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The NY Post’s Hunter Biden “scoop” involves some shady behavior by a computer-repair guy.
Louis Proyect
And the Republicans have the balls to complain about Trump's tax returns being leaked to the NYT.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/hunter-biden-new-york-post-emails-scoop-computer-repair.html
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Re: The fascist threat
workerpoet
Agreed -- though the brutality aimed and minorities, the poor and the left are certainly familiar. A difference I've noted over the years is the influence of "libertarianism" which, unlike the rigid, militaristic hierarchy of German fascism is more like anarcho-fascism, at least in its goal. The reduction of government to what is needed to protect the wealthy and their property from the increasingly disenfranchised majority -- laws, police and prisons. The rest is pure corporate dictatorship resembling a mad-max serfdom. The road there is still rife with fear-driven partisan hierarchy as the trump administration and GOP illustrate daily.
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Re: Leading Members of the DSA Want You to Get Out the Vote for Biden | Left Voice
workerpoet
Voting against Trump is not necessarily voting for Biden. It's the "lesser of evil" trap we are put in every four years. Though I don't always do it, sometimes voting Green instead, defeating the over-the-top brutal authoritarianism of Trump is the right thing to do tactically even as progressives organize to push and oppose him on issues vital to us. At the same time, I found it interesting that the Socialist Party has united with the Greens in support of Howie Hawkins. Though, in my opinion, the timing is bad given the threat posed by the extreme-right, I am encouraged by this rare example of left unity.
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Re: Fascism, Trumpism, and the left | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Dayne Goodwin
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >> ...Remember, (despite what Lars Lih claims) Lenin's key to success was outright rejection and repudiation of the received wisdom from the prior 50 years of Marxist theory combined with a novel restatement of principles. Andrew, you did not provide one quote from Lenin, one reference to anything from Lenin's writings or speeches, where Lenin outright "rejected and repudiated" any major point of Marxist wisdom. Where can i find Lenin's "novel restatement of principles"? On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 10:12 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: Andrew, would you please list some of these major points of Marxist wisdom which Lenin 'outright rejected and repudiated'?The received Marxist wisdom in 1917 at the time of the Russian revolution that Lenin acted contrary to: On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 9:43 PM Dayne Goodwin via groups.io <daynegoodwin=gmail.com@groups.io> wrote: > > On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >> >> ...Remember, (despite what Lars Lih claims) Lenin's key to success was outright rejection and repudiation of the received wisdom from the prior 50 years of Marxist theory combined with a novel restatement of principles. You need to make a similar jump into the void in order to understand the current situation. > > Andrew, would you please list some of these major points of Marxist wisdom which Lenin 'outright rejected and repudiated'? > > > On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:33 AM Andrew Stewart <hasc.warrior.stew@...> wrote: >> >> Your analysis is to pull out something about Germany from 85+ years ago as if that can be mechanically imposed upon the 21st century? Also, Germany was not a settler-colonial society and Weimar was a parliamentary system as opposed to a Federalist system. C'mon Louis, de omnibus dubitandum. Ford's class analysis is there, it is Marxist, and you just don't want to see it. Remember, (despite what Lars Lih claims) Lenin's key to success was outright rejection and repudiation of the received wisdom from the prior 50 years of Marxist theory combined with a novel restatement of principles. You need to make a similar jump into the void in order to understand the current situation. >
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Re: Maynard Solomon, Provocative Biographer of Composers, Dies at 90
I was recently going through and playing most of my Vanguard classical LPs.If anybody is interested,I run the Classical Music On Vinyl Facebook group.We have over 3000 members.
Vanguard also issued a handful of sought after psychedelic rock LPs,such as the one by The Third Power,which I once lucked out on at a thrift store.
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Re: Fascism, Trumpism, and the left | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Mark Lause
On the question of historical documents such as the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the writings of the "enlightened" Anglo-American thinkers, etc. nobody thinks that they determine things. In most of these cases, they simply codified what the writers saw as the practices taking place around them. Although seen as a tremendously creative project, the Constitution essentially nationalized the kind of structures that the former colonies had already established at a state level. That said, once the words are on paper, they matter because they are generally expected to matter. The weight of public opinion more-or-less gives them meaning. Something like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Bill of Rights codify expectations that are a material force. In terms of political parties, the U.S. formations are what political scientists used to call caucus parties--something borrowed from eighteenth century Britain. The only real members are members of a parliamentary caucus--and whatever party structures they make to assist their work there. Mass suffrage created the basis for mass membership parties in the next century, but not here. Mass organizations here provided the basis for new parties, but the successful model of this, the Republicans quickly went about the process of dissolving those Union Leagues, Loyal Leagues, etc. as it abandoned Reconstruction. In other cases, such as the Greenbackers or Populists, the crushing of the parties also brought down the mass organizations. .
