BLS Daily Reportboundary=---- =_NextPart_000_01BD6C60.57905880
This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. -- =_NextPart_000_01BD6C60.57905880 charset="iso-8859-1" BLS DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, APRIL 17, 1998: RELEASED TODAY: Regional and state unemployment rates were generally stable in March. All four regions reported little change from February, and 40 states and the District of Columbia recorded shifts of 0.3 percentage point or less. The national jobless rate was essentially unchanged at 4.7 percent. Nonfarm payroll employment increased in 32 states and the District of Columbia __BLS announces it will partially switch to a geometric mean method of calculating the CPI beginning with January 1999 data. This change is expected to shave 0.2 percentage point annually from the inflation barometer. BLS plans to switch to a geometric mean calculation method for 61 percent of the expenditure weights in the CPI-U and 64 percent of the weights for the CPI-W. The agency will continue to use the current arithmetic mean method of calculating the remaining index categories. Changing many items to a geometric mean index will improve the pricing measure and allow it to approximate more closely a true cost-of-living gauge, says BLS Commissioner Abraham. Moving to a geometric mean index will partially offset the CPI's substitution bias (Daniel J. Roy, Daily Labor Report, page AA-1; Text E-1, E-4). __The government's main inflation gauge will be changed to account for the fact that consumers respond to the rising prices of many items by shifting to lower-cost substitutes, BLS announced yesterday. The announcement marked the end of a series of changes in the CPI that were begun in 1995 to correct for the CPI's tendency to overstate the actual rise in the cost of living. The changes affect the vast majority of Americans and the budgets of governments at all levels because the CPI is used to determine cost-of-living adjustments in benefits, such as Social Security, and for adjusting features of the income tax, such as standard deductions and tax brackets. When the change announced yesterday is incorporated into the CPI next January, the cumulative effect of all the revisions will be to trim the annual increase in the index by about eight-tenths of a percentage point (John M. Berry, Washington Post, page A1). __The government is making changes in its chief inflation index to better reflect how Americans shop - cutting back when something costs too much, switching from name brands, buying at outlets instead of department stores. The switch, which will start with the price report for January, should shave about 0.2 percentage point off the CPI, which last year hit an 11-year low of 1.7 percent (AP story: New York Times, page A18). __The Labor Department said it will adopt a new formula for calculating the CPI that it expected to reduce its annual rate of growth by two-tenths of a percentage point Katharine Abraham, commissioner of BLS, said the decision to use the new formula was based on a great deal of research that she said backed up the view that consumers are price sensitive (Reuters story). New claims filed with state agencies for unemployment insurance benefits fell 22,000 to a seasonally adjusted 289,000 for the week ended April 11, the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration reports. ETA said the last time the number of initial claims was this low was the week ended July 28, 1997. The drop in weekly claims was the largest since Jan. 24, 1998, when claims dropped 25,000 (Daily Labor Report, page D-1; Washington Post, page F2)_The number might have been held down by the Good Friday and Passover holidays, which could have prevented some discharged workers from seeking benefits, analysts said (New York Times, page C9; Wall Street Journal, page A2). Construction of new homes and apartments dropped 2.8 percent and building permits fell 2.5 percent in March after soaring a month earlier, according to the Department of Commerce (Daily Labor Report, page D3; Washington Post, page F2; New York Times, page C9; Wall Street Journal, page A2). Manufacturers in the Mid-Atlantic region reported a steady pace of business activity in April, although employment measures declined during the month, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia says (Daily Labor Report, page A-6). A chart shows the percentage of companies, by industry, who downsized their work forces three or more times in the past three years: fifty-one percent of firms in insurance, 46 percent in technology, 34 percent in manufacturing, and 25 percent in health care. The source is BNA (Washington Post, page F2). DUE OUT MONDAY: Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers: First Quarter 1998 -- =_NextPart_000_01BD6C60.57905880 b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQWAAwAOzgcEABQACQAfADcAAQBNAQEggAMADgAAAM4HBAAU
Re: IMF Article VI Change Update
e. ahmet tonak wrote: I urgently need an update about the developments re. IMF Article VI change. Thanks very much. One of the best sources on the doings of the IMF is Marike Torfs of Friends of the Earth in Washington; I don't know if she does email, but FOTE is at 202-783-7400. Also, the 50 Years is Enough people, at [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Doug
Re: End to armed struggle?
