress in 2007, more major raids followed, including two at the Smithfield pork slaughterhouse in Tarheel, North Carolina, which took place in the middle of one of the country's longest and hardest-fought union organizing campaigns. In addition, 130 immigrants were arrested at Micro Solutions in Van Nuys, dozens at a Fresh Direct produce warehouse in New York City, and 161 poultry workers at Koch Foods in Ohio. Just before the Postville raid, 311 workers were detained at Pilgrim's Pride plants where they cut up chickens for KFC. As early as the IFCO raid, some workers and low-level supervisors were charged with criminal violations, not just being in the country illegally. At Swift the administration began to shape its new strategy of substituting criminal charges for status violations. Some 65 of the workers arrested there were charged with identity theft or other criminal offenses, as were the workers picked up at Smithfield. Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokesperson, told reporters outside one Swift slaughterhouse that "we have been investigating a large identity theft scheme that has victimized many U.S. citizens and lawful residents." ICE head Julie Myers told other reporters in Washington, D.C. that "those who steal identities of U.S. citizens will not escape enforcement." Dramatic identity-theft charges were intended to gain public support for the raids and the bills in Congress, but ICE was also announcing a new strategy for criminalizing work. ICE claims that raids and sanctions protect wages against employers' use of undocumented labor. A week after the Postville raid, ICE Director Myers claimed enforcement targeted "unscrupulous criminals who use illegal workers to cut costs and gain a competitive advantage." An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claims "unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions. ... ICE's Worksite Enforcement Unit also helps employers improve worksite enforcement of employment regulations." Actual enforcement of labor standards, however, is in freefall. On July 15 the Government Accountability Office charged that Department of Labor inspectors routinely fail to investigate complaints, and close half of them after short calls to employers.. From 1997 to 2007, the number of inspectors dropped from 942 to 732, and the number of cases went from 47,000 to 30,000, the lowest since World War Two. Meanwhile, the budget for the Border Patrol has climbed to $1.6 billion, while 15,000 agents make ICE the second-largest investigative agency in the Federal government. The affidavit supporting ICE's search warrant for the Postville plant stated a source saw a supervisor "duct-tape the eyes of an undocumented Guatemalan worker shut and hit the Guatemalan with a meat hook, apparently not causing serious injuries. The Guatemalan did not want to report the incident because 'it would not do any good and could jeopardize his job.'" Although ICE would not identify the beaten worker or confirm his detention, it is probable that after the raid he was in Federal prison, while the supervisor continued working. The Iowa Labor Commissioner documented 57 cases of child labor at Agriprocessors and filed 9000 child labor charges against the company. Some of the 57 young people are now undoubtedly in prison or wearing electronic ankle bracelets. Although some may get temporary visas as witnesses, all will eventually be deported. Despite ICE claims that raids protect labor standards, enforcement often helps employers attack efforts by undocumented workers to better conditions. The two raids at Smithfield's Tarheel, North Carolina, packinghouse created a climate of terror during the union organizing drive, according to organizers. When housekeepers at the Woodfin Suites in Emeryville, California, tried to enforce a new municipal living wage law, ICE investigated them at the request of Congressman Brian Bilbray (R-San Diego), and company president Samuel Hardage. According to Mejia, supervisors often used immigration status to threaten workers in a union drive at Agriprocessors a year before the raid. And at Pilgrim's Pride packing plants ICE and employers cooperated to arrest employees this spring. After the first Smithfield raid in January, 2007, Mark Lauritsen, UFCW packinghouse director, said the Department of Homeland Security and the company "were worried about people organizing a union, and the government said, 'here are the tools to take care of them.'" Scott Frotman, spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers, says "raids let companies drive down wages and working conditions." To NILC's Marielena Hincapie, raids show the employers' power: "Enforcement intimidates even citizens and legal residents. The employer brings in another batch of workers and continues business as usual. People who protest get targeted and deported." Employers, while complaining about the inconvenience of raids, have been very willing to accept greater enforcement. American Meat Institute chair and Tyson Foods CEO Dick Bondhas supported the Bush plan "because it included some of the provisions that AMI and the industry really want: a path to legalization, a guest worker program and a better employee verification program." Nan Walden, a former Democratic Congressional aide who owns a large pecan ranch near Tucson, and helped organize Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, worries that "removing 9-12% of the workforce will be a disaster." She advocates a "humane" guest worker program, a verifiable identification system, a path to citizenship for undocumented people, and "market-based quotas" for future migration. She criticizes Arizona's sanctions law, however, for its "piecemeal approach." While she's "disturbed by the hatred stirred up by opponents of immigration," Walden warns that without a reform like the one she describes, employers will move operations out of the state and country. "Raising wages isn't the answer, because our costs are all going up, and we still have to be competitive." Criminalizing work has helped ICE gain the involvement of state and local authorities. Last year Arizona passed bills requiring state employers to use the E-Verify system to ensure they were not hiring the undocumented. Employers must verify an applicant's immigration status with a database, that DHS said in 2006 "is still not sufficiently up to date to meet the ... requirements for accurate verification." The original bill would have punished any employer with an undocumented employee, but after employers protested, the law was changed so that they would be fined only for future hiring. E-Verify makes undocumented workers more vulnerable. One woman employed in a Tucson bakery, who withheld her name, explained she was getting only $10/hour for tending the oven, while legal residents were getting $16 for the same job. "If I leave or get fired, how will I find another job with a bad Social Security number?" she wondered. A Tucson union organizer, also afraid to be identified, added that construction workers told her that contractors lowered wages from $18 to $10/hour after the law passed, and told them to bring their own tools to the job. She described rising unemployment, with workers leaving for other states. "It's not going to stop us from organizing the union," she said, "but it will certainly make it harder." In March Arizona state police arrested 14 employees at a Tucson Panda Express restaurant for mismatching Social Security numbers. After the state prosecutor threatened felony identity theft charges, carrying long prison sentences, workers pleaded guilty to lesser charges and were sentenced to time served. Nevertheless, in June they were still in jail, four months after the raid. As in Postville, deportation became a desirable outcome that would free them from incarceration. Francisco Mondaca, the only one able to get bail, pleaded guilty to "impersonating a Panda worker." He says "I didn't hurt anyone. I filed W-2s and paid taxes. All I did was go to work." After the raid Panda Express fired all its Arizona workers, according to one terminated employee, and brought in a new workforce. "The company knew we didn't have papers," he said. "Managers would talk about it." No action was taken against company management. Over a dozen states now have some version of employer sanctions, and Colombia County in Oregon has put a local sanctions ordinance on the ballot. On March 17, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour signed SB 2988, which requires employers to use E-Verify, and gives them immunity for hiring undocumented workers if they do. An undocumented worker holding a job faces felony charges carrying one to five years in prison, and fines up to $10,000. Workers are ineligible for bail. Then, on August 25, ICE agents raided a Howard Industries plant in Laurel, Mississippi, sending 481 workers to a privately-run detention center in Jena, Louisiana, and releasing 106 women for "humanitarian reasons," most in ankle bracelets. While workers taken to Jena weren't immediately hustled before a judge, as in Postville, they were incarcerated with no idea of where they were being held, and weren't charged or provided lawyers for days. ICE spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez declined to say how long detention would last. Federal prosecutors charged eight with felony identity theft, and Gonzalez said criminal charges might be brought against the others. Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), called the raid political. "They want a mass exodus of immigrants out of the state, the kind we've seen in Arizona and Oklahoma," she declared. "The political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics, and what the electorate might look like in 20 years." In the last two decades, the percentage of African Americans in the state's population has increased to over 35%. Immigrants, who were statistically insignificant until recently, are expected to reach 10% in the next decade. And workers have been joining Mississippi unions in catfish and poultry plants, casinos and shipyards. Raids and sanctions come on top of day-to-day harassment. At roadblocks near local chicken plants in Laurel, police stop workers and confiscate the cars of those who can't get drivers' licenses because they don't have papers. "They take us away in handcuffs and we have to pay over $1000 to get out of jail and get our cars back," according to one worker who asked that her name be withheld. Similar roadblocks and auto confiscations are common now in many states. Jim Evans, state AFL-CIO staffer, leader of the legislature's Black Caucus, and MIRA board chair, says the state sanctions law and the raid serve the same objective. "They are efforts to drive a wedge between immigrants, African Americans, white people and unions - all those who want political change here." At the same time, he says, "they make it easier to exploit workers. The people who profit from Mississippi's low wage system want to keep it the way it is." He points to the fact that while workers without papers now risk fines, prison time and deportation, Mississippi employers have hired thousands of guest workers in the state's packinghouses, shipyards and casinos. At the Signal International shipyard, workers contracted in India paid thousands of dollars for temporary visas, and were then been fired and threatened with deportation when they protested bad conditions. Guest workers are welcome in Mississippi, so long as they don't settle down with families, organize unions, or push for political change. Two weeks before the Laurel raid Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff made the same connection. "We tried very hard last year to get a guest worker program which I continue to believe is not only necessary for the economy but it is actually a way of enabling the enforcement," he said. "There's obviously a straightforward solution to the problem of illegal work, which is you open the front door and you shut the back door...Congress wasn't willing to open the front door ... In the interim, to be honest, we're closing the back door." Closing the back door is a euphemism for immigration raids. Opening the front door means guest worker programs. Immigrant rights organizations and unions, however, have challenged this enforcement program with demonstrations and lawsuits. In Phoenix, county sheriff Joe Arpaio became a hero to nativist groups for invading immigrant communities with deputies, busses and helicopters, picking up people on the street and holding them for ICE. But when Pruitt's Furniture Store hired off-duty deputies to arrest day laborers, and Arpaio brought in the Minutemen, huge picket lines of workers, churches and immigrant rights groups grew to over a thousand people. "Even the Phoenix Police Department came out to protect us from him," says Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "The mayor called for an FBI investigation, and the governor took $1.8 million from Arpaio's budget." The United Food and Commercial Workers organized five hearings to investigate raids, and filed a lawsuit to stop ICE from conducting the kind of mass detentions it made at Swift. The union also organized a National Commission on ICE Misconduct and Violations of Fourth Amendment Rights. "Showing up for work should not subject workers to being detained," says UFCW President Joe Hansen. "Work is not a crime. Workers are not criminals. We do not leave our constitutional rights at the plant gate." In California the AFL-CIO, two central labor councils and one building trades council, the NILC and the ACLU filed suit in 2007 to stop ICE from issuing a new no-match regulation. Under Chertoff's proposal Social Security would have sent letters to over 160,000 employers, listing the names of at least eight million workers with mismatched numbers. Employers would have had to fire all who could not produce numbers SSA could verify. The order was blocked by U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney, and is still on hold. And just three days after the Mississippi raid, while many immigrants hid in their homes in fear, MIRA organizer Vicky Cintra and over a hundred raid victims and family members marched down to the Howard Industries plant in Laurel to demand withheld paychecks. When company managers called the police, who tried to arrest Cintra, immigrants began shouting "Let her go!" As news reporters arrived on the scene, the police backed off. Seventy families got paychecks to keep them eating, while their men were in immigration jail and their women were braceleted and unable to work. More protests in the following days forced the company to pay hundreds of other families as well. Newspaper reports had highlighted an incident in which some workers applauded as immigrants were led from the plant in handcuffs during the original raid. But when Cintra and the braceleted women protested on the grass outside the gate, African American workers leaving at shift change crossed the street, embraced them, and offered to find them food and to support their protest. Implementing its program by executive action, the administration is using immigration raids to create a large bureaucracy, with rich contracts and high-paying jobs. It hopes to give it an unstoppable political momentum that will tie the hands of any new administration. Should John McCain be elected President, he is likely to embrace that program, and continue the quest in Congress to weld that system into place. McCain cosponsored the Kennedy-McCain bill, helping set the terms for Washington's immigration debate. As Arizona Senator he belongs to the political establishment that made his state an enforcement testing ground. Barack Obama has the chance to stop this juggernaut. At the AFL-CIO, Anna Avenda?o, director of immigration programs, is drafting ideas for an Obama administration's first 100 days. "At the very least, it could change the regulations and terms of enforcement," she says, ending, for instance, the practice of charging undocumented immigrants with federal crimes like identity theft. The larger question, however, is whether Obama would challenge the mushrooming enforcement bureaucracy and the raids it feeds on, advocating a more humane immigration policy. Organizations like the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights urge that instead of the enforcement/guest worker/legalization triad, Congress should legalize people without papers, and make more visas available for legal migration, without setting up guest worker programs. The AFL-CIO, the Network, and many others want much greater enforcement of labor standards and union rights, and call for repealing employer sanctions. Congress member Jackson Lee advocates combining jobs programs with legalization and organizing rights, to bring workers together instead of pitting them against each other. If an Obama administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress move in this direction, immigration policy would no longer be the "third rail of American politics," in the words of party strategist Rahm Emmanuel. Instead, it would protect the rights and living standards of immigrants, and workers generally. For more articles and images on immigration, see http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/imgrants.htm Just out from Beacon Press: Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 25 12:18:41 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:18:41 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ghostly Demarcations Message-ID: <48DB9DC1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ghostly Demarcations Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, by Derrida et al (Radical Thinkers III series) James Heartfield http://www.culturewars.org.uk/index.php/site/article/ghostly_demarcations2/ God is dead, Nietzsche; Nietzsche is dead, God,? Graffito In 1993, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida published Specters of Marx, which was quite an event. It is hard to remember now, but Derrida had a huge reputation then. The method, or school of thought he founded was called ?deconstruction?. It was self-consciously difficult, since it revolved around ambiguity and deferring conclusions. One of Derrida?s bigger teases was his relation to the great socialist thinker, Karl Marx. As his reputation grew Derrida refused to be pinned down on his attitude to Marx, which was quite a statement in itself, since, in those politically contested times, all were expected to situate themselves in the great debate of the day, between liberalism and Marxism. Derrida was of course quite familiar with Marxist theory, at least the dogmatic kind that was popular in the Stalin-influenced Communist Party (PCF). His friend and co-thinker Louis Althusser developed his parallel ideas (together they were called post-structuralists) in what he thought of as a development of Marxism. Indeed, the intellectual milieu Derrida moved in at the Ecole Normale Superieur and as a contributor to the journal Tel Quel, was heavily influenced by an increasingly radical outlook, that moved from official Communism to posturing Maoism. Politically, though, Derrida?s instincts were more much conservative. As a Jew in French Algeria, Derrida had been a childhood victim of Vichy discrimination, but he was more alarmed by the nationalist independence movement, the FLN, and did his national service teaching the children of the French occupation forces (where others, like Jean Jeanson and Frantz Fanon aided the freedom fighters). Married to a Czech, he lent his authority to the Cold War campaign for East European dissidents, whose British representative was Roger Scruton and which is today claimed as a success by the CIA. His elevation to a public figure was through charming an American audience by exposing the pretensions of European ?structuralist? theory at a conference at the Johns Hopkins University, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. In 1968, when intellectuals like Guy Debord, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke threw themselves into students? and workers? protests, Derrida retreated, expressing his fear of the mob. Though Derrida and his fellow ?deconstructionists? were sold as the continuation of the spirit of 1968 to gullible American students, their real relationship to those events was analogous to Stalin?s relationship to the Russian revolution, which is to say, they summarised its defeat in a philosophy that mocked the pretensions of those who wanted to change the world. And perversely, Derrida flirted with some thinkers who were politically associated with the far right, Friedrich Nietzsche, the former Nazi collaborator Paul de Man and the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger. His defence of these philosophers? intellectual contribution was a kind of dare to leftists, to see if they could be provoked (they were too jaded to care, perhaps even a bit turned on by the Nazi chic). The essay skirting around de Man?s wartime contributions to Nazi propaganda was surely the model for Bill Clinton?s Grand Jury defence ?it depends what you mean by ?is??. At a deeper level Derrida?s sympathy with Nietzsche and Heidegger was a wilful adoption of the obscurantist and anti-rational currents of reactionary thinking that corresponded to the anti-democratic element in right wing politics. Early on, those who ran across Derrida understood that he was not radical, but something of a Cold War liberal. His interest in reactionary philosophers was noted by the left-wing paper l?Humanit?, and later became a sticking point with the radicals at Tel Quel. Even when he gave papers in US colleges, more radical American academics winced at the quietistic implications of ideas such as those expressed in ?The Ends of Man?, a paper he gave in New York in response to the events of 1968. For the most part, though, Americans welcomed the mocking of rationalist pretensions. L?Humanit?, still publishing today In his rather good account of the impact of deconstruction in America, French Theory (translated from the French) Francois Cusset shows how the ground for Derrida?s success in America was already prepared by a Yankee disdain for unifying theories. Derrida blossomed in Yale University?s literature department alongside de Man, Bevis Hillier and Harold Bloom, because, even though his public face was that of austere theory, his actual message was pluralistic and jokey-cute ? ideal for an academic audience that was negotiating the diverse claims of special interest groups organised around gender and race. Derrida took the deconstruction of rationalism (which meant Marxism in the French context) and reapplied it to deconstruct the American Dream, just at the point that it was disintegrating under competing demands. As Cussett shows, Derrida?s citations in journals began to rise in the US, just as they were falling off in his native France. Derrida?s book on Marx had an impact out of proportion with its content because of the intellectual state of those radicals who counted themselves Marxists. In 1993 we (I was editor of the book reviews section of a journal called Living Marxism at the time) were frustrated with the state of things. The collapse of the official Communist states in east Europe and Russia was shown almost nightly on television screens as a popular revolution against Marxism, with joyous Poles and East Germans dancing on prostrate statues of Lenin. In the West, the Socialist parties were by the close of the 1980s the pathetic losers of election after election. The organised working class that we had hoped would be the vehicle of social change was battered and demoralised by a decade of unemployment, strike breaking and attacks on trade unions. Left wing politics was a laughing stock. So when superstar philosopher Jacques Derrida deigned to talk about the importance of Marx, much of the left was unduly flattered. We had been thrown a lifeline that might save us from obscurity, if only we would embrace his philosophy of deconstruction as a kind of ?radicalisation? of Marxism. Sadly, Specters of Marx was not very good. Not as a contribution to Marxism, nor as a work of deconstruction. There is some pretentious stuff at the beginning trying to ask the question where do we stand with Marx today, which only manages to irritate Marxists with its image of Marx dead, haunting us. There is a long complaint against ?Capitalist Triumphalism? at the end of the Cold War, exemplified by Francis Fukuyama?s essay ?The End of History?. There is some low level rehearsal of Marx?s categorical development of the value form and the commodity, which is supposed to show that Marx is not a dullard (which is most definitely true, so much so that Marx?s original passages leave Derrida standing in the blocks). And then there is the vague hope that there might now be a ?new international? which, abandoning Marx?s materialism, political programme and class politics, will counter the ascendance of the right. Substantially, though, Derrida was out of sympathy with Marx?s project, but chose, for pragmatic reasons, to tiptoe around the areas where his differences were clearest. For Marx, ?all science would be superfluous if the appearances of things coincided with their essence?; for Derrida, this was anathema, since his philosophy rejected the distinction between appearance and essence, as ?metaphysics?. For Marx, the rehearsal of the alienated forms of exchange were intellectual preparation for the assertion of free subjectivity, through the class struggle; for Derrida subjectivity was precisely what was to be criticised, as he argued in ?The Ends of Man?. But Derrida preferred not to take issue with Marx, sensing that his reputation had lost the awkward association with mass movements, and was available for incorporation into the project of deconstructing Western rationalism (an enterprise wholly at odds with Marx?s own joyful plundering of the Western canon). Derrida himself Ghostly Demarcations is a response to Derrida?s original book Specters of Marx, a collection of papers from some leading Marxist academics, Pierre Macherry, Antonio Negri (who went on to write the influential, though difficult, Empire), the erudite critic of post-structuralism Aijaz Ahmad, and the witty and acerbic critic Terry Eagleton and many others. The collection was first published by Verso nine years ago, and is republished here as part of the ?Radical Thinkers? series. Re-reading it has a certain ghoulish fascination. Today, Derrida?s work is largely forgotten outside some specialist philosophical schools, and I fear that his main contributions are just too slight to save him for prosperity (he died in 2004). Does anyone still think that we can undo ?logocentrism?, or that we would want to? Derrida contributed a ?short response that has already gone on too long? to the papers in Ghostly Demarcations, and very bad-tempered it is. Having played fast and loose in his interpretation of Marx, Derrida seems very angry that any of his respondents should be so cavalier with him. His scorn for the attempt to seek Marx?s heritage seems like bad manners after so pointedly dancing on his grave. On the other hand, some of the Marxists represented here are very brusque. In particular Aijaz Ahmad and even more so Terry Eagleton make fun of Derrida and the pretensions of deconstruction rather effectively. After his ill-made attack on Martin Amis, it is good to be reminded just how effective a critic Eagleton can be. Still, there is something rather less than satisfying about the defence of Marxism put up by Derrida?s respondents in Ghostly Demarcations. What the defenders of Marxism do not really face up to is the fact that Marxism as a school of thought could not really survive in the absence of a combative labour movement. Marxism, after all, strived to be the intellectual reflex of the working class movement. Ahmad?s argument that Marxism need not be hurt by the collapse of the Stalinist social system (because that was not Marxism, but a travesty of Marxism) will not do. It was not the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the end that undermined Marxism, but the absence of combativity in the working class, most pointedly in the West, not in the East. Certainly that defeat of the working class was conditioned by the object lesson in the defeat of alternatives to capitalism. But in the end, without being attached to a dynamic challenge to capitalism, what could Marxism be ? a philosophy, an ideology, an academic discipline? Back in 1995 I reviewed Specters of Marx in Living Marxism. Living Marxism was a very interesting intellectual project. Its founders took as their starting point the proposition that the Marxist tradition was dead, that there was nothing left to defend, and that we needed to found a new Marxist tradition for our times. Reviewing Derrida?s thoughts made it clear that Marxism as such only had a future as a kind of culture of complaint. ?The attraction of Marx for Derrida is not the case for overthrowing capitalism, but the case merely for calling it into question?, I wrote. Marxism is just ?the rejuvenated complaints of the radical intelligentsia.? (Living Marxism issue 75, January 1995). Sadly, that is what goes by the name of Marxism these days, a kind of moaning that is, if it were possible, even more reactionary than capitalism. On the other hand, it is pointed that Marx?s reputation is rather good these days. In 2005 he was named the greatest philosopher ever in a Radio 4 poll, Francis Wheen?s admittedly rather trivial biography was a best-seller, while EU trade negotiator Pascal Lamy lauded Marx?s memory only last year. ?Southey will be remembered when Shakespeare is forgotten?, joked Coleridge; on the same model we might say that ?Derrida will be read when Marx is forgotten?. Maybe that is how it should be. After all, it was the intensity of the class struggle that made it obligatory for all kinds of third-rate ideologues to rise up on their hind legs to ?refute? Marx. Maybe now that it is less of a scandal, intellectuals are comfortable giving Marx his due. In academia, Marx?s insight into the historical transience of human relations is often acceded, even lauded, in specific realms of gender identity or international relations. Perhaps we should expect Marx?s reputation to settle down, so that he can take his place alongside other great thinkers, like Newton, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, GWF Hegel and Darwin. But then the name of Marxism is not that important. It is the spirit of Marx that counts: the willingness to overturn received opinion, and the ambition to overturn existing conditions. The class conflict that Marx imbued with transformatory potential is not present, but you would have to ignore the lessons of 1989-91 to imagine that things never change. On Culture Wars, spiked and before that in the pages of Living Marxism, I and others have reflected on the retreat from subjective agency. But subjectivity is not wholly separate from the objective world. Yesterday?s subjective acts are today?s objective conditions. More than ever, society needs theoretical investigation, whatever we call it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ? Books and Essays ? Radicalism, past, present and future This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Sep 25 14:02:21 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:02:21 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lenin forests Message-ID: <48DBB60C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Soviet tree slogans visible on Google Earth Telegraph.co.uk - United Kingdom A series of huge tributes to Vladimir *Lenin* and the USSR, each made from hundreds of trees, have been spotted across Russia on Google Earth. *...* This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Sep 25 12:32:53 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:32:53 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Query concerning Jean van Heijenoort In-Reply-To: <5581891.1215555838469.JavaMail.root@whwamui-soar.pas.sa.ea rthlink.net> References: <5581891.1215555838469.JavaMail.root@whwamui-soar.pas.