[PEN-L:1140] Transnationals allegedly fund paramilitary groups
Visit the COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR at http://www.prairienet.org/clm The rural people complained that multi- nationals running gold mines in the south of the department of Bolivar were responsible for creating and funding the paramilitary groups which expelled them from their homes. __ INTER PRESS SERVICE Friday, 21 August 1998 Transnationals allegedly fund paramilitary groups - BOGOTA -- Rural people displaced by the violence in Colombia met President Andres Pastrana today, amid allegations that the paramilitary groups which forced them to flee their homes were funded by transnational mining concerns. Eight delegates representing some 5,000 displaced people, mainly refugees in the northeastern city of Barrancabermeja, met Pastrana to explain the situation they had been suffering for the last two months. The rural people, from the northern department of Bolivar, said they were forced to leave their homes under threats from paramilitary groups who considered them guerrilla collaborators. After a two-hour meeting, agreement was reached to start a process to document complaints and proposals from the displaced people in Barracabermeja tomorrow. Pastrana asked the representatives for "a little patience," saying the problem they faced would not be easy to solve. Internal displacement is one of the main problems caused by the conflict, said Almudena Mazarraza, director of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees office in Colombia. Various reports state more than a million Colombians have been forced from their homes by war in the last decade. According to Colombia's Silent Crisis, a report released in April by the U.S. Committee for Refugees, all of the displaced, mostly women and children, are victims of one or more of the three major armed groups in Colombia --the military, paramilitary forces which have been linked to the army and the land-owning elite, and the three guerrilla groups. "Colombia is being ripped apart, its people butchered and uprooted, but sweeping brutal violence associated with multiple conflicts, rampant institutionalized human rights abuse, impunity, and efforts by private groups, including narco-traffickers to expand their economic power and lawlessness," says the report's author, Hiram Ruiz. While the commission was meeting Pastrana, another 250 displaced people occupied Bolivar Square in Bogota, asking Congress opposite for an audience in order to discuss their situation. Church authorities ordered that the cathedral, on one side of the square, be closed in order to prevent it from being occupied. The rural people complained that multinationals running gold mines in the south of the department of Bolivar were responsible for creating and funding the paramilitary groups which expelled them from their homes. The delegation provided no names, but indicated that U.S. and British companies were backing the paramilitary groups in order to take over the mineral-rich lands of local people by intimidation. "We have come to Congress to tell the government once more that we have been in this situation for two months and have not been given any attention," said Edgar Quiroga, leader of the displaced people. Quiroga said the displaced would not leave the capital until minimum security conditions are guaranteed. Copyright 1998 IPS/GIN. __ *** * COLOMBIA SUPPORT NETWORK: To subscribe to CSN-L send request to * * [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUB CSN-L Firstname Lastname * * (Direct questions or comments about CSN-L to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) * * Visit CSN's website http://www.igc.org/csn Read COLOMBIA BULLETIN * * For free copy and info contact CSN, P.O. Box 1505, Madison WI 53701 * * or call (608) 257-8753 fax: (608) 255-6621 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Visit the COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR at http://www.prairienet.org/clm * ***
[PEN-L:1117] Re: Re: Re: Re: This list has some great kidders
Hello again, Boddhi, I'm resolved to laying bare my awesome ignorance here - I'm in with a serious chance of learning something. I guess I was pointing to a large (international?) government-sponsored bond market. Capitalists fund infrastructure by investing in bonds. If the monetarists are right, and inflation ensues, well, then the infrastructure is paid for all the quicker'n'cheaper, eh? I'm told the French govt planned its whole infrastructure policy on happy projections of rampant inflation. Governments are in the business of producing demand by way of their debt-financed infrastructure enterprises. That's two needs government can meet that Wall St ain't meeting at the moment, eh? And capitalists get to socialise a heap of costs (inert and human infrastructure), too! Ah, I always wanted to know what 'fungible' meant! Well, taxpayers