C. Lear, With a guaranteed market, coca production would go up *initially*, no question about it, but htere are several things to consider. First, coca production is geographically delimited by law already and the plant itself has a limited range it can grow in, so while produciton would certainly expand, it can't expand that much. Second, this would be part of an anti-drug policy. It's only the initial carrot in a carrot and stick strategy. Third and most important, a serious buying effort (in the billions of dollars) would represent an immense, unprecedented interdiction and interference in the cash-flow of the narco-traffickers. Fourth, at $10,000 a killogram-equivalent, the coca farmers would be seeing vastly more money than they ever would from the Colombians. This would clearly stimulate the non-coca economy. Furthermore, the program could be designed to stimulate economy in a tailored way. Goods could be substituted for cash strategically since the region is so isolated and such an effort would naturally control the major roadways and rail lines. (I think there's only one rail line from Bolivia to the coast anyway, am I right?). Better yet, a rational credit system could be started. Finally, after the program began buying coca as leaves or paste, (and people got used to the money) you could start buying whole plants and acreage. Later you could pay people to guide you to fields for eradication. The kind of money I'm talking about makes a tremendous impact. Thus you'd have people coming down off the mountains into the towns with unprecedented amounts of hard currency. That has to stimulate a local industrial economy. Understand, I'm not talking about a socialist program for development, would that I were. I am talking about a strategy to get people out of the coca business that people in the West could see the logic of. I admit that the real problem is the structure of the legal economy. If this cash and these goods can't get people into other businesses, they'll go right back to coca. Right now, however, they're both poor and contributing to the drug problem. At least they wouldn't be as poor and the flow of cocaine would be dramatically interrupted for a few years. Demand is always going to be there and cocaine is always going to be addictive. That's irreducible. The cocaine business is very supply-side. Supply does in fact create its own demand. At the end of the day you've got to get people out of that business. Right now we have an opportunity, at the very least, to buy the drug we are trying to interdict for less much less than the completely ineffective interdiction is costing us and even less than consumers are paying for it anyway! Less total money would go into the cocaine business and the interdiction would be vastly increased. peace
Re: End to armed struggle?
On Mon, April 20, 1998 at 17:36:33 (EDT) Bad Shot Diva (boddhisatva) writes: .. With a guaranteed market, coca production would go up *initially*, no question about it, but htere are several things to consider. First, coca production is geographically delimited by law already and the plant itself has a limited range it can grow in, so while produciton would certainly expand, it can't expand that much. ... Without further information, this is a non-sequitur. Just about everything on the planet has a limited growing range. The question is, what percentage of that range will forever be unavailable for increased growth. Second, this would be part of an anti-drug policy. It's only the initial carrot in a carrot and stick strategy. ... I think a much better carrot would be to return the land to the people from whom it was stolen in the first place, and help to rebuild a domestic market based on foodstuff production, not an artificial market for cocoa which might in fact expand greatly. We don't want to "bring people down from the mountains", we want to return to them what is theirs, and if they then want to come down, fine... Besides, injecting a ton of cash into a society can be tremendously destabilizing and ultimately destructive. Demand is always going to be there and cocaine is always going to be addictive. That's irreducible Unsupported conclusion. Demand *of some degree* will always be there, true, but that does not mean it is irreducible. The same can be said of cigarettes. Massachusetts has had a relatively cheap and very effective anti-smoking campaign with very positive results. Anyway, it is not the "logic" of the approach that matters. It is the politics. What makes you think anybody with any influence on policy is in any way interested in reducing the supply of drugs here, or the misery caused to the countries who grow it? Were that true, we would have made this a health problem here long ago. Bill
Books, Articles, on Poverty Capitalism
For a student's project, I would appreciate suggestions of books, articles, journals, etc., on Poverty in Capitalist Society. (Redundant, I know.) Unless replies are of general interest, please reply to me personally. Many thanks. Larry Shute -- Laurence Shute Voice: 909-869-3850 Department of Economics FAX: 909-869-6987 California State Polytechnic University, Pomona 3801 West Temple Avenue Pomona, CA 91768-4070 USAe-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
(Fwd) (Fwd) Genocide IV
