[PEN-L:12003] Time For A New Modern System That Empowers the People
The present political system prevents the people from coming to power. This is done both with the carrot and the stick. It is done by creating the illusion that the people have a say, through voting, while at the same time putting in place powerful mechanisms of the dictatorship of the rich over the people. The execituive power, the legislature, the so-called "justice" system, the police and army, the electoral laws and system, all serve to keep the ruling class in power and the working class out of power. Consider just the question of running for office. A whole system of laws exist to make it next to impossible for small parties and independent candidates to participate in the elections. Simply getting on the ballot is a major undertaking. TV and radio coverage is also decided by the rich and their monopoly controlled media and requires tens of millions of dollars. All of this blocks participation by ordinary people. The promotion of this system, as a "representative democracy" of the people, is a fraud to hide the fact that it is a dictatorship by the monopoly capitalists over the people. It is a dictatiorship kept in place both by illusions of democracy, and by force, whenever necessary - as striking workers, welfare mothers, demonstrators against the KKK, youth and students, Black communities, and others know well. The existing system can't be fixed to serve the people because it is designed to keep the rich in power and the people out. Why should workers support such a system? It is unfair and not legitimate. Expecting the system to work and attempting to fix it is much like expecting an old car to to take us into the future. No matter how much tinkering is done under the hood, no matter what the change in color or style, it simply can't change the fact that it's a worn out jalopy. A new paint-job can make the car look better, but it only hides the reality that it is not capable of meeting the needs of modern times. The existing political system belongs on the junk heap of history. An entirely new system is needed, one designed to put power in the hands of the people. How can the new institutions be organized to insure it is the people who hold supreme power in their hands? How can elections serve to enable ordinary people to themselves run for office and to select their representatives from their peers - from among those who can represent them? These are the problems to be taken up and solved. Building the new is the order of the day, not sprucing up the old. The ruling class wants people to go along with the system and simply cast their votes or remain passive despite their dissatisfaction. Why give these rulers what they want? We say reject this democracy of the rich! Don't support a system designed to keep the American people out of power. VOR, 1996 Shawgi Tell Graduate School of Education University at Buffalo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:12001] Re: The call for new Teamsters election and
On Mon, 25 Aug 1997 19:02:15 -0700 (PDT) Max B. Sawicky said: [...] >That IS should be credited with revival of the >IBT is debatable. They certainly had to help, >like many other lefts within that union. In >fact, on the crucial issue of vanguardism in the >1960's and 1970's, the IS was more right than I >was, among others, so I have to tip my hat to >them. I heard Walter Daum of IS give a speech 26 >years ago. I wish I had taken what he said more >to heart. I would have gone further in life. I >doubt that an ISer would actually put on the airs >to which LP says they are entitled. Max, I'm impressed by your memory. What did I say? Walter Daum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[PEN-L:12000] Nation Magazine review of Doug Henwood's "Wall Street"
Nation Magazine, September 8-15, 1997 Whose Economy Is It? By Gary Mongiovi Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom. By Doug Henwood. Verso. 372 pp. $25 Economic processes are complex, and the forces that shape them are seldom transparent; such conditions are favorable to opportunistic ideologies. The folklore of the market has so deeply penetrated our collective intuition that to doubt the rationality, desirability or inevitability of capitalism is to identify oneself as a naive--or dangerous--eccentric. And so we are assured that markets are efficient and benevolent; that interest is just compensation for the capital-creating abstinence of capitalist savers; and that economic prosperity is, paradoxically, contingent upon workers' willingness to accept stagnant or declining living standards--as thought the economy had some other purpose than to enable the people who inhabit it to meet their material needs. The murkiest aspect of modern capitalism is its financial system, whose putative function is to channel money capital, and consequently productive resources, into the investment projects that can make the best use of them. Financial markets have acquired a quasi-mystical aura that is reinforced by the media ritual of reporting the day's stock market performance; this fetishization of the Dow has created the illusion that what is good for the markets is good for the rest of us. Most people sense that the doings of the markets have some relevance to their