Bulletin N° 722
Subject
:
THE LESSER-EVIL PARADOX.
“Thanksgiving”
Season 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
To discover the degree to which our
lives are derived –including our
personal behavior and our most intimate ideas and preferences-- from influences
beyond our control is sometimes enervating. After all, if we are not whom we
think we are, who exactly are we? The dialectical
materialism of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his followers (who were keen on
differentiating the social object,
“mankind-in-itself” from the historical agent,
“mankind-for-itself”) offered an alternative philosophy to the positivism of Auguste
Comte (1798–1857). In past CEIMSA Bulletins, we have discussed the deductive
role played by Humanist ideology in social science research and carried this
discussion to the more recent writings of N. Katherine Hayles
and Anthony Wilden, (see, for example,
CEIMSA Bulletin N° 462); while for a critical
analysis of the theory of historical materialism as well as the method,
dialectical materialism, we have recommended the recent writings of Bertell
Ollman (see CEIMSA Bulletin N° 344).
Meanwhile, the ruling
class continues to promote the fetish of algorithms to mystify the historical
process and to reify our lives, by use of metaphysics, with categories inscribed in
already-written manuscripts. (The word algorithm derives from the name of the
mathematician, Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi, who
was part of the royal court in Baghdad and who lived from about 780 to
850.) For some critical descriptions of
this branch of mathematics, we offer CEIMSA readers several brief reviews
of this increasingly popular and decidedly counter-revolutionary thought
process that has morphed into a full-blown intellectual movement in the context
of everyday authoritarian micromanagement --at work, in the market place, at school, and
at home we are progressing step by step toward unknown consequences of these
police actions, while the social science theory
of historical materialism (which
postulates that material conditions influence ideas more than ideas influence
material conditions) and the social science method
of dialectical materialism (which uses space/time at different levels of
abstraction in order to extend generalizations about social context thereby
identifying specific forces of change, and the constraints imposed on these social
forces, and the likely development of new unexpected formations as an outcome,
carrying within them new contradictions and new potentials for further change.
Below are
discussions of the counter-revolutionary method of algorithm, as it attempts to
serve the social order through orchestrated change from above, to deter social
revolution by way of massive maneuvers of oscillation :
What's an algorithm?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hfOvs8pY1k
How algorithms shape our
world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENWVRcMGDoU
Algorithms Are Taking Over The World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_aLU-NOdHM
Algorithms
THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY The Secret
Algorithms That Control Money and Information
http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Pasquale-blackbox.pdf
by FRANK PASQUALE
The 17 items below offer
CEIMSA readers a look at the material reality which inevitably impinges upon
our ideas requiring our very thought processes to adapt.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
From: "Matt D., UFPJ"
<info@actionnetwork.org>
Sent: Saturday, 26 November, 2016
Subject: Teargassed for Thanksgiving.
What I Saw at Standing Rock.
Dear
Francis,
This
week, I and many other peaceful water protectors were attacked at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in Standing
Rock, ND.
I
can tell you first hand that on the week of Thanksgiving 2016 the US Government
is still brutalizing Native Americans on their own land. On Sunday evening, I
quickly went from preparing dinner to defending the front line from a
militarized police assault.
Native
elders prayed near the barricade as nonviolent demonstrators faced DAPL's
militarized police, Morton County Sheriff Office, and their weapons. The
prayers were meant for both sides.
The
police's violent attack on our camp carried on until the next morning and in
the midst of it I and hundreds of others were tear
gassed and shot at with rubber bullets as we fled the thick, suffocating clouds
of smoke. A camp-mate of mine was shot by one of the bullets and had his arm
broken. One woman I know was sent to the ER because one of the police's
concussion grenades exploded near her face, causing burns. The police hosed us
with liquids for hours in the freezing cold. Our warm clothes froze stiff. You
could see icicles forming on the razor wires as they aimed
their guns at us. I'm still haunted by the fact that one young woman whom I'd
seen at the camp nearly every day and have spoken to a couple times may have to
have her arm amputated from a police concussion grenade that was aimed at her.
That
night, our camp was converted into an fully
functioning emergency response center with every necessary health and support
service you could imagine being provided by hundreds, if not thousands of
volunteers. Nobody rested.
It's
almost impossible to believe that within a matter of minutes, our camp went
from a peaceful place of laughter and prayer to a battlefield. The police were
not there to arrest us that night- I believe only one person was arrested- they
were there to hurt us and to wear down the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their
growing support, in an attempt to protect DAPL.
I
am still hearing individual stories from that late night and still having
difficulty coming to terms with what we experienced. I remember thinking to
myself, "Is this Iraq or Standing Rock?" I will never forget what I
saw there. Through that experience, the purpose of the camp and the struggle
there became clearer to me, and for many of us, it has strengthened our
resolve.