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: I now have a copy of: Anellis, Irving H. Jean van Heijenoort: Logic and Its History in the Work and Writings of Jean van Heijenoort. Ames, Iowa: Modern Logic Publishing, MLP Books, 1994. Neither of the individuals listed are in the index, and I doubt they are in the basic biographical chapter either. I don't know where my copy of Anita Feferman's bio of Van H is at the moment, but I'm guessing Feferman did not discuss such connections in great detail. But one should not assume anything without checking. At 06:23 PM 7/8/2008, Ralph Dumain wrote: >This is the first I've heard of any of this. I have no information, >but it sounds fascinating. I wish there were a quick way for me to >get hold of this article: > >'La dialectique du capital' Revue internationale 2 (8) September >1946 pp. 124-136. > >I think van H threw in the towel on Marxism in 1948, but apparently >he was still at it in 1946. > >I remember the Grossman book coming out. I should put it on my want list. > >-----Original Message----- > >From: "farmelantj at juno.com" > >Sent: Jul 8, 2008 7:51 AM > >To: marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu, lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org, > marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > >Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Query concerning Jean van Heijenoort > > > > > >I have received the following request from Rick Kuhn > >concerning Jean van Heijenoort, since I am unable to > >answer his question, I suggested to him that I should > >forward his request to discussion lists where there > >may be people who can. With his permission, this is > >what I am doing. Please note that Rick Kuhn's > >contact information is down at the bottom of > >this post. > > > >Jim F. > > > >---------------------------- > > > >Dear Jim Farmelant > > > >I have seen that you have an interest in Jean van Heijenoort and hoped > >that you might be able and willing to help me. My particular interest > >is in connections between van Heijenoort, Bernice Shoul and Henryk > >Grossman. Shoul was an economist and a friend of van Heijenoort > >starting in the 1940s. She drew on the work of Henryk Grossman in > >several of her publications, as did van Heijenoort in 'La dialectique > >du capital' Revue internationale 2 (8) September 1946 pp. 124-136. He > >wrote this under the pseudonym Alex Barbon. Grossman, whose on the > >theory of economic crisis was very controversial, lived in New York > >from 1938 until 1948. > > > >This research is part of a project that resulted in my Henryk Grossman > >and the recovery of Marxism University of Illinois Press, Chicago 2007. > > > >Any information or leads you could provide would be very much > >appreciated. > > > >Best regards > > > >Rick Kuhn > > > >_____________________________________________________ > >School of Social Sciences/Arts phone +61 (2) 612-53851 > >Building 24 fax > +61 (2) 612-52222 > >ANU ACT 0200; > >Rick.Kuhn at anu.edu.au > >Australia > >www.anu.edu.au/polsci/rick > > > >____________________ From jannuzi at gmail.com Thu Sep 25 20:06:39 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:06:39 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Abroad, Bailout Is Seen as a Detour From Capitalism Message-ID: > CB: What does "duff" mean In the post-big-bang financial era of Japan, it means 'no longer going concerns'. Because they had failed to meet new capital adequacy ratios. The government rule was that if a bank of certain classes didn't meet the new standards, they would be forced into government ownership, stripped of their assets (their loan portfolios) and given to foreign private equity groups (who then got to keep the good loans and pretend they knew what they were doing other than seeking to sell the banks on for huge profits in a couple years, or make almost as much with new IPOs). Interestingly one of the new banks that resulted Shinsei was called the most innovative and profitable but is now faltering because of its ties to all that duff stuff in the US. CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 07:22:19 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:22:19 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] March on Wallstreet ! Message-ID: <48DCA9CA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> [from Lauren in Detroit] Members of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures and Evictions and supporters organized what ended up being a very successful protest in downtown Detroit today (September 25th). Approximately 30 demonstrators gathered in front of the Detroit City Council Building with signs and leaflets protesting Wall Street's bailout by the government, and demanding the passage of Senate Bill 1306, which proposes the passage of a 2 year moratorium on home foreclosures in Michigan. News crews gathered around as Council member JoAnn Watson discussed a resolution passed by the Council demanding that Congress assist victims of the housing/mortgage crisis by passing this moratorium. Following statements by Watson and a handful of Moratorium NOW! members regarding the importance of the halt of foreclosures, demonstrators marched through the financial district in Detroit. The route had three stops along the way, at branches of banks that will be receiving billions of taxpayer dollars. A representative of Moratorium NOW! spoke at each stop about the unfairness of the bailout, as well as why the organization is pushing for the passage of SB 1306. Demonstrators received positive feedback from local passerby, and the event went off without a hitch. Moratorium NOW! will be hosting a meeting on September 27 to follow up on the demonstration and plan future events. For more information, or to become a member of Moratorium NOW!, please visit http://www.moratorium-mi.org or call 313-887-434. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From Waistline2 at aol.com Fri Sep 26 07:58:50 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:58:50 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Government bail out and sovereign debt: theory Message-ID: Liberating Sovereign Credit for Domestic Development Part I: The Curse of Dollar Hegemony By Henry C.K. Liu September 2004 " When a sovereign state issues money as legal tender, it issues a monetary instrument backed by its sovereign rights, which includes taxation. A sovereign state never owes domestic debts except by design voluntarily. When a sovereign state borrows in order to avoid levying or raising taxes, it is a political expedience, not a financial necessity. When a sovereign state borrows, through the selling of sovereign bonds denominated in its own currency, it is withdrawing previously-issued sovereign credit from the financial system. When a sovereign state borrows foreign currency, it forfeits its sovereign credit privilege and reduces itself to an ordinary debtor because no sovereign state can issue foreign currency. Government bonds act as absorbers of sovereign credit from the private sector. US Government bonds, through dollar hegemony, enjoy the highest credit rating, topping a credit risk pyramid in international sovereign and institutional debt markets. Dollar hegemony is a geopolitical phenomenon in which the US dollar, a fiat currency, assumes the status of primary reserve currency in the international finance architecture. Architecture is an art the aesthetics of which is based on moral goodness, of which the current international finance architecture is visibly deficient. Thus dollar hegemony is objectionable not only because the dollar, as a fiat currency, usurps a role it does not deserve, but also because its effect on the world community is devoid of moral goodness, because it destroys the ability of sovereign governments beside the US to use sovereign credit to finance the development their domestic economies, and forces them to export to earn dollar reserves to maintain the exchange value of their own currencies." full: _http://www.henryckliu.com/page3.html_ (http://www.henryckliu.com/page3.html) Money issued by sovereign government fiat is a sovereign monopoly while debt is not. Anyone with acceptable credit rating can borrow or lend, but only sovereign government can issue fiat money as legal tender. When sovereign government issues fiat money, it issues certificates of its sovereign credit good for discharging tax liabilities imposed by sovereign government on its citizens. Privately-issued money can exist only with the grace and permission of the sovereign, and is different from sovereign government-issued money in that privately issued money is an IOU from the issuer, with the issuer owing the holder the content of the money's backing. But sovereign government-issued fiat money is not a debt from the government because the money is backed by a potential debt from the holder in the form of tax liabilities. Money issued by sovereign government by fiat as legal tender is good by law for settling all debts, private and public. Anyone refusing to accept dollars in the US for payment of debt is in violation of US law. Instruments used for settling debts are credit instruments. **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 09:58:15 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:58:15 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Protest on Wall Street Message-ID: <48DCCE57.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/wall-st-protest No Bailout for Wall Street -- Protest on Wall Street this Thursday at 4pm! NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: A September 26 AFP wire story date incorrectly attributed a quote to Naomi Klein that should have been attributed to Arun Gupta. The error has been corrected by AFP but please note that the statement below was NOT written by Naomi Klein and though she supported the original protest call, the statement is correctly attributed to Gupta, as stated in the corrected AFP article also posted below. We would greatly appreciate if this error was not repeated. Statement by Arun Gupta Call to Self-Organize This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place. This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the ?therapy,? and we?ll just roll over! Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there?s evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy. This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate. Let?s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below). We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War. With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top. This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who already made a killing off the mortgage bubble. Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York Times admits that ?Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,? and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration wants ?Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want, whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.? It?s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us. Let?s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip. By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave work, we?re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can?t get off work can still join us downtown as soon as they are able. There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse other than we?re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks pay, let those who brought the ?toxic? mortgage-backed securities pay! On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of connections - we all know many other organizations, activists and community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the event, etc. Do whatever you can - make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can?t be silent! What?s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated? We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don?t know what to do. Let?s take the lead and make this the start! AGAIN: When: 4pm - ? Thursday, September 25. Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc. Why: To say we won?t pay for the Wall Street bailout Who: Everyone!Questions? Contact Arun Gupta at ebrowniess at yahoo.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected: Popular Anger Puts Fat Cat CEOs on the Run Agence France Presse September 26, 2008 NEW YORK (AFP) - An angry US public and Congress are pushing to snip the rip cord on golden parachutes used by fat cat CEOs to escape Wall Street's mayhem. Democrats in Congress -- set to resume emergency talks Friday with their Republican counterparts on a 700-billion-dollar (478-billion-euro) bailout for the financial industry -- insisted that any agreed package include restrictions on executive pay. They caught the mood of a nation sickened at watching the titans of finance walk away from Wall Street disasters not only unscathed, but enriched. "The wealthiest people, those... in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all," read a petition to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, which by Thursday, after three days, had 32,600 signatures. The petition, organized by independent Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, attacked what it described as the Treasury's attempt to let bungling executives "continue to make exorbitant salaries and bonuses." Those gigantic pay checks, bonuses, and Midas-like farewells encapsulate what the public sees as Wall Street's greed-is-good philosophy. For example, the CEO of bankrupt Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, received total compensation of 71.9 million dollars in 2007, including stock, bonuses and other pay, according to a survey published by Forbes magazine. Martin Sullivan, the chief executive of AIG, who left the insurance giant before it was rescued this month by the federal government, received 14 million dollars, a survey in USA Today said. He also quit with a severance package worth 47 million dollars. Even punishment for those at the center of the chaos comes with a gold lining. When the government took over collapsed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, ousted bosses Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron were not allowed 12.59 million dollars worth in severance payments. Yet they still got out the door with 9.43 million dollars in retirement benefits. Public anger at such figures underlies skepticism about the entire government rescue. "We'll never see that money again," said Mathew May, a 24-year-old economics student attending a small demonstration near the New York Stock Exchange. "They deregulated the markets and ran wild. Now we're bailing them out." Arun Gupta, an editor of alternative New York newspaper The Indypendent, said there was "socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us." "Think about it," Gupta wrote in an email that quickly circulated to thousands of activists and inspired the New York street protest. "They said providing healthcare for nine million children, perhaps costing six billion dollars a year, was too expensive, but there's evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs." And left-wingers are not the only ones speaking out. Newt Gingrich, the fiercely conservative former speaker in the House of Representatives, wrote in the National Review that the bailouts, likely to top a trillion dollars, smack of "crony capitalism." "Doesn't that mean that we're using the taxpayers' money to hire people to save their friends with even more taxpayer money?" he asked. Forbes, the magazine for and about the rich, also said enough was enough. "The compensation schemes for Wall Street CEOs should be capped to a small fixed amount," wrote national editor Robert Lenzner. "The rest should be dependent on performance in a way that does not reward taking greater risk than is prudent. If CEOs don't perform, they should get nothing." One worker in the New York finance sector, who asked not to be named, said his colleagues were as angry as the general public. "A lot of people are very upset that managers in their own companies and captains of industry in other areas made some really, really bad decisions," he said. "The most insulting thing is the golden parachutes where these jackals from Fannie and Freddie, having destroyed the company, walked away with millions.... It all comes down to greed." This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 10:02:56 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:02:56 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Labor unions protest in NY against bailout Message-ID: <48DCCF70.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Labor unions protest in NY against bailout . http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE48O8KJ20080926?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0 By Christian Wiessner NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hard hats, transit workers, machinists, teachers and other labor unionists railed against the U.S. government's proposed bailout of Wall Street on Thursday in a protest steps from the New York Stock Exchange. Several hundred protesters yelled their enthusiastic support as union leaders decried a proposed $700 billion plan aimed at reinvigorating the credit markets by relieving financial institutions of distressed debt. "The Bush administration wants us to pay the freight for a Wall Street bailout that does not even begin to address the roots of our crisis," said AFL-CIO National President John Sweeney. "We want our tax dollars used to provide a hand up for the millions of working people who live on Main Street and not a handout to a privileged band of overpaid executives." Signs read "No Blank Checks For Wall Street" and "Our Hard-Earned Pensions Are Not Up For Grabs." Protesters cheered repeated calls for the government to spend money on education, health care and housing as freely and readily as it was proposing to do for Wall Street. "We know that the economic situation has to be solved. But we want a responsible rescue, not an opportunistic bailout," said United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. "And that means, just like every single boss says to me, that there should be accountability for the teachers, then there should be accountability for Wall Street," he said. "The bailout is a sellout unless it includes the victims of the tyranny," civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson told reporters after the rally. "The homeowners need long-term, low interest rate loans and the restructuring of loans, not the repossession of homes." Continued... "This is a Roosevelt moment," Jackson said, referring to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt's program to lift the United States out of the Great Depression. "It's time for reconstruction of manufacturing law, trade law and banking transparency." (Editing by Daniel Trotta) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 10:11:32 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:11:32 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Financialization Message-ID: <48DCD174.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> a brief section on financialization, taken from book: The Confiscation of American Prosperity. By Michael Perelman http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/financialization-from-the-confiscation-of-american-prospection/ http://michaelperelman.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/financialization1.doc Financialization Nothing has contributed to imbalances in the economy so much as the outlandish expansion of financialization, which the right wing promoted through reckless deregulation. Talk of deregulation may evoke images of bulldozers free to tear up sensitive land or factories permitted to spew out toxic waste, but deregulation has other less obvious, but equally destructive, dimensions. Almost unnoticed in the background, business interests have convinced the government to mindlessly dismantle the supposedly arcane regulations meant to maintain order in the financial industry. Many of these controls began after the Great Depression, which clearly demonstrated how an unfettered financial system, left to its own devices, can easily spin out of control. Business, having soon forgotten this lesson, bristled against regulations, arguing that meddlesome regulations do nothing to protect the economy; they merely prevent the efficient functioning of the financial system. In reality, unregulated financialization works like a drug induced euphoria. A get rich quick mentality spreads throughout the economy. Solid wealth producing activities quickly lose their attraction. Recall the billion dollar incomes of hedge fund managers. In this environment, economic booms soon morph into bubbles that are certain to burst. Typical of the boom mentality, in 1986, a year before the stock market fell 508 points in a single day, 40 percent of the 1,300 members of Yale's graduating class applied to a single investment bank, First Boston (Lewis 1989, p. 24). The stock market recovered, but the frenzy began anew in the late 1990s. Enron was emblematic of mesmerizing lure of financialization and suggestive of its dangers. A once sleepy, capital intensive pipeline company, Enron became the darling of Wall Street after it converted itself into a major financial player during the frenetic 1990s boom. By December 31, 2000, Enron's stock reached $83.13. At this point, the stock market valued the company at more than $60 billion, 70 times what the company purportedly earned. Fortune magazine rated Enron as the most innovative large company in America in the magazine's survey of Most Admired Companies. Soon thereafter, the now disgraced corporation declared bankruptcy, leaving its stock worthless (Healy and Palepu 2003, p. 3). Not surprisingly, while the stock was soaring, Enron won friends in high places, including both Presidents Bush and Senator Phil Gramm, a former professor of economics who chaired the Senate Banking Committee at the time. Senator Gramm's wife, Wendy, another economist, won an appointment as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In 1992, she exempted Enron's trading in electricity futures from oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Doug Henwood, an outstanding observer of the financial world, writes of this incident: Enron happened to be a big funder of her husband, Texas Senator Phil Gramm (another friend of the free market who drew public paychecks almost all his working life). Six days after that ruling, Gramm left the CFTC, and five weeks later she joined Enron's board. In December 2000, Senator Gramm helped push a bill through Congress that deregulated trading in energy. Enron's electricity trading business swelled, and some of the firm's only real profits were made. Without owning a single California power plant, Enron came to control the state's market. Rolling blackouts became the norm, prices skyrocketed, and the same state racked up billions in debt. Phil Gramm blamed environmentalists for the crisis. Finally, price controls were imposed and the bubble burst. Deprived of its cash cow, Enron hit the rocks a few months later. [Henwood 2003, pp. 200 1] In short, much of the imaginary value represented by Enron literally disappeared. The inimitable John Kenneth Galbraith referred to such imaginary value as a "bezzle": At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement. This inventory it should perhaps be called the bezzle amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars .... In good times people are relaxed, trusting and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all of this is reversed. [Galbraith 1961, p. 138] A few high level employees who cashed out their stock in time and escaped prosecution can still laugh all the way to the bank. Some of the big banks also did quite well. Although they face continuing problems in the courts, their penalties will not be enough to deter them in the future. We should not forget Wendy Gramm, the regulator, who also prospered: "from 1993 to 2001 her salary, attendance fees, stock option sales, and dividends totaled between $915,000 and $1.85 million. Her stock options swelled from $15,000 in 1995 to approximately $500,000 by 2000" (Prins 2004, p. 147). Ms. Gramm has continued her jihad against regulation. Later she ran the Mercatus Center, where she still serves as a senior scholar. Mercatus is the third largest recipient of conservative foundation funding, according to the Center for Media and Democracy (n.d.). According to the Wall Street Journal, this organization has been extraordinarily effective in eliminating all manner of regulations (see Davis 2004). In effect, these winners pushed the cost of the bezzle onto others. The typical investors who saw their stock become worthless realized the consequences of the bezzle. So did the hapless Enron employees, especially those whose pensions consisted of Enron stock. Arthur Anderson, the accounting company that facilitated the fraud no longer exists, as its investors must bitterly know. The California energy consumers did not escape unscathed. Many years from now they will still be paying off the inflated long term contracts that the state signed in their name. Enron alone may not have controlled the California energy system, but it was among the handful of companies that did. People around the country had bought houses, changed careers, and made life altering decisions based on their mistaken belief that their stake in the Enron bubble represented true wealth. Others, who had no direct connection with the company at all, also got caught up with the Enron disaster. People set up businesses to service Enron employees or sold them goods on credit. Others, even further removed from Enron, paid a price when, unbeknownst to them, their pension plans had invested in the company. In the end, Enron caused irreparable harm to many thousands of people. By any calculation, losses that occur after a bubble bursts far outweigh the benefits that people enjoy during the boom. Where does the blame lie? The criminal activity of some of the Enron executives and their abettors in the financial world is not surprising. A certain percentage of people will always cross the line when the opportunity presents itself. What is shocking is that the majority of the wrongs that Enron committed were actually legal, largely because of the regulatory laxity achieved by the right wing revolution. The need for stricter financial regulations is more urgent than ever. Since 1970, the ratio of total financial assets to the Gross Domestic Product has more than doubled (Henwood 2003, p. 191). By the end of June 2004, the Bank for International Settlements estimated that the world financial market had $220 trillion worth of outstanding derivative contracts, or more than $35,000 for every single person on the face of the earth. The estimated daily turnover in foreign currency and interest rate transactions in April 2004 was $2.4 trillion, a 74 percent increase over a three year period (Bank for International Settlements 2005, pp. 21 and 1). In less than two weeks, these financial transactions would equal the total value of the annual production of all the economies of the world, which is estimated at about $30 trillion. In contrast, the New York Stock Exchange with a typical daily turnover in early 2005 of a mere 1.5 billion shares worth about more than $50 billion seems tame indeed. While the relative size of the financial sector has ballooned, the manufacturing sector has shrunk. For example, the share of manufacturing represented 21.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 1974; by 2004, that figure had fallen to 12.1 percent. In contrast, the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector rose during the same period from 14.9 percent to 20.6 percent, effectively trading places with the manufacturing sector (President of the United States 2006, Table B 12, pp. 296 97). However, the data fail to reflect the full extent of the shift from manufacturing to finance because non financial companies often earn substantial profits from financial operations, without reporting separate information for their financial operations. The magnitudes in question can be substantial. For example by 2005, General Motors and Ford earned almost all of their profits from their financial operations rather than from producing cars. For General Electric, financial operations produced almost half of the company's profit (Henry 2005). While financialization is not as extreme for the entire corporate sector, by one estimate, financial profits as a share of total profits rose from around 15 percent during the 1960s to above 30 percent for most of the 1980s 90s (Epstein and Power 2002). Using a different method, the Department of Commerce estimated that by early 2005 financial profits represented more than one third of all corporate profits, up from little more than 20 percent a decade earlier continues to climb (US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis 2005; Henry 2005). Both these breakdowns necessarily underestimate financial profits because many corporations do not separate their financial from their non financial profits. As manufacturing continues to move abroad, the relative importance of financial profits will most likely continue its steady increase, at least until the coming depression. The probable consequences will not be pleasant. New Enrons are growing at this very minute. They always do. Although the financial industry lobbies hard against regulation, effective regulation can limit the number and the size of future Enrons. In a healthy economy, the collapse of a few speculative ventures does relatively little harm. In a vulnerable economy, the size of the suddenly disappearing bezzle can set off a depression with a magnitude many thousands of times greater than Enron. A healthy market economy requires that business invest for the future. Even in the unlikely situation in which every corporation "played by the rules," financialization represents a significant threat to the extent that the economy becomes "the prisoner of impatient capital" (Harrison 1994, p. 214). A financialized world without oversight where everything is arranged to improve the next quarterly financial report is a certain recipe for disaster. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 10:15:20 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:15:20 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Pablo Picasso Message-ID: <48DCD259.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso Pablo Picasso . Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso 1962 Birth name Pablo Diego Jos? Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Mar?a de los Remedios Cipriano de la Sant?sima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ru?z y Picasso Born October 25, 1881M?laga, Spain Died 8 April 1973 (aged 91)Mougins, France Nationality Spanish Field Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Printmaking, Ceramics Training Jose Ru?z (father), Academy of Arts, Madrid Movement Cubism Works Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)Guernica (1937) The Weeping Woman (1937) Pablo Diego Jos? Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Mar?a de los Remedios Cipriano de la Sant?sima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ru?z y Picasso (October 25, 1881 ? April 8, 1973) was an Andalusian-Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937). Contents[hide]? 1 Biography o 1.1 Personal life o 1.2 Political views ? 2 Art o 2.1 Before 1901 o 2.2 Blue Period o 2.3 Rose Period o 2.4 African-influenced Period o 2.5 Cubism o 2.6 Classicism and surrealism o 2.7 Later works ? 3 Commemoration and legacy ? 4 Children ? 5 Notes ? 6 References ? 7 External links o 7.1 Museums o 7.2 Essays Biography Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego Jos? Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Mar?a de los Remedios Cipriano de la Sant?sima Trinidad Clito, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ru?z and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish custom. Born in the city of M?laga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don Jos? Ruiz y Blasco (1838?1913) and Mar?a Picasso y L?pez. Picasso?s family was middle-class; his father was also a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz?s ancestors were minor aristocrats. The house where Picasso was born, in M?laga The young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first words were ?piz, piz?, a shortening of l?piz, the Spanish word for ?pencil?.[1] From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was a traditional, academic artist and instructor who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork. The family moved to La Coru?a in 1891 so his father could become a professor at the School of Fine Arts. They stayed almost four years. On one occasion the father found his son painting over his unfinished sketch of a pigeon. Observing the precision of his son?s technique, Ruiz felt that the thirteen-year-old Picasso had surpassed him, and vowed to give up painting.[2] In 1895, Picasso's seven-year old sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria - a traumatic event in his life.[3]After her death, the family moved to Barcelona, with Ruiz transferring to its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home.[4] Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, and the impressed jury admitted Picasso, who was still 13. The student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented him a small room close to home so Picasso could work alone, yet Ruiz checked up on him numerous times a day, judging his son?s drawings. The two argued frequently. Picasso?s father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrid?s Royal Academy of San Fernando, the foremost art school in the country.[4] In 1897, Picasso, age 16, set off for the first time on his own. Yet his difficulties accepting formal instruction led him to stop attending class soon after enrollment. Madrid, however, held many other attractions: the Prado housed paintings by the venerable Diego Vel?zquez, Francisco Goya, and Francisco Zurbar?n. Picasso especially admired the works of El Greco; their elements, like elongated limbs, arresting colors, and mystical visages, are echoed in Picasso?s ?uvre. Personal life After studying art in Madrid, Picasso made his first trip to Paris in 1900, then the art capital of Europe. There, he met his first Parisian friend, the journalist and poet Max Jacob, who helped Picasso learn the language and its literature. Soon they shared an apartment; Max slept at night while Picasso slept during the day and worked at night. These were times of severe poverty, cold, and desperation. Much of his work had to be burned to keep the small room warm. In Madrid in 1901, Picasso and his anarchist friend Francisco de As?s Soler founded the magazine Arte Joven (Young Art), which published five issues. Soler solicited articles and Picasso illustrated the journal, mostly contributing grim cartoons depicting and sympathizing with the state of the poor. From that day, he started to sign his work simply Picasso, while before he had signed Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. In the early twentieth century, Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In 1904, in the middle of a storm, he met Fernande Olivier, a Bohemian artist who became his mistress.