--- Forwarded Message Follows --- From: "James Michael Craven" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: Clark College, Vancouver WA, USA To:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 18:20:49 PST8PDT Subject: (Fwd) Genocide IV 13. "The instrument of treaty ratification [UN Convention on Genocide] which the Senate instructed Ronald Reagan to deposit with the U.N. Secretary-General in November of 1988 contained a 'Resolution of Ratification' (S. Exec. Rep. 2 99th Cong, 1st Sess. 26-27 [1985], adopted on Feb 19, 1986; often referred to as 'The Lugar-Helms-Hatch Sovereignty Package'). The resolution contained a reservation (Article I (2)) stating: [N]othing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States of America prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States. It is thus plain that the Senate sought, even while enacting legislation to 'implement' the Genocide Convention and effecting a corresponding ratification of its terms by treaty, to exempt the U.S. from the implications of international law, custom, and convention. In effect, it sought to elevate the U.S. Constitution to a status above that of the Laws of Nations. As has been noted elsewhere, 'the acknowledged purpose of the Sovereignty Package was to reduce the convention to nothing more than a mere symbol of opposition to genocide. This fact alone raises the question of whether the United States ratified in good faith.' ( Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention p.98, Durham, NC, Duke Univ Press, 1991) The Package has been described by a Senate Committee as an 'embarrassment to the United States' insofar as it clearly suggests that the U.S. formally seeks to retain prerogatives to engage in or sanction policies and activities commonly understood as being genocidal, even while professing to condemn genocide. (S. Exec. Rep. No. 2 99th Cong, 1st Session, 1987, p.32; the resport also points out that 'a question arises as to what the United States is really seeking to accomplish by attaching this understanding. The language suggests the United States fears it has something to hide.' [footnote 14 p. 48 in Churchill, Ibid) quoted in Churchill, Ibid, pp 17-18 14."There is abundant evidence that the Senate was aware, even as it advanced its 'Sovereignty Package' purportint to subordinate the Genocide Convention to the U.S. Constitution, that the gesture contradicted the requirements of the constitution itself. Not the least indicator of this lies in the testimony of an expert witness, American Bar Association representative George Finch, in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee during its 1950 hearings on the matter. After observing that a formal treaty would be required in order for the U.S. to become a party of record in the Convention, Finch observed that 'By the United States Constitution [Article VI, Section 2] treaties are 'the supreme law of the land, and judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.' [U.S. SEnate, Hearings on the Genocide Convention Before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C. 81st Cong, 2nd Sess., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978, 9.217] In other words, the government would be unable to unilaterally legislate exceptions for itself with regard to the terms, provisions, and understandings of the Genocide Convention if it were ratified by treaty." (Churchill Ibid p. 18) 15. "On its face, the problem might seem to have been resolved, domestically at least, by a Supreme Court opinion rendered in Reid v Covert (354 U.S. 1, 1957) that 'any treaty provision that is inconsistent with the United States Constitution would simply be invalid under national law.' Under Article 27 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, however, no country can invoke the provisions of its internal law as a reason for not abiding by a treaty obligation.[ L. Henkin, et al "International Law: Cases and Materials" Charlottesville, VA, The Michie Company, 1980, p. 264] Although the United States is not yet a signatory to the Vienna Convention, it has officially recognized it as being the 'definitive' promulgation of the Laws of Nations with regard to treaty relations. [ Michla Pomerance, "The ADvisory Function of the International Court in the League and U.N. Eras", Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, pp. 115-25] Hence the SEnate's attempt to carve out exemptions for the U.S. from the force of international law has no international legal integrity, and is subject to protest or renunciation by other parties to the Genocide Convention (Ibid. pp18-19) James Craven Dept. of Economics,Clark College 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA.
Microsoft and Higher Education (fwd)
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1998 07:38:13 -0700 From: "Michael Pidwirny, OUC" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Computer-mediated Communications (B.C.) Users Group" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Microsoft and Higher Education The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/) has an extensive series of articles on Microsoft's growing role in higher education at Colleges and Universities. See URL: http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-33.dir/33a00101.htm One of the articles specifically examines the question "is Microsoft positioning itself to compete with Colleges and Universities?" See URL: http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-33.dir/33a03301.htm
Re: Microsoft and Higher Education (fwd)
The best part is the story about the web site where you can get M$ to pay you $200 to mention the company's product in your class. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Understanding Chiapas
Although I pride myself in being knowledgeable about Latin American politics, I was astonished to discover how little I knew about the origins of the Zapatista struggle. The left has paid much attention to the elliptical but inspired communiquis of Subcommandante Marcos. We have also participated in and studied Zapatista solidarity movement and off the Internet. Our analysis of why Mayan peasants launched the struggle in the first place has not kept pace unfortunately with these other activities. Theory has lagged behind practice. The purpose then of this post is threefold. I want to identify the root causes of the Zapatista rebellion. Next, I want to reply to a Harry Cleaver's idea that the Zapatista movement represents some kind of new paradigm for the left. Finally, I want to shed light on the explosive class/indigenous aspects of the struggle in the context of my continuing study of these issues. It is rather surprising that for all the discussion of the Zapatistas in the mass media and the Internet, there are actually very few scholarly works written in English. Journalist John Ross wrote a book 4 years