hold the stock - a rather more democratic distribution than Wall St affords, I'd have thought. As for capitalist accumulation funding new industry - well, Wall St ain't doing that either. Wall St seems to me to be one giant bed, under which capitalists do keep their money - leading to tandem unemployment and overcapacity and therefore a tendency precisely to keep money, as inert paper, from becoming real capital. I mean, where's the M-C-M here? As paper, it does very little. Converted into money - in significant amounts, it destroys potential capital (by way of mega-'correction'). You don't have the real multiplier unless the 'C' part of M-C-M happens, do you? >One particular advantage finance capitalism has over Keynesianism >is that Keynesianism finances a few industries more than others. That >creates a "narrow" market. Doesn't Wall St do precisely this? High Tech. is in the driving seat, isn't it? Just like cars'n'the-like so disastrously were in 1929. And because information, as software, can sell for way above exchange value, Wall St ensures a lack of productive investment in those areas where commodities must occasionally be sold below exchange values to make up for the prices software can command. Ah, as you go on to say: >One of the worrisome (by which *I* mean >"delightful", at least to a Marxist) things about the present U.S. equity >market is that it's so narrow. A few years ago, the broader you bought >across the well-capitalized averages, the better you did. > As you suggested, the Japanese style of Keynesianism leads to >disaster and I think it is because when the government tries to broaden >out its investment, that leads inevitably to cronyism. I'm not making universal panacaea claims for Keynesianism, just wondering why people are persisting in lauding the relative virtues of Friedmanism. It ain't even working in the short term to undo the weaknesses Keynesianism evinced over its reign of several decades - and cronyism is a tendency rather than a short-term inevitability. >There is not, at >present, a system that expresses the true economic will of the people >across the economy in the form of credit. Socialism anyone? Yes please. Cheers, Rob.
[PEN-L:1139] LBO on bankruptcy article
The most recent LBO had an excellent article about bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal has done a piece on the research in support of that law. I have included my notes from an earlier piece by the same writer. Both articles have a common theme -- the prostitution of the university to corporate interests. Cwiklik, Robert. 1998. "The Problem With Ivory Tower Inc.: When Research and Lobbying Mesh." Wall Street Journal (9 June): pp. B 1 and B 13. He describes the proliferating hybrid on the nation's campuses: research centers funded by, and working at the behest of, big corporations and industry groups. In the area of science and technology alone, more than 1,000 such centers existed in 1990, up from about 700 in 1980, according to a recent Carnegie Mellon University study funded by the National Science Foundation. These organizations then produce studies to further the lobbying efforts of the corporate sponsors. The University of Maine's Lobster Institute in Orono, heavily subsidized by the seafood industry, did a study a few years ago purporting to show that lobsters don't suffer when boiled alive. The Credit Research Center, founded in 1974 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., moved last year to Washington, where it operates under the auspices of the Georgetown School of Business. Its nine-member governing board includes four credit-industry executives and five academics, including director Michael Staten, an economist and professor at the business school. Industry representatives make up more than 70% of the center's advisory council, a group that Dr. Staten calls "a Who's Who of credit granters." And industry dollars supply almost all of the CRC's $450,000 annual budget, including Dr. Staten's salary. Dr. Staten co-authored the center's Visa-MasterCard study with John M. Barron, a Purdue economics professor who sits on the CRC's governing board. Their conclusion: About one-fourth of Chapter 7 bankruptcy filers can afford to repay at least 30% of their unsecured debt, a type that includes unpaid credit-card balances. ## Cwiklik, Robert. 