well-being; in this they are not wrong. But few of us have a clear understanding of how the movements of stock and bond prices connect to our lives. Doug Henwood's engaging book is a razor-sharp dissection of the world of high finance. Henwood (a Nation contributing editor) starts by pointing out that financial markets have very little to do with the allocation of funds to productive investment, most of which is financed out of firms' previously accumulated profits. Well over 90 percent of all stock market trades involve nothing more than the speculative reshuffling of the ownership of corporations. Similarly, most corporate debt is not used to finance the creation of new plants and equipment but to underwrite mergers and acquisitions, or buy back the firm's own common stock. Instruments like swaps, options and derivatives are advertised as hedging devices that protect producers and commercial enterprises against the risk of unanticipated changes in prices, interest rates or currency exchange rates; to some extent they do. But there is a strong speculative dimension to the markets for these instruments; instances of financial blowback are not uncommon, with the 1995 Barings debacle being the most striking recent illustration of what can happen when even the simplest hedge instruments are used to pursue a speculative killing. The deep complexity of many derivative securities makes their own riskiness difficult to gauge; changes in interest rates or in the price of pork belly futures can plunge the holders of such securities into a financial tailspin, as many players, notably Procter & Gamble, discovered in 1994. None of this information is particularly esoteric. Yet financial deregulation and tax relief for the put-upon recipients of capital gains income are endorsed, with mind-boggling earnestness, by economists, financial professionals and Senate banking committees precisely on the ground that such policies would stimulate economic growth. What, then, is the role of the markets? Henwood's central theme is that the system is a powerful engine for the concentration of income and wealth. Instruments of finance are weapons in the class war: "Behind the abstraction known as 'the markets' lurks a set of institutions designed to maximize the power and wealth of the most privileged group of people in the world, the creditor-rentier class of the First World and their junior partners in the Third." Economic orthodoxy has little use for concepts like power, exploitation, predation or coercion; no one, after all, is compelled to enter into any market transaction. But Henwood makes a persuasive case that all of Wall Street's "sophisticated machinations" are ultimately grounded in force. The relentless demand by portfolio managers for higher returns puts pressure on corporations to cut costs by downsizing. Central bankers regulate interest rates with a deliberate view to keeping labor markets slack enough to discourage wage increases and dampen any incipient tendencies toward worker militancy. The erosion of real wages in an aggressively consumerist age has resulted in an enormous increase in consumer indebtedness, which itself has a coercive aspect: "Debt," says Henwood, "can be a great conservatizing force; with a large monthly mortgage or MasterCard bill, strikes and other forms of trouble-making look less appealing than they would otherwise." It may be a coincidence that among developed economies, those whose financial systems are dominated by the stoc
[PEN-L:11999] Re: More on UPS
> . . . > On a related note, a lot of the privatization stuff is only possible, I > think, _because_ of new technologies -- that is, it had not been possible Yes and no. Without doubt technology is important, but the political element should not be underestimated. For instance, before 1900, much of routine municipal services (such as they were in those days) were contracted out. Corruption scandals ended those practices and gave rise to civil service standards. There were also private roads and bridges, and catastrophic bankruptcies in companies that had contracted to build such things. This will be explicated at length in an EPI report, probably out early next year. Cheers, MBS === Max B. SawickyEconomic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-8810 (voice) Ste. 1200 202-775-0819 (fax)Washington, DC 20036 http://epn.org/sawicky ===
[PEN-L:11998] More on UPS
The following is an exchange that took place elsewhere; given the recent query as to why the UPS strike made a big splash and the miners and NYNEX strikes didn;t, thought others here might find it of interest... jd To: Danny Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: Jim Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: FW: UPS Cc: Bcc: Thanks Danny. I think what I was trying to say was re: "the rise of UPS" was more in relation to the increase in the market for package delivery services. That is, regardless of whether or not UPS as a company came out of the effort to privatize government services, it could not grow without a growth in the overall market. If this had all remained under the arm of the US Postal Service, the phenomena itself wouldn;t have been different, or the role of package delivery in the just-in-time/atomized economy would not have been any less