ago that is now out of print. Dan La Botz, author of the excellent book on the Teamsters for Democratic Union called "Rank and File Rebellion," has written a study of the overall political and economic crisis in Mexico that I suspect is quite good, given his track record. However, I can't imagine a more useful or informative book than George Collier's "Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas," published by Francis Ford Lappe's outstanding Food First Foundation. Collier, an anthropologist, has spent 30 years researching peasant life in Chiapas. His father was John Collier, Sr., who was Commissioner of Indian Affairs under Franklin Roosevelt and an activist for indigenist causes. My remarks on Chiapas are drawn from his excellent book that I recommend to everybody for more complete information. (Food First is at www.foodfirst.org.) It is important to realize that the peasant rebellion broke out in Chiapas for reasons almost identical to rebellions in Peru and Guatemala previously reported on: land hunger. While the Mexican Revolution delivered the most substantial land reform in Latin American history, it never broke from the capitalist system. So the contradictions of the capitalist system have attacked the land claims of the indigenous peoples and the peasants, no matter how sweeping the various land reform acts. In Peru and Guatemala, semi-feudalism confronted the largely Indian peasantry. In Mexico, it has instead been the undiluted machinations of capitalism itself. In 1914, as a consequence of the original Zapata revolution, debt slavery was abolished in Mexico. Even though this semi-feudal institution disappeared, the naked forces of capitalism continued to kept the peasant oppressed. The most notable example was the ability of non-Indians to purchase communal lands owned by impoverished Indian communities in the highlands of southern Mexico. In their place, cattle ranches and coffee plantations soon appeared. Now that the landless peasant was forced to earn his wage, he had no choice except to work for the capitalist rancher or farmer. The formal debt slavery may have been abolished, but the Indian farmhand stayed tied to the "padron." A new upsurge in the Mexican Revolution took place in the 1930s during the administration of President Lazaro Cardenas, father of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Responding to the plight of the peasants who never received the full land benefit of land in 1914, he enacted a new agrarian reform. Cardenas, like FDR, was not committed to total social transformation. His reforms, like our own New Deal, were arguably intended to stabilize the capitalist system itself. By co-opting the Mexican peasantry, as FDR was attempting to do vis-a-vis the American working-class, Cardenas hoped to reduce social inequality and boost confidence in the social system in one fell swoop. His main concern was to help Mexico recuperate from the devastating effects of the 1929 crash. The Great Depression curtailed demand for Mexican exports, which resulted in the loss of foreign capital that the bourgeoisie required for industrial development. Cardenas put forward an alternate development model. He instituted a six-year plan that would replace export-oriented agriculture with new domestic industrialization based on peasant production of cheap food. In order to free up land for the production of foodstuffs for the internal market, the government began to expropriate land from stagnant commercial estates. The land was turned over to ejidos, lands controlled by largely Indian peasant communities. Chiapas benefited substantially from this land reform and a base for the governing PRI party that extended well into the 1960s. Even though the powerful PRI party had committed itself to land reform, there were serious obstacles to its implementation in Chiapas. The main problem is that it
Re: drugwar [was: End to armed struggle?]
boddhisatva wrote: I'm just going to keep saying it. This anti-cocaine bullshit is a complete waste of time. We can buy it for less. ... Is or is not buying off coca farmers a win-win? Bill answers: And what happens when they have a guaranteed market? ... If one wants to get rid of the drug trade, and more importantly the negative aspects of that trade, it's important to lower demand. Instead of buying the crop, as boddhi suggests, the market should be freed. That would drive down the price and take the profits out of smuggling (because there would be no smuggling) and out of gangsterism. But then anti-drug education and drug-treatment plans (medicalization) need to be instituted to lower demand, which would drive the price and profit down further. But of course our fearless leaders prefer a moralistic, authoritarian, violent, and destined-to-fail approach guaranteed to incarcerate a large percentage of "minority" youth. Does anyone have any direct info about the success of medicalization efforts? I heard that one could get heroin in the UK by prescription. Is this true? does it work? in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and human beings dear." -- R.H. Tawney.
Re: End to armed struggle?
On Mon, April 20, 1998 at 15:56:52 (EDT) boddhisatva writes: To Whom..., I'm just going to keep saying it. This anti-cocaine bullshit is a complete waste of time. We can buy it for less. There literally is no better strategy for undermining traffickers. At best these Bolivians are planning to destroy a quarter of the coca crop. The Western governments could buy the coca for peanuts compared to what they spend on "interdiction" that is totally futile. You guys are economists. Is or is not buying off coca farmers a win-win? And what happens when they have a guaranteed market? If you're going to cite economic reasons, at least address the issues of supply *and* demand --- what's to say that with a guaranteed market, production won't increase and/or prices? You also need to address the root problems of this: export promotion, lack of production for domestic markets, lack of land ownership, domestic (US) demand for the product, etc. Bill