1998. "UPS Tries to Buy Its Way Into the Ivory Tower." Wall Street Journal (6 February): pp. B 1 and B 2. UPS offered the University of Washington medical school $2.5 million to establish a research chair in occupational orthopedics. UPS asked that a particular researcher at the school, Stanley J. Bigos, be appointed to the chair and granted tenure. Dr. Bigos is an orthopedic surgeon and professor, whose research has suggested that workers' back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job. About 20%, or $2.8 billion, of total contributions to higher education came from companies in 1996, according to the Council for Aid to Education, a New York nonprofit group. Today, corporations increasingly "want something back" for their gifts, says John Coy, head of Consulting Network, a Vienna, Va., firm that advises big companies on their financial relationships with universities. Cuts in government support for higher education have turned universities into scavengers for private funds, and schools now routinely permit corporate donors not only to name endowed professorships and chairs, but also to select their subject areas. Thus, there's a Coca-Cola Professor of Marketing at the University of Georgia, a Lego Professor of Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (who is also a Disney fellow) and a La Quinta Motor Inns Professor of Business at the University of Texas. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1115] Re: Re: This list has some great kidders
G'day Boddhi, > I hope it's clear that I see *two* two questions here. First, is >this monetarist transmogrification necessary *under capitalism*? - to >which I answer "yes". Second, does it foreshadow disaster - likewise >"Yes." The point is that you can't go back and re-institute or even save >a failed structure. The Keynesian model stagnated (or led to crisis, as >in Japan) because it could not provide capitalism with enough >market-rationalized credit. I am certain you are right in the second instance, but remain ambivalent regarding the first. Keynesianism need not open itself up to the sort of behind-closed-doors nepotistic despotism that has demonstrably characterised Nippo-Keynesianism. How important is it to capitalism in general and, much more decisively in the foreseeable term, capitalists in particular, where the credit comes from? Is credit not always available, and is that credit not generally available at much more stable and realistic rates than 'free markets' can offer over time? I reckon the reason Keynesianism has been pressured out of government platforms is purely because Keynesianism had always been based on a nation-building ethos. The time came when some capitals, now needful of developing markets (by size and diversity - in recent times, because erstwhile secret info technology needed a civilian market after Vietnam, the space race and the cold war wound down) felt inhibited by the troublesome steps and grids at national borders just as the new commodity technologies offered ways to flatten out those steps and grids. This explains only the decline of state-centred Keynesianism, not the economic theory at its base. If capitalism does not somehow construct enabling fetters and secure credit projections for its individual practitioners at the global level, then capitalism will have that much shorter a reign. Not that I can see how it'd do this ... but then I've swallowed enough Marx to see ultimate crisis everywhere - and our lot have been embarrassed by that before, as Doug regularly reminds us. Cheers, Rob.
[PEN-L:1138] Deflation?
AFTER GIVING DUE AND CAREFUL STUDY TO THE fallout from Ailing Asia, Reeling Russia and Listing Latin America, weighing the possible impact of the personalities filling our tiny screen from Monica Lewinsky (former First Intern now embittered extern) and Osuna bin Laden (may his tribe decrease) to Ken Starr (will somebody please tell him to stop smiling when he spots a camera pointed his way) and Bill Clinton (who thinks that being President means you never have to say you're sorry), weighing the effects of the anti-terrorist missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan against the potential terrorist retaliatory attacks on Americans abroad and at home, our considered reaction to Friday's stock market action is...??? How can a market be so ugly all day long and so beautiful in the final hour? Did the real market sneak away late Friday to get a head start on the weekend and a rogue market take over? If so, won't the real market be boiling mad, and what does that bode for Monday? Did Alan Greenspan decide to switch his portfolio from bills to equities or at least grab a few calls on the S&P index? Did every partner at Goldman Sachs (enough to fill 100 elevators if the fat ones call in sick) chip in a week's pay and buy stocks in a gallant move to save the nation, the economy, the bull market and their pending IPO (not necessarily in order of importance)? Did the humble but honest Japanese investor, who after eight years of a bear market in Tokyo still has a yen for stocks, decide to try his luck in the US. and proceed to quietly pour into our market some of the dough he has been squirreling away in postal savings at a 0.0005% yield (compounded)? Did the trillions the Russians don't pay in taxes hop a freighter, land on these shores and rush helter-skelter into the stock market? Did the Colombian drug lords, nervous about devaluation