[5] Olivier appears in many of his Rose period paintings. After acquiring fame and some fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including Andr? Breton, poet Guillaume Apollinaire, writer Alfred Jarry, and Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollonaire pointed to his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.[6] Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, c. 1920 He maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev?s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in Rome; and they spent their honeymoon in the villa near Biarritz of the glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Err?zuriz. Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova?s insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso?s bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev?s troup, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer. In 1927 Picasso met 17 year old Marie-Th?r?se Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso?s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova?s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Th?r?se Walter and fathered a daughter, Maia, with her. Marie-Th?r?se lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso?s death. Dora Maar au Chat, 1941 The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica. During the Second World War, Picasso remained in Paris while the Germans occupied the city. Picasso?s artistic style did not fit the Nazi views of art, so he was not able to show his works during this time. Retreating to his studio, he continued to paint all the while. Although the Germans outlawed bronze casting in Paris, Picasso continued regardless, using bronze smuggled to him by the French resistance. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began to keep company with a young art student, Fran?oise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Unique among Picasso?s women, Gilot left Picasso in 1953, allegedly because of abusive treatment and infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso. He went through a difficult period after Gilot?s departure, coming to terms with his advancing age and his perception that, now in his 70s, he was no longer attractive, but rather grotesque to young women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf as buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl, including several from a six-week affair with Genevi?ve Laporte, who in June 2005 auctioned off the drawings Picasso made of her. Picasso was not long in finding another lover, Jacqueline Roque. She worked at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso?s life, marrying in 1961. Their marriage was also the means of one last act of revenge against Gilot. Gilot had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children with Picasso, Claude and Paloma. With Picasso?s encouragement, she had arranged to divorce her then husband, Luc Simon, and marry Picasso to secure her children?s rights. Picasso then secretly married Roque after Gilot had filed for divorce in order to exact his revenge for her leaving him. Picasso had constructed a huge gothic structure and could afford large villas in the south of France, at Notre-dame-de-vie on the outskirts of Mougins, in the Provence-Alpes-C?te d'Azur. By this time he was a celebrity, and there was often as much interest in his personal life as his art. In addition to his manifold artistic accomplishments, Picasso had a film career, including a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau?s Testament of Orpheus. Picasso always played himself in his film appearances. In 1955 he helped make the film Le Myst?re Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were ?Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can?t drink any more.?[7] He was interred at Castle Vauvenargues? park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rh?ne. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.[8] Political views Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951 Picasso remained neutral during World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II, refusing to fight for any side or country. Some of his contemporaries felt that his pacifism had more to do with cowardice than principle. An article in The New Yorker called him ?a coward, who sat out two world wars while his friends were suffering and dying?.[9] As a Spanish citizen living in France, Picasso was under no compulsion to fight against the invading Germans in either World War. In the Spanish Civil War, service for Spaniards living abroad was optional and would have involved a voluntary return to the country to join either side. While Picasso expressed anger and condemnation of Francisco Franco and fascists through his art, he did not take up arms against them. He also remained aloof from the Catalan independence movement during his youth despite expressing general support and being friendly with activists within it. In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended an international peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Stalin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.[10] But party criticism of a portrait of Stalin as insufficiently realistic cooled Picasso?s interest in communist politics, though he remained a loyal member of the Communist Party until his death. In a 1945 interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso stated: ?I am a Communist and my painting is Communist painting. ? But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in a special way to show my politics.?[11] He was against the intervention of the United Nations and the United States[12] in the Korean civil war and he depicted it in Massacre in Korea. In 1962, he received the International Lenin Peace Prize. Art Picasso?s work is often categorized into periods. While the names of many of his later periods are debated, the most commonly accepted periods in his work are the Blue Period (1901?1904), the Rose Period (1905?1907), the African-influenced Period (1908?1909), Analytic Cubism (1909?1912), and Synthetic Cubism (1912?1919). In 1939?40 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, under its director Alfred Barr, a Picasso enthusiast, held a major and highly successful retrospective of his principal works up until that time. This exhibition lionized the artist, brought into full public view in America the scope of his artistry, and resulted in a reinterpretation of his work by contemporary art historians and scholars.[13] Before 1901 Picasso?s training under his father began before 1890. His progress can be traced in the collection of early works now held by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which provides one of the most comprehensive records extant of any major artist?s beginnings.[14] During 1893 the juvenile quality of his earliest work falls away, and by 1894 his career as a painter can be said to have begun.[15] The academic realism apparent in the works of the mid-1890s is well displayed in The First Communion (1896), a large composition that depicts his sister, Lola. In the same year, at the age of 14, he painted Portrait of Aunt Pepa, a vigorous and dramatic portrait that Juan-Eduardo Cirlot has called ?without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.?[16] In 1897 his realism became tinged with Symbolist influence, in a series of landscape paintings rendered in non naturalistic violet and green tones. What some call his Modernist period (1899?1900) followed. His exposure to the work of Rossetti, Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and Edvard Munch, combined with his admiration for favorite old masters such as El Greco, led Picasso to a personal version of modernism in his works of this period.[17] Blue Period Femme aux Bras Crois?s, 1902 For more details on this topic, see Picasso's Blue Period. Picasso?s Blue Period (1901?1904) consists of somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. This period?s starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year.[18] Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from this period. In his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter?prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects?Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas. Starting in autumn of 1901 he painted several posthumous portraits of Casagemas, culminating in the gloomy allegorical painting La Vie (1903), now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.[19] The same mood pervades the well-known etching The Frugal Repast (1904), which depicts a blind man and a sighted woman, both emaciated, seated at a nearly bare table. Blindness is a recurrent theme in Picasso?s works of this period, also represented in The Blindman?s Meal (1903, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in the portrait of Celestina (1903). Other works include Portrait of Soler and Portrait of Suzanne Bloch?. Rose Period Pablo Picasso, Gar?on ? la pipe, (Boy with a Pipe), 1905, Rose Period For more details on this topic, see Picasso's Rose Period. The Rose Period (1904?1906)[20] is characterized by a more cheery style with orange and pink colors, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a model for sculptors and artists, in Paris in 1904, and many of these paintings are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899?1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods. African-influenced Period Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Museum of Modern Art, New York For more details on this topic, see Picasso's African Period. Picasso?s African-influenced Period (1907?1909) begins with the two figures on the right in his painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which were inspired by African artifacts. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubist period that follows. Cubism Three Musicians (1921), Museum of Modern Art Analytic cubism (1909?1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and ?analyzed? them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque?s paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912?1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments?often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages?were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art. Classicism and surrealism In the period following the upheaval of World War I, Picasso produced work in a neoclassical style. This ?return to order? is evident in the work of many European artists in the 1920s, including Andr? Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, and the artists of the New Objectivity movement. Picasso?s paintings and drawings from this period frequently recall the work of Ingres. During the 1930s, the minotaur replaced the harlequin as a common motif in his work. His use of the minotaur came partly from his contact with the surrealists, who often used it as their symbol, and it appears in Picasso?s Guernica. Guernica, 1937, Museo Reina Sofia Arguably Picasso?s most famous work is his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War ? Guernica. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. Asked to explain its symbolism, Picasso said, ?It isn?t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.?[21] Guernica hung in New York?s Museum of Modern Art for many years. In 1981 Guernica was returned to Spain and exhibited at the Cas?n del Buen Retiro. In 1992 the painting hung in Madrid?s Reina Sof?a Museum when it opened. Later works Picasso sculpture in Chicago Picasso was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949. In the 1950s, Picasso?s style changed once again, as he took to producing reinterpretations of the art of the great masters. He made a series of works based on Velazquez?s painting of Las Meninas. He also based paintings on works by Goya, Poussin, Manet, Courbet and Delacroix. Nude Woman with a Necklace (1968), Tate He was commissioned to make a maquette for a huge 50-foot (15 m)-high public sculpture to be built in Chicago, known usually as the Chicago Picasso. He approached the project with a great deal of enthusiasm, designing a sculpture which was ambiguous and somewhat controversial. What the figure represents is not known; it could be a bird, a horse, a woman or a totally abstract shape. The sculpture, one of the most recognizable landmarks in downtown Chicago, was unveiled in 1967. Picasso refused to be paid $100,000 for it, donating it to the people of the city. Picasso?s final works were a mixture of styles, his means of expression in constant flux until the end of his life. Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. Only later, after Picasso?s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time. Commemoration and legacy Picasso sculpture in Halmstad At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he didn?t need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. These works form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Mus?e Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, M?laga, Spain, the Museo Picasso M?laga. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of Picasso?s early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal Picasso?s firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father?s tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaime Sabart?s, Picasso?s close friend from his Barcelona days who, for many years, was Picasso?s personal secretary. Several paintings by Picasso rank among the most expensive paintings in the world. Gar?on ? la pipe sold for USD $104 million at Sotheby's on May 4, 2004, establishing a new price record. Dora Maar au Chat sold for USD $95.2 million at Sotheby?s on May 3, 2006.[22] As of 2004, Picasso remains the top ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) according to the Art Market Trends report.(pdf) The Picasso Administration functions as his official Estate. The U.S. copyright representative for the Picasso Administration is the Artists Rights Society[23]. Children ? Paulo (February 4, 1921 ? June 5, 1975) (Born Paul Joseph Picasso) ? with Olga Khokhlova ? Maia (September 5, 1935 ? ) (Born Maria de la Concepcion Picasso) ? with Marie-Th?r?se Walter ? Claude (May 15, 1947 ?) (Born Claude Pierre Pablo Picasso) ? with Fran?oise Gilot ? Paloma (April 19, 1949 ? ) (Born Anne Paloma Picasso) ? with Fran?oise Gilot This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Sep 26 05:34:30 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:34:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Positivist Dispute (Positivismusstreit) - 14 Message-ID: Frisby, David. "The Popper-Adorno Controversy: the Methodological Dispute in German Sociology," Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 2, June 1972, 105-119. I've not yet had a chance to compare this article to Frisby's later, 36-page introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. This article, however, is a concise summary of the disparate perspectives of Popper and Adorno. Adorno did not take up Popper's 27 theses on the social sciences, but laid out his alternative position, contributing to Popper's frustration. Given Popper's quarrels with positivism, it is perplexing to see Popper labeled as a positivist. There are of course different periodizations and approaches to positivism, and it seems that the Frankfurters used the term rather loosely, perhaps in consonance with the broad perspective of scientism of Comte's original positivism. Yet Feyerabend too characterized Popper as positivistic (Against Method, p. 66). The prescriptions of philosophers as well as scientists may differ from their actual practice. Popper rejects scientism while centering his perspective on the alleged methodology of the natural sciences, and addresses historiography while neglecting actual historical research. Popper's attention to the social sciences is scanty, yet asserts that all sciences are methodologically essentially the same. The dispute under discussion has historical precendents--the German preoccupation with the Geisteswisshenschaften, the Methodenstreit of the late 19th century, and the neo-Kantian dualism between the natural and historical sciences. For Popper, the logic of all sciences, including the social sciences, begins with a problem, to which alternative solutions are proposed and criticized. Popper opposes scientism and the hard-and-fast distinction between disciplines. What exists for him are problems and the scientific tradition. The objectivity of scientific knowledge does not consist in the objectivity of scientists, but in the critical method and tradition. Popper's social categories are competition, tradition, social institutions, and the state. Propositions are distinguishable as relevant to internal problems of the subject matter and to extra-scientific problems. The critical method is driven by pure deductive logic. As to social science, Popper maintains that sociology serves to address the unintended consequences of social action, for example, of competition. Sociology concerns itself to construct theories of institutions and traditions, keeping in mind that only individuals act and institutions emerge out of a situational logic, and that a theory of institutional consequences of actions could lead to a theory of the emergence and development of institutions. Adorno agrees with Popper on scientism but disagrees with Popper's methodological stance on problems, solutions, refutation, criticism, and objectivity. Popper's conception of a problem is based on the distinction between knowledge and ignorance and a discovery of a lapse in knowledge, while for Adorno a problem is not essentially epistemological but practical, and not just specific problems but ultimately the "problematic condition of the world." Simplification and atomism (a la Wittgenstein) are not principles adequate to the understanding of society. Contradictions are not merely logical problems, but embedded in society itself. Methodology is ultimately answerable to the object studied, not to methodological ideals. Re hypotheses and testability, Adorno "suggests that social laws are incommensurable with the concept of hypotheses." [RD: I do not understand this.] "Thus the logical method of reduction of an entity to its elements, out of which the hypotheses are constructed, virtually eliminates objective contradictions." (112) Popper's anchoring of discrete problems/solutions in empirical evidence as a basis for hypothesis testing obscures the fact that the object of study, society, is already structured, and that fact-fetishism leaves society's structure unquestioned. According to Adorno, facts are "themselves mediated through society. Not all theorems are hypotheses; theory is the telos, not the vehicle of sociology." [RD: I don't find this formulation at all clear.] Frisby clarifies (113): "There is a tendency to reduce theory to an instrument of research within sociology as if sociology is divorced from the society which it studies. Knowledge derived from an uncritical acceptance of empirical facts becomes a pure reproduction of the existing relations of society." [RD: this is a bit better, and should be an obvious basic understanding. Adorno could have expressed himself more clearly, however, about what he means by hypothesis, law, fact, theory, etc.] Adorno questions Popper's "relationship posited here between tests and research procedures." For Adorno, individual facts should be seen in a dialectical relationship with social totalities, which conventional empirical research methods cannot test. Adorno agrees with Popper on the goal of criticism, but the critical activity of sociology cannot be directed solely to self-criticism, but to the critique of society itself. Consider the contradiction between the stated concept of a liberal society and the actual inequality institutionalized by that society. A preocuupation with logical contradiction misses the point. Popper's approach is purely subjective and doesn't address the legitimation of society. Critique must be not only of scientific statements but of the facts themselves. Adorno puts it thus: "The critical approach is not purely formal but also material; of necessity critical sociology, if its concepts are to be made true, is both the particular idea and at the same time a critique of society." [RD: This is the crux. Formal vs material: this is the crux of the matter and the key to the limitations of bourgeois epistemology.] Adorno [see the introduction to the volume] criticizes Popper's superficial rendering of social factors (competition, tradition, social institutions, state power). Popper overlooks the decisive influence of fundamental productive and market forces. The institutions of science are similarly molded. What Popper considers to be the critical tradition amounts to this: (Frisby, 114) "scientific objectivity is made to rest upon the old liberal model of disinterested men assembled round a table to reach a consensus." Value and value-freedom for Adorno are interdependent, but as conventionally seen, separate the "rationality of means" from the "increasing irrationality of ends". [RD: Herman Melville already recognized this in 1851.] Sociology, if not merely technocratic, must base itself on the quest for a more just society. Popper affirms that his methodology is a theory of scientific revolution while his social theory is one of piecemeal reform. This duality between theory and method is not accepted by Adorno. Adorno distinguishes [see introduction] between a dialectical and a positivist view of totality. [Quoting from the published translation of 1976, not this article]: "The crucial difference between the dialectical and the positivistic view of totality is that the dialectical concept of totality is intended 'objectively', namely, for the understanding of every social individual observation, whilst positivistic systems theories wish, in an uncontradictory manner, to incorporate observations in a logical continuum, simply through the selection of categories as general as possible. In so doing, they do not recognize the highest structural concepts as the precondition for the states of affairs subsumed under them. " Adorno emphasizes that he encourgages, not eschews, empirical studies. Examples of the Frankfurt School's contributions are the study on authority and the family (1930s) and the authoritarian personality. One commentator, however, complains of the lack of a substantive theory beyond the critique of ideology: dialectical sociology remains unanchored in a theory of advanced industrial society. (Reference: M. Kruger, "Sociology of Knowledge and Social Theory," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 14, 1969, 152-63.) From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Sep 26 10:50:10 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:50:10 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Pablo Picasso Message-ID: <20080926.125011.160.2.farmelantj@juno.com> On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:15:20 -0400 "Charles Brown" writes: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso > > Pablo Picasso > > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8vaOI-lovo&NR=1 Pablo PicassoWords and music: jonathan richman Well some people try to pick up girls And get called assholes This never happened to pablo picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare and So pablo picasso was never called an asshole Well the girls would turn the color Of the avacado when he would drive Down their street in his el dorado He could walk down you street And girls could not resist his stare Pablo picasso never got called an asshole Not like you Alright Well he was only 5?3" But girls could not resist his stare Pablo picasso never got called an asshole Not in new york Oh well be not schmuck, be not abnoxious, Be not bellbottom bummer or asshole Remember the story of pablo picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare Pablo picasso was never called an asshole Alright this is it Some people try to pick up girls And they get called an asshole This never happened to pablo picasso He could walk down your street And girls could not resist his stare and so Pablo picasso was never called... ____________________________________________________________ Click here to compare prices and features on point of sale systems. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3l5GmtCl0Xa5PcD1JA0uv4DLDVfWAwKiWGeOl9Ui12wrlsmV/ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 11:02:26 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:02:26 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical intellectuals Message-ID: <48DCDD62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> In the 1930's-40's highwater period of US political accomplishments, many of the intellectuals involved in practical critical activity were artists and journalists not so much "philosophers". Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Lillian Hellman, painter Charles White, et al. even , maybe , Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if there is an American cultural style involved in that. In other words, America's noted "anti-intellectualism" may have displaced the progressive intellectuals from into the arts. Traditionally, journalism has been a favored US intellectual discipline more than academic disciplines. Should US progressive intellectuals in 2008 be looking to other secular fields of communication besides academic disciplines such as philosophy, social science , history etc. to get involved in mass ideas and opinions ? Charles This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 11:07:25 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:07:25 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ramming through the bailout Message-ID: <48DCDE8D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ramming through the bailout http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleprint/987/ Bush, Paulson make Dellinger look like a Boy Scout As the Bush administration attempts to ram a bailout package of nearly one trillion dollars through Congress, it begins to feel like Colonel Sanders asking the public to trust him to take care of the chickens. If it weren?t so damn serious, there would be something almost comical about it. Here we have the White House, which has squandered trillions of dollars over eight years, and its point man, Hank Paulson, fresh from 38 years of gaming the financial system while working at Goldman Sachs, insisting that Congressional leaders hand over a trillion dollars to them with no debate and no strings attached. In this real life drama, Bush and Paulson make John Dillinger, the legendary bank robber of the Depression years, look like a Boy Scout. Nothing to do with socialism This is not ?socialism for the rich,? as some have suggested. Socialist measures would thoroughly clean up and stabilize the financial system to be sure, but a socialist-led government would also place the good as well as the bad assets of the responsible parties (commercial and investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds) into the hands of a public democratically run authority. It would turn the Federal Reserve Bank, which during the Greenspan era was one of the main architects and cheerleaders of bubble economics (hi-tech, stock market and, its latest version, housing) into a publicly controlled institution. And it would bring those responsible to trial and penalize them appropriately, if convicted. At the same time, a socialist-led government and its congressional allies would funnel money to homeowners and working people and enact special measures to assist communities of the racially oppressed, not to mention our rural towns. It would rebuild our nation?s deteriorating infrastructure, invest in renewable energy and green jobs, and bring the Iraq war to a quick end. It would also propose the people?s takeover of the energy complex, which has also turned into a cash cow of the wealthiest corporations. Use common sense Does it make any sense to give control of our financial and economic system for the indefinite future to the same individuals, who while gaming the system, got us into this mess in the first place? I can?t think of anything that is less democratic or goes against the grain of common sense. In the money and banking textbooks that I read years ago, our financial institutions and system supposedly channeled idle money to productive uses ? to new technologies and business startups, to build homes and create jobs, to invest in new plant and equipment, and to construct and renew our nation?s infrastructure, while extracting handsome profits all the while. Looking back, it is fair to say that banks and investment houses did perform this function for a period in capitalism?s development, but that period has largely passed. Finance capital?s rise and ultra-right rule Indeed, with the rise to dominance of the extreme right and the reassertion of power by finance capital three decades ago, our financial system has operated more or less independently of other sectors of the economy, functioned largely free of any regulatory body, and grown exponentially. Finance capital ? in its quest to maximize its rate of profit ? has drained dollars from the private economy (especially the manufacturing sector) and the public treasury into incredibly risky and speculative financial schemes; it has spawned a series of complex financial instruments and paper transactions which few understand, but fabulously enrich the buyers and borrowers of these exotic instruments, most of which have nothing to do with the real economy. Finance capital has facilitated megamergers, takeovers and corporate flight to off shore locations; it has wreaked havoc on sovereign states and their economies, particularly in the developing world; it has without as much as a thought introduced enormous instability into the arteries of the U.S. and world economy, evidenced by the frequent financial contagions at home and globally. And, it has been one of the main class agents to successfully engineer the biggest transfer of wealth in our nation?s history from wealth creators -- the world?s working people -- to wealth appropriators, the upper crust of U.S. finance capital, while leaving at the same time our nation with an astronomical pile up of household, government and corporate debt that cannot be unwound overnight. In short, the reassertion of finance capital to a dominant position in the political economy of our country, which was only possible because of the right wing dominance of our nation?s political levers of power, has come at a heavy price for the American people and people worldwide. Clinging onto power And yet, despite this incredible wreckage, this almost incomprehensible corruption, this reckless speculation, these merchants of plunder, debt and hardship are still attempting to resolve this financial crisis in a way that continues to leave them in charge of the main levers of power and their wealth intact. As I said earlier, this is not socialism. A more apt description is parasitic state monopoly-finance capitalism. According to marxism, the main mission of the state is to reproduce the conditions for the reproduction of the class structure and economic relations of capitalism. If I am not mistaken, isn?t this precisely what Bush, Paulson and team are doing now? Arena of struggle Of course, marxism also says that state is an arena of struggle. While the ruling class employs the state apparatus, including violence when necessary, to impose its interests on society, a united working class and people can successfully resist these measures from within as well as outside state structures. This was done in the 1930s and in so doing, secured important victories for the nation?s working class and its allies. It was also done in the 1960s and in doing so brought down the system of legal segregation. And we see it again today in the incredible efforts of millions of working people of all races and nationalities and their allies to elect Barack Obama and larger Democratic Party Congressional majorities in November. Indeed, it is a task that takes on even greater significance given the financial storm that is shaking our country. For the moment however, the American people and their friends in Congress are faced with a first class challenge ? to impose their own imprint on the way in which this financial crisis is resolved. Let?s have no doubt that our financial system can be stabilized and restored to its orderly functioning in a way that meets the needs of the American people and our country. But will take a fight! Sam Webb is chairperson of the Communist Party. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 11:17:46 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:17:46 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Charles White Message-ID: <48DCE0FA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/792/Charles_White_a_lover_of_the_arts http://negroartist.com/negro%20artist/charles%20white/index1.htm This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Sep 26 11:18:51 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:18:51 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical intellectuals In-Reply-To: <48DCDD62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48DCDD62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: There's a whole book out on that era: THE CULTURAL FRONT, author is, I think, Michael Deming. There are progressive journalists, songwriters, and filmmakers. The whole institutional and media landscape has changed, though. At 01:02 PM 9/26/2008, you wrote: >In the 1930's-40's highwater period of US political accomplishments, >many of the intellectuals involved in practical critical activity were >artists and journalists not so much "philosophers". Arlo Guthrie, Pete >Seeger, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Lillian Hellman, painter Charles >White, et al. even , maybe , Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if there is an >American cultural style involved in that. In other words, America's >noted "anti-intellectualism" may have displaced the progressive >intellectuals from into the arts. > >Traditionally, journalism has been a favored US intellectual discipline >more than academic disciplines. > >Should US progressive intellectuals in 2008 be looking to other secular >fields of communication besides academic disciplines such as philosophy, >social science , history etc. to get involved in mass ideas and opinions >? > >Charles From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 11:21:53 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:21:53 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical intellectuals In-Reply-To: References: <48DCDD62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48DCE1F1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> I can't think of any philosophers or other academic thinkers in leading roles. Can you think of any ? Charles >>> Ralph Dumain 09/26/2008 1:18 PM >>> There's a whole book out on that era: THE CULTURAL FRONT, author is, I think, Michael Deming. There are progressive journalists, songwriters, and filmmakers. The whole institutional and media landscape has changed, though. At 01:02 PM 9/26/2008, you wrote: >In the 1930's-40's highwater period of US political accomplishments, >many of the intellectuals involved in practical critical activity were >artists and journalists not so much "philosophers". Arlo Guthrie, Pete >Seeger, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Lillian Hellman, painter Charles >White, et al. even , maybe , Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if there is an >American cultural style involved in that. In other words, America's >noted "anti-intellectualism" may have displaced the progressive >intellectuals from into the arts. > >Traditionally, journalism has been a favored US intellectual discipline >more than academic disciplines. > >Should US progressive intellectuals in 2008 be looking to other secular >fields of communication besides academic disciplines such as philosophy, >social science , history etc. to get involved in mass ideas and opinions >? > >Charles _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 11:24:03 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:24:03 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Michael Denning's "The Cultural Front" Message-ID: <48DCE274.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/denning.htm Michael Denning's "The Cultural Front" By Louis Proyect After I joined the Trotskyist movement in 1967, I soon learned that "Stalinism" was a many-headed monster. Not only did it betray revolutions, it was responsible for the sort of awful kitschy popular art that Trotskyist intellectuals of the 1930s had blasted away at in journals like the Partisan Review. The Trotskyist aesthetic was very much bound up with the modernism of T.S. Eliot and at a certain point in the Cold War, the left politics was dropped altogether. Hostility to the proletarian novel soon transformed itself into hostility toward the proletariat itself. In recent years there has been an effort to rethink the political legacy of the 1930s. New Left historians like Mark Naison have attempted to understand how the Communist Party at the grass-roots level managed to provide leadership to working class struggles no matter the ineptness of the party tops. As the political legacy is being rethought, so is the cultural legacy. An important new book titled "The Cultural Front" by Yale professor Michael Denning is an attempt to reconsider the popular art of the 1930s and 40s as something much broader and deeper than merely the production of Communist Party hacks. He argues that the "Cultural Front" included the CP but that the majority consisted of independents like Orson Welles. While the tendency of cold war historians has been to write off such figures as "fellow travelers", Denning believes that the inspiration for left-wing film, popular music and literature was the labor movement itself and not directives from Communist Party headquarters. Key to his analysis is the debunking of what some have derisively called Communist Party "front groups". Was Popular front culture a "front" for the machinations of Moscow, or what ex-Trotskyist Irving Howe once called a "brilliant masquerade"? Were artists duped into lending their name for various "Peace with the Soviet People" groups without knowing what they were getting into? Denning makes the case that such formations were not facades at all. Groups such as the "American Friends of Spanish Democracy" or the "Hollywood Anti-Nazi League" were instead part of a social movement that should be understood in terms of Gramsci's concept of the "cultural front": "One can say that not only does the philosophy of praxis not exclude ethico-political history but that, indeed, in its most recent stage of development, it consists precisely in asserting the moment of hegemony as essential to its conception of the state and to the 'accrediting' of the cultural fact, of cultural activity, of a cultural front as necessary alongside the merely economic and political ones." In other words, the vast production of left-wing popular art of the 1930s and 40s was an attempt to create a "counter-hegemonic" culture. The Great Depression and the rise of fascism created a crisis of traditional American culture as well as politics. The optimism of the Lincoln era had to give way to something new. This new culture was imminently successful since it did manage to touch the lives of millions of ordinary working people and begin to create an alternative vision of society. With this perspective in mind, Denning amasses an encyclopedic wealth of information about the period that entertains as well as educates. There is a chapter on John Dos Passos, whose reputation has suffered in recent decades. This is a shame since Dos Passos writes brilliantly about "big money", the "great imperial steam-roller of American finance," a fact of existence that is still with us. The bread-lines of John Steinbeck may have disappeared, but there is something still very contemporary about the venality of the typical Dos Passos character who is seduced by the "big money". If you want to understand the 1980s and the soul of characters like Jerry Rubin or Donald Trump, Dos Passos is the place to go. My favorite chapter is "Cabaret Blues", which contains a perceptive analysis of the jazz world's connections to the left, including Billie Holiday's. She sang at Caf? Society, a Greenwich village nightspot started by the leftist Barney Josephson who wanted to bring white and black folks together for entertainment and political inspiration. It was a hangout for wealthy left-liberals from Park Avenue, Jewish trade unionists and black celebrities like boxer Joe Louis. She first sang "Strange Fruit" there, a song that helped her find herself as an artist in 1941, as she reported to pianist Teddy Wilson. Denning reports that Duke Ellington and Count Basie used to do benefits to raise money for medical aid for the Spanish Republic and that as late as 1951, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and J.J. Johnson were performing at a Labor Youth League dance. In the final section of the book, Denning raises a number of interesting questions about the relationship between popular culture and socialist politics. In the course of this discussion, he refers to the journal "Modern Quarterly" that was initiated by left-wing intellectuals including the editor V.F. Calverton and Sidney Hook. In its heyday, from 1927 to 1931, this journal attempted to address the need for an Americanized Marxism. Later on, in 1933 and 1934, a successor journal titled "Modern Monthly" addressed the same themes. In 1933, several of the intellectuals who had been associated with these journals, including Calverton and Hook, joined with left-wing labor leader A.J. Muste and his Conference for Progressive Labor Action in founding a new party called the American Workers Party (AWP). This formation led an important CIO labor struggle in Toledo in 1934 which triggered a general strike in the city. The "Modern Monthly" became the unofficial organ of the AWP and Max Eastman and Edmund Wilson joined its editorial board. In late 1934, the AWP fused with the Trotskyist movement and A.J. Muste and most of the AWP intellectuals went their own way. This information is of tremendous value to those of us who are trying to construct a revolutionary socialist movement that is free of the distortions associated with "Cominternism", that is to say the tendency to superimpose schemas from afar upon the class struggle of a given society. This tendency has existed in the 3rd and 4th Internationals, both of which took for granted the legitimacy of Zinoviev's organizational and political model. This model served Stalin as he attempted to convert Communist Parties into pawns of his foreign policy. It unfortunately has tended to cause Trotskyist parties to suffer from sectarianism and dogmatism as "international secretariats" of one stripe or another dictate strategy and tactics to national sections. Trotsky himself, serving as Comintern deputy before his downfall, sent letters to the French Communist Party, telling it what was appropriate to print on the front page of L'Humanite. The collapse of the Soviet Union has thrown Stalinism and Trotskyism into a crisis since the paradigm that tended to lock them into a deadly embrace has disappeared. This affords nonsectarian and nondogmatic Marxists an opportunity to take up the task that has always existed: to construct a Marxist movement based on the living reality of the country you live in. This does not mean that one should not be an internationalist. It simply means that internationalism can only be fostered by solid, authentic revolutionary parties rooted in their local class struggle. This is the sort of internationalism that Subcommandante Marcos represents, who speaks the political and cultural language of the Chiapas peasantry while communicating online with the radical movement internationally. The "thread" of an indigenous Marxism has always existed in the United States. It existed in the V.F. Calverton journals and Muste's American Workers Party. It might have been crowded out by the mass acceptance of the Communist Party, but resurfaced again in the late 1940s with the emergence of Monthly Review, a journal that Denning considers in the spirit of Calverton's. The 1960s radicalization gave a last burst of life to "Comintern" type thought and politics, not least of which was the re-energized Trotskyist movement. A new radicalization will have an opportunity to reject these centralizing models and draw from the alternative represented by the national Marxisms of Gramsci or Peru's Mariategui. It might even consider the Trotskyism of CLR James, who while remaining deferential to the idea of the Fourth International, showed in his writings how important it was to be rooted in the class struggle of one's own society. Gramsci, Mariategui and James all understood the need to be engaged with popular culture. They were all fascinated by the movies, daily newspapers and popular fiction. The reason popular culture is important is that it is an important way to reach working people. The record of the "cultural front", which is the subject of Denning's investigation, is exemplary. This leftist popular art was so pervasive and so deeply rooted that it took a campaign of exceptional violence, both physical and juridical, to stamp it out. McCarthyism was nothing more nor less than attempt to lobotomize an American population that had grown to accept the legitimacy of left-wing politics and art. By contrast, the politics and art of the 1960s and 1970s was much more ephemeral. The manifestos of innumerable Trotskyist or Maoist "new internationals" appear as dated as a Jefferson Airplane album or Peter Max poster. In the next radicalization, we need to develop a Marxism that is much more deeply rooted in our native soil. This is the only way to withstand 1950s style repression or the petty-bourgeois infantile ultraleftism that was the undoing of our most recent foray into oppositional politics and for which we have nobody but ourselves to blame. Louis Proyect This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 11:26:42 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:26:42 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Legacy of the Cultural Front: an Interview with Alan Wald Message-ID: <48DCE312.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> The Legacy of the Cultural Front: an Interview with Alan Wald By Political Affairs http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3887/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor?s note: Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan ( I was in Latin American solidarity work with Wald in Ann Arbor in 1982-4) and is the author of seven books including, Writing from the Left and Exiles from a Future Time. He is a member of the editorial boards of Science & Society and Against the Current. He also edited The Radical Novel Reconsidered series published by the University of Illinois Press, which includes Burning Valley by Philip Bonosky. PA: Can you talk about what proletarian and social realist literature is? AW: There are simple and complex definitions of both categories. There has long existed a broad proletarian literature about the lives and experience of working-class people, mostly written by those sympathetic to socialist ideals. However, in the early 1930?s, a more specific proletarian literature movement was fostered by the Communist Party. After the Popular Front began in 1935, the party officially turned in a new direction. Yet writers continued to be attracted to the Communist-led tradition; Philip Bonosky, who published proletarian novels from a Communist perspective during the cold war, is an example. Social realism is also a term with multiple meanings. It was originally applied to painting and generally referred to art with a social and political content, and a technique that one might call naturalist. In the 1930?s, however, social realism sometimes became linked to socialist realism, then the official Soviet doctrine. When a painting or text is called social realist, one can not always tell whether ?social? is being used as a shorthand for the word socialist, as one finds in the phrase ?social democracy,? or whether it means simply ?social? in the looser sense of socially conscious. PA: So you make a distinction between the proletarian literature of the early 1930?s and that which came out of the Popular Front period? AW: Yes, although perhaps more in theory than practice; one of the contradictions to be found when a political party tries to lead a cultural movement is that writers and artists create out of needs beyond immediate policies. I would certainly say that there was more latitude after 1935 on the Communist-led literary left toward popular writing. The vocabulary changes to an advocacy of a people?s literature and a people?s culture. The John Reed Clubs, which focused on working-class writers, some of whom showed an affinity with modernism in their poetry, were abolished. Other kinds of writers become more prominent; for example, the Hollywood humorist Donald Ogden Stewart was the new head of the League of American Writers. Yet the broader trend of working-class literature persisted, and there also continued to be writers who wanted to work in the more specific proletarian school. PA: Is the ?proletarian literature movement? over? Is it a real cultural force now? AW: I really don?t follow contemporary literature very closely; there are still too many fascinating and forgotten works to be unearthed from the 1930?s-50?s era. But I find that literature about working-class life continues to be produced, as well as some fine radical novels. The specific proletarian literature movement, the one primarily connected with the centrality of the Communist Party in the US left, is over. But I wouldn?t want to see that experience lost from memory or trivialized into a sound-byte. I think any new radical movement is going to have to come to terms with the achievements and weaknesses of Communism and the cultural work associated with it. At the same time, the next radical cultural upsurge must find its own way, and evolve only in a very loose association with organizations and social movements. PA: Given that you come from a different Marxist tradition than the people you study and given that there is a historical gulf between those traditions, how did you become interested in the Communist-led cultural front? AW: As a 1960?s radical, I didn?t come out of the Trotskyist tradition. In high school, I was an alienated existentialist; in college, briefly an aspiring beatnik and then a new leftist. I joined SDS in 1965, which was transformative in producing a lifelong opposition to capitalism. When SDS fell apart, I joined the Young Socialist Alliance at Antioch College in 1968, and then the Socialist Workers Party in Berkeley in late 1969. In these groups I received a fabulous political education in classical Marxism, and met extraordinary socialist veterans of the 1930?s, 40?s, and 50?s. But it wasn?t Trotskyism that particularly drew me in the first place. What attracted me was radical activism against racism and the Vietnam War, and the ideas of Marxism - something more heterogeneous. In the 1960?s and 1970?s I surely read more Georg Lukacs than Trotsky. I was entranced by the writings of Isaac Deutscher, but this started earlier - I had seen Deutscher?s books on the desk of Carl Oglesby, president of SDS, with whom I took a seminar in college. The Bolshevik leaders could be brilliant, but they could never be the fulcrum for my thinking. What was consistent from my early radicalization until now is that ?hard? (sectarian) versions of Trotskyism always revolted me. I imagined that I saw a fresh revolutionary synthesis of old left and new left in the writings of Ernest Mandel and the journal New Left Review; for a few years I was hopeful that the SWP might go in that direction, too. Its creative response to Malcolm X impressed me, and I felt it embodied an organic link to the US working class, as did the Communist Party. Andy Castillo While studying US radicalism, I came to realize that, from the beginning of my intellectual and political awakening, there was a presence of the Communist left, but it wasn?t identified as such. For example, in high school, my teacher gave me Richard Wright to read, and my parents had 1930?s fiction by James T. Farrell on their bookshelf. It was only by reading about Wright that I discovered he had been in the Communist Party. Even when I read Wright?s essay in The God that Failed, which is an attack on the Communist Party, what he wrote about Communism was so intriguing that I wanted to learn more. In the ferment of the early 1960?s, this literature and culture of the old left was suddenly revived and present in a way that it is not today; I think that?s because the old left was intimately linked to the antiracist and anti-imperialist activism that was attracting the young. I was culturally into jazz and modernism, yet felt more affinity with the old left than with Timothy Leary and the Hippies. At Antioch College I found children of Communists leading the civil rights movement. While in SDS I was drawn to community organizing, and occasionally an old Communist would show up at a meeting and make a lot of sense. Remnants of the old left were just part of the picture if one was in the streets. So it wasn?t hard for me to feel an empathy with the ideals of Communist cultural workers of past decades, even though I was absolutely horrified by everything I learned about the Stalin regime. We should also note that practically every one of the important writers of the left departed the Communist movement, except for a handful like Walter Lowenfels, Meridel Le Sueur and Thomas McGrath, and of course Philip Bonosky. Most of the writers I interviewed had a critical perspective on the CP experience, and sometimes they were even more critical than myself. They agreed that they had completely misread what had occurred in the USSR. But they were admirable people, perhaps more so because they could admit that they had been wrong. PA: Can you talk about your upcoming book? AW: Trinity of Passion: The U.S. Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade is a follow-up to Exiles from a Future Time, which is mostly about poetry and the origins of the Communist tradition. The new book focuses on fiction from the Spanish Civil War through World War II. For example, I treat a number of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, all who were then close to the Communist Party: Milton Wolfe, Alvah Bessie and William Herrick. I also treat several leftists who wrote about military combat during World War II, such as John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Dan Levin, Saul Levitt and Lewis Falstein. There is a section on the Harlem left during the war, focusing on Ann Petry, and a newly-documented chapter about Arthur Miller and the left. And I write about Albert Maltz, whose astonishing World War II novel, The Cross and the Arrow, addressed German resistance in a manner that anticipates contemporary debates about the responsibility of the Germans for Nazism. The book goes through the late 1940?s, and the follow-up volume will be on the cold war. PA: There have been a number of recent attacks on academics on the left for opposing the Bush administration, for being Marxists, or whatever. Why do you think universities reflect such a sharp point of conflict? What are some ways to protect political freedom on campuses? AW: You may have seen the recent piece by Ellen Schrecker, ?Worse than McCarthy,? where she talks about how, during McCarthyism, professors were fired and blacklisted - which seems much worse than today. But Schrecker then observes that, at present, state legislatures are looking at who is being hired and what?s being taught - something more far-reaching than party affiliation. In that sense, it is not a repeat of McCarthyism. What is going on now is broader. My impression, from reading the charges of people like David Horowitz, who claims to identify the 100 most dangerous professors, is that the ideologists of the right are primarily concerned about gays and lesbians, or else people who are currently attacking US foreign policy, or just people who may have crossed swords with David Horowitz in the past. I see it as part of the general development of a right wing that is looking for ways to discredit liberalism wherever it can find an opening, not narrowly Marxism and Communism. One reason the universities make a good target is that a segment of scholars in the humanities give the impression of being elitists, even if they imagine that they are the opposite. Part of this is the appearance of indulging in esoteric vocabularies and theories, and a self-righteousness about one?s political correctness. The best way to fight back is to set a good example of actively creating a humane culture at the university, a democratic culture that tolerates a diversity of ideas - including ideas with which we disagree. As a socialist, I favor university intellectuals finding a way to relate to working people, especially rank-and-file labor organizations. At the least, intellectuals might be involved in community organizations - but as learners as much as teachers. When one works along side someone in a common project, trust is built. We should try to talk language that can have some resonance among ordinary people. In these last respects, Communist intellectuals and cultural workers set a good example - yet another reason to study them! --Send your letters to the editor to pa-letters at politicalaffairs.net This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Sep 26 11:43:29 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:43:29 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical intellectuals In-Reply-To: <48DCE1F1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48DCDD62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <48DCE1F1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: Sidney Hook played a leading role, as a Marxist in the 1930s. Then he played a leading anti-communist role. John Dewey was no Marxist, but he played a leading role as a progressive. See this partial list of philosophers victimized by McCarthyism: The Honor Roll: American Philosophers Professionally Injured During the McCarthy Era by John McCumber I suppose it all depends on what you mean by leading role. C. Wright Mills played a leading intellectual role in the '50s, but he wasn't organizationally connected to a movement as far as I can recall. At 01:21 PM 9/26/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >I can't think of any philosophers or other academic thinkers in leading >roles. Can you think of any ? > >Charles > > >>> Ralph Dumain 09/26/2008 1:18 PM > >>> >There's a whole book out on that era: THE CULTURAL FRONT, author is, >I think, Michael Deming. > >There are progressive journalists, songwriters, and filmmakers. The >whole institutional and media landscape has changed, though. > >At 01:02 PM 9/26/2008, you wrote: > >In the 1930's-40's highwater period of US political accomplishments, > >many of the intellectuals involved in practical critical activity >were > >artists and journalists not so much "philosophers". Arlo Guthrie, >Pete > >Seeger, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Lillian Hellman, painter >Charles > >White, et al. even , maybe , Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if there is >an > >American cultural style involved in that. In other words, America's > >noted "anti-intellectualism" may have displaced the progressive > >intellectuals from into the arts. > > > >Traditionally, journalism has been a favored US intellectual >discipline > >more than academic disciplines. > > > >Should US progressive intellectuals in 2008 be looking to other >secular > >fields of communication besides academic disciplines such as >philosophy, > >social science , history etc. to get involved in mass ideas and >opinions > >? > > > >Charles From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 12:05:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:05:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical intellectuals In-Reply-To: References: <48DCDD62.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <48DCE1F1.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48DCEC3D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Thanks for the reference. I'm thinking of connected to the mass struggles. Yea, come to think of it Plekanov was a leading Marxist philosopher in Russia, but by 1917 , he was against the insurrection. Kautsky was a leading intellectual , and we know about him when it counted. Dewey's a good example. >>> Ralph Dumain Sidney Hook played a leading role, as a Marxist in the 1930s. Then he played a leading anti-communist role. John Dewey was no Marxist, but he played a leading role as a progressive. See this partial list of philosophers victimized by McCarthyism: The Honor Roll: American Philosophers Professionally Injured During the McCarthy Era by John McCumber I suppose it all depends on what you mean by leading role. C. Wright Mills played a leading intellectual role in the '50s, but he wasn't organizationally connected to a movement as far as I can recall. At 01:21 PM 9/26/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >I can't think of any philosophers or other academic thinkers in leading >roles. Can you think of any ? > >Charles > > >>> Ralph Dumain 09/26/2008 1:18 PM > >>> >There's a whole book out on that era: THE CULTURAL FRONT, author is, >I think, Michael Deming. > >There are progressive journalists, songwriters, and filmmakers. The >whole institutional and media landscape has changed, though. > >At 01:02 PM 9/26/2008, you wrote: > >In the 1930's-40's highwater period of US political accomplishments, > >many of the intellectuals involved in practical critical activity >were > >artists and journalists not so much "philosophers". Arlo Guthrie, >Pete > >Seeger, Paul Robeson, Billie Holiday, Lillian Hellman, painter >Charles > >White, et al. even , maybe , Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if there is >an > >American cultural style involved in that. In other words, America's > >noted "anti-intellectualism" may have displaced the progressive > >intellectuals from into the arts. > > > >Traditionally, journalism has been a favored US intellectual >discipline > >more than academic disciplines. > > > >Should US progressive intellectuals in 2008 be looking to other >secular > >fields of communication besides academic disciplines such as >philosophy, > >social science , history etc. to get involved in mass ideas and >opinions > >? > > > >Charles _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 12:14:36 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:14:36 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Financial Crisis Goes Beyond Finance by Michael Perelman Message-ID: <48DCEE4C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/the-financial-crisis-goes-beyond-finance/ http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2008w38/msg00134.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I just dashed off the first draft of a discussion of the financial crisis to be published in a South Asian publication. It is very preliminary. I could appreciate any pointers. Thanks. MP The Financial Crisis Goes Beyond Finance The crisis today crisis in mortgage lending does not come as a surprise to me. I discussed the buildup to the crisis in a book published last year: The Confiscation of American Prosperity: From Right Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression. The book shows describes more than three decades of concerted efforts to restructure the economy to respond to the antiauthoritarian spirit of the 1960s, which included. Most important of all, the counterrevolution to the 60s was concerned about a decline in the rate of profits. The objective was to remake the United States as a capitalist's utopia with strict market discipline for ordinary people, while showing special favors on business. Tax cuts, deregulation, and a more business-friendly legal structure became the order of the day. Success showed up relatively quickly in the labor market, where capital halted the increase of wages by 1972, the year when real hourly wages peaked. Since then wages have oscillated but never again reached that level. Profits began to recover, but on closer examination the recovery was unusual. In competitive industries, profits were not particularly high. Profits in producing goods were concentrated in industries protected by intellectual property or government favoritism were better. But the big profits came in finance. Even major industrial firms, such as General Motors, Ford, or General Electric began relying on their financial divisions for much of their profits. What was happening? According to the textbook model of economic growth, new productivity translates into higher wages, which, in turn, create more demand, which spurs industry to produce newer or better products, increasing productivity. In recent decades, debt rather than income spurred demand. As profits recovered, more affluent people saw their portfolios increasing, creating what economists call the wealth effect: the increasing value of their stocks, and later of their houses, was treated as income, which generated demand. Frequently, people used their houses to borrow money to support this demand. Production of physical goods was largely neglected. I am reminded of a conversation between Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, a quarter millennium ago. Boswell observed [Boswell, James. 