We
are not simply camped out to make a point. We are in it to shut down the Dakota
Access Pipeline. We are in it to protect our planet and our brothers and
sisters who inhabit it. We are in it to defend Native American treaties. We are
in it to oppose racist militarism at home and abroad. And we are in it to win.
Thanks
to your support, we have been able to turn our calls of solidarity into
meaningful action.
Now,
please sign our petition to Obama, McDonough, and Darcy to stop the pipeline
and to end the historic violence against Native Peoples.
Please,
as you enjoy the holidays and the company of your loved ones, do not forget
Standing Rock, which in my assessment, is the epicenter of our ongoing battle
for peace and justice today.
In
Peace,
Matt
D.,
UFPJ
Organizer & Peace Pledge Campaigner
|
|
===========
b.
CRIMINAL LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST THE US
GOVERNMENT
ON BEHALF OF CHILDREN & THE FUTURE
GENERATIONS OF THE WORLD
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/16/jeffrey_sachs_praises_the_youth_activists
===========
c.
Matt Damon from Howard Zinn's
speech: The Problem is Civil Obedience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2li9E_94MA
===========
d.
Standing Rock Special on American Indian Resistance
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/24/standing_rock_special_dallas_goldtooth_on
===========
e.
Ralph Nader
Interviews Noam Chomsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6c1FLWbNP4
===========
f.
Jeremy Scahill: Mike Pence Has
"Militant Agenda" Against Women, the Poor, Immigrants, LGBTQ People
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/21/jeremy_scahill_mike_pence_has_militant
===========
g.
From: Richard Greeman
Subject: The Struggle: Let’s All Hang Together (or
we’ll hang separately!)
The Struggle: Let’s All Hang Together (or we’ll hang separately!)
by Richard Greeman
1. A Foreseeable
Surprise
If Donald Trump’s electoral revolution came as a
surprise, the profound disgust of the citizenry for the ruling elites has long
been no surprise to anyone. The folks in the middle and at the bottom, left
high and dry by the post-2008 “recovery” in favor of the top 1%, were totally
fed up and ready for a political revolution. That slogan was successfully used
in the Democratic primaries by the old Jewish socialist Bernie Sanders, who
genuine popularity came near to dethroning Hillary Clinton, the pre-selected
candidate of Wall St. and the DNC, considered “inevitable” by the media.
While Hillary was campaigning behind closed doors in
luxury hotels to win the financial support of bankers and traders, Bernie was
out on the hustings drawing crowds of up to 20,000
enthusiastic supporters, who were hard at work in their constituencies. Yet
while the TV cameras followed Trump everywhere, we never got to see those mass
meetings of Sanders supporters. And as we later learned from Wikileaks, the DNC and media barons were
working together to marginalize Bernie’s candidacy by denigrating it as
“futile.”
Nonetheless, Sanders kept rising in the polls, which
consistently gave him a majority over Trump or any other Republican candidate
in a hypothetical general election. These polls, deliberately ignored at the
time by the Democratic leadership, were confirmed by the Nov. 8 election
results. Trump won in the very states and even down to the identical rust-belt
counties where Sanders carried the primaries.[1] Clearly, what those voters wanted
was a political revolution.
Yet the Democratic leadership, operating behind the
scenes, obstinately imposed on the party the predictably disastrous candidature
of Hillary Clinton. She was and is a shop-worn, visibly unpopular personality
(polls), the symbol of the arrogance of the Washington elite, weighed down with
the heavy negative baggage the two terms of her husband. The Clintons’
neo-liberal, globalist ‘New Democrat’ policies are considered responsible for
the poverty and insecurity into which millions of working families have fallen,
black and white together. These former “middle class” working people have not
forgotten that their lives were destroyed by deliberate de-industrialization of
the middle west, off-shoring of jobs to low-wage
countries, financial deregulation, and the elimination of Welfare and aid to
dependent children under the Clintons’ presidencies. For these disenchanted
Democrats as well as for the enthusiastic Democratic activists of Bernie’s
“political revolution,” the imposed (if not rigged)
candidacy was an arrogant slap in the face.
The elite Democrats’ electoral strategy was as disastrous
and as far from reality as was their choice of candidate. Unbelievable as it
may seem, they decided to turn the election by focusing on the narrow
demographic of “college-educated Republicans” (who of course voted Republican).
The Democrats were apparently so confident they owned the votes of
their historical (since FDR and LBJ) base of unionized and other working people
and ethnic minorities that Clinton barely campaigned in the devastated
areas (which voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but not for Clinton in 2016). Nor
did she address the suffering of the millions who are upset about growing
inequality, economic insecurity, unemployment, overwork (two jobs), low wages,
race and gender discrimination, lost savings, underwater mortgages, debts, and
bankruptcies. (At least Bill Clinton pretended to “feel our pain”). Instead,
Hillary stood for the status quo when everyone was crying out
for change.
Thus, in the very first fifteen minutes of the first
televised debate, Trump was able to present himself as the champion of the
working class. All he needed to do was keep reminding the audience of the
Clintons’ responsibility for imposing the disastrous (for workers) 1994 North
American Free Trade Association Treaty (NAFTA) and to Trumpet his own
opposition to the semi-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP, or “NAFTA on
steroids,” favors the rights of multinational corporations over the welfare of workers,
the environment and human rights. Long supported by globalists Obama and
Clinton, it would have reduced U.S. wages to Asian levels and completed the
ruin of “working-middle-class” viewers -- and they knew it. So after those
fifteen minutes, many turned off their TVs and went bed. They had seen enough,
it was already late, and tomorrow is work.
So is it really such a mystery why down-scale voters,
deeply discontented with the Establishment and deprived of the option of a
Leftist “political revolution” chose the option of a political revolution of
the Right?
2. So Who’s To Blame?
There are two ways to react to this disaster. We can
either blame the American people or point our finger at the country’s elites,
at the political Establishment, the billionaire donors, and their commercial
mass media who organized this catastrophe for which the American people will
pay the price for a long time. To blame the American public, particularly to
stigmatize the white working class, is to fall back into the same elitism that
enraged Trump’s voters, whom Clinton famously categorized as “deplorables.” Indeed, the Democratic elite are now blaming
their own failure on the very voters they scorned.
Of course Trump barely hides his own racism and
misogyny and did not reject the support of David Duke the former KKK leader.
But everyone who voted for Trump is not necessarily a bigot. According to the
analysis of the N.Y. Times, statistics show that the election
was decided by voters who had gone for Obama in 2012.[2] Obviously, they all aren’t racists.
Nor were the Brits who voted for Brexit all
xenophobes. That electoral bomb also exploded “by surprise” when
the Oxbridge elites of the ruling Conservative party, completely cut off from
the people, called that referendum to settle an intra-mural contest, like a
ball in one of their Public School sports. They thus gave the millions of
common folk humiliated by neo-liberal globalization a target for their anger
and alienation.
Michael Moore
was one of the few to see the parallel. Well before the US election he noted
that those portions of the U.S. that have been most ravaged by free trade
orgies and globalism are filled with rage and “see [Trump] as a chance to
be the human Molotov cocktail that they’d like to throw into the system to blow
it up.”
On the other hand, the fact that 53% of white women found
it in their hearts to vote for a bully who brags about sexually abusing women
is astounding and disturbing. “Elite white feminism gave Us Trump,”[3] writes Liza Featherstone, the editor
of a prescient pre-election collection of left-feminist essays False
Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton[4] which examines her track record on
welfare, Wall Street, criminal justice, education, and war. “She has advanced
laws and policies that have done real harm to the lives of women and children
across the country and the globe.3 That certainly
accounts for part of the problem.
“Nevertheless,” writes the Marxist-humanist scholar
Peter Hudis, “those who place the entire blame on
Clinton for Trump’s victory are missing a critical point. Male chauvinism
clearly was pivotal in the electoral outcome. That Trump could manage to grow
his support even after the evidence of his history of sexual abuse became
widely known is a very disturbing sign of the sexism that is endemic to this
society.”[5] Alas, aggressive verbal and physical
male behavior toward women is already becoming “normalized” since Trump’s
election. Turning next to the economy, Hudis
continues:
Clinton’s defeat may show that neoliberalism
is in crisis, but that does not in any way mean that it points to a weakening
of the hegemony of capitalism. In fact, it is now clear how wrong it was for
many leftists to focus their politics for the past two decades on attacking “neoliberalism”—without ever getting to explicitly oppose
the logic of capital as a whole and articulate an alternative to it….
Capitalism may be turning away from its neoliberal phase as convincingly as it
earlier dropped Keynesianism... Trump is part of a worldwide rejection of neoliberalism on the part of reactionary forces, who feel
it has failed to live up to its promise. However, today’s collapse of neoliberalism does not represent a step forward, but a
reactionary move to atavistic nationalism, racism, and misogyny.
We should have no illusions about the impact
of Donald Trump’s victory. It is a disaster. The prospect of a unified
right-wing government, led by an authoritarian populist, represents a
catastrophe for working people. Some may have hoped that Trump’s outlandish
campaign threats were not meant to be taken seriously ;
but the man means business, and he is not going to waste his crucial first
hundred days pussyfooting around, as Obama did. Trump has already chosen
Stephen Bannon the alt/right blogger as his chief
White House Strategist. He will now have Sen. Jeff Sessions, an outspoken, unrepentant racist, as Attorney
General, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a notorious Islamophobe, as
national security adviser, and hawkish Rep. Mike Pompeo,
who wants to tear up the treaty with Iran, as CIA director. Under
consideration for Homeland Security is immigrant-hunter Joe Arpaio,
recently-ousted Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, now under indictment for
his excessive brutality to prisoners. With such enemies in power, the
struggle for equality and social justice will be long and hard. No sense
counting on Obama and the Democrats, who are keeping a low profile and will
play at conciliation — unlike the Republicans who rejected Obama’s legitimacy
and blocked him from day one of his administration.
Above all, let us not divide our ranks by scapegoating the members of the famous “white working
class” (no more racist than other whites) on whom the Democrat elites (having
scorned them) are now blaming this catastrophe. These frustrated rust-belt
voters, many of them former Bernie-supporters and Obama voters, having tossed
their Molotov cocktail into the White House, are now waiting eagerly to see if
President Trump will keep his promise to immediately end outsourcing of
jobs. [6] When their right-wing pro-business
billionaire president lets them down, as he inevitably will, we will find them
along side us again in the labor and social struggles of the next four
years. “As long as power was split between a Democratic Presidency and a
Republican Congress, each side could blame the other for the lack of positive
accomplishments.” Writes Ken Knabb from Oakland, CA.
“But now that the Republicans have got a monopoly, there will be no more
excuses.”[7]
United we stand.
Divided we fall.
_________________
[1] https://blogs.mediapart.fr/vincent-presumey/blog/091116/ne-pas-jouer-se-faire-peur-mais-regarder-la-realite-en-face
[2] https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/796243415101034496
[3] http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2936-elite-white-feminism-gave-us-trump-it-needs-to-die?
[4] Contributors include Liza
Featherstone, Laura Flanders, Moe Tkacik, Medea Benjamin, Frances Fox Piven
and Fred Block, Donna Murch, Kathleen Geier, Yasmin Nair, Megan
Erickson, Tressie McMillan Cottom,
Catherine Liu, Amber A’Lee Frost, Margaret Corvid, Belén Fernández,
Zillah Eisenstein, and others.
[5] http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles/trumps-election-capitalisms-dangerous-turn-toward-open-racism-misogyny-peter-hudis
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/business/economy/can-trump-save-their-jobs-theyre-counting-on-it.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
[7] http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/trump.htm
===========
h.
Shameful
and Poisonous
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45847.htm
by Stephen Cohen
"We
are at the moment in an exceedingly dangerous relationship with Russia"
===========
i.
From: "Mark Crispin Miller
Subject: [MCM] So who hacked all those
emails? Agents of the Kremlin? Or teen-agers obsessed
with UFOs?
Madsen put this out back
in October. Maybe now it will sink in....?
MCM
So Who
Hacked Clinton? The Truth Could Be
More
Shocking Than You Expected
by Wayne Madsen
===========
j.
Presidential
Polls Were Off the Mark Because of Voter Suppression
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17686
Filmmaker
Greg Palast says the states of Michigan, Arizona,
North Carolina, and Ohio were stolen in this election
===========
k.
It's not Donald Trump who matters now in the
Middle East – it's Putin
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45855.htm
It is easy to say that the Arabs are appalled that an Islamophobe has won the White House. But did they think
Obama or any of his predecessors – Democrat or Republican – had any special
concern for Islam? Of course not
by
Robert Fisk
===========
l.
US, British ‘Clean House’ to
Delete Syria Terror Links
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45851.htm
US President Barack Obama has just given the Pentagon
orders to assassinate commanders of the Al Nusra
terror network in Syria. American media reports over
the weekend say the new urgency arises from US intelligence fears that al
Qaeda-affiliated groups are preparing to mount terror attacks against Western
targets from strongholds in Syria.
===========
m.
Nationwide Actions
Demand Army Corps Block Dakota Access Pipeline
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17709
Rallies
and sit-ins were held in over 100 cities around the world against the Dakota
Access Pipeline. Lauretta Prevost with Mirrors and
Hammers Productions,www.mirrorsandhammers.com
===========
n.
Noam
Chomsky and Jeffrey Sachs "US Foreign Policy -- Hegemony or
Survival?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arG9Xifbcbc
Columbia
University, November 16, 2004 (Introduction by Jeffrey Sachs).
===========
o.
Noam Chomsky
2016 After the Electoral Extravaganza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-OS-DgxuFo&spfreload=10
===========
p.
Ralph Nader,
“This Could Be The Most Serious Event In History"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRkqYuv3_8
===========
q.
After the
Electoral Extravaganza by Noam Chomsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-1fX1H2dyA
===========
r.
Should Clinton Get off Scot-Free?
http://therealnews.com/t2/story:17765:Should-Clinton-Get-off-Scot-Free%3F
Glen
Ford says Americans shouldn't be reconciled to criminality and corruption,
regardless of one's opinion of Trump.
(Note:
This interview took place before a Trump aide stated that the administration
will not open an investigation into Hillary Clinton.)