in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, etc., etc., take their loot out of South American banks (scrupulously paying penalities for early withdrawal, of course) and send it, disguised as bananas, tacos and coffees, into this country, whence it found its way into the pharmaceutical sector? Did the early selling represent heavy shorting by the aforementioned Osama bin Laden and the last-minute buying represent even heavier buying by his estranged Saudi relatives? Did the Chinese, famously canny investors, having suckered the Americans into shoring up the yen while they were dumping $10 billion worth of that shaky currency, put their winnings from that transaction into U.S. stocks? Did participants in the global sex industry, which, a U.N. agency revealed this week, hundreds of billions a year, fearful that exposure will subject it to local taxes, choose 3:30 p.m. on Friday to sequester their ill-gotten gains in IBM, Microsoft, GE and other impeccable issues? That the stock market buckled so sharply Friday morning was hardly surprising. In fact, the surprise would have been if it hadn't. We don't think the selling was occasioned by the news that some smart missiles had been fired at some dumb terrorists. Nor, for that matter, are we persuaded that Mr. Clinton 'fessing up to doing naughty things in the Oral Office sent stocks into a tizzy. The strikes against the terrorists, if anything might be viewed as a positive and purposeful action. And gosh, is there anyone of legal competence (or even most folks might not qualify for that designation) who thought Mr. Clinton wasn't capable of fibbing. We remember in the initial months of the President's first term, Barrons ran a cover showing Mr. Clinton fitted with a fine Pinocchio nose We weren't prescient, merely observant. More likely the excuse for the big dive was the evidence, which suddenly became too imposing for even the most optimistic bull to ignore, that the world was inexorably dissolving all around us. Beyond East Asia and Japan, the likes of Russia and Venezuela were teetering on the precipice, with Brazil and Mexico, to name only two, closer to the precarious edge. And the currency plague is threatening to spill over from the emerging economies and infect Canada and Norway, as well. Especially unsettling was the official denial China that it planned to devalue the yuan or unpeg the Hong Kong dollar. Denial of intent to devalue is invariably a precursor to devaluation. Mr. Yeltsin, you may recall, firmly offered just such a vow the day before the Russian ruble, with Moscow's. blessing went down the tubes. The Chinese economy, from all indications and despite the numbers concocted by Beijing, is stagnating or worse. It's hard to imagine the powers-that-be hesitating to do what they must to stay competitive In foreign markets. All of which strikes us -- and, obviously, an increasing number of investors as well -- as auguring further deflationary pressure around the globe. We think the stock market reacted on Friday to the dreary prospect of a beggar-thy-neighbor world. Nothing we're afraid, changed in the final hour
[PEN-L:1114] Re: forwarded from Mark Miller
Hello again, >That point of Bourdieu's has, however, already been made, several >times, by George Gerbner. Bringing to mind Gerbner's 'cultivation' thesis. I'd really like a copy of Mark's Baltimore work (which expands on this?), if I may. I have a problem with 'cultivation', in that it jumps too quickly to its conclusions. We are presented with self-incarcerating old dears and girls, all convinced that nought but rapists, muggers and drug-crazed murderers exist beyond the front door. Well, I reckon their ferar is justified. Not by their perceptions of the incidence of crime, which is naturally overstated both in commercial news organs and by the political machinery (as Gerbner argues), but by imagining themselves, in particular, caught in the nightmare moment. As a man, I'm quite aware I'm actually statistically more liable to be hurt or killed by violence than is a young woman or an aged person, but I blithely trot off to the 'danger' spots regardless - as do most men of my age. The reason is that I have a (partly warranted) view of myself as one who, presented with danger, might make a decent fist of either fight or flight. In full awareness of the statistics, I might be less inclined to take such risks (even though they be smaller) if I were a slight woman or a limping pensioner. The dread is of ghastly helplessness before the villain, not necessarily of the number of villains there be. Gerbner doesn't allow for this rational application of the perceived self to the risk. So I'd love to know if there is a demographic dimension to Mark's work, and if it reflects the concern I've been trying to express. Although how one comes up with a policy or a political response to this, I just dunno. Cheers, Rob.