1934-64. Life of Johnson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press): ii, p. 464] "Very little business appeared to be going forward in Lichfield. I found however two strange manufactures for so inland a place, sail-cloth and streamers for ships: and I observed them making some saddle-cloths, and dressing sheep skins: but upon the whole, the busy hand of industry seemed to be quite slackened. "Surely, Sir, (said I,) you are an idle set of people." "Sir (said Johnson) "We are a City of Philosophers: we work with our Heads, and make the Boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands." Johnson, of course, was being ironic. The philosophers of the new economy were not. They breathlessly referred to a weightless economy [see Coyle 1998]. Tom Peters, the management guru, derided old-line businesses as "Lumpy-object purveyors" [Peters 1997, p. 16]. Even Alan Greenspan is fond of rhapsodizing about how modern production techniques are making the economy lighter and lighter: "The world of 1948 was vastly different from the world of 1996. The American economy, more then than now, was viewed as the ultimate in technology and productivity in virtually all fields of economic endeavor. The quintessential model of industrial might in those days was the array of vast, smoke-encased integrated steel mills in the Pittsburgh district and on the shores of Lake Michigan. Output was things, big physical things." "Virtually unimaginable a half century ago was the extent to which concepts and ideas would substitute for physical resources and human brawn in the production of goods and services. In 1948 radios were still being powered by vacuum tubes. Today, transistors deliver far higher quality with a mere fraction of the bulk. Fiber-optics has [sic] replaced huge tonnages of copper wire, and advances in architectural and engineering design have made possible the construction of buildings with much greater floor space but significantly less physical material than the buildings erected just after World War II. Accordingly, while the weight of current economic output is probably only modestly higher than it was a half century ago, value added, adjusted for price change, has risen well over threefold. [Greenspan 1996] Nobody seemed to sense that anything was awry. Leaders in the U.S. were content to let the modern equivalent of the boobies of Manchester produce their goods in Asian sweatshops, then borrow the proceeds from their masters to support their consumption. The game depended upon continued growth, whether illusory or real. Deregulation helped to promote illusions of prosperity. So did the dot.com hysteria of the late 1990s. When the bubble burst, the Federal Reserve came to the rescue with low interest rates. Temporarily lacking sufficient confidence in the stock market, real estate seemed a better bet. Real estate prices soared. People could borrow more on their houses. And with rapidly rising real estate prices, people could comfortably lend money to people who could not afford the loans because, after all, real estate would always increase in value. To make the illusion even more solid, people believed that they could avoid risk. Ratings agencies told investors that paper based on this real estate was just a shade more risky than U.S. government bonds. To seal the deal, investors sold "insurance," which promised to cover losses if the investment would go sour. This insurance business was so brisk that the amount of insurance sold was many times more than the face value of the investments. After all, selling this insurance was an easy way to profit from real estate market ahead nowhere to go but up. When the music stopped playing, with the regulators discovered that nobody with watching the store. Far more insurance was sold then the insurers could afford to cover. The ratings agencies are putting their seal of approval on the paper to get more fees. As I write this, the government is considering buying up bad debt to the tune of $700 billion, bailing out crooks and incompetents. The government debt will give the neoliberals excuse to cut more programs to help needy people, while bailing out the rich. Some thing similar happened a few decades ago with another war, a different Bush, and John McCain. Many years ago, Lyndon Johnson, who would have just celebrated his hundredth birthday couple days ago, found himself stuck in a war he couldn?t win. He also knew that if he raised taxes to pay for the war, the public would demand an immediate halt with an intensity that he could not resist. Johnson relied on borrowing, which raised interest rates. Savings and loan institutions, like the investment banks today, borrowed short and lent long. In this case, people put their savings in the banks and the banks lent out money on 30 year mortgages. To prevent gouging and make mortgages affordable, the Savings and Loans were prevented from paying interest rates high enough to keep depositors from exiting, which could make them bankrupt. The Reagan administration, including daddy Bush, moved to deregulate the Savings and Loans. Given this newfound freedom, crooks and nincompoops (including President Bush?s younger brother) rushed in to take advantage of profiting from other people?s money. As the scope of this disaster was becoming obvious, five senators, including John McCain along with Alan Greenspan (perhaps the Godfather of the recent financial crisis), rushed in to defend one of the more egregious Savings and Loan operations run by Charles Keating. Oh, yes, a small savings-and-loan in Arkansas, which was connected with Bill Clinton (who allowed Congress to deregulate the current financial system, led by Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain?s chief economic adviser) also ran into difficulties. The savings-and-loan scam crashed leaving the government to pick up the pieces at a cost that is still debated, but which was still well over $100 billion -- pocket change today. The difference today is that our politicians now promise effective regulation this time around, just as they did with Sarbanes-Oxley in the wake of crash of Enron and the rest of the dot.com boom. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 12:37:50 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:37:50 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Scientists warn US Congress of cancer risk for cell phone use Message-ID: <48DCF3BF.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Scientists warn US Congress of cancer risk for cell phone use http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080925220553.si7sokjt&show_article=1 Sep 25 06:06 PM US/Eastern 5 Comments A man is sillhouetted against the sun as he uses a mobile te... Scientists on Thursday warned US legislators of the risks of brain cancer from cell phone use, highlighting the potential risk for children who use mobile phones. "We urgently need more research," said David Carpenter, director of the Institute of Health and Environment at the University of Albany, in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Domestic Policy. "We must not repeat the situation we had with the relationship between smoking and lung cancer," Carpenter said. Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said that most studies "claiming that there is no link between cell phones and brain tumors are outdated, had methodological concerns and did not include sufficient numbers of long-term cell phone users." Many studies denying a link "defined regular cell phones as 'once a week,'" added Herberman. "I cannot tell this committee that cell phones are definitely dangerous. But, I certainly cannot tell you that they are safe," he said. Carpenter and Herberman both told the committee the brain cancer risk from cell phone use is far greater for children than for adults. Herberman held up a model for lawmakers showing how radiation from a cell phone penetrates far deeper into the brain of a 5-year-old than that of an adult. "Every child is using cell phones all of the time, and there are three billion cell phone users in the world," said Herberman. He added that, like the messages that warn of health risks on cigarette packs, cell phones "need a precautionary message." Noting that numerous US studies have not found a definitive cancer-phone link, Carpenter asked: "Are we at the same place we were with smoking and lung cancer 30 years ago?" The committee were shown several European studies, particularly surveys from Scandinavia -- where the cell phone was first developed -- which show that the radiation emitted by cell phones have definite biological consequences. For example, a 2008 study by Swedish cancer specialist Lennart Hardell found that frequent cell phone users are twice as likely to develop a benign tumor on the auditory nerves of the ear most used with the handset, compared to the other ear. In addition, a paper published this month by the Royal Society in London found that adolescents who start using cell phones before the age of 20 were five times more likely to develop brain cancer at the age of 29 than those who didn't use a cell phone. Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 12:43:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:43:06 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] America Pays the Piper, Big Time Message-ID: <48DCF4FB.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> America Pays the Piper, Big Time -------------------------------------------------------------- by Robert Parry consortiumnews.com (September 24 2008) After a 28-year binge of drunken optimism and blind nationalism - often punctuated by chants of "USA, USA!" and "We're No. 1!" - Americans are waking up with a painful hangover, facing a grim "morning in America", not the happy vision that Ronald Reagan famously sold them on. As the United States begins to assess how the nation got into its trillion-dollar bailout mess, a true understanding must go back three decades or so when Reagan deployed his well-honed communications skills and the Republican Right mastered the dark arts of propaganda to get the American people to shed the annoying strictures of rationality. In the 1970s, there had been stumbling efforts by three presidents - Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter - to begin confronting stubborn structural problems, such as a growing dependence on foreign oil, environmental damage, and excessive military spending which had sapped resources away from a productive economy. Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to communist China; and he initiated "d?tente" with the Soviet Union. But his presidency foundered on the rocks of his political paranoia that led to the Watergate scandal. President Ford tried to continue many of Nixon's policies, particularly winding down the Cold War with Moscow and slimming down the bloated Pentagon budget, which had fed what President Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial complex". However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan's Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned "d?tente"; he let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young intellectuals called neoconservatives) pressure the CIA's analytical division; and he brought in a new generation of tough-minded operatives, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. After winning in 1976, President Carter injected more respect for human rights into US foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify its repressive internal practices. At home, Carter proposed a comprehensive energy policy and warned Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a national security threat of the first order, what he called "the moral equivalent of war". However, powerful vested interests managed to exploit the shortcomings of all three of these presidents to sabotage any sustained progress. For instance, Carter's prescient energy address was widely mocked as the "MEOW speech". Soon, the American people were persuaded to turn away from their real-world challenges and enter a land of make-believe. Don't worry, they were told. Be happy. Reagan as Piper The lead piper in this parade away from America's tough choices was Ronald Reagan who insisted in his First Inaugural Address in 1981 that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem". As President, Reagan attacked the federal regulatory system and cut taxes so recklessly that his budget director, David Stockman, foresaw red ink "as far as the eye can see". Reagan also justified fattening the Pentagon's budget by citing dire warnings that the Soviet Union was on the rise (despite CIA analysis at the time that it was in sharp decline). To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era's feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or - in Jeane Kirkpatrick's memorable attack line - they would "blame America first". Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking new media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, et cetera) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan's propaganda themes. Significantly, too, Reagan credentialed a new generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called "perception management", the shaping of how Americans saw, understood - and were frightened by - threats from abroad. Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, US intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above. {1} In effect, Reagan's team created a faux reality for the American public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants and wealthy oligarchs became an East-West showdown. US-backed insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble "freedom-fighters". While Reagan played the role of the nation's kindly grandfather, his operatives refined their skills at dividing the American people, using "wedge issues" to deepen grievances especially among white men who were encouraged to see themselves as victims of "reverse discrimination" and "political correctness". Yet even as working-class white men were rallying to the Republican banner (as so-called "Reagan Democrats"), their economic interests were being savaged. Unions were broken and marginalized; "free trade" policies shipped manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were decaying; drug use among the young was soaring. Wall Street Greed Meanwhile, unprecedented greed was unleashed on Wall Street, fraying old-fashioned bonds between company owners and employees. Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than fifty times the salary of an average worker. By the end of the Reagan and Bush One administrations in 1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical worker. (That CEO-salary figure is now more than 250 times that of an average worker.) The era's financial imbalances had other effects. Bloated with hundreds of billions of new dollars, the military-industrial complex recycled some of that money back into right-wing and neocon think tanks, which then justified more spending on "defense". The super-wealthy finance industry kicked back money to both Republicans and Democrats - as well as to friendly think tanks - to ensure that "free-market" ideology flourished and regulatory "barriers" were removed in the name of progress. Much of this momentum continued through Bill Clinton's presidency. Indeed, some of Clinton's biggest achievements involved collaborating with congressional Republicans on deregulation and trade agreements initiated during the Reagan & Bush One era. In the 1990s, the Republican Right also continued building its media infrastructure, expanding into talk radio, TV and the Internet. By contrast, the American Left mostly ignored building media, making the Right's investment even more striking since defense of liberal positions nearly disappeared from large swaths of the nation. {2} The consequences of this imbalance became more obvious when the right-wing media and the Republican congressional majority harassed Clinton through the final years of his presidency. Increasingly, the mainstream press joined in, bending to the dominance of the conservative message. Although Clinton still managed to turn the gigantic federal deficit into a surplus, his presidency was rated as a disappointment, if not an embarrassment. In Campaign 2000, the media's hostility was transferred to Democrat Al Gore, with distortions about Gore appearing in the New York Times and the Washington Post as well as the New York Post and the Washington Times. {3} Meanwhile, Republican George W Bush - though a plutocrat born to privilege - was pitched to the voters as some sort of everyman. He was praised, too, for surrounding himself with "adults", such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. When Gore still managed to beat Bush in the national popular vote and stood a good chance of overcoming Bush's narrow lead in the swing state of Florida, much of the US press corps acted as if Bush deserved the White House and that Gore should concede. An unprecedented intervention by five conservative Republicans on the US Supreme Court stopping a court-ordered recount in Florida was welcomed by much of the American news media, which saw its principal role as protecting Bush's fragile "legitimacy" and uniting the country behind his presidency. That attitude grew stronger after the 9/11 attacks when the major news organizations wanted to demonstrate their "patriotism" in line with rank-and-file Americans. The Bush-Cheney power grabs after 9/11 received scant media criticism as did the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like in the Reagan era, the neocons played a key role with their "perception management", painting the "war on terror" as a frightening conflict between good and evil, in which Islamic militants "hate our freedoms" and seek to hem in the United States with a "caliphate" stretching from Spain to Indonesia. The hyping of this Islamic threat fit with the neocon exaggerated depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s - and again the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans let their emotions run wild, from the hunger for revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over Iraq. When old allies like France urged caution, angry Americans poured French wine into gutters and renamed "French fries" as "Freedom fries". When the rare expert dared question Bush's case for war - as former weapons inspector Scott Ritter did - the major media joined in attacking the skeptic's patriotism. Arguably, the descent into this dark fantasyland - that Ronald Reagan began in the early 1980s - reached its nadir in the flag-waving early days of the Iraq War, but the journey continued. It carried the country through Campaign 2004 when John Kerry's Vietnam War heroism was mocked and he was dismissed as "looking French". Reality began to reassert itself with the bloody insurgency that resulted from Bush's conquest of Iraq and with his administration's inept response when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Gradually, Americans were waking up from a long sleepwalk, but the nation still stumbled from disaster to disaster, from an exploding federal debt to the bursting of the real-estate bubble to the fact that the anti-regulatory fervor has left the country on the brink of a new Great Depression. Ironically, many of the same Wall Street hotshots who had so disdained government - whose high-flying lifestyle was built on Reagan's ideology that "government is the problem" - now found themselves turning to Washington for a $700 billion bailout. But the future remains unclear. One might think that the American people would now be wide awake, having learned their lessons and eager to throw out both the neocons, who engineered the foreign policy debacles abroad, and the anti-regulators, who precipitated the economic catastrophe at home. Yet the perception managers appear to have at least one more trick up their sleeves. They are turning John McCain, the self-proclaimed foot soldier of the Reagan revolution who championed the neocon cause overseas and the deregulators' schemes in the domestic economy, into a reformer who can change the system. If recent opinion polls are to be believed, tens of millions of Americans still want to believe. Links: {1} See Robert Parry's Lost History at http://www.neckdeepbook.com/ {2} See Parry's Secrecy & Privilege at http://www.neckdeepbook.com/ {3} http://www.neckdeepbook.com/ _____ Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W Bush (2007), was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (2004) and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' (1999) are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com. http://consortiumnews.com/2008/092408.html This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 13:05:22 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:05:22 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Solvency vs. Liquidity Message-ID: <48DCFA33.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Solvency vs. Liquidity http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/09/solvency_vs_liquidity.html SOLVENCY vs. LIQUIDITY....Paul Krugman says he's uneasy about the proposed Wall Street bailout because it seems to be based on the mistaken idea that all we have is a liquidity problem. Atrios amplifies: Again, the problem is that lots of bad loans were made, lots of people made highly leveraged investments in those bad loans, and still more people bet on those loans by insuring them. The loans are bad. The mortgages are not going to be repaid in full. Housing prices are not going to magically shoot up 50% over the next 6 months. People gambled and lost and now the Democrats are racing to bail them all out. I'll make the standard disclaimer that there's no way for an ordinary layman to have enough information to truly judge what's going on behind all those closed doors in Washington. And I'll add further that as laymen go, I'm as ordinary as you can get. Nonetheless. It's true that the Bernanke/Paulson bailout is aimed at illiquid debt instruments. And those instruments are illiquid largely because they contain lots of toxic mortgage securities and nobody knows how much this stuff is really worth. It's unlikely that the toxic sludge makes these instruments literally worth nothing, but who knows? The mere possibility that they're worthless means that any bank who owns them might be insolvent, and since everyone owns at least some of them, this in turn means that everyone might be insolvent. Result: no one is willing to loan money to anyone else, because who wants to loan money to a bank that might never pay it back? And since huge flows of overnight interbank loans are the oil that lubricates the credit markets, when this flow seizes up, the entire credit market seizes up. (What's more, if this WSJ tick-tock is correct, the seizure became critical on Wednesday, which is why B&P changed their minds midweek about pursuing a systemwide bailout that they'd opposed earlier.) The purpose of the bailout, then, isn't to recapitalize the banks, it's to put a firm value on the toxic sludge once and for all. Maybe it's a dime on the dollar, maybe it's 50 cents on the dollar. Whatever. When that's done and the feds have purchased the sludge, some banks will turn out to be insolvent, and perhaps they'll be allowed to fail. Others will turn out to be in bad shape but still solvent, and they'll continue doing business. Once that's sorted out, the commercial paper market will loosen back up since everyone will know who it's safe to loan money to and who it's not. Now, there are obviously all sorts of problems here. How is the Treasury going to value all the sludge? If they value it too high, then we really are bailing out irresponsible bankers who made stupid loans, and the taxpayers will foot the bill when the sludge eventually gets sold off at a loss. Value it too low and the feds are acting as vultures, causing more bank failures than we really ought to have. Furthermore, once the sludge is off Wall Street's books and some big banks turn out to be involvent for certain, will they really be allowed to fail? Or will Bernanke and Paulson prop them up yet again? Beats me. Obviously skepticism is warranted on these scores, especially since we're all being asked to approve the bailout basically at gunpoint. Still, it's not clear to me that Bernanke and Paulson are unaware that the real problem is insolvency, not illiquidity. Their plan, as near as I can tell, is to liquidate the sludge precisely so we can tell who's really involvent and who isn't. What's more, if Democrats manage to grow a spine over the next few days (and no, I'm not taking bets), the bailout bill could contain provisions to restructure loans for distressed homeowners, which means, contra Atrios, that all those bad loans could genuinely become a little less bad. It would be nice if this were set up so that restructuring was mandatory for any bank that wanted government help, but given the way all these mortgages have been sliced and diced over the years, I don't even know for sure if that's possible. Again: I'm guessing here based on my current knowledge of what's going on. Anybody who thinks I'm missing the point should let me know. And obviously we should all be watching like hawks to make sure that B&P aren't offering sweetheart deals to the masters of the universe who caused the meltdown in the first place. But that's why God invented Democratic committee chairmen, right? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 13:44:43 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:44:43 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Venezuela's Chavez says "taking back" mines Message-ID: <48DD036C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Venezuela's Chavez says "taking back" mines Fri Sep 19, 2008 7:59pm EDT CARACAS, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Friday he is "taking back" mines, a sign the leftist may order takeovers in a sector that includes a large gold project run by Canada's Crystallex Chavez, who has nationalized swaths of the oil-based economy, appeared to single out Las Cristinas, the Crystallex-owned project that has the potential to be a world-class mine but was denied an exploration permit in April. "We are taking back big mines, and one of them is one of the biggest in the world. And do you know what it is? It's gold, it's gold," Chavez told supporters at a rally during a speech about the benefits of state control in an economy. Las Cristinas has been on standby for years in need of permits. The government's permit denial this year sent Crystallex' stock plummeting. Since then, the company has failed to have the permit ruling overturned. But it has said it has held encouraging talks with the government about the project. Government officials have not publicly echoed such sentiment. (Reporting by Enrique Andres Pretel; Writing by Saul Hudson; Editing by Marguerita Choy) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Sep 26 14:50:36 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:50:36 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?THE_GOAL_THAT_CAN=E2=80=99T_BE_RENOUNC?= =?utf-8?q?ED?= Message-ID: <48DD12DD.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Reflections by Comrade Fidel THE GOAL THAT CAN?T BE RENOUNCED http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2008/ing/f240908i.html Around 35,000 Cuban health specialists provide free or paid-for services in the world. Furthermore, some young doctors from countries such as Haiti and others among the poorest of the Third World are working in their homelands thanks to the assistance provided by Cuba. In Latin America, our main contribution has been the ophthalmologic surgeries that will help to preserve the eyesight of millions of people. Besides, we are assisting in the training of tens of thousands of young medical students from other nations, both in and outside Cuba. Nevertheless, this is not anything that is ruining our people, who were able to survive thanks to the internationalism that the USSR pursued with Cuba, which helps us to pay our own debt to humankind. After carefully meditating and analyzing in detail the history of the last few decades, I have come to the conclusion, without the least bit of chauvinism, that Cuba has the best medical care in the whole world, and it is important that we are aware of that, since it is the starting point for what I wish to state. The basis of the aforementioned success lies in the network of polyclinics and family doctors? offices set up throughout the country, which replaced the disastrous and precarious capitalist system of medical care that was based on the private practice of medicine, although the tough reality of the times imposed the creation of a number of mutualist health care centers. To the youngest ones amongst us, I should clarify that these were cooperative institutions where those services were offered for a monthly fee. Under that modality, all the members of my family benefited from some of those services at a hospital located in the far-away capital of the former province of Oriente. However, I cannot remember one single sugarcane or sugar mill worker entitled to be a member of that institution, for they lacked the necessary resources and never used to travel to that city. Wherever the principles of capitalism prevail, society moves backward. That is why we must be extremely careful every time we see that socialism is forced to resort to capitalist mechanisms. There are those who get intoxicated and alienated while dreaming about the effects of the drug of individual egoism as if it were the only incentive capable of mobilizing people. The great need for medical specialists generated a bourgeois elitist spirit in that sector. Cuba put an end to it, once and for all, after the Revolution, all along these years, graduated growing numbers of doctors who refused the private practice of medicine and later on became specialists through study and systematic practice, which resulted in a huge mass of well trained professionals. Under capitalism, the limited number of specialists whose work had to do with health and life became gods. We have no other alternative but to cultivate in these people, as well as in the high-level educators and other professionals who require great doses of knowledge, a profound revolutionary spirit. Experience has shown that is possible, especially in a profession that has so much to do with life and death. Our network of polyclinics provides coverage to all cities and rural areas throughout Cuba; it was created as a result of a process aimed at developing health centers adapted to the most varied situations in our country and among its inhabitants. In a city such as Havana, the largest in the country that stands as an example of the complexities of urban life -which, on the other hand, are different from those in Santiago de Cuba, Holgu?n, Camag?ey, Villa Clara or Pinar del R?o, just as much as they differ amongst themselves -each polyclinic looks after approximately 22 000 people. After the triumph of the Revolution on January 1st, 1959, the citizens of the capital used to inundate the emergency rooms of the hospitals which were generally many blocks away from their homes, seeking the assistance that the Revolution was providing there, free of charge, with the then-available equipment. They did not go to the recently created polyclinics where, quite often, the least efficient doctors were assigned to. Later on they learned to receive such assistance at the polyclinics which were gradually better equipped and staffed with doctors of an increasing quality and professionalism. Finally, they opted for the best variant: first they went to the family doctor?s office, where they would be looked after by a young doctor who was trained after a six-year programme of theoretical and practical courses skillfully designed by eminent professors. Afterwards they continued studying until they became specialists in General Comprehensive Medicine. The polyclinic, with its laboratories and equipment, used to be their support system. One day, when I visited one such centre to check on its professionalism, I asked them, without previous notice, to examine my vital signs. That was one of the best and fastest tests I had ever seen in my life. Not even for a single second has the Revolution waned in its efforts to repair, adapt or build new polyclinics and family doctors? offices, while thousands of students enrolled in and graduated from more than 20 medical schools. It?s been a long and fascinating experience. According to the current approach, polyclinics must always be ready to offer 10 basic services: diagnosis, emergency care, dental care, comprehensive rehabilitation, maternal and child health, nursing, clinical and surgical care, assistance to the elderly, mental health, hygiene and epidemiology. The system was designed to provide services in 32 specialties, including those that must be looked after at any time, day or night, ranging from an agonizing toothache to a heart attack. Polyclinics should have emergency rooms, thus placing emergency care closer to family households. When I wrote Vices and Virtues, I pointed out that every attempt by those workers to appropriate goods passing by their hands, as some do, was something unworthy of those workers? behavior, whatever their social status, skills, education or knowledge; whether they harvest potatoes, milk cows, cook in a restaurant, work in a factory or a school, a library or a museum, whether a manual or an intellectual worker, anywhere they were. Nobody wishes to establish slave or semi-slave labor in our world. We all believe that citizens are born to live a prouder life. He who steals forgets that all persons want tranquility and respect for themselves and their relatives, a variety of quality foods, decent housing, power without cut-offs, running water, roads without potholes, comfortable and safe transportation, good hospitals, well-equipped polyclinics, first-class schools, shops and groceries that work properly, movie theatres, radio, television, the Internet and many other nice things that can only be the result of methodical, efficient and well organized work by highly productive workers. The production of consumer goods and services requires modern equipment in construction, agriculture, transportation, high voltage electric power, chemical or flammable products; working conditions that encompass risks in terms of heights, depths and many other unavoidable variants. The tiniest negligence causes mutilation and death, and so we are forced to always observe measures to prevent them or minimize them as much as possible, even though, unfortunately, we have been unable to avoid the occurrence of a painful number of such cases every year. Added to this there are the occupational diseases and the suffering and damages they cause. Those goods and services everybody longs for will not come out of mere chance. Heavy investments, state-of-the-art technologies, costly raw materials, abundant energy, and, especially, human labor are indispensable if we do not want to remain stuck in prehistory. Just recently I requested data from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security about the number of workers involved in health and education programmes in the country; figures accounted to almost 20 % of the active labor force involved in economic production and services. The data I received, which I carefully analyzed, justify the steps we have taken to increase the retirement age. In the bill this is associated with real improvements in household income and, in my opinion, it is also related to the pressing need to avoid excess of money in circulation and the duty we have to swiftly recover from the ravages of the hurricanes in a way that nobody feels they have been abandoned to their own fate. The question I pose is whether or not human beings are able to rationally organize the society they are obliged to live in. The efforts being made by musicians with their instruments are probably just as powerful as those of the welders at the Antillana de Acero steel industry. Sometimes there are no differences between the first and the latter in terms of their mental and physical efforts, although there might be some differences in their way of thinking, because the first are well-known and constantly applauded, and the latter are not. However, the first can make use of their influence to combat the old vices of past societies, as many others do, not only musicians, but also prestigious writers and painters who have been trained by the Revolution. There are professionals specialized in economic sciences, labor organization, psychology and other branches, who are aware of these realities, dealing with subjects associated to them in some way or another. We read or hear about interesting concepts seeking answers which will no doubt end up pointing in the same direction as long as the national and international debate opens up. The Nobel Laureates in Economics are amazed by the never before seen crisis of developed capitalism, which at this moment requires an additional 700 billion dollars that will have to be paid by the children of American families. Apparently, the experts of imperialism just can?t hit the nail on the head, while the heads of state, prime ministers and high-ranking officials who attend the United Nations General Assembly are straining their brains trying to find solutions. It is curious to see that many of the United States? allies at NATO no longer speak in their own national language, but in English - visibly broken English- the Esperanto of our era. I think that there is no alternative but to re-evaluate everything, looking for more productivity and less waste of human resources in all vital sectors, including health and education -as well as in all others in the productive economy and the services -without strictly abiding by the figures that were issued years ago, trying to enhance -rather than allowing a decrease of- the quality of everything that is being done in our country, without neglecting our internationalist duty, the fruits of which have started to be clearly noticed. Those are many more than one could imagine and considerably less than we need. We have to contribute the rest without any hesitation whatsoever. Fidel Castro Ruz September 24, 2008 8:37 p.m. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Sep 26 20:44:58 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:44:58 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical Message-ID: >>Should US progressive intellectuals in 2008 be looking to other secular fields of communication besides academic disciplines such as philosophy, social science , history etc. to get involved in mass ideas and opinions ?<< Journalism became an academic major, void of historical content, much like business and management. To be a successful journalist one needs, I suspect, some good luck and a large network. The people I know who manage to get an income from freelance all talk of the 'network' that keeps commissions coming their way. So whatever the area we are supposed to be looking to, I don't think it is journalists (or journalists who became great novelists, without academic training in either journalism or creative wrirting). As for people that other people look to, everytime someone on a list like this cites Chomsky, or that idiot with the 'Iraq blog' Juan Coleman, or someone like Perelman--and pardon my sinister outlook, but citing these usually just stops discussion or certainly doesn't inspire it. It's as if discussion lists existed for people to read texts written by people who do not write for that particular list. Take for instance the recent Perelman piece. It advances the term 'financialization' and then somewhat nostalgically talks about industrial production and the need for regulation. It doesn't discuss how the people who ran Enron (but also Carlyle Group and many other companies, firms, equity groups etc that grew from the late 80s onwards) were able to stay ahead of wave after wave of privatization, not just deregulation. There is nothing original or startling in the analysis Perelman gives, and yet it is long-winded while being incomplete. I could say the same thing about HCKL. Longwinded, unoriginal, incomplete, and even if it doesn't kill discussion and communication, it hardly inspires it. Are we supposed to be impressed because these guys write in longer chunks of prose and get paid to do it? CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Sep 27 00:15:40 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:15:40 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ballad for Americans: US organic radical In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Did it again. Juan Cole is the blogger who everyone turns to for 'analysis' of Iraq. Apologies to the Juan Colemans of the world. CJ From ProfitSci at aol.com Sat Sep 27 12:45:19 2008 From: ProfitSci at aol.com (ProfitSci at aol.com) Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:45:19 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A New Kind of Revolutionary Organization Surfaces on the World Wide Web Message-ID: Dear Marxism-Thaxis List Members, Hello, this is my first post here. I recently noticed the surfacing of what is, in my experience -- at least in terms of what it claims about itself -- a new and unprecedented KIND of Marxian, revolutionary organization, on the world wide web. It is called the Equitarian Advocacy Group, and it advocates a kind of Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY, one which is based upon public ownership and democratic disposition of what it names as EXTERNALITY EQUITIES. The new sites are at: _http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Equitism-entry.htm_ (http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Equitism-entry.htm) _http://www.equitarian.org/Equitarian/Equitarian-entry.htm_ (http://www.equitarian.org/Equitarian/Equitarian-entry.htm) _http://www.equitist.org/Equitist/Equitist-entry.htm_ (http://www.equitist.org/Equitist/Equitist-entry.htm) What I find so refreshing about this group's promises is, especially, its promise to not only NOT work to take state power for ITSELF and its Members, but, if a government committed to the equitarian programme does comes to power -- a result for which the Advocacy Group pledges to work -- the Advocacy Group promises to stay completely OUT of that government, and to work to check tendencies to the abuse of its power within that new government. See: _http://www.equitist.org/Equitist/InternalAffairs/InternalAffairs.htm_ (http://www.equitist.org/Equitist/InternalAffairs/InternalAffairs.htm) Preamble, point 4. Another aspect of this group's theory that I like -- whether I end up agreeing with it or not - is their clear articulation of the new Social Relation of Production that they see as the successor to the presently-dominant Social Relation Of Production, i.e., to the Capital-relation. They call this new Social Relation of Production the [Generalized] Equity-relation, and they derive it as one having a dialectical, aufheben self-negation relationship to the Capital-relation. On this, see, for example -- _http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicDemocracy/PoliticalE conomicDemocracy.htm_ (http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicDemocracy/PoliticalEconomicDemocracy.htm) [be sure to copy the complete, multi-line URL into your browser in order to reach this essay]. Finally, I appreciate -- again, whether I end up agreeing with it or not -- this group's clear articulation of what they conclude to be the essence of Marx's critique of Capital's political-economy, namely, what Marx called the economic law of motion of modern society. On this, see, for example -- _http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion/Politica lEconomicLawOfMotion.htm_ (http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion.htm) The theoretical roots of this group seem to be mainly Marxian, but the Group seems to transcend, and to critique, both today's "Left" and today's "Right" ideologies. For more on this, see -- _http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/HeartSoulOfMarxianTheory/HeartSoulOfM arxianTheory.htm_ (http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/HeartSoulOfMarxianTheory/HeartSoulOfMarxianTheory.htm) _http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/TowardsAStrategyForHumanity/TowardsAS trategyForHumanity.htm_ (http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/TowardsAStrategyForHumanity/TowardsAStrategyForHumanity.htm) [be sure to copy the entire, two-line URL into your browser to get to any of the linked texts listed above]. This Advocacy Group also seems to transcend the antinomy of Revolution versus Reform, holding that its equitarian reforms are what might be called revolutionary reforms -- reforms that, if adopted, would drive the adopting society through a revolutionary transformation, beyond capitalism, to Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY. It would be interesting to know what this Marxian Theory/Praxis Group thinks about this new approach to the social revolutionary transition to Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY. Regards, Miguel P. S. I found out about this new org. via a dialectics site I have been keeping an eye on -- _http://www.adventures-in-dialectics.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/Adventures-I n-Dialectics-entry.htm_ (http://www.adventures-in-dialectics.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/Adventures-In-Dialectics-entry.htm) via the preface to the latest article posted there -- _http://www.adventures-in-dialectics.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/MetaMonadolo gy/MetaMonadology-entry.htm_ (http://www.adventures-in-dialectics.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/MetaMonadology/MetaMonadology-entry.htm) -- in the following opening passage: "What this text addresses, in toto, is the '''psycho-historical''',cognitive revolution that F.E.D. is offering. It's deeper title, then, should be: Announcing a Cognitive Revolution, Necessary Precursor to Humankind's Self-Liberatory Self-Transformation Beyond the Capital- Relation as Predominant Social Relation of Re-Production of Modern Society. As I state at the outset of Part II of this text, I believe that experience with compact, explicit dialectical models; with the 'algorithmic dialectics' and the 'dialectical algorithmics' of, e.g., the Q categorial ideography, can help to catalyze, in the 'experiencer', a cognitive revolution. It can help to catapult that experiencer [deeper] into '''the dialectical operations stage of adult human cognitive development'''. That, at least, has been my experience. I also hold that such a revolution in cognition, diffusing in widening waves, rippling throughout the global populace, is prerequisite to a successful, liberatory transition to the higher polity ? to the political-economic democracy ? of 'democratic- communist' society, i.e., to the 'externality-equities based economic democracy that F.E.D. advocates [for more on this, see _http://www.equitism.org_ (http://www.equitism.org/) ]." **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Sep 27 15:51:38 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:51:38 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A New Kind of Revolutionary Organization Surfaces on the World Wide Web Message-ID: <20080927.175139.3732.0.farmelantj@juno.com> On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:45:19 EDT ProfitSci at aol.com writes: > Dear Marxism-Thaxis List Members, > > Hello, this is my first post here. > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2008-September/036446.html There Joaquin Bustelo looked at one of the websites associated with him. See: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2008-September/036461.html Therefore, unless people here are eager to read more unformatted postings from him, I will do what Les Schaffer is doing with him on Marxmail. Jim Farmelant ____________________________________________________________ Visit the Big Apple. Click here for information on vacation packages and tickets. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3nK3sPkFJ0x1yNIil0EVKJeLkNjMz7LH68A8VrC161RMDeZz/ From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun Sep 28 09:43:45 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:43:45 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The debate and Obama's continuing victory: notes Message-ID: Watching the first Presidential debate in its entirety was cause to think out real time events and this period of history. Holding the first presidential election in Oxford Mississippi, is in itself a profound political signal. "Everybody know's about Mississippi, Goddamn." Oxford Mississippi, gained national attention in 1962 as a combination of the governor, University of Mississippi officials and reactionary whites attempted to prevent James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi after he won a federal court case for admittance. Mississippi is of course home of the reactionary Senator Trent Loot, who resigned office in December 2007 to pursue a career in the private sector. For the past 150 years, Mississippi has been a stable base of support for the most reactionary, fascistic and white chauvinists political's in America and an important foundation of historic Southern reaction and the Southern body politic. Senator Obama candidacy and increasing winning bid for President expresses some very real changes in America. These changes can generally be defined as the post-Jim Crow period. Obama's candidacy expresses an America being knee deep in the post Jim Crow period. Obama's candidacy cannot be reduced to the "need of America imperialism to put on a black face." If American imperialism does in fact need to put on a black face, why is this so? Obama candidacy is taking place as the new features of a new era of financial imperialism further define our moment of history. Modern financial imperialism is not the same imperialism that Lenin faced and wrote about. The new era is characterized as the domination of the speculator as he writes the political and economic agenda for world capital. This domination is erected on the basis of the world wide non-banking financial architecture, more than less detached from industrial production. The non-banking financial architecture thrives in an environment that is a transition in the mode of production. The revolution in the productive forces creates and deepens the transition. Today, modern electronics is eliminating human labor from production, destroying the source of all value, and bring to antagonism capitalism as a system of buying and selling based of labor power. Further, the sharpening of the current financial crisis reveals to all the essence of the new world order based on a financial regime of non-banking financial architecture. Capital is seeking new forms of private property and maximum profits not rooted in the exploitation of labor. Obama's candidacy is placed in this context. In order to politically facilitate the bringing of the rest of the world into the relations defining the new era, the United States cannot continue to be seen as a "white man's (white people), America," ruled and governed on the basis of structural and institutional privileges given to whites. Most thinking people over the age of 21 understand that the Republican Party is the official party of rich white people. Within the new financial architecture, the best and last great area of earth open to the potential for massive (maximum) profits, based on material production is basically Africa. America foreign policy cannot be understood by the rest of the world as a rehash of the age old ideology of the "white man's burden." Thus, America - (meaning the state, government and corporations), has to prove that it has in fact been reformed. An Obama victory based in the electorate, rather than a coup, as was the case with Bush W. in 2000, proves to the world that America has been reformed. In fact America has been reformed. The so-called black bourgeoisie that is developing (a bourgeoisie that is really an American bourgeoisie that happens to be black) is represented in such figures as Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice and Barack Obama and gives credence to America's claim that it is a good and decent country that the rest of the world can trust, and more importantly, with whom they can conduct trade and financial relations without the white superiority crap. America has been reformed and absolutely no one on the "left" or "right," predicted in advance what has become Senator Obama's stunning victory in Iowa, then his victory over Senator Clinton and his mounting victory over John McCain. America has been fundamentally reformed and a massive white backlash is the worst thing that could happen to U.S. foreign policy and domestically. The ruling class can use Barack Obama as the icon of the physical coming together of white and black in America and the need to consolidate a world ruling class united on the basis of this stage of capital. Hence, the opening presidential debate was held in Oxford Mississippi as a signal that even ole Mississippi is ready for change. Obama candidacy and run for president, on the basis of brining together a mass of white, black and brown segments of labor, means the possibility of unity of the working class, on the basis of the most economically distress, is now possible for the first time in American history. At the same time, there remains a historically evolved, objective impulse toward the white backlash. An aspect of this backlash is witness in the desertion of a small percentage of Hilary Clinton supporters from the Democratic Party and support of senator John McCain and the Republican party. Then, of course there is a permanent layer of voting Americans who simply cannot and will not vote for any black person due to their ideology. Politically, the white backlash continues to find real ideological and political expression in the Southern political structures. Yet, Senator Obama is clearly leading in all the current polls against Senator McCain. At this writing I am told he is 12 points ahead of Senator McSame in Michigan and leading him in Ohio. A 12 point lead in Michigan is extraordinary. Senator Obama's performance in last nights debate was subdued and calm. Senator McCain presented himself as a "grumpy old man" unwilling and unable to even look at his debating opponent. Like all of us, Obama is subject to the mood and psychology of America society and (in my opinion) spent an inordinate amount of time deliberately staying away from being defined or portrayed as "the anger black man." Obama was successful in drawing a picture of the ideological divide between himself and Senator McCain. Obama stepped forth as the classical Social Democrat. The calling card of Social democracy is always the demand to raise the consuming capacity of the masses without changing the underlying property relations defining capitalism. September 27, 2008 WL **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From jannuzi at gmail.com Sun Sep 28 17:35:03 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:35:03 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The debate and Obama's continuing victory: notes Message-ID: The most significant things I can think of right now are: 1. BO did well during the Democratic primary in the states the Republicans win in presidential and other elections, so this showed a potential weakness in the states the Democrats have to win to carry the election. 2. So far, that would explain his lack of a blow out, but on the other hand, the lack of a Democratic 'white backlash', has helped the Democrats see gains in the sort of states they must absolutely win to get back into the White House. 3. The Republicans re-doubled their efforts to brainwash people that 'the surge is working' and they even rolled up their sleeves and did a better job on hurricane responses. A Katrina-like response in Texas would have been a total disaster for them. However, the speculation for profit economy folded on them in September, so this has given the economic advantage, discussion of which would typically already be controlled by the party outside of the presidency. This shows that contrary to what a lot of people (in the mainstream media, in the Democratic Party, etc.) said about BO, he is a weak thinker and speaker on the political economy. Still, the proportions of the dysfunction are beyond comprehension within the ideology of the American ruling class, which tends to make people reach for apocalyptic metaphors out of fear. 5. WL writes: >>Obama candidacy and run for president, on the basis of brining together a mass of white, black and brown segments of labor, means the possibility of unity of the working class, on the basis of the most economically distress, is now possible for the first time in American history.<< I would have been more impressed if BO had chosen an Hispanic VP candidate, especially a woman Hispanic. Instead, he chose Biden in a misguided attempt to shore up his perceived weakness in foreign policy (that is, imperialist foreign policy). And the Democrat strategy is likely to hand Pres. Barrage Obomber a 'big fuck you' from the browns of the earth. As the DoD now tries to ratchet up a 'crisis' with Pakistan, we see the Barrage Obomber's idea that S. Asia is the 'front in the war on terror' already bring results for him. He will most likely be handed options for invading Pakistan when gets to the White House. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sun Sep 28 17:36:41 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:36:41 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The debate and Obama's continuing victory: notes In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>so this has given the economic advantage, discussion of which would typically already be controlled by the party outside of the presidency<< That should read, "So this has given the economic advantage back to the Democrats." CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sun Sep 28 18:29:22 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:29:22 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The biggest problem with the plan Message-ID: The biggest problem with the bailout plan is this: Even if it makes credit available again, companies and people are not going to borrow. If individuals were borrowing, they were often borrowing to 'refinance' their debt in order to free up money to buy that second home, that time-share, or that new SUV, etc. And if companies, firms, equity groups, holding companies, etc. were borrowing, it was to gear/leverage in order to make money. So if people can't borrow to refinance and if companies can't borrow to speculate, they won't. So the only way the plan will have an effect , I believe, is if it re-inflates the bubbles, which are the problem to begin with. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sun Sep 28 21:01:49 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:01:49 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] THE OIL NEXUS Message-ID: It seems quite possible that the reason the cummulative bubbles (one big leverage pyramid) came unwound when they did was that the firms with proprietary access to the 'financial markets' (i.e., massive access to credit couldn't sustain the oil bubble to a price of 200 dollars a barrel and the price fell sharply. The run on oil got started because the US invasion of Iraq was so destructive of the country's production of high grade, sweet, light, benchmark grade oil. But it was geared financing that kept the oil pricing bubble going for so long. I have to wonder though if the immediate 250 billion cash infusion promised in the bailout won't go to getting the bubbles going again, or to start a new one (like back to E. Asian stock markets and real estate, for example). So a big f- you too to all the peak oil a-holes on A-List and Marxmal while I am at it. CJ http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9042 >>Goldman Sachs again in the middle The oil price today, unlike twenty years ago, is determined behind closed doors in the trading rooms of giant financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange). ICE Futures is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange. ICE in Atlanta was founded in part by Goldman Sachs which also happens to run the world's most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices. As I noted in my earlier article, ('Perhaps 60% of today's oil price is pure speculation'), ICE was focus of a recent congressional investigation. It was named both in the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' June 27, 2006, Staff Report and in the House Committee on Energy & Commerce's hearing in December 2007 which looked into unregulated trading in energy futures. Both studies concluded that energy prices' climb to $128 and perhaps beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the Bush Administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the USA. And at Enron's request, the CFTC exempted the Over-the-Counter oil futures trades in 2000. So it is no surprise to see in a May 6 report from Reuters that Goldman Sachs announces oil could in fact be on the verge of another "super spike," possibly taking oil as high as $200 a barrel within the next six to 24 months. That headline, "$200 a barrel!" became the major news story on oil for the next two days. How many gullible lemmings followed behind with their money bets? Arjun Murti, Goldman Sachs' energy strategist, blamed what he called "blistering" (sic) demand from China and the Middle East, combined with his assertion that the Middle East is nearing its maximum ability to produce more oil. Peak Oil mythology again helps Wall Street. The degree of unfounded hype reminds of the kind of self-serving Wall Street hype in 1999-2000 around dot.com stocks or Enron. << From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 29 06:36:37 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:36:37 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Today's Polls, 9/28 Message-ID: <48E09395.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> 406 comments Post a Comment http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ Today's Polls, 9/28 Here's the long and short of it for John McCain: Barack Obama has as large a lead in the election as he's held all year. But there is much less time left on the clock than there was during other Obama periods of strength, such as in February, mid-June or immediately following the Democratic convention. This is a very difficult combination of circumstances for him. On the strength of a set of national tracking polls that each show Obama at or near his high-water mark all year, our model projects that he would win an election hold today by 4.2 points. It discounts this lead slightly to a projected margin of 3.3 points on November 4, as most races tend to tighten as we approach election day. This lead might not sound like that much, but it's fairly significant: we've been through two conventions and one debate, voters have dug their heels in, and Obama's position in the Electoral College is extremely robust. Trimming away a 4-5 point lead isn't that difficult over the summer months -- in fact, McCain accomplished exactly that in July and August -- but it's a steeper hill to climb after Labor Day. And if anything, our projection may be lowballing Obama slightly, as the aforementioned national tracking data (which incorporates one day of post-debate interviewing) has Obama's lead in the range of 5-8 points; the model will need Obama to hold those numbers for another day or two before it catches up to them. Democrats have no reason to be complacent. Although the situation looks dramatically better for them than it did two weeks ago, so too have the stakes of the election increased. The next president will face perhaps the most challenging set of circumstances of any since Franklin Roosevelt, and could potentially have nearly as much impact on the future direction of the country. Obama could very easily lose, and even if he wins, odds are that there will be at least one more swing back toward McCain in the intervening 37 days. Nevertheless, as Isaac Chotiner suggests, I believe that the national punditry is understating the difficulty of the position that McCain finds himself in. *-* There is almost no action at the state level today. Mason-Dixon has John McCain ahead by 16 points in Tennessee and 12 in Kentucky; SurveyUSA has Obama up 16 in Connecticut. Among these results, the only remotely interesting one is Kentucky, and then only because it suggests that Obama might be able to avoid a complete disaster in Southern Ohio. There's More... This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 29 07:05:54 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:05:54 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Henry James brother of William James Message-ID: <48E09A71.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 29 07:15:28 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:15:28 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cubism/bizarre cubiques Message-ID: <48E09CAF.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Cubism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper describes three phases of Cubism in his seminal book The Cubist Epoch. According to Cooper there was Early Cubism, (from 1906-1908) during which time the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called High Cubism, (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent; and finally Cooper referred to Late Cubism (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement.[1] In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form?instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics. Contents [hide] 1 Conception and origins 2 Analytic Cubism 3 Synthetic Cubism 4 Cubism and its ideologies 5 Cubism in other fields 6 Cubism today 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links [edit] Conception and origins During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Micronesian and Native American art for the first time. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1904, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in African art and African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the antecedent of Cubism. Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Paul C?zanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision, and secondly his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones. However, the cubists explored this concept further than C?zanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time. This new kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects could be visualized in painting and art. The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. A later active participant was the Spaniard Juan Gris. After meeting in 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the development of Cubism. Picasso was initially the force and influence that persuaded Braque by 1908 to move away from Fauvism. The two artists began working closely together in late 1908 - early 1909 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term "cubism", or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture - that of a man-made construction, a coloured canvas."