strategic. I suppose a more relevant service to the restructuring economy like Dave says is the "just-in-time" and "fast economy" stuff, of which the 2-day and next-day service probably is more representative; and UPS as I recall lagged behind in that area. I agree with Dave re: the other aspects of UPS in the economy that should have been mentioned (namely (a) the process of privatization as an aspect of the restructuring; (b) the attack on unions; and (c) concentration within industries; all towards how to maximize profits under these conditions). On a related note, a lot of the privatization stuff is only possible, I think, _because_ of new technologies -- that is, it had not been possible for private industry to make a profit off of, say package delivery to all points in the U.S., without a technical infrastructure (both transportation and communication) that cheapened costs to the point where a UPS could be profitable, and hence push the USPS out of the way. (Or private toll roads with computerized toll collection or privatized welfare services with highly computerized systems that reduce transaction costs etc. etc.) I don't know if it is right to say the interstate system was a "new technology" or not (if new construction techniques or automotive technologies came out of WWII that made a large scale system like that feasible, or if it was purely driven by the military, or the military and the road construction companies and the oil companies, or excess productive capacity coming out of the war, or even if UPS pushed something like that from the beginning to help make it happen using techniques that had existed for quite a while), but definitely it provided part of the technical infrastructure UPS required. I suppose underneath Dave's comments is a general warning to be conscious of the details of how history is made; that we are not just being blown along on the winds of history, but that "we make our own history" (but not to forget either that they do it "under very definite presuppositions and conditions"). Re: the other points he makes vis-a-vis what's next: these are very important. jd P.S. If you think it's okay, I wd like to fwd this to the league-discuss list, and maybe another list or two. >Jim, > >I shared your comments on UPS with this other listserve I'm on, and Dave >wrote this response. I thought it was an interesting perspective. > >Danny >-- >From: Dave Marsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Monday, August 25, 1997 7:16 PM >To:Danny Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: UPS > >Danny, >If you think this is of any value to Jim Davis, you might pass it along: > >He wrote: < The rise of UPS itself I think is tied to the restructured >economy, >where large industrial >units are broken up into smaller specialized units that are held together >economically by a transportation/communication intensive network. UPS is >at the >center of that transportation network; that is, holding together the atomized >production regime.> > >Actually, the rise of UPS is directly tied to the conscious plan to privatize >all government services, starting with, for instance, the Post Office, which >began in the Carter regime. This is not then the product of a process >nearly so >anonymous as that described above. It was a *deliberate* destruction of that >which served the many, for the profit of the few. Today, I cannot mail a >package >weighing 16 oz or more without standing in line at the post >office--because of a >"terrorism" law which cannot prevent letter bombs from being delivered to the >United Naitons, a law passed in the wake of a "terrorist" passenger plane >bombing which is either the result of a) shoddy airline maintenance, the >direct >result of the "deregulation" of that industry (ask the Machinists if you doubt >this) or b) an accidental or deliberate U.S. government missile strike. >Thus is >the general population inconvenienced, swindled, terrorized, you name it. > For that matter, you can date the rise of UPS generally to the decision >of Arthur Somerville, the postmaster general under Eisenhower, to take the >
[PEN-L:11997] EPI: Coming Attractions
EPI in collaboration with the Women's Research and Education Institute will be releasing the following reports on Labor Day: "Nonstandard Work, Substandard Jobs: Flexible Work Arrangements in the U.S." The authors are: Arne L. Kalleberg, Edith Rasell, Ken Hudson, David Webster, Barbara F. Reskin, Naomi Cassirer, and Eileen Appelbaum. and "Managing Work and Family: Nonstandard Work Arrangements Among Managers and Professionals" The authors are: Roberta M. Spalter-Roth, Arne L. Kalleberg, Edith Rasell, Naomi Cassirer, Barbara F. Reskin, Ken Hudson, David Webster, Eileen Appelbaum, and Betty L. Dooley. Summaries will be available on the EPI web site (EPINET.ORG). The full reports cost $12 each. PLEASE DO NOT e-mail me to obtain these items. For further information on ordering, send e-mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or regular mail to: Economic Policy Institute Publications/Fulfillment Suite 1200 1660 L Street, NW Washington, DC 20036 MBS === Max B. SawickyEconomic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-8810 (voice) Ste. 1200 202-775-0819 (fax)Washington, DC 20036 http://epn.org/sawicky ===