[PEN-L:1113] Re: Media ownership
G'day Penners, Doug asks Mark: >In your book that anticipated >Bourdieu, did you anticipate his argument that competition produces not >diversity but sameness? Well, you only gotta watch commercial TV doncha? I mean, Oz, with its five 'free-to-air' channels (hardly anyone has taken to pay TV, and won't until the pay sector robs fta of its staples), has diversity because it has a (relatively) well funded public service broadcaster (like the BBC) and a special broadcaster (SBS) originally dedicated to catering for an ever more multicultural populace, but now even more than that (wonderful films - none of that dubbing crap either - proper sub-titles; loads of soccer, and, of course, that extra bit of nudity we Anglo-Saxons like so much 'coz we denied it to ourselves for so long - who was it who asked 'do you mean if I show a tit, it's rated R, but if I show it getting blowed off, it's PG?') Our commercial channels are taking to permanent logo display coz that's the only way you'd know whom you're watching! I remember Steiner's programming thesis (1951, I think), which held that if a second channel came in, it would merely do exactly what the first channel did. That way, in an expensive operation like TV, you're assured of a healthy slice of the extant action. You need four commercial channels before a little bit of differentiation might be expected in a given slot. Often, policies pursuing diversity of content by way of diversity of ownership and control don't get anywhere for precisely this reason. One proprietor with multiple channels is much more likely to diversify content - in pursuit of wider and better segmented audiences. Newspapers depend a lot on news (if not as much as they used to, in my opinion), and syndication, with its economies of scale, strikes me as the commercial way to go in this globalised world, where the relative significance of misbehaving foreigners can easily be made out to be as 'sexy' as local school closures. Concentration is necessarily a function of capitalism, no? Especially where advertisers themselves are ever more likely to be integrated chains themselves, where the whole world, in properly homogenised form, is ever more available and sellable, and where technological convergence demands electronic editions, moving pictures and data bases, and allows cross-promotion (often this latter taking up a goodly chunk of the 'news'). Chomsky talks about the 'flack' industry too. 'Think tanks' and various peak bodies join hands to offer so concerted a threat to those who dare push envelopes on 'defamation', 'invasions of privacy' and 'bias' that we end up with a fairly uniform manifestation of 'prior constraint' - this means censorship 'before the fact', and can therefore never be quantified. And, yes, those who own media, own significant stock in the purported object of their role as 'watchdog', share financial sources with them, share directors with them, and swap executive staff with the regulators. Which all adds up to inevitable concentration and tendencies to standardisation. Just in closing, Oz used to boast a plethora of high-circulation left newspapers, but if you don't have the advertising, you just lose more money the more copies you sell. They're all gone now, anyway. Mebbe now that the decisive cost of newsprint can be got around (ie. electronic issues), we might find a return to variety. You'd still have to expect a sort of commodified leftism, I suppose (advertising would still generally be required to fund newsgathering), and journos can still be neatly controlled by way of regulated 'press passes'. In the UK, I'm told, you don't get near a news scene unless you hold a pass issued at the discretion of the cops! I'm meandering rather - so here I stop. Cheers, Rob.
[PEN-L:1137] Re: Re: Speakers wanted III
Valis: >Well, your resentment is a wasted emotion in this case. The counterfeit >status you accord Boddhi is not so blatantly evident to me as to you. >His consigning of every last shepherd and nut-gatherer to the meatgrinder >of proletarization is as unsettling to me as it apparently is to you, >but that just makes him more orthodox than either of us. Valis, I think I might know what the problem is. You might be one of the unfortunate recipients of a copy of the Communist Manifesto that was the target of a Cointelpro operation in the 1970s. FBI agents broke into the offices of publishers of the Communist Manifesto and deleted everything past the first chapter, "Bourgeois and Proletariat." The first chapter contains the sentence, "The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization." This sentence and others have had the effect of making Marx and Engels appear as fans of the capitalist system. The small ex-Trotskyist group in England called Living Marxism has built a movement around the first chapter of the CM. But if you can track down the original copy of the CM, you will discover a second chapter titled "Proletarians and Communists." This chapter rather completes M&E's thinking on these questions and is rather essential reading. It states, among other things, that "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." This chapter and other writings by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin have had a big effect on my thinking, but little on people like Boddhisatva and the LM sect. If you have trouble getting a hold of the original version of the CM, I suggest you get the latest copy from Verso or Monthly Review which is complete. Since the courts ruled against Cointelpro, this classic of communist literature is once again available in its pristine version. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:1135] Re: Fw: honesty in russia?