[2] Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on canvasCubism was taken up by many artists in Montparnasse and promoted by art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, becoming popular so quickly that by 1911 critics were referring to a "cubist school" of artists. However, many of the artists who thought of themselves as cubists went in directions quite different from Braque and Picasso. The Puteaux Group was a significant offshoot of the Cubist movement; it included Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, his brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Villon, and Fernand L?ger, and Francis Picabia. Other important artists associated with cubism include: Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Diego Rivera, Marie Vorobieff, Louis Marcoussis, Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, Roger de La Fresnaye, Henri Le Fauconnier, Alexander Archipenko, Franti?ek Kupka, Am?d?e Ozenfant, L?opold Survage, Patrick Henry Bruce among others. Section d'Or is another name for a related group of many of the same artists associated with cubism and orphism. In 1913 the United States was exposed to cubism and modern European art when Jacques Villon exhibited seven important and large drypoints at the famous Armory Show in New York City. Braque and Picasso themselves went through several distinct phases before 1920, and some of these works had been seen in New York prior to the Armory Show, at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery. Czech artists who realized the epochal significance of cubism of Picasso and Braque attempted to extract its components for their own work in all branches of artistic creativity - especially painting and architecture. This developed into Czech Cubism which was an avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914. [edit] Analytic Cubism Analytic Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Colour was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on colour, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world. During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities. Both painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame, exemplified through their paintings Ma Jolie (1911), by Picasso and The Portuguese (1911), by Braque. In Paris in 1907 there was a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing C?zanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism from Paul C?zanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Picasso was the main analytic cubist, but Braque was also prominent, having abandoned Fauvism to work with Picasso in developing the Cubist lexicon. Juan Gris, Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin, 1919, oil on canvas [edit] Synthetic Cubism Synthetic Cubism was the second main branch of Cubism developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. It was seen as the first time that collage had been made as a fine art work. The first work of this new style was Pablo Picasso's Still Life with Chair-caning (1911?1912), which includes oil cloth pasted on the canvas. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings and may refer to a newspaper titled "Le Journal". Newspaper clippings were a common inclusion in this style of cubism, whereby physical pieces of newspaper, sheet music, or the like were included in the collages. JOU may also at the same time be a pun on the French words jeu (game) or jouer (to play). Picasso and Braque had a constant friendly competition with each other and including the letters in their works may have been an extension of their game. Whereas analytic cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), synthetic cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Picasso, through this movement, was the first to use text in his artwork (to flatten the space), and the use of mixed media?using more than one type of medium in the same piece. Opposed to analytic cubism, synthetic cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space. Another technique used was called papier coll?, or stuck paper, which Braque used in his collage Fruit Dish and Glass (1913). [edit] Cubism and its ideologies Paris before World War I was a ferment of politics. The new anarcho-syndicalist trade unions and women's rights movements were especially active and vigorous, but patriotic, nationalist movements were strong as well. Cubism was a particularly varied art movement in its political affiliations, with some sections being broadly leftist or radical, and others strongly aligned with nationalist sentiment. [edit] Cubism in other fields Cubist villa in Prague, Czech RepublicThe written works of Gertrude Stein employ repetition and repetitive phrases as building blocks in both passages and whole chapters. Most of Stein's important works utilize this technique, including the novel The Makings of Americans (1906?08) Not only were they the first important patrons of Cubism, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were also important influences on Cubism as well. Picasso in turn was an important influence on Stein's writing. The poets generally associated with Cubism are Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Andr? Salmon and Pierre Reverdy. As American poet Kenneth Rexroth explains, Cubism in poetry "is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture. This is quite different from the free association of the Surrealists and the combination of unconscious utterance and political nihilism of Dada."[3] Nonetheless, the Cubist poets' influence on both Cubism and the later movements of Dada and Surrealism was profound; Louis Aragon, founding member of Surrealism, said that for Breton, Soupault, ?luard and himself, Reverdy was "our immediate elder, the exemplary poet."[4] Though not as well remembered as the Cubist painters, these poets continue to influence and inspire; American poets John Ashbery and Ron Padgett have recently produced new translations of Reverdy's work. Cubist House of the Black Madonna, Prague, Czech Republic, 1912Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is also said to demonstrate how cubism's multiple perspectives can be translated into poetry.[5] The composer Edgard Var?se was heavily influenced by Cubist writing and art.[citation needed] [edit] Cubism today Cal Poly Pomona university library in Pomona, California.[6]Far from being an art movement confined to the annals of art history, Cubism and its legacy continue to inform the work of many contemporary artists. Not only is cubist imagery regularly used commercially but significant numbers of contemporary artists continue to draw upon it both stylistically and perhaps more importantly, theoretically. The latter contains the clue as to the reason for cubism's enduring fascination for artists. As an essentially representational school of painting, having to come to grips with the rising importance of photography as an increasingly viable method of image making, cubism attempts to take representational imagery beyond the mechanically photographic and to move beyond the bounds of traditional single point perspective perceived, as though, by a totally immobile viewer. The questions and theories which arose during the initial appearance of cubism in the early 20th century are, for many representational artists, as current today as when first proposed. [edit] See also Art periods This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 29 07:16:05 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:16:05 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cubism Message-ID: <48E09CD5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Analytic cubism (1909?1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colours. Both artists took apart objects and ?analyzed? them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque?s paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912?1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments?often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages?were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso#Cubism This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Mon Sep 29 07:35:21 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:35:21 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] John Henry Hammond Message-ID: <48E0A159.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> John H. Hammond John Henry Hammond II (December 15, 1910 ? July 10, 1987) was a record producer, musician and music critic from the 1930s to the early 1980s. In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th Century popular music. Hammond was instrumental in sparking or furthering numerous musical careers, including those of Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Big Joe Turner, Pete Seeger, Babatunde Olatunji, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Bob Dylan, Freddie Green, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Asha Puthli and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Contents [hide] [edit] Early years and family Hammond was the only son of James Henry Hammond, son of General John Henry Hammond and Sophia Vernon Wolfe. James was a brother of Ogden Hammond, ambassador to Spain, and uncle to politician Millicent Fenwick. Hammond's mother was the former Miss Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, one of three daughters of William Douglas Sloane and Emily Thorn Vanderbilt. James Hammond and Emily Sloane were wed on April 5, 1899. They also had a daughter, Alice Frances Hammond, who married firstly George Arthur Victor Duckworth, MP, in 1927, and secondly musician Benny Goodman, in 1942. Born in New York City to great wealth as the great-grandson of William Henry Vanderbilt, Hammond showed interest in music at an early age. At age four he began studying the piano, only to switch to the violin at age eight. He was steered toward classical music by his mother, but was more interested in the music sung and played by the servants, many of whom were black. In his teens he began listening to black musicians in Harlem, who adopted him as a novel mascot,[1] and in 1927 heard Bessie Smith sing at the Alhambra Theater, a performance which influenced the rest of his life. In 1928 Hammond entered Yale University as a member of the class of 1933, where he studied the violin and, later, viola. He made frequent trips into New York and wrote regularly for trade magazines. In 1931 he dropped out of school for a career in the music industry, first becoming the U.S. correspondent for Melody Maker. [edit] Career In 1931 he funded the recording of pianist Garland Wilson, marking the beginning of a long string of artistic successes as record producer. He moved to Greenwich Village, where he claimed to have engaged in bohemian life and worked for an integrated music world. He set up one of the first regular live jazz programs, and wrote regularly about the racial divide. As he wrote in his memoirs,[2] "I heard no color line in the music....To bring recognition to the negro?s supremacy in jazz was the most effective and constructive form of social protest I could think of." r. By 1932?1933, through his involvement in the UK music paper Melody Maker, Hammond arranged for the faltering US Columbia label to provide recordings for the UK Columbia label, mostly using the Columbia W-265000 matrix series. Hammond recorded Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Joe Venuti, and other jazz performers during a time when the economy was bad enough that many of them would not have had the opportunity to enter a studio and play real jazz. He played a role in organizing Benny Goodman's band, and in persuading him to hire black musicians such as Charlie Christian, Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton. In 1933 he heard the 17 year old Billie Holiday perform in Harlem and arranged for her recording debut, on a Benny Goodman session. Four years later, he heard the Count Basie orchestra broadcasting from Kansas City and brought it to New York, where it began to receive national attention. In 1938, he organized the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall, presenting a broad program of blues, jazz and gospel artists, including Ida Cox, Big Joe Turner, Albert Ammons, Meade "Lux" Lewis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Count Basie orchestra, Sidney Bechet, Sonny Terry, James P. Johnson, and Big Bill Broonzy (who took the place of the murdered Robert Johnson). After serving in the military during World War II, Hammond felt unmoved by the bebop jazz scene of the mid-1940s. Rejoining Columbia Records in the late 1950s, he signed Pete Seeger and Babatunde Olatunji to the label, and also discovered Aretha Franklin, then an eighteen year-old gospel singer. In 1961, he heard folk singer Bob Dylan playing harmonica on a session for Carolyn Hester and signed him to Columbia and kept him on the label despite the protests of executives, who referred to Dylan as "Hammond?s folly." He produced Dylan's early recordings, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall." John Hammond also oversaw the highly influential posthumous reissues of Robert Johnson?s recorded work (produced by Frank Driggs), convincing Columbia Records to issue the album "King of the Delta Blues Singers" in 1961.[1] Artists Hammond signed to the label included Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen. Hammond retired from Columbia in 1975, but continued to scout for talent. In 1983, he brought guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan to Columbia and was credited as executive producer on his debut album. [edit] Legacy Hammond received a Grammy Trustees Award for being credited with co-producing a Bessie Smith reissue in 1971, and in 1986 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He died in 1987 after a series of strokes. He was the father of John P. Hammond (better known as John Hammond Jr.), a noted blues musician and singer, and Jason Hammond. [edit] References This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon Sep 29 09:56:03 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:56:03 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Then: was 600, 000 workers. Now: 50, 000 General Motors Message-ID: _http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2008.09/PT.2008.09.03.html_ (http://www.peoplestribune.org/PT.2008.09/PT.2008.09.03.html) In 1953, General Motors chief executive Charles E. ?Engine Charlie? Wilson famously declared, ??what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa?? That quote was immediately adapted and marketed by corporate media to become the popularly spoken slogan, ?What?s good for General Motors is good for America.? And why not, they argued. GM at the time was the biggest and most profitable company in the world, directly employing 600,000 workers. It dominated the automobile manufacturing industry. Industrial workers in America during that period enjoyed some of the side benefits that came from a three decade long, unprecedented, capitalist economic expansion that occurred following World War II. That economic expansion was made possible by the leading role played by American capital in the rebuilding of war-torn Western Europe and Japan, resulting in untold profits made by U.S. banks and industry. Autoworkers, like their counterparts who worked in the steel, oil, rubber and electrical industries, as well as workers generally, argued for and got a share of the lucrative booty that American capital was extracting from the rest of the world. All these workers had to do was agree to politically support the corporate-led, U.S. foreign policy of the time and constant raises in their standard of living would be assured. Working class identity and terminology were routinely replaced with ?middle class? identity and terminology, proclaiming the ?American Dream? for generations to come as the popular catchphrase of that heady, seemingly endless period of economic prosperity. That was then and now is now! Over the last 30 years global corporations and our government have carefully and aggressively implemented a constantly accelerated, permanent replacement (?displacement?) of the American worker with electronic production, mainly through the rapidly increasing use of robotics and computers in production, supplemented by off-shoring other production to lower wage areas of the globe. The ties that once bound American workers to their employers and the capitalist system of production in the past are now in the process of being broken forever. A new and rapidly growing economic class of dispossessed is being created from amongst the ranks of those workers who in the past loyally embraced a system that provided them with a reasonably stable economic existence. A vivid example of this general process is certainly clear when examining the General Motors Corporation of today. Its combined hourly workforce in the U. S. and Canada now hovers around 50,000 workers and it announced last month that it will cut its North American salaried workforce by 15 percent by November 1 of this year, while it recently eliminated paid health care coverage for its non-union, salaried retirees. The United Auto Workers Union negotiated a new contract late last year with General Motors that for the first time in history paid wages and benefits to new hires at less than half of what was then paid to existing workers. This was followed by its announcement last month of a record breaking $15.5 billion loss for the preceding quarter. Add to this that GM?s stock price has sunk 89% since the beginning of this decade and it?s not difficult to conclude that things are not likely to get better. This kind of scenario is not just playing itself out at General Motors. It?s happening at Ford, Chrysler and a majority of corporations and companies, both large and small, across the country. Formerly stable working class families are being thrown onto the economic scrap heap by an economic system that is increasingly replacing them with more efficient, labor-less, electronic production. This developing new class has an extraordinary historical challenge and mission in front of it as it defends itself and humanity from being destroyed. Either we develop a collective vision and program for saving humanity from those who are proving they are no longer fit to rule society, or we will fall victim to the untold misery and suffering that their broken capitalist system of production and exchange will increasingly heap upon us. The future is up to us. **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From jannuzi at gmail.com Mon Sep 29 18:15:33 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:15:33 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Then: was 600, 000 workers. Now: 50, 000 General Motors Message-ID: >>The future is up to us.<< The whole piece and its conclusion might sound hopeful if the year were 1960. CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 07:35:55 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:35:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ida B. Wells : American Lenin Message-ID: <48E1F2FA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ida B. Wells Born July 16, 1862(1862-07-16) Holly Springs, Mississippi Died March 25, 1931 (aged 68) Chicago, Illinois Education Fisk University Occupation Civil rights & Women's rights activist Spouse(s) Ferdinand L. Barnett Parents James Wells Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton Ida Bell Wells (July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931), aka Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was an African American civil rights advocate and an early women's rights advocate active in the Woman Suffrage Movement. Fearless in her opposition to lynchings, Wells documented hundreds of these atrocities. Biography Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862 to a carpenter, James Wells, and Elizabeth "Lizzie Bell" Warrenton Wells, both of whom were slaves until freed at the end of the Civil War. When she was fourteen, her parents and her youngest sibling, a brother only nine months old, died of yellow fever during an epidemic that swept through the South.[1] At a meeting following the funeral, friends and relatives decided that the six remaining Wells children should be farmed out to various aunts and uncles. Wells was devastated by the idea and, to keep the family together, dropped out of high school and found employment as a teacher in a black school. Despite difficulties, Wells was able to continue her education by working her way through Rust College in Holly Springs. In 1880, Wells moved to Memphis with all of her siblings except for her 15-year-old brother, January.[citation needed] There she got a summer job. When possible, she attended summer sessions at Fisk University in Nashville. Wells held strong political opinions and she upset many people with her views on women's rights. When she was 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge." Wells became a public figure in Memphis when, in 1884, she led a campaign against racial segregation on the local railway. A conductor of the Chesapeake, Ohio & South Western Railroad Company told her to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered her into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1875-which banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color in theaters, hotels, transport, and other public accommodations-had just been declared unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), and several railroad companies were able to continue racial segregation of their passengers. Wells refused to give up her seat, 71 years before Rosa Parks, and the conductor, who had to get assistance from two other men, dragged her out of the car. When she returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case in the local circuit court, but the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, which reversed the lower court's ruling in 1887. Wells, in her mid-thirties, c. 1897.During her participation in women's suffrage parades, her refusal to stand in the back because she was black resulted in the beginning of her media publicity. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech, an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Memphis on Beale Street. In 1892, however, she was forced to leave the city because her editorials in the paper were seen as too agitating. In one of her articles, written after three of her friends who owned a grocery store were attacked and then lynched because they were taking business away from white competitors, she encouraged blacks to leave Memphis, saying, "there is... only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons." Many African-Americans did leave, and others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. As a result of this and other investigative reporting, Wells' newspaper office was ransacked, and Wells herself had to leave for Chicago. She also published in 1892 her famous pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. This pamphlet, along with her 1895 A Red Record, documented her research on and campaign against lynching. Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women", she concluded that Southerners concocted the rape excuse to hide their real reason for lynching black men: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks but also their ideas about black inferiority. In 1893, she and other black leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, organized a boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the suggestion of white abolitionist and anti-lynching crusader Albion Tourg?e, Wells and her coalition produced a pamphlet to be distributed during the exposition. Called Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, it detailed in English and a few other languages the workings of Southern lynchings and a handful of other issues impinging on black Americans. She later reported to Tourg?e that 2,000 copies had been distributed at the fair.[2] Also in 1893, Wells found herself thinking of filing a libel suit against two black Memphis attorneys. She again turned to Tourg?e, who had trained and practiced as a lawyer and judge, for possible free legal help. Deeply in debt, Tourg?e could not afford to do the work, but he asked his friend Ferdinand L. Barnett if he could. Barnett accepted the pro bono job.[3] Two years later, he and Wells were married.[4] She set an early precedent as being one of the first married American women to keep her own last name with her husband's. This was very unusual for that time. In 1892, Wells went to Great Britain at the behest of British Quaker Catherine Impey. An opponent of imperialism and proponent of racial equality, Impey wanted to be sure that the British public was informed about the problem of lynching. Although Wells and her speeches, complete with at least one grisly photograph showing grinning white children posing beneath a suspended corpse, caused a stir among doubtful audiences, Wells was paid so little that she could barely pay her travel expenses.[5] During her second British lecture tour, again arranged by Impey, Wells wrote about her trip for Chicago's Daily Inter Ocean in a regular column, "Ida B. Wells Abroad". In doing so, she became the first black woman paid to be a correspondent for a mainstream white newspaper.[6] (Tourg?e had been writing a column for the same paper, which was the local Republican Party organ and competitor to the Democratic Chicago Tribune.)[7] After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1928). She died of uremia in Chicago on March 25, 1931, at the age of 68. [edit] Legacy Throughout her life, Wells was militant in her demands for equality and justice for African-Americans and insisted that the African-American community must win justice through its own efforts. As playwright Tazewell Thompson sums her up, "...A woman born in slavery, she would grow to become one of the great pioneer activists of the Civil Rights movement. A precursor of Rosa Parks, she was a suffragist, newspaper editor and publisher, investigative journalist, co-founder of the NAACP, political candidate, mother, wife, and the single most powerful leader in the anti-lynching campaign in America. A dynamic, controversial, temperamental, uncompromising race woman, she broke bread and crossed swords with some of the movers and shakers of her time: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Francis Willard, and President McKinley. By any fair assessment, she was a seminal figure in Post-Reconstruction America." On February 1, 1990, the United States Postal Service issued a 25 cent postage stamp in her honor.[8] [edit] Significant quotations "One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap."[9] [edit] References ^ Biographical information by Lee D. Baker at Duke University ^ Elliott, Mark. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourg?e and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press (2006), 239-40. ^ Elliott, 239. ^ "Miss Ida B. Wells About to Marry.", Washington Post (June 13, 1895). Retrieved on 2008-05-09. ^ Elliott, 240-41. ^ Elliott, 242. ^ Elliott, 232. ^ Scott catalog # 2442. ^ Women in History at Lakewood Public Library (OH) website, "Ida B. Wells-Barnett". Accessed December 13, 2005. [edit] External links Wikisource has original text related to this article: Ida B. WellsWorks by Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg Lynch Law by Ida B. Wells "Ida B. Wells - Illinois During the Gilded Age, 1866-1896, Illinois Historical Digitization Projects at Northern Illinois University Libraries". Retrieved on 2008-03-28. Lee D. Baker. "Ida B. Wells-Barnett(1862-1931) and Her Passion for Justice, Black Women, African American Women, Sufferage, Women's Movement, Civil Rights Leaders". Retrieved on 2007-12-09. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells" Categories: 1862 births | 1931 deaths | American activists | African Americans | Civil rights activists | American women's rights activists | American feminists | American suffragists | People from Mississippi | Fisk University alumni Hidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since April 2008 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Sep 30 07:41:17 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:41:17 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Congressional Black Caucus divided on $700 billion bailout Message-ID: _http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2008/09/cbc-members-oppose-bailout-bil-001186. php_ (http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2008/09/cbc-members-oppose-bailout-bil-001186.php) Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were divided on the proposed $700 billion bailout plan that failed in Congress Monday afternoon. A slight majority of CBC members voted against the plan, while a significant number voted in favor of the bailout. In total, 21 members of the CBC opposed the bailout while 18 members supported it. The bill, called the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, failed 228 to 205 in the House of Representatives on Monday. Rep. Jesse Jackson called the bill "a tremendous improvement over the legislation proposed by the Bush Administration last week," but he voted against it because he said "it still falls short of what is needed to shore up the economy, protect taxpayers and promote economic growth." "We have gone from Roosevelt's New Deal, to Reagan's Raw Deal, to Bush's Quick Deal," Jackson said in a statement. He said the American People are demanding a "fair deal." The Illinois Democrat urged Congress to pass a modified bill that includes a new stimulus, a substantial investment in infrastructure and a program that helps keep taxpayers in their homes. Of the 42 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, 39 are eligible to vote in the House of Representatives. Two members -- Donna Christian-Christensen (USVI) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC) -- are delegates and cannot vote. The 42nd member is Barack Obama, a member of the U.S. Senate, which is expected to take up the bill later this week. CBC members voting against the bailout plan (21): G.K. Butterfield, Andre Carson (IN), William Clay (MO), Emanuel Cleaver (MO), John Conyers (MI), Elijah Cummings (MD), Donna Edwards (MD), Al Green, Jesse Jackson Jr. (IL), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX), William Jefferson (LA), Hank Johnson (GA), Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI), Barbara Lee (CA), John Lewis (GA), Donald Payne (NJ), Bobby Rush (IL), David Scott (GA), Robert Scott (VA), Bennie Thompson and Diane Watson (CA). CBC members voting for the bailout plan (18): Sanford Bishop (GA), Corrine Brown (FL), Yvette Clark (NY), James Clyburn (SC), Artur Davis (AL), Danny Davis (IL), Keith Ellison (MN), Chaka Fattah (PA), Alcee Hastings (FL), Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), Kendrick Meek (FL), Gregory Meeks (NY), Gwendolynne Moore (WI), Charles Rangel (NY), Laura Richardson (CA), Edolphus Towns (NY), Maxine Waters (CA) and Mel Watt (NC). Articles written by a Staff Reporter are unsigned reports from a member of the staff. **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Sep 30 07:51:09 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:51:09 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] A note sent to Marxmial Message-ID: Dear comrades, someone has suggested on Marxmail that the members of that list should begin to draft a clear document on the current crisis, for general distribution among the people of the US of America. I believe that this is a very good idea. It would mean a step ahead in the meaning of these lists. I suggest that members of the Rad-Green and A mailing lists can collaborate with them. Same may run, probably, with Pen-Lers. I honestly believe, from outside the Great Monster, that you have all been put by history in a particularly important place: that of helping history in its doing, not just commenting history led by others. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: N?stor Gorojovsky <_nmgoro at gmail.com_ (mailto:nmgoro at gmail.com) > Date: 30-sep-2008 9:50 Subject: Re: [Marxism] The Current Crisis: A Socialist Perspective To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <_marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu_ (mailto:marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu) > ?Hic Rhodos, hic salta?, comrades! Jay's suggestion and Greg's endorsement seem to be more than enough to begin to throw to the list a preliminary text and to work on it. This list has been existing for long and fruitful years, and it has been very useful in analyzing, commenting and disseminating information among people with a strong socialist compromise, mostly US residents. Circumstances have put it in a completely new situation. As from what I see from my distant vintage point, Marxmail can become a small but meaningful beacon. I agree with Jay and Greg. From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Sep 30 07:52:21 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:52:21 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] essay on current crisis Message-ID: The following essay tries to put the current crisis in perspective. Any comments are very welcome. Hans. In order to understand the response to the crisis by the US Administration, and in order to develop possible alternatives, we have to see the present credit crisis in conjunction with two other looming crises in the background. The main looming crisis, the mother of all crises, is climate change. Right now, as we speak, we should be engaged in a crash program switching to renewable energy, mass transportation, much more energy-efficient housing and much more energy-conscious consumption patterns. This is not being done because our economy is so complicated and rigid that a switch is too painful, and continuing on the path of high fossil fuel usage is so profitable that it cannot be resisted. Not only do we know that a response to climate change will be necessary, we also know that we are heading for other environmental breaking points such as overfishing of the oceans, depletion of our water tables, food insecurity, natural disasters and diseases. In other words: the present financial crisis is only one of a series of crises we are facing in the next two decades. And fortunately it is an early and still isolated crisis. The stock market is still high, the real economy is still strong, the country is not overrun with hurricane refugees or reeling from an epidemic or terrorist attack. The response to this crisis should therefore be to embrace this partial breakdown and make the best of it instead of resisting it. Let the investors who made bad investments go bankrupt and use the taxpayer's money to jump-start the economy in the right direction, on a path of distributed energy supply, lower growth fueled by smaller businesses, with renewable energy and drastic energy savings. If the assets which Wall Street has been dealing with are so complicated that nobody can understand or regulate them, and it is not even possible to know after the fact how the meltdown occurred, then these assets must be wiped out, together with the huge debt overhang which depresses economic activity in general. Policies would be (1) single payer health care and beefing up social security so that people who lose their jobs still have health care and pensions, (2) bankruptcy reform to allow people to build a new life, (3) green job initiatives to train workers in the new renewable energy industries and public funding for research in renewable energy the results of which will be made available to everybody in the world, (4) feed-in tariffs and credit guarantee to stimulate renewable energy production which is by its nature small scale, (5) businesses that are too big to failed will be nationalized, (6) the nationalized Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae should guarantee mortgages based on high efficiency standards, (7) huge public investments in smart grid, a network of high voltage DC transmission lines, electrification of the railroads, reforestation. This is what we should use the $700 billion for instead of throwing good money after bad in the hope that the existing structure will not break down. A partial breakdown is perhaps our only chance to remove the barriers for the changes that the next generation inherits a livable world. Why are we using all available money to keep the most rotten parts of our system afloat instead of building the resilience and nimbleness which allows us to go forward? On the one hand there is regulatory capture, those who are causing the crisis are influencing economic science, the regulators, and public opinion. On the other, the big elephant in the room nobody dares to talk about is the second looming crisis, the collape of today's international monetary system. Let me explain. Market economies are based on the principle: everybody who wants to buy something must have sold something first. In a growing world economy, there must be exceptions to this principle because the sale of goods in period n does not generate enough money to buy the larger bundle of goods produced in period n+1. Somewhere there must be buyers who buy before having sold. Under the gold standard, these were the gold miners. In the times which are now known as the golden area of capitalism, this extra purchasing power was generated by the banking system and loand to local businesses who in the judgment of the loan officers would make a positive contribution to the economy. But internationally, this credit money regime was not duplicated on an international scheme; instead of a truly multilateral international credit money, the national money of the USA served as international money. The USA, the richest country in the world, was able to print dollars and buy real goods from the poorer countries with this newly printed money. This worked as long as the USA was the strongest economy, monetary and fiscal policy was sound, corporate financial statements and economic statistics were reliable, and the USA was investing capital around the world. All these fundamentals have been reversed. Today, the richest country of the world sucks in capital from the poorer countries in order to finance war expenditures and speculative bubbles. The only thing that keeps the dollar afloat is the "safe haven" effect, that in the turmoil created by this lopsided world system the dollar itself was considered the safest investment. If the US cleans house and lets its financial bubbles burst, it destroys the dollar's track record as a safe haven and shows to the rest of the world that the dollar is an emperor with no clothes. But the longer we prop up this system the more fagile it becomes. Is there a way out? Yes. The US must take the initiative to replace the dollar system with an international monetary system based on ecological equity: those countries who need to grow to feed their populations must be given seigniorage so that their growth is based on clean energy rather than coal. In the Bretton Woods negotiations, Lord Keynes himself was in attendance. England, which just had lost its hegemony, was pushing for the bancor, a truly progressive international monetary system. They understood that another hegemon, who would no longer England, was not in England's national interest. Keynes lost, and the world saw another period of monetary hegemony. Today, the US, the declining hegemon, can and should take the role Keynes tried to take in Bretton Woods. I am sure the world would be delighted to follow. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list _pen-l at lists.csuchico.edu_ (mailto:pen-l at lists.csuchico.edu) _https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l_ (https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l) **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Tue Sep 30 08:34:21 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:34:21 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] World Capitalism in Crisis, by Alan Woods Message-ID: A friend sent me these links: World capitalism in crisis ? Part One http://www.marxist.com/world-capitalism-in-crisis-1.htm World capitalism in crisis ? Part Two http://www.marxist.com/world-capitalism-in-crisis-2.htm From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Sep 30 08:49:35 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:49:35 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Then: was 600, 000 workers. Now: 50, 000 General Motors Message-ID: In a message dated 9/29/2008 8:15:50 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, jannuzi at gmail.com writes The whole piece and its conclusion might sound hopeful if the year were 1960. CJ Comment 1960? Well, 48 years ago - say half a century ago, America was a very different country, from several points of view. Part of the conclusion of this article states: >> Formerly stable working class families are being thrown onto the economic scrap heap by an economic system that is increasingly replacing them with more efficient, labor-less, electronic production.<< **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Sep 30 10:50:36 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:50:36 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] World Capitalism in Crisis, by Alan Woods Message-ID: In a message dated 9/30/2008 10:42:08 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, rdumain at autodidactproject.org writes: A friend sent me these links: World capitalism in crisis ? Part One http://www.marxist.co m/world-capitalism-in-crisis-1.htm World capitalism in crisis ? Part Two http://www.marxist.co m/world-capitalism-in-crisis-2.htm Comment Read both parts of this article several times and it strikes me as something written for Marxists of various shades. My old party experience is that it is not necessary for individuals and individual communists and/or Marxists to achieve unity based on ones individual expositions on the economy and its layers of financial architecture. Rather, unity is achieved based on concrete programs of actions. No matter how bad things get the working class, and most certainly that section of proletarians actively engaging the system (state) cannot on its own evolve a class unraveling of the social and economic system. Thus, communists must explain their vision of what is possible at a given moment while bringing to the fore the question of power and reorganization of society ultimately on the basis of collective ownership of means of production. Much of our working class, the absolute majority, are still wedded to moral, ideological and political support of the free market system. That is to say, they are not class conscious, and still strive for someone to "fix" the system in their favor. I am not sure about demands for nationalization, specifically banks and insurance companies. I tend towards their abolition, along with the stock market. I tend towards demands riveted to providing socially necessary means of life, to everyone without regard to income. For instance, it seems plausible to take toilet paper and female hygiene products out of the value relations without nationalizing the productive infrastructure and facilities that produce these products. Further, it seems to me that nationalizing something like paper used for newsprint would serve no purpose other than to create a useless infrastructure. Seems to me that a huge sector of the real economy can be taken out of the value relation, placed under local government and local jurisdiction rather than nationalized. Should the light bulb industry be nationalized? No in my opinion. Should towels and face cloth production be nationalized when we can almost overnight create a distribution infrastructure capable of meeting the needs of the population, using our simple computer technology. I found nothing in Woods economic exposition fundamentally unreasonable, and most certainly agree with his emphasis on the speculators as writing the agenda for world capital in real time. WL. **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Tue Sep 30 09:06:00 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:06:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Irving H. Anellis on Jean Van Heijenoort (1) Message-ID: Anellis, Irving H. Van Heijenoort: Logic and Its History in the Work and Writings of Jean van Heijenoort. Ames, IA: Modern Logic Publishing, 1994. Description: xiv, 341 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN: 1884905005 (pbk.) Contents: Preface List of illustrations 1. Curriculum vitae 2. Van Heijenoort at Brandeis 3. Van Heijenoort as historian of logic 4. Philosophy and foundations of mathematics 5. Van Heijenoort as logician--contributions to proof theory 6. A Final Word Appendices Bibliography Name index Many years ago I acquired Anita Feferman's Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean Van Heijenoort (1993). I've been aware of Anellis' work for many years, rather impossible to find, but I finally got off my duff and contacted Anellis himself and bought this book from him. Van Heijenoort is known for two things: as Trotsky's bodyguard and later as a leading historian of and contributor to mathematical logic. I've read (or skimmed in the case of the strictly technical parts) all but 4, which I'm now reading. I saved what I am most interested in, the chapter on philosophy and foundations, for last. This chapter begins with Van H's reactions to Marx, Engels, and Trotsky on mathematics and logic. But I will begin my next installment with some interesting details of the other chapters. TO BE CONTINUED From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 10:56:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:56:06 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Kucinich on money Message-ID: <48E221E5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Revolutionary socialists have always, always, always advocated nationalization of the banks and democratic accountability of the Central Bank. That is what should be meant by fundamental change in the monetary system (any monetary system, like money itself, is by definition debt-based). Isn't it time for fundamental change? Shane Mage "5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. " http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html#Proletarian This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 12:36:43 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:36:43 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Pakistani and American Troops Exchange Fire Message-ID: <48E2397C.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/world/asia/26military.html> September 26, 2008 Pakistani and American Troops Exchange Fire By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON - Pakistani and American ground troops exchanged fire along the border with Afghanistan on Thursday, a top American military official said, ratcheting up tensions as the United States increases its attacks against militants in Pakistan's restive tribal areas. The clash started after the Pakistanis fired shots or flares at two American helicopters that Pakistan says had crossed its border. The two American OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance helicopters were not damaged and no casualties were reported. But American and Pakistani officials agreed on little else about what happened. American and NATO officials said that the two helicopters were flying about one mile inside Afghan airspace to protect an American and Afghan patrol on the ground when the aircraft were fired on by troops at a Pakistani military checkpoint near the Tanai district in Khost Province. The officials said small-caliber arms were used. In response, the American ground troops shot short bursts of warning fire, which hit well shy of the checkpoint, and the Pakistanis fired back, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a spokesman for the United States Central Command. But a spokesman for the Pakistani Army, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said Pakistani forces fired warning shots at the American aircraft after they crossed into Pakistan's territory in the area of Saidgai, in the Ghulam Khan region of North Waziristan. "On this, the helicopters returned fire and flew back," General Abbas said. The general's statement did not address the account of ground fire. Local residents said that one of the two helicopters had entered inside Pakistan territory by about a mile, while the other hovered on the Afghan side of the border. "When our forces fired warning shots, we were a little scared of a possible retaliatory fire from the helicopters," said one of the residents, Hajji Said Rehman Gorbaz. "But we were happy to see the helicopter flying back into Afghanistan. We were happy that our forces fired at the helicopter." Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, said Thursday that his nation's military had fired only flares at the helicopters, seeming to draw a distinction with warning "shots," which usually refers to bullets or other ordnance that could more seriously damage the helicopters. "They are flares," Mr. Zardari said as he sat down to meet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the United Nations. He said the flares would alert the pilots that they had crossed the border, which he said is rugged and poorly marked. Ms. Rice agreed that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan was "very, very unclear." But the encounter drew immediate protest from Pentagon officials in Washington. "The flight path of the helicopters at no point took them over Pakistan," a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, told reporters. Mr. Whitman said United States and NATO military officials were speaking to their Pakistani counterparts to determine what happened and to ensure there was no repeat, adding, "The Pakistanis have to provide us with a better understanding of why this took place." General Abbas, the Pakistani spokesman, said the clash had been reported to NATO headquarters in Kabul and was under investigation by Pakistani and NATO officials. Military officials and diplomats said the episode showed there was a risk of a much more serious, and lethal, misunderstanding along the border. Pakistani civilian leaders have denounced an incursion by American Special Operations forces into Pakistan on Sept. 3, which was authorized under orders given by President Bush in July, and the Pakistani Army has vowed to defend its border. Yousaf Raza Gilani, Pakistan's prime minister, told reporters on Wednesday, "We will not tolerate any act against our sovereignty and integrity in the name of the war against terrorism." The United States says its goal is to stop attacks on troops in Afghanistan by Al Qaeda and by Taliban militants based in Pakistan. The latest clash on Thursday comes after a week of claims by Pakistani intelligence officials that American helicopters had strayed across the border, and that an American remotely piloted surveillance aircraft had crashed, apparently because of a mechanical failure, in Pakistani territory. American officials denied these claims, saying they were being manufactured by Pakistani officials in response to rising anti-American sentiment in Pakistan after the increased American activities in the border area. Thom Shanker contributed reporting from New York, Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan. September 25, 2008 Pakistan President Says Flares Fired at NATO Chopper By REUTERS Filed at 12:05 p.m. ET NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said his country's forces had fired flares at NATO helicopters in the border area on Thursday to ensure they did not cross into Pakistani territory. "They are flares, they are flares, just to make sure that they know they have crossed the border line," said Zardari, when asked to comment on helicopters from the NATO-led force in Afghanistan being fired on from a military checkpoint along Pakistan's border. Speaking to reporters at the beginning of a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Zardari said the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan was often very unclear and so warning flares were sent up. "Sometimes the border is so mixed (confused) that they don't realize that they have crossed the border line," said Zardari. Rice agreed with him, saying, "Yes, the border is very, very unclear," adding: "It is one of the most inhospitable places." The Pentagon said earlier the NATO helicopters were U.S. military aircraft operating inside Afghanistan and that they had at no time crossed into Pakistan. NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said its helicopters were fired on from a Pakistani military checkpoint along the border but that there were no reports of any damage or casualties. The U.S. military has conducted a number of strikes against Taliban militants inside Pakistan. Pakistan strongly condemned the raids and said it would not tolerate any infringement on its territory. (Reporting by Sue Pleming, editing by Sandra Mal This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 12:53:30 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:53:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Putin, Chavez Discuss Nuclear, Military Cooperation + Putin Says Ties with Latin America a Top Priority Message-ID: <48E23D6A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Putin, Chavez discuss nuclear, military cooperation 10:04 | 26/ 09/ 2008 MOSCOW, September 26 (RIA Novosti) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has hosted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at his official country residence near Moscow, where the two discussed nuclear and military cooperation. (Russian warships head to the Caribbean - Image gallery) "We are ready to look at the possibility of cooperation in the use of nuclear energy," the premier said after the meeting late Thursday. Putin said relations between the two countries were developing in all areas, stressing that "we are ready to discuss military-technical cooperation." Military ties between Moscow and Caracas have been growing as Russia asserts itself on the global stage and Venezuela seeks ties with countries sharing its opposition to U.S. influence on international affairs. Chavez holds talks with President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday in the southern Orenburg region, where they will observe military exercises. Discussions are likely to focus on military-technical and economic cooperation, as well as international issues. The offer of nuclear cooperation is likely to set alarm bells ringing in Washington, particularly after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov could not find time to discuss Iran's nuclear program with counterparts while at the UN General Assembly in New York this week. Last October, Deputy Prime Minster Alexander Zhukov said Russia expected to sign an agreement with Venezuela on cooperation in the civilian nuclear sector, and the Venezuelan president has since confirmed his country seeks to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Iran has also been mentioned as a possible partner for Venezuela in the nuclear sphere, but the country is not thought to yet have a nuclear program. Venezuela has become a major purchaser of Russian weapons, buying more than 50 combat helicopters, 24 Su-30MK2 fighters and 100,000 Ak-103 rifles. Current contracts are worth about $4 billion and a Kremlin source said Thursday that Russia would grant Venezuela a $1 billion loan to buy Russian arms. Putin says ties with Latin America a top priority By STEVE GUTTERMAN - 11 hours ago NOVO-OGARYOVO, Russia (AP) - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin vowed Thursday to make relations with Latin America a top foreign policy priority, a pledge backed by the first Russian naval deployment to the Caribbean since the Cold War. Putin greeted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, on his second trip to Russia in just over two months, with offers to discuss further arms sales to Venezuela and possibly helping it to develop nuclear energy. Chavez's visit takes place as a Russian naval squadron sails to Venezuela, across the Caribbean Sea from the United States, in a pointed response to what the Kremlin has cast as threatening U.S. encroachment near its own borders. Both men suggested their countries are working to decrease U.S. global influence. "Latin America is becoming a noticeable link in the chain of the multi-polar world that is forming," Putin said at his suburban residence at the start of his talks with Chavez. "We will pay more and more attention to this vector of our economic and foreign policy." Putin did not mention any specifics of potential Russian-Venezuelan military cooperation in his opening remarks, but Russian news reports said that Venezuela could buy Russian air defense missiles and more Sukhoi fighter jets. Earlier Thursday, a Kremlin official who spoke on customary condition of anonymity said that Russia would grant Venezuela a $1 billion credit for the purchase of Russian weaponry in an effort to help Venezuela revamp its military forces. Russia has signed contracts worth more than $4.4 billion with Venezuela since 2005 to supply arms including fighter jets, helicopters, and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles. Putin did not specify what kind of cooperation Russia could offer Venezuela in the nuclear field, but Russia is aggressively promoting itself as a builder of nuclear power plants and supplier of fuel to nations seeking nuclear energy. Chavez, who addressed Putin as "my dear friend Vladimir," said that stronger ties with Russia would help build a multi-polar world - a term Russia and Venezuela use to describe their shared opposition to the perceived U.S. global domination. "I think that today more than ever before what you have said about a multi-polar world is becoming reality," Chavez told Putin. He said he brought greetings from Cuban leader Fidel Castro, another staunch U.S. enemy. Both leaders have used criticism of the U.S. to boost their popularity at home and advance foreign policy objectives. Russia is the latest leg in a tour taking Chavez to a number of nations whose governments are eager to counter U.S. global clout. He stopped briefly in Cuba on his way to China, where he touted agreements to increase oil exports and purchase military jets. Signaling similar interests in Russia, Chavez said he and President Dmitry Medvedev will observe military exercises when they meet Friday in the southern Orenburg region. The region near Kazakhstan's border is home to oil industry facilities. In an interview broadcast on Russian television before the visit, Chavez said that Venezuela and Latin America as a whole need "friends like Russia" to help them shed U.S. "domination" and ensure peace. Russia has ramped up its cooperation with Caracas further since last month's war with Georgia, which has badly damaged Moscow's already strained ties with the West and particularly the United States. Russia's deployment of warships to Venezuela for naval maneuvers came after the United States used naval ships to ferry aid to Georgia after the war - a mission Russian officials harshly criticized. The Russian naval deployment follows a weeklong visit to Venezuela by a pair of Russian strategic bombers. On his Sunday TV and radio program, Chavez joked that he would be making his international tour aboard the "super-bombers that Medvedev loaned me." Chavez has also talked about creating "a new strategic energy alliance" with between the oil-rich nations. After visiting Venezuela this month, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said five major Russian oil companies are looking to form a consortium to increase Latin American operations and to build a $6.5 billion refinery to process Venezuelan crude. Putin said that Russia's Gazprom state natural gas giant will launch its first drilling rig next month to tap Venezuela's offshore gas reserves. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 12:55:32 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:55:32 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cynthia McKinney Message-ID: <48E23DE4.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Cynthia McKinney A Gift for a Generation: A U.S. Financial System of Our Own September 25, 2008 Last week, I posted ten points (that were by no means exhaustive) for Congressional action immediately in the wake of the financial crisis now gripping our country. At that time, the Democratic leadership of Congress was prepared to adjourn the current legislative Session to campaign, without taking any action at all to put policies in place that protect U.S. taxpayers and the global community that has accepted U.S. financial leadership. Those ten points, to be taken in conjunction with the Power to the People Committee's platform available on the campaign website at (http://votetruth08.com/index.php/resources/campaignplatform), are as follows: 1. Enactment of a foreclosure moratorium now before the next phase of ARM interest rate increases take effect; 2. elimination of all ARM mortgages and their renegotiation into 30- or 40-year loans; 3. establishment of new mortgage lending practices to end predatory and discriminatory practices; 4. establishment of criteria and construction goals for affordable housing; 5. redefinition of credit and regulation of the credit industry so that discriminatory practices are completely eliminated; 6. full funding for initiatives that eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in home ownership; 7. recognition of shelter as a right according to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to which the U.S. is a signatory so that no one sleeps on U.S. streets; 8. full funding of a fund designed to cushion the job loss and provide for retraining of those at the bottom of the income scale as the economy transitions; 9. close all tax loopholes and repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the top 1% of income earners; and 10. fairly tax corporations, denying federal subsidies to those who relocate jobs overseas repeal NAFTA. In addition to these ten points, I now add four more: 11. Appointment of former Comptroller General David Walker to fully audit all recipients of taxpayer cash infusions, including JP Morgan, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG, and to monitor their trading activities into the future; 12. elimination of all derivatives trading; 13. nationalization of the Federal Reserve and the establishment of a federally-owned, public banking system that makes credit available for small businesses, homeowners, manufacturing operations, renewable energy and infrastructure investments; and 14. criminal prosecution of any activities that violated the law, including conflicts of interest that led to the current crisis. Ellen Brown, author of "The Web of Debt" writes at http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/, "Such a public bank today could solve not only the housing crisis but a number of other pressing problems, including the infrastructure crisis and the energy crisis. Once bankrupt businesses have been restored to solvency, the usual practice is to return them to private hands; but a better plan for Fannie and Freddie might be to simply keep them as public institutions." Too many times politicians have told us to support the "free market." The unfolding news informs us in a most costly manner that free markets don't work. This is a financial system of their making. It's now past time for the people to have an economic system of their own. A reading of the full text on the Congressional "Agreement on Principles" for the proposed $700 billion bailout reveals the sham that this so-called agreement truly is. Today our country faces an economic 9/11. The problem that is unfolding is truly systemic and no stop-gap measures that maintain the current bankrupt structure will be sufficient to resolve this crisis of the U.S. economic engine. Today is my son's birthday. What a gift to the young people of this country if we were to present to them a clean break from the policies that produced this economic disaster, the "financial tsunami" that former Comptroller General David Walker warned us of so many months ago and instead offered them a U.S. economic superstructure that truly was their own. Power to the People! - -- "And advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 60 The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. - -- Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 13:39:18 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:39:18 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] World Capitalism in Crisis, by Alan Woods Message-ID: <48E24827.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Waistline2 I am not sure about demands for nationalization, specifically banks and insurance companies. I tend towards their abolition, along with the stock market. ^^^^^ "5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. " http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html#Proletarian This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Sep 30 14:05:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:05:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama gas? Detroit station swaps signs, lowers Message-ID: <48E24E34.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Obama gas? Detroit station swaps signs, lowers prices By KELLY KOZLOWSKI ? Free Press staff writer ? September 25, 2008 Read Comments(169)Recommend(16)Print this page E-mail this article Share this article: Del.icio.us Facebook Digg Reddit Newsvine Buzz up! When it comes to campaigning for the presidency, sometimes a T-shirt and a pin just don't cut it. Sometimes you need a really big sign and a price cut on gas. Whether or not either method guarantees a win remains to be seen, but Detroit Sunoco station owner Samir Bazzi and son, Nick, are giving both a shot. Bazzi replaced his Sunoco sign with an Obama campaign sign five days ago and lowered gas prices to $3.49 per gallon. "Everything's down," Bazzi said. "We're trying to support people." Bazzi is also selling Obama hats and T-shirts. The owner of the station for the past seven years, Sammi said he has been a Democrat since he came to America from Lebanon in 1986. ?I supported Bill Clinton when I started voting and now I support Barack Obama. He is a good man who supports the poor people and looks out for those who have lost their homes and businesses.? Bazzi said he plans to continue keeping the price of gasoline below those of his competitors and said if Obama wins the election in November he will throw a big party at the station, offering free food and drinks to his customers. ?Obama is a good man in the greatest country on earth and we need someone like him to lead us.? "This is an Obama neighborhood," Nick Bazzi said, adding that sales have increased since the signage switch. Many patrons voiced support as they filled up on fuel. "It looks nice--real nice," said Eric Joye, 36, of Detroit. "That's free advertising. It just shows who he supports." "I think it's wonderful," said Alma Raymond, 54, of Detroit. "He's going to get a lot of business, just like Obama's going to get a lot of votes. [Obama] is going to be our next president." Samir Bazzi echoed expectations of an Obama victory. "We support Obama they way he's going to support us," Bazzi said. Phillip Young, 39, of Detroit called the gas station sign "unique." "It did get my attention when it first went up. With about 40 days and counting, I think everybody should come out and vote. Eight years is a long time, and it's way past due." Nick Bazzi said the sign will stay up through Nov. 4. Staff writer Joe Rossiter contributed to this report. In your voice Read reactions to this story Newest first Oldest first Criticalmass77 wrote: I'm suprised that, as a franchise owner, that Sunoco doesn't make him removed the sign and place it elsewhere, as it is blocking the Sign of the company he gets his gas from. I mean, it's creative by any means... And throwing labels on groups based on one individual is just as narrow minded as being racist/sexist etc. Any kind of prejudices are plain and simple, unthinking persons label. To answer the question " Can't we all just get along?" . In one word. No. The beauty of that is, we can disagree on a great many things, but I believe that in the end, we have the ability to put differences aside and work towards a common good. We have the ability...whether or not anyone uses it..who knows? It's sort of like seeing the overweight people on the motorized carts at the store...and they stand up to reach what they want, they just appear to not use the ability to walk and take an easy way out. Stealing the cart from those who many actually need it. The ability is there. 09/27/2008 8:55:03 p.m. EDT This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com