Romola Garai (“Atonement,” “Suffragette”) plays Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor, a strong feminist and socialist who takes part in workers’ battles and fights for women’s rights, as well as the abolition of child labor. The film also details her tragic relationship with Edward Aveling (Patrick Kennedy), whom she meets in 1883.
"There is no doubt that corporate America and the vast majority in the
capitalist class back Biden and that he, in turn, will rule for them.
And despite attempting to remake himself as mildly progressive for the
election, his conservative politics constantly betray him. In response
to the George Floyd protests, Biden attempted to come across as
moderately, ambivalently sympathetic by suggesting that instead of
aiming for the heart, cops should “shoot ’em in the leg”. It’s hard to
think of a more eloquent metaphor for Democratic Party policies.
"That Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad have
given their political support to this odious creep is bad enough. That
they are now cheerily working alongside him and endorsing his program is
just pathetic. This charade is the latest example of the major fault
lines present in the Sanders campaign from the beginning. The most
important one is the political differences between the rank and file and
the leadership."
Minneapolis, Minnesota—Fourteen years before he killed George Floyd, Derek Chauvin was one of several cops who opened fire on and killed Wayne Reyes Sr., a Native man who was a suspect in a stabbing. Nine years before he killed George Floyd, Chauvin was placed on administrative leave for his role in an officer-involved shooting in Little Earth of United Tribes, the country’s only Section 8 housing project specifically devoted to Native Americans. He was among a group of five officers who fired at a twenty-three-year-old Native man named Leroy Martinez, whom they accused of brandishing a gun in the complex, shooting him in the torso, though not fatally. Chauvin was put on three days’ leave, but the Minneapolis Police Department chief concluded later that the group had acted “appropriately and courageously.”
Bless You Your Ladyships! Claire Fox and Kate Hoey amongst Brexiteers to receive peerages Kate Hoey (who claims to have been in the International Marxist Group) and Claire Fox (who definitely was a…
NY Times, August 1, 2020 Trump Might Try to Postpone the Election. That’s Unconstitutional.
He should be removed unless he relents.
By Steven G. Calabresi
Mr. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.
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The president on Thursday tweeted that the 2020 election would be “fraudulent” if there is universal mail-in voting.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.
But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
Here is what President Trump tweeted:
The nation has faced grave challenges before, just as it does today with the spread of the coronavirus. But it has never canceled or delayed a presidential election. Not in 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln was expected to lose and the South looked as if it might defeat the North. Not in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression. Not in 1944 during World War II.
So we certainly should not even consider canceling this fall’s election because of the president’s concern about mail-in voting, which is likely to increase because of fears about Covid-19. It is up to each of the 50 states whether to allow universal mail-in votingfor presidential elections, and Article II of the Constitution explicitly gives the states total power over the selection of presidential electors.
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It is up to each of the 50 states whether to allow universal mail-in voting.Credit...Matt Slocum/Associated Press
Election Day was fixed by a federal law passed in 1845, and the Constitution itself in the 20th Amendment specifies that the newly elected Congress meet at noon on Jan. 3, 2021, and that the terms of the president and vice president end at noon on Jan. 20, 2021. Even if President Trump disputed an election he lost, his term would still be over on that day. And if no newly elected president is available, the speaker of the House of Representatives becomes acting president.
President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.
Steven G. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.
There was a moment, just before Lee Grant accepted the Academy Award for her supporting performance in the iconic 1975 movie “Shampoo,” when she knew her life had changed. She was making her way to the stage, and a thought blazed its way into her consciousness.
“It was probably the end of my great, beautiful, gorgeous 12 years in Hollywood,” Grant recalled recently, noting that she was 49 when she won her Oscar. “I realized, as a woman actor, that my career was probably really over.”
Grant was speaking at AFI Docs, where she was honored at the Guggenheim Symposium for her work directing documentary films, which defined most of her career through the 1980s and 1990s. Six of those features will screen over the next six weeks through AFI Silver’s virtual cinema, as the program “20th Century Woman: The Documentary Films of Lee Grant.”
Now in her 90s, Grant appeared at the Guggenheim Symposium by way of Zoom, looking every bit as hip as she was 50 years ago, when she was part of a chapter in American cinema that changed the medium and the business but also reinvigorated a career that had been cut viciously short during the McCarthy era.
Grant had just made a smashing film debut in William Wyler’s 1951 drama “Detective Story” when she spoke at the funeral of the actor J. Edward Bromberg, noting that the stress of being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee most likely led to his early death. For the next 10 years, she was blacklisted as a suspected communist, even though she wasn’t ideological. “I married a communist writer,” she explained, adding that it was the intellectual engagement of her first husband, Arnold Manoff, and his friends that attracted her. “I hadn’t become a communist because I didn’t understand it.”
Lee Grant accepts the Oscar awarded to her as best supporting actress for her role in “Shampoo,” at the Academy Awards in 1976. She explains to the audience she wore a wedding dress because she wanted a bride's luck. (AP)
Grant received her first Oscar nomination for her poignantly funny performance in “Detective Story.” But the career that should have taken off was effectively destroyed. (“I’d been blacklisted from the time I was 24 until the time I was 36,” she noted, “which is really a Hollywood actor’s lifetime in film.”)For the next decade she worked when she could, in theater and occasionally TV, until she was hired on the hit soap opera “Peyton Place.” As the blacklist began to loosen and eventually disappear, she said “yes to everything,” to quote the title of her memoir. Grant’s insatiable appetite for work allowed her to work with some of the era’s most legendary directors, including Hal Ashby (“The Landlord,” “Shampoo”), and do some of the era’s most fabulous schlock.
She still cracks up remembering her big line in the 1978 disaster flick “The Swarm,” in which she played a TV news reporter: “The bees are coming!” She laughed so hard doing the scene that the director made her go collect herself. “It was the funniest lowest point,” she recalled, “and I was absolutely grateful for the chance to do it and bring home the paycheck.”
By then, Grant had enrolled in the American Film Institute’s newly minted Directing Workshop for Women, where she gravitated toward adaptations of August Strindberg (“The Stronger”) and Tillie Olsen (“Tell Me a Riddle”). In 1979, she began filming her first documentary, “The Willmar 8,” an account of women going on strike against the bank where they work in a small Minnesota town. It was the astonishingly assured debut of a natural documentarian; Grant won another Oscar for directing “Down and Out in America,” her 1986 film about the social, economic and political fallout of the Reagan era, that kicks off AFI Silver’s six-week series.Those films also exemplified an oeuvre that gravitated toward tough, issue-oriented investigations of everything from poverty and inequality to sexual orientation and women’s issues. And all reflected a singular style, one that combined Grant’s native curiosity with disarming intimacy and compassion.
“Maybe because of my background as an actor, I so identify with who I’m talking to and what’s coming at me,” she explained. “Whatever style there is comes out of my identification with what’s being said to me.”
Lee Grant talks to Ann Hornaday during the 2020 Guggenheim Symposium at AFI DOCS. (AFI Docs)
Perhaps most meaningfully, Grant never appears on screen in her documentaries, and only rarely allows her voice to be heard. Rather, her subjects and the films themselves become her emotional instrument. Even after her heady days of near-constant work in Hollywood, it wasn’t until she began to direct that she truly found the voice that had been silenced decades ago.“I’d had to shut up for so long,” she said, describing the paranoia and paralyzing self-doubt that she suffered while being blacklisted. “You’re worried that if you open your mouth, somebody’s name is going to come out and hurt them. So getting to do documentaries was such a door [swinging] open for me. I could ask anything, I could say anything and I could address some of the things I felt deeply about in a very real way.”
As this essay will tell, I began my working life when I was nineteen years old and stopped working for a wage at age 59, forty years later. For most of us, these are the most productive years of our lives. I spent 30 of these years working in the academia. Most people who spent as much time at universities would consider themselves academics. Yet I never have and I hope this essay will explain why. And if someone insists, I would call myself an accidental academic. As the reader will find, my my socialist convictions and love life played the central role in shaping of my employment history and the big chunk of it as an academic. Let's me distinguish intellectual and scholarly interests from academic life. While academics typically need to tip their hat to intellectual and scholarly interests, they often are neither seriously intellectual nor scholarly. For the great majority, it has been largely a job, perhaps for some and at an earlier period in recent history, a cushy job.
As a student of Karl Marx and (eco)socialism since 1971, it seemed appropriate to open this essay with maxims from the theory of history of Marx and Engels and its focus on how our working life make us who we are and how circumstances and our lives interact. Marx and Engels considered humans to be the sum total of our social relations shaped by the dominant mode of production. Thus, followed their focus the importance of class relations in the study of history. But class formation has become a much more complicated issue than they envisioned. As we will see, in my individual case reveals that once I radicalized and became a socialist in 1971, my political life, circumestances, as well as my own personal life, abilities and perferences determined my working life.
Last Thursday, the US-based global tech giants reported their quarterly earnings simultaneously. On the same day, the US economy recorded the biggest quarterly contraction in national output ever (-9.5% yoy or -32.9% annualised).
In contrast, the ‘fearsome foursome’: Alphabet (Google) – the world’s largest search engine; Amazon – the world’s largest online distributor; Apple – the world’s largest computer and mobile phone manufacturer; and Facebook – the world’s largest social media provider, posted double-digit revenue growth for the three months ended in June, raking in a combined $33.9 billion in profit in the second quarter alone. While the US and world economy have been plunged into the deepest slump since the 1930s by the lockdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s most prominent tech companies have prospered.
After a grandiose announcement that he was leaving New York Magazine due to a stifling political atmosphere, Andrew Sullivan has now launched a comedy career. In a post of his new “non-conformist” newsletter, Sullivan announces that he will present an analysis of contemporary “social justice” politics. This politics, he says, is the development of “an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades.” Critical theory, he says with what can only be dry sarcasm, is so powerful and omnipresent that it is “changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.”
Sullivan’s account is full of falsehoods and misinterpretations so drastic that they could only be the product of a refined wit. The neologisms he attributes to the tradition founded by thinkers like Theodor Adorno are: “non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining.” One can only hope that Sullivan branches into sketch comedy, so we might see a dramatization of Adorno’s reaction to such terms. “The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest,” reads Sullivan’s deadpan conclusion. “Let’s do this.”
Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, published on behalf of the Home Office, ‘approved by ministers’ and retailing at £12.99, is ‘the only official handbook on which the Life in the UK test is based’. Last week the Historical Association published an open letter – signed so far by more than 350 historians – pointing out that the handbook is ‘fundamentally misleading and in places demonstrably false’. Five immigration lawyers have detailed further disturbing omissions. Some of the most misleading passages date only from the third edition, of 2013. No people of colour in the colonies or the UK are mentioned apart from Sake Dean Mahomed, who co-founded England’s first curry house in 1810. The handbook provides clear detail on the constitution, but the past it presents is both whitewashed and devoid of the work of decades of revisionist history. Anyone applying for British citizenship (in the year to March 2020, 165,693 people) will have had to commit this to memory to pass the test.
Monarch butterflies may be gone in thirty years. Saving them seems apolitical, but environmentalists have landed in the sights of drug cartels, illegal loggers, Trump supporters, and even clandestine avocado farmers.