Frank Durgin wrote: >There is something I am not understanding here. It seems to me by >supporting the ruble the IMF was undercutting those who were shorting the >ruble. By supporting the ruble at an unsustainably high level, the Russian central bank gave short-sellers more time to take their position. It's like an open invitation to short. Doug
[PEN-L:1134] Fw: honesty in russia?
-- Doug Hennwod wrote > [PEN-L:1018] Re: honesty in russia? > Date: Thursday, August 20, 1998 10:49 AM > The front page of today's Financial Times reports that the Russians used > all of the latest $4.5 billion disbursement from the IMF defending the > ruble (i.e., it went into the pockets of speculators who were shorting the > ruble profitably). > > Doug > > There is something I am not understanding here. It seems to me by supporting the ruble the IMF was undercutting those who were shorting the ruble. As I understand it, to short a ruble selling at 6 per dollar I would borrow 6,000 rubles and buy $1,000 USD. Then when the ruble fell to 7,000 I would buy 7,000rubles with my $1,000 and pocket the extra 1,000 rubles. By supporting the value of the ruble the IMF would deprive me of that profit. I could also pull the same thing off without borrowing money by working with a future. could I not? What have I not understood here? Frank
[PEN-L:1133] Speakers wanted II
Valis: >Individuals may arrive at Marxism, or at any doctrinal corpus, via a tipsy >journey of contradictory thoughts and blind stumbles. And they may feel >themselves fully arrived, only to become vessels of antagonism vis-`a-vis >some comrades nevertheless: witness the war between Louis and Boddhi. Valis, not everybody who says that they are a Marxist is. Boddhisatva is not a Marxist. He just uses the word to gain acceptance in left-wing circles. He is an apologist for capitalism and I completely resent you putting him and me in the same category. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:1130] Re: Miller/Henwood/Cox
>It is these days. > >Doug It absolutely is not. Dinkins is a liberal. The Nation Magazine is liberal. Paul Wellstone is liberal. What happened is that a section of the Democratic Party dumped liberalism and embraced conservative politics. Clinton, Zuckerman, Koch all symbolize this. Our problem is that our liberals are totally sold-out when it comes to supporting the new brand of Democratic Party politics. This does not mean that they don't have their own agenda, as Wellstone does. Their problem is that unlike the 1930s, there is no segment of big capital that wants to back a liberal agenda. What will be interesting to see as this economic crisis unfolds whether or not there are FDR's in the wings. (By the way, what is the deal with the fucked up listproc software which throws "re's" in front of a subject heading like the cascading brooms in Walt Disney's "Sorcerer and the Apprentice"?) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:1129] Re: Re: Re: Miller/Henwood/Cox
Louis Proyect wrote: >Doug, Zuckerman is not a liberal. Politically, he has been a strong >supporter of Koch and Guliani. This is not liberalism. It is these days. Doug
[PEN-L:1136] Re: Speakers wanted III
Louis asserts: > >Individuals may arrive at Marxism, or at any doctrinal corpus, via a tipsy > >journey of contradictory thoughts and blind stumbles. And they may feel > >themselves fully arrived, only to become vessels of antagonism vis-`a-vis > >some comrades nevertheless: witness the war between Louis and Boddhi. > > Valis, not everybody who says that they are a Marxist is. Boddhisatva is > not a Marxist. He just uses the word to gain acceptance in left-wing > circles. He is an apologist for capitalism and I completely resent you > putting him and me in the same category. Well, your resentment is a wasted emotion in this case. The counterfeit status you accord Boddhi is not so blatantly evident to me as to you. His consigning of every last shepherd and nut-gatherer to the meatgrinder of proletarization is as unsettling to me as it apparently is to you, but that just makes him more orthodox than either of us. I have opened the considerable issue of the Means heresy (as I have come to name it) without drawing so much as one contending syllable from either of you. The weather outside is calling; if an ample thread grows here, I'll have to pick it up tonight. valis
[PEN-L:1128] Global economic crisis
