Mike Meeropol writes, >POLITICALLY, it appears that all potential ways of COMBATING these >tendencies are being closed off. The long run appears to promise declining >standards of living of larger and larger percentages of the population as >international competition forces wages (and social wages) down towards some >"lowest common denominator." (this is what Michael Perelman in _The >Pathology of the US Economy_ called the "Haitianization" of the US economy THIS is the question that animates me most, lately: how can leftists respond to the global downward pressure on wages (& on the public infrastructure) which we are assured by the capitalist press is the irresistible effect of global competition? How to keep a populist eat-the-rich message (to say nothing of a revolutionary socialist clarion call) from foundering on the 'brute facts' of globalization? --Mike Parkhurst U. of Massachusetts/Amherst [EMAIL PROTECTED]