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H-Net Review [H-Africa]: Backman on Esders and Hen and Lucas and Rotman, 'The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources'
Andrew Stewart
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 9:24 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Africa]: Backman on Esders and Hen and Lucas and Rotman, 'The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources' To: <h-review@...> Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, Pia Lucas, Tamar Rotman, eds. The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources. Studies in Early Medieval History Series. London Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. xiv + 266 pp. $115.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-350-04838-6. Reviewed by Clifford Backman (Boston University) Published on H-Africa (October, 2020) Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut When one thinks about the Merovingians--and, really, who doesn't?--one seldom thinks of the Mediterranean. There is good reason for that. Whatever else the Merovingians may have been, they were a hodgepodge of northern clans, tribes, and kingdoms who came from one end of the northern tier of Europe and settled eventually in the other. They drank beer rather than wine; cooked in lard rather than olive oil; avoided cities as centers of evil spirits; had little literature that we know of and less science; had no ships other than rivercraft; and lived, fought, and died on scattered parcels of farmland cleared from the immense, dense forest of the continent. That is not to say they fitted the prejudiced Dark Age caricature of them as mere "barbarians"--a kind of gruesome but temporary way station between the glories of Rome and Aachen. As shown by a generation of scholars from Walter Goffart and Ian Wood to Chris Wickham, Andreas Fischer, and Peter Heather, the period from Rome's fall to Aachen's ascent deserves to be studied for its own self and not merely as another of history's dreary "periods of transition"; after all, every age is one of transition, and the transitions involved--political, cultural, intellectual, technological, and every other type--are usually themselves the chief points of interest. Most of this new work emphasizes the active involvement of the Merovingian kingdoms in the broader, and specifically Mediterranean, world. The volume under consideration both results from and mimics the east-west and north-south contact it discusses, for it is the culmination of a joint research project by mostly younger scholars at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development. The thirteen studies that make up the volume cover a broad spectrum of topics and use a wide array of primary sources, although this is less the result of an expansive interpretive vision of the topic than of the scattered and fragmentary nature of the surviving documents. Composite volumes like this have significant value in themselves and as spurs to further research, but they seldom result in the kind of cohesive theoretical or interpretive model they aim for. This volume certainly points to such a model even if it fails to reach it. That is hardly the fault of the authors. For the period and place they examine, after all, virtually every single surviving piece of written evidence that we have (not counting monastic copies), gathered together in its modern published edition, would fit on my own unimpressive desk. It would all even fit into my Kindle. Given this reality, the best we can hope for is an unfinished, however accomplished, mosaic. The present volume, bright with promise, presents just such a mosaic. The thirteen studies treat four main themes. First is the question of how the people of the Merovingian era perceived themselves. Were they late-arriving Romans or post-Romans? Did they think of themselves, in other words, as a society distinct from the one that preceded it or as an extension of it? The Franks undoubtedly became Romanized when they entered western Europe; they adopted Roman language, elements of Roman law, and parts of Roman technology, and their rulers at least mimicked aspects of Roman governance. But was this identification with Rome or mere convenience? Yitzhak Hen argues that the dissemination of the _Expositio totius mundi et gentium_, a fourth-century Greek geographical text, across western Europe in a fifth-century Latin translation illustrates one aspect of this identity formation. He may be right, but in the complete absence of a manuscript tradition it is impossible to tell. (The text is known only from a much-marred seventeenth-century edition.) The existence of the text certainly means _something_. There is no reason, though, to assume that the Latin version was composed by a Merovingian or on behalf of a Merovingian, or even was ever read by a Merovingian. It may well have been the work of an urbane Italian who wanted to soothe his worried mind with a tome on the glorious expanse of his beloved, if troubled, empire. Helmut Reimitz contrasts the legal decrees from the third episcopal Synod of Mâcon (585 CE) with the description of that gathering in Gregory of Tours' _Historia Francorum_. The synod was convened by the then-archbishop of Lyon and involved, according to Gregory, nearly seventy bishops or their representatives. Three issues predominated: the Gundovald affair (in which a pretender to the Merovingian throne and would-be spouse to the charming widow Brunhild, queen of Austrasia, pressed his case by pointing out the support he had from figures in the Byzantine court); the question of bishops' authority to demand the payment of tithes from their parishes; and the vexed question of whether or not, and when, the Latin word _homo_ ("man") could be interpreted to mean both men and women. Reimitz emphasizes the synod's reliance on Roman law, in contrast to Gregory's relative dismissal of Roman precedents in favor of considerations of divine purpose. Again, the conclusion drawn--that the Frankish clerics emphasized Roman secular law as the means to resolve their disputes since they saw themselves as Romans--is perfectly plausible but is by no means the only sensible one. Gregory's aim in his ___Historia Francorum_, after all, was to show God's hand still at work in a fallen world, not to provide a record of a series of legal briefs. The second part of the volume consists of four studies that trace the extent of the diplomatic reach of the kingdoms of the era. Anna Gehler-Rachunek begins, appropriately, with a look at Frankish marriage negotiations in the sixth century. This was an age in which marriage-diplomacy was arguably the only real diplomacy, since the political rights of rulers usually came down to what they were entitled to by a marriage or an inheritance from one. Once again Gregory of Tours provides most of the evidence, with some assistance from Isidore of Seville. Gehler-Rachunek starts with the conversion of the Visigothic king, Reccared, from Arianism to orthodox Latin Christianity in 589 and his subsequent expectation that his relations with the Frankish kings Guntram and Childebert would improve now that he had joined them in the true faith--only to be rebuffed by Guntram because of Reccared's maltreatment of his, Guntram's, niece Ingund. Was Reccared's conversion therefore a diplomatic ploy? Did family honor take precedence over religious brotherhood? Gehler-Rachunek shows the many marriage links established between the Visigothic royal family and those of the Austrasian and Neustrian Frankish houses that preceded Reccared's reign, bringing in the diplomatic involvement of Spanish Byzantine courtiers as well, to show that the Germanic kingdoms were in considerably more and closer contact with one another and with far-off Constantinople than previously thought. Unfortunately, she does not consider the various Byzantine sources of the era, which might have added considerable nuance to her argument by providing an "outsider's" view. Next, Hope Williard provides a summary of the ties of diplomatic friendship (_amicitia_) among Frankish royal and nobles as related by the ever-present Gregory. By Williard's own count Gregory discusses eight cases of _amicitia_ in his history, and she argues that the term had ambivalent meanings that ranged from the connections between a lesser (in the political sense) individual and a superior one, which case _amicitia_ implies something like cozening in search of political favors, to the friendly relations between political equals that precedes betrayal and strife. As Gregory uses it, she argues, _amicitia_ echoed the ties between ancient Roman _clienteles_, and if she is right then she is making a very important point. The point is more suggestive than conclusive, since eight examples out of a four-hundred-plus-page text cannot be regarded as definitive, but it fully merits further study. Bruno Dumézil and Yaniv Fox turn their attention to the _Epistolae Austrasicae_, a collection of diplomatic letters from the fifth and sixth centuries that survives in a single ninth-century manuscript that has long been regarded as a product of the Carolingian court--that is to say, the collection itself, not merely the manuscript copy. Dumézil makes a strong argument that the _Epistolae_ was actually the work of Magneric, the bishop of Trier, sometime around the year 590. If Dumézil's is codicological, Fox's is rhetorical and focuses on two diplomatic episodes, first the effort by Byzantium to win Frankish support against the Lombard invasion of southern Italy, and second the negotiations over the fate of Athanagild, the young nephew of Childebert II who got caught up in the rebellion against restored Byzantine power in Visigothic Spain and ended up in Byzantine custody. In both cases, Fox argues, the Franks and Byzantines relied heavily on language that was religiously tinged rather than based on law or politically strategic appeal. Part 3 collects four studies dealing with the social dimensions of law and religion. Lukas Bothe takes the prize for best essay title with his "Mediterranean Homesick Blues," which inspects Germanic laws regarding the slave trade. Here he follows the granular, quantitative work of Michael McCormick's _Origins of the European Economy_ (2001) but looks in particular at the European Christian justification for engaging in human trafficking. The slave trade, he finds, reached far into the Germanic hinterlands, but each society (the Visigoths, the Burgundians, the Franks) responded differently to the moral question of that trade. Till Stüber examines the so-called Three Chapters controversy as it was debated at the 5th Council of Orléans. The controversy itself centered on the supposedly Nestorian writings of three theologians that had been debated at the Council of Chalcedon. Stüber ignores the theological issues themselves and emphasizes instead the significance of a council in northern Francia engaging in the debate, a debate having originated in an exchange of letters between the bishop of Arles and Pope Vigilius--while he was residing temporarily in Constantinople. The Frankish Church, the implication goes, was not peripheral to the Church Universal but was actively and continually engaged with it. Next come two studies on rituals as described in Merovingian liturgical and hagiographical texts. Rob Means goes in depth into the _Sacramentary of Gellone_, a late eighth-century text from Meaux, and discusses the _ordo_ for ritually purifying an altar where a murder has been committed. This being the Dark Ages, the question is not altogether theoretical and the existence of such a rite should be contrasted with the fact that whereas Gregory of Tours narrates many a defilement of altars and churches by bloodshed he never mentions a purification of those sacred spaces. Tamar Rotman closes this section of the book with an inspection of the sources regarding the pillar-climbing ascetic, Vufiliac of Trier, focusing once again on the ever-present Gregory. She emphasizes the ways Gregory shapes Vufiliac's story in order to provide a distinction between his tale and that of Simeon Stylites over in Syria. The last section of the volume contrasts Frankish and Byzantine portrayals of emperorship: Pia Lucas studies Gregory's depiction of Tiberius II; Stefan Esders examines Fredegar's portrait of Constans II; and Federico Montinaro shifts the perspective by analyzing a Byzantine view of Frankish political rulership, namely, Theophanes's discussion of the end of Merovingian rule and the rise of the Carolingian version. The general conclusion of these studies is that western writers used descriptions of Byzantine politics as a way of depicting rulership as an aspect of Christian history, a means of promoting God's will on earth, whereas a Byzantine writer like Theophanes reveals a factually shaky but genuine interest in matters far away from the cosmopolitan center of Constantinople. All in all, this is an engaging and impressive collection. The essays are filled with sharp insights and an eager willingness to upend traditional interpretations that makes the reading enjoyable without weakening their scholarly gravitas. Two weaknesses stand out, however, almost across the board. First, with the exception of Bothe, the authors fail to emphasize the distinctions between the societies of Dark Age Europe. The Visigoths were not like the Franks, who were not like the Burgundians, who were not like.... The authors are well aware of this, of course, and may have written their contributions assuming that the likely readers of a volume like this would also be aware of the fact and therefore need not be reminded. Nevertheless, using the general term "Merovingian" in the title to describe all these societies could easily mislead an unexperienced reader. More significant, though, is the near-total absence of Byzantine sources. Only Theophanes appears in any meaningful way, and he only in a readily available English translation. Any research project aimed at showing the interaction of the western and eastern worlds of the Mediterranean should surely look through both ends of the telescope. Citation: Clifford Backman. Review of Esders, Stefan; Hen, Yitzhak; Lucas, Pia; Rotman, Tamar, eds., _The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Revisiting the Sources_. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. October, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55070 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart
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Re: Fascism, Trumpism, and the left | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Andrew Stewart
No government in the United States or anywhere else in the world is "controlled" by any document, let alone Federalist Paper NO. 10. To assert otherwise IMO is nonsense. As the case of New Labor proves, if nothing else, constitutions and similar bodies of rules, like computer programs, can readily be hacked to allow things supposedly contrary to the sacred "intent of the framers."You really don't seem to get this. I presume that "New Labor" references the neoliberal turn in what had been during the period from roughly 1934-1974 the social democrat-ish nature of the Democratic Party. Gerald Horne (both a Communist as well as both a lawyer and history professor) has made this a very simple argument: The Roosevelt turn towards social democracy within the Democratic Party was the exception rather than the rule of American history. The embrace of marginalist-neoclassical economics since the 1970s by both parties is the country returning to the norm of what the country was designed to do, sanctify and protect private property rights while marginalizing the vast majority of the population. American Federalism is designed for the norm to be the dictatorship of capital operated by rich, white male property owners. Neoliberalism merely modifies this ever so slightly by allowing for a few dark/female/gender nonbinary faces in those high places. You want to apply notions of European parliamentary democracy to your analysis in the name of who know what.
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Re: New polls in key battlegrounds raise concerns for Trump | Fox News
Richard Modiano
On the Senate side: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-democratic-senate-candidates-are-competitive-in-red-states-like-alaska-kansas-and-montana/
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Re: Emergency brake
R.O.
Indeed. Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history emphasizes the contingent and transience.
"Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." There is no salvation in Benjamin.
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Leading Members of the DSA Want You to Get Out the Vote for Biden | Left Voice
Louis Proyect
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Re: Emergency brake
Ernestleif
One of my all time favorite quotations.
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Emergency brake
Louis Proyect
"Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps things are very different. It may be that revolutions are the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake." --Walter Benjamin
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Re: Fascism, Trumpism, and the left | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
fkalosar101@...
No government in the United States or anywhere else in the world is "controlled" by any document, let alone Federalist Paper NO. 10. To assert otherwise IMO is nonsense. As the case of New Labor proves, if nothing else, constitutions and similar bodies of rules, like computer programs, can readily be hacked to allow things supposedly contrary to the sacred "intent of the framers." The obsessional mental contortions of the greatly overrated Madison et al have life only because it suits the book of the ruling class on the whole to continue perpetrating them. The main thing that surfaces in #10 as quoted is an obsessive and not very clearly articulated preoccupation with the creaky old topos of "tyranny of the majority." The usage of the word "party" is unclear and "faction" only slightly less so.
A constitution in any case is what its interpreters say it is--and as the appalling case of the corrupt and perverted liar Cony-Whatsit, now being rammed raw down the throats of all the actual people in the United States proves--those pimps and whoremongers will say anything to get their way. It isn't some archaic set of rules or Sibylline Books that controls the fate of nations or even the greatly overrated US constitution. Any set of explicit rules can be hacked to justify any outcome desirable to the ruling class. That is the purpose of legal interpretation. If you can have the Demicraps and the Refuckingscum, you could also have the equivalent of actual parties within those formations--if the right people thought it was a good idea. It's the decadent American ideology as controlled by American capitalism that stands in the way. And that ideology is something that is renewed and recreated from moment to moment rather than being handed down on tablets of stone by the gods from time immemorial. I can't find any evidence BTW that J.S. Mill opposed the British parliamentary system or favored an American-style republic--I have the impression, on the contrary that he idealized the British system and revered his non-governing Queen and Head of State, though I gather in a somewhat different way from Walter Bagehot. Mill was at one time a member of Parliament himself.
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The Climate Movement Must Disrupt the Normal Routines of Fossil Capital
Louis Proyect
This extract is taken from Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, which will be published by Verso Books in January 2021. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/ende-gelande-climate-justice-movement-nonviolence
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Rochester AFL-CIO Calls for General Strike if Trump Steals Election – Payday Report
John Reimann
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: John Reimann <1999wildcat@...> Date: Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 3:08 PM Subject: Fwd: Rochester AFL-CIO Calls for General Strike if Trump Steals Election – Payday Report To: Revolutionary Socialist Network <revolutionary-socialist-network@...> ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: <1999wildcat@...> Date: Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 3:07 PM Subject: Rochester AFL-CIO Calls for General Strike if Trump Steals Election – Payday Report To: John Reimann <1999wildcat@...> https://paydayreport.com/rochester-afl-cio-calls-for-general-strike-if-trump-steals-election/ “Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” Felicity Dowling Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook “Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” Felicity Dowling Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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New polls in key battlegrounds raise concerns for Trump | Fox News
Louis Proyect
From Fox News, no less.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-polls-in-key-battlegrounds-raise-concerns-for-trump
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Amy Cooper Made 2nd 911 Call to Falsely Accuse Black Bird-Watcher
Louis Proyect
Amy Cooper Made 2nd 911 Call to Falsely Accuse Black Bird-WatcherProsecutors said Ms. Cooper called the police first to claim she had been threatened by a man in Central Park who had asked her to leash her dog, then to claim he had assaulted her.  Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on a Black bird-watcher in Central Park, made a second, previously unreported call to 911 in which she falsely claimed that the man tried to assault her, a prosecutor said on Wednesday. “The defendant twice reported that an African-American man was putting her in danger, first by stating that he was threatening her and her dog, then making a second call indicating that he tried to assault her in the Ramble area of the park,” Joan Illuzzi, a senior prosecutor, said. The second call was disclosed as Ms. Cooper appeared remotely in Manhattan Criminal Court to answer a misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report, which carries a maximum sentence of a year in jail. Ms. Cooper had been charged in July, and no additional charges were announced on Wednesday. Ms. Illuzzi said the Manhattan district attorney’s office was negotiating a possible plea deal with Ms. Cooper that would allow her to avoid jail. ADVERTISEMENT The hearing was the latest development in the Memorial Day weekend encounter that resonated across the country and reignited discussions about the potential danger of false accusations made to the police about Black people. Ms. Cooper was filmed calling 911 from an isolated area of Central Park after a Black man asked her to leash her dog, as the rules required. During the first call, she said multiple times that an “African-American man” was threatening her, emphasizing his race to the operator as she raised her voice frantically. Video of the encounter, shot by the man, Christian Cooper, on his phone, has been viewed nearly 45 million times. Its timing, one day before protests erupted nationwide over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, only deepened its role in sparking outrage over what many viewed as an example of everyday racism. (Ms. Cooper is not related to Mr. Cooper.) But prosecutors said Ms. Cooper made a later call to 911, which was not shown in the video. In that call, Ms. Cooper told the dispatcher that Mr. Cooper had tried to assault her, according to a criminal complaint. When the police arrived, however, Ms. Cooper told an officer that her reports were untrue, and that Mr. Cooper had not touched or assaulted her, the complaint said. ADVERTISEMENT The criminal complaint mentioned two calls, but charged her with only one count. Ms. Illuzzi told the court that Ms. Cooper had used the police in a way that was “both racially offensive and designed to intimidate,” and that her actions were “something that can’t be ignored.” Still, the prosecutor said the district attorney’s office was exploring a resolution to the case that would require Ms. Cooper to take responsibility for her actions in court and attend a program to educate her on how harmful they were. “We hope this process will enlighten, heal and prevent similar harm to our community in the future,” Ms. Illuzzi said. Judge Nicholas Moyne adjourned the case until Nov. 17 to give Ms. Cooper’s lawyer, Robert Barnes, and prosecutors time to work out the details of an agreement. “We will hold people who make false and racist 911 calls accountable,” the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said in a statement on Wednesday. “Fortunately, no one was injured or killed in the police response to Ms. Cooper’s hoax.”  Image
Mr. Barnes said in July that Ms. Cooper would be found not guilty if the case went to trial and criticized what he called a “cancel culture epidemic.” ADVERTISEMENT “How many lives are we going to destroy over misunderstood, 60-second videos on social media?” he asked. He declined to comment on Wednesday. Mr. Vance’s decision to charge Ms. Cooper drew mixed reactions from Black community leaders and proponents of overhauling the criminal justice system. He also did not have the support of Mr. Cooper, who has long been a prominent birder in the city and sits on the board of the New York City Audubon Society. As the episode gained widespread attention across the country, Ms. Cooper, who had been a head of insurance portfolio management at Franklin Templeton, lost her job and was publicly shamed. She also surrendered her dog temporarily to the rescue group from which she had adopted it. At the time, Mr. Cooper, a 57-year-old Harvard graduate who works in communications, said the consequences and public backlash she had faced were already enough. He did not cooperate with the prosecution’s investigation and said in a statement in July that “bringing her more misery just seems like piling on.” In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Cooper declined to answer specific questions about the second 911 call or about Ms. Cooper’s potential plea deal. The encounter in Central Park was “not about Amy Cooper,” he said, but about a larger societal problem. “My response is very simple: We have to make sure we don’t get distracted,” Mr. Cooper said. “We have a very important goal — and we have to stay focused on it — which is reforming policing, getting systemic change to the structural racism in our society.” Weeks after the confrontation, New York State lawmakers approved legislation entitling people to “a private right of action” if they believed that someone called the police on them because of their race, gender, nationality or any other protected class. The move was a direct response to the Central Park run-in and other false reports to the police about Black people. ADVERTISEMENT The clash between Mr. Cooper and Ms. Cooper began as he biked to search for birds in a semi-wild section of the park known as the Ramble, where dogs must be leashed. He encountered Ms. Cooper, walking with an unleashed dog, and said in a Facebook post that she refused to put a leash on the dog when asked. He wrote that he offered the dog treats in an effort to persuade Ms. Cooper to follow the area’s rules. Then, video captures her calling 911 and telling an operator, “I’m in the Ramble, there is a man, African-American. He has a bicycle helmet and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” One day after the incident, Ms. Cooper issued a public apology. “I reacted emotionally and made false assumptions about his intentions when, in fact, I was the one who was acting inappropriately by not having my dog on a leash,” Ms. Cooper said in the statement. “I am well aware of the pain that misassumptions and insensitive statements about race cause.” Sarah Maslin Nir and
Jan Ransom contributed reporting.
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Re: Fascism, Trumpism, and the left | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
Andrew Stewart
I've always said that the Rethuglicans and the Demicraps are not parties but "anitparties"--based on all the Floundering Bothers horseshit about the "evils of party" or faction or whatever (not as unified a perspective as some want to see there). Actual membership parties would be a step forward in the US context--especially if such parties had a broader activist and internationalist focus rather than existing merely as loose networks of committees (and conspiracies) to elect this or that Wonderbread man or woman.The Democrats and Republicans are the contemporary manifestations of Federalist Paper 10's express intent. The Constitution is explicitly and intentionally designed to prevent a membership-based party from ever gaining a foothold within the federal government, something John Stuart Mill alluded to in his treatise on parliamentary government <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5669>: In the false democracy which, instead of giving representation to all, gives it only to the local majorities, the voice of the instructed minority may have no organs at all in the representative body. It is an admitted fact that in the American democracy, which is constructed on this faulty model, the highly-cultivated members of the community, except such of them as are willing to sacrifice their own opinions and modes of judgment, and become the servile mouthpieces of their inferiors in knowledge, do not even offer themselves for Congress or the State Legislatures, so certain is it that they would have no chance of being returned. Had a plan like Mr. Hare's by good fortune suggested itself to the enlightened and disinterested founders of the American Republic, the federal and state assemblies would have contained many of these distinguished men, and democracy would have been spared its greatest reproach and one of its most formidable evils.State and municipal governments allow a little variation because their systems are not exact copies of the Federalist system. Many successes in the past 150 years by radical parties came about thanks to fusion politics, which functionally can be manipulated by parties to function in the way European parliamentary coalition politics work. The Populist Party, for example, developed a plan utilizing fusion politics in order to collaborate with the Republican Parties in Southern states <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Party>. (Notably, however, the liberal faction of the Green Party has tried to argue their "lesser evil" strategy is a form of fusion politics, though I would be to differ.)
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Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist
Louis Proyect
Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa ActivistNew accounts from the scene raise questions about whether Michael Reinoehl, suspected of killing a far-right Trump supporter, pulled out a gun before officers fatally shot him. Video
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A Sudden Spray of Bullets: Reconstructing a U.S. Task Force’s Killing of an Antifa ActivistPresident Trump praised the killing of Michael Reinoehl, suspected of fatally shooting a far-right protester, as “retribution.” Our investigation found that officers may have shot without warning or seeing a gun.
By Evan Hill, Mike Baker, Derek Knowles and
Michael Reinoehl was on the run. A few days after a shooting left a far-right Trump supporter dead on the streets of Portland, Ore., Mr. Reinoehl, an antifa activist who had been named in the news media as a focus of the investigation, feared that vigilantes were after him, not to mention the police. Even some of his close friends did not know where he was. But the authorities knew. On Sept. 3, about 120 miles north of Portland, Mr. Reinoehl was getting into his Volkswagen station wagon when a pair of unmarked sport utility vehicles roared through the quiet streets, screeching to a halt just in front of his bumper. Members of a U.S. Marshals task force jumped out and unleashed a hail of bullets that shattered windows, whizzed past bystanders and left Mr. Reinoehl dead in the street. Attorney General William P. Barr trumpeted the operation as a “significant accomplishment” that removed a “violent agitator.” The officers had opened fire, he said, when Mr. Reinoehl “attempted to escape arrest” and “produced a firearm” during the encounter. But a reconstruction of what happened that night, based on the accounts of people who witnessed the confrontation and the preliminary findings of investigators, produces a much different picture — one that raises questions about whether law enforcement officers made any serious attempt to arrest Mr. Reinoehl before killing him.  Image
In interviews with 22 people who were near the scene, all but one said they did not hear officers identify themselves or give any commands before opening fire. In their official statements, not yet made public, the officers offered differing accounts of whether they saw Mr. Reinoehl with a weapon. One told investigators he thought he saw Mr. Reinoehl raise a gun inside the vehicle before the firing began, but two others said they did not. ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Reinoehl did have a .380-caliber handgun on him when he was killed, according to the county sheriff’s team that is running a criminal homicide investigation into Mr. Reinoehl’s death. But the weapon was found in his pocket. An AR-style rifle was found apparently untouched in a bag in his car. Five eyewitnesses said in interviews that the gunfire began the instant the vehicles arrived. None of them saw Mr. Reinoehl holding a weapon. A single shell casing of the same caliber as the handgun he was carrying was found inside his car. Garrett Louis, who watched the shooting begin while trying to get his 8-year-old son out of the line of fire, said the officers arrived with such speed and violence that he initially assumed they were drug dealers gunning down a foe — until he saw their law enforcement vests. “I respect cops to the utmost, but things were definitely in no way, shape or form done properly,” Mr. Louis said. ADVERTISEMENT The U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment for this article, citing the pending investigation. The agency previously said that it had attempted to “peacefully arrest” Mr. Reinoehl and that he had threatened the lives of law enforcement officers. President Trump, who has described the racial justice protests that have roiled the nation as the work of lawless criminals, praised the operation. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him,” the president told Fox News. “And I will tell you something, that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.” ‘That shot felt like the beginning of a war’Mr. Reinoehl had joined protesters in Portland in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by the Minneapolis police in May, writing online that they were waging a necessary war with the potential to “fix everything.” He devoted himself to the Black Lives Matter movement and once touted himself as “100% ANTIFA all the way.” Mr. Reinoehl, a 48-year-old contractor and professional snowboarder, had run into trouble with the law in June, when he was cited for driving under the influence of a controlled substance and having an unlicensed firearm in the car. Later, during the protests, the police arrested him and cited him for carrying a loaded firearm in a public place, but prosecutors dropped the charges. When the protests against the police got underway in Portland, he carved a niche for himself providing security, watching for agitators. After a caravan of supporters of Mr. Trump arrived in Portland on Aug. 29 and began clashing with the protesters, a security camera showed Mr. Reinoehl keeping an eye on one of them — Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer who was walking with a can of bear repellent and an expandable baton. Seconds later, a separate livestream video captured Mr. Danielson being shot, and The Oregonian newspaper reported later that Mr. Reinoehl was under investigation in the case. In an interview while he was in hiding that Vice News broadcast on Sept. 3, Mr. Reinoehl said he had fired in self-defense. “That shot felt like the beginning of a war,” he said. ADVERTISEMENT  Image
A quiet night and a sudden raidOn the day the interview aired, officers with the U.S. Marshals’ Pacific Northwest Violent Offender Task Force met for an intelligence briefing. The team, which included a mix of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, already knew that Mr. Reinoehl was staying in a brick complex of apartments in Lacey, Wash. The task force had information from an informant, passed on by the Portland police, about Mr. Reinoehl’s location and possession of firearms, said Lt. Ray Brady of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, who leads the team investigating Mr. Reinoehl’s death. Though the Portland police had yet to issue a warrant for Mr. Reinoehl’s arrest, the task force prepared to move in. That evening, outside the apartment complex where the police say Mr. Reinoehl had been staying, the neighborhood was quiet. Mr. Louis, a carpenter and former U.S. Army medic, watched his son ride his bike with his younger brother and a neighborhood friend. Around the corner, Chad Smith and two friends, Chase Cutler and Jon Chastain, were wrapping up an afternoon spent working on cars. Mr. Reinoehl left the apartment and walked toward his Volkswagen, parked along the street roughly 100 feet away. Two officers positively identified Mr. Reinoehl, who proceeded to get into the car, said Lieutenant Brady, who shared some of the initial findings of the investigation with The New York Times. They decided to make an immediate arrest, the officers told investigators, in part to avoid a high-speed chase. ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Smith said he and his friends turned their heads to the sound of a vehicle accelerating rapidly, headed southbound toward the street where Mr. Reinoehl was walking. A second law enforcement S.U.V., which had been parked across from Mr. Smith’s house, moved in with such speed that the friends thought they were witnessing a road rage incident or a gang shooting. Mr. Smith and Mr. Cutler ran after the unmarked S.U.V.s, watching as they turned onto Mr. Reinoehl’s street, one cutting the corner and speeding over the grass. Nate Dinguss, who according to Lieutenant Brady lived in the apartment where Mr. Reinoehl was staying, said Mr. Reinoehl was chewing a gummy worm as he approached his station wagon, with a phone in one hand and a bag in the other. Mr. Dinguss said in an interview that officers began jumping out of the vehicles before they had come to a complete stop, and that one of them opened fire immediately, before any commands had been given. Another man who was walking his dog nearby said that a burst of about 10 gunshots began almost immediately after the S.U.V.s came to a halt, and that he did not recall hearing any commands. Mr. Louis, who was on the other side of the scene, some 140 feet from Mr. Reinoehl, also said the police opened fire immediately, without giving any warnings — as did Mr. Smith and Mr. Cutler. “There was no, ‘Get out of the car!’ There was no, ‘Stop!’ There was no nothing. They just got out of the car and started shooting,” Mr. Louis said. Mr. Smith described it similarly: “There was no yelling. There was no screaming. There was no altercation. It was just straight to gunshots.”  Image
ADVERTISEMENT Of the 22 people interviewed by The Times who said they were near the shooting when it occurred, only one man reported hearing any shouting before the gunshots began. That man, Quentin Gruner, whose apartment is about 75 feet away, said he was letting his dog out when he heard shouting that he thought was neighbors having a fight, followed by a popping noise. The four officers who were riding in the S.U.V.s said in their statements to Thurston County sheriff’s investigators that they shouted “Stop! Police!” before opening fire, Lieutenant Brady said. But the officers gave conflicting stories about what led them to begin firing. One reported that he saw Mr. Reinoehl, inside the vehicle, raise “what they perceived to be a gun,” Lieutenant Brady said. Two other officers said they only saw Mr. Reinoehl make “furtive movements” toward the center console, he said. Lieutenant Brady said the first shots appear to have struck Mr. Reinoehl inside the vehicle, and videos of the aftermath show bullet marks in the driver’s side of the windshield. Though apparently wounded, Mr. Reinoehl began moving away from the officers on foot. Officers continued to fire, and as Mr. Reinoehl stepped into the street from behind a nearby truck, a final burst took him down, Lieutenant Brady said. He most likely died immediately, said the Thurston County coroner, Gary Warnock. Officers also offered conflicting accounts of those final shots. One said that Mr. Reinoehl, while in the street, pointed a gun. Other officers said that he appeared to be trying to “retrieve” one from his pants pocket. ADVERTISEMENT As they searched Mr. Reinoehl’s body, officers found the gun, Lieutenant Brady said. It was still in his pocket. The aftermathIn all, four officers fired about 30 rounds from two rifles and two handguns, Lieutenant Brady said. A visit to the scene by a reporter, as well as videos and photos from the aftermath, showed that at least eight of the officers’ bullets struck civilian property. Angel Romero, who lives directly adjacent to the shooting, said at least five bullets hit a brick wall and a wooden fence at his home. One traveled through an exterior wall and passed above his dog kennels and through his dining room — narrowly missing his brother before lodging in a kitchen wall. Mr. Romero’s neighbor found a smashed bullet in his backyard grass. “They literally found ricochet bullets where my kid was,” Mr. Louis said. Lieutenant Brady said it would be several months before lab results determined whether the shell casing found in the Volkswagen matched the handgun found in Mr. Reinoehl’s pocket, and it may never be known whether it was fired that day. There is no evidence that Mr. Reinoehl touched the rifle found in the bag in his car, the chief investigator said.  Image
None of the officers said they saw Mr. Reinoehl fire his handgun, and investigators have found no other evidence that suggests he did. Investigators found no .380 bullets or casings outside the vehicle. ADVERTISEMENT In the aftermath, some news accounts quoted witnesses describing Mr. Reinoehl firing shots. One of them, Mr. Smith, said he was misquoted. Another woman also described Mr. Reinoehl firing shots, but in another account said that she was not present when the shooting began. Mr. Cutler said he heard a pistol that he thought might have been Mr. Reinoehl’s firing first, but Lieutenant Brady said the officers fired pistols as well as rifles. Six minutes after the shooting started, Jashon Spencer, a resident of the apartment complex, began filming a live video from the scene. In it, roughly eight and a half minutes after Mr. Reinoehl was likely killed, an officer could be seen beginning chest compressions on Mr. Reinoehl’s motionless body. They were undertaken almost perfunctorily, from a standing position, and soon ended.
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