August 22, 1998 Overseas Markets Send Wall Street Reeling By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and JONATHAN FUERBRINGER NEW YORK -- Investors hoping for a languid summer day of stock trading were treated instead to a wild ride Friday. After sharp drops on markets in Asia and Europe, the Dow Jones industrial average acted like a bungee-jumper. The Dow plunged 280 points just before noon, then bounced back to end the day at 8,533.65, a loss of only 77.76 points, or nine-tenths of 1 percent. The Nasdaq composite index fell 34.84, or 1.9 percent, to 1,797.61. U.S. stocks were again caught in a global downdraft, as there was no bad domestic news Friday. The U.S. economy remains robust by almost all measures, and consumer confidence is still high. The housing market is strong, auto sales are expected to do well as General Motors recovers from two plant strikes and personal income is rising. "A confluence of events overseas is overwhelming what I believe to be very good fundamentals for the U.S. economy," said Timothy J. Morris, chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust in New York. It is clear, for example, that Asia has not yet righted itself. Adding to fears that Japan's economy is worsening, Okura & Co., a Tokyo trading concern, sought protection from creditors Friday, the nation's third-largest corporate bankruptcy this year. Investors were also disappointed by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's reluctance to reduce the crippling 5 percent consumption tax. The yen lost ground again to the dollar, falling 1.2 percent. Russia's financial crisis shows no signs of abating, and its stock market dropped 5.6 percent Friday. A newer worry on the international scene is Latin America. Inflation rates are rising in the emerging market nations of Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, and their currencies are sinking. As a result, there is increased concern that their troubles will have an impact on U.S. exports. Roughly 20 percent of U.S. exports go to Latin American nations. Indeed, some analysts think the selloff in emerging markets signaled the realization among investors that the backstops of the International Monetary Fund and the group of seven leading industrial nations may no longer be there. John Lipsky, chief economist at Chase Manhattan Bank, said that even if the IMF were to try another bailout, such a move would no longer be reassuring to investors because it has not proved to be effective. "The awareness that the crisis management is in crisis adds to investor uncertainty and market volatility," he said. As a result, some investors are beginning to question whether U.S. stocks can be a port in a worldwide economic storm. "The risks to the U.S. are rising," said Bill Dudley, economist at Goldman, Sachs. "The International Monetary Fund is out of money and out of credibility. The pressures on emerging-market countries are real. And the U.S. economy is more fragile because of its dependence on the stock market." Investors seem to be bracing themselves for the second wave of Asia troubles. The first stage in the crisis was an expected decline in exports, evidenced in the June trade figures. Of the $10 billion slide in the last six months, $8 billion of it was a collapse in exports. The second stage is a flood of cheap imports into this country, which has not yet happened. If it does, U.S. corporations will find their margins squeezed as they are forced to compete with these lower-priced goods. Another worry among economists is that the capital spending boom that has kept the U.S. economy perking is about to end. "You do have tantalizing signs that the capital spending boom is finally over," said M. Cary Leahey, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. "The classic economic problem now is firms are preparing for a party in 1999 and maybe nobody's going to show up." -- (complete article is at www.nytimes.com) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:1127] Re: Re: Miller/Henwood/Cox
>And the Daily News, once a right-wing rag absentee owned by the Chicago >Trib, is now owned by a local elite liberal, Mort Zuckerman. > >Doug Doug, Zuckerman is not a liberal. Politically, he has been a strong supporter of Koch and Guliani. This is not liberalism. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:1126] Re: Miller/Henwood/Cox
Louis Proyect wrote: >In the mid 60s, one of the 3 most important dailies in NY was the NY Post. >Owned by Dorothy Sann, it put forward an undiluted New Deal liberalism that >shaped the thinking of many of its working-class and middle-class readers. >If the Daily News was the favored publication of the Irish and Black >municipal workers, the Post was the favorite of Jewish schoolteachers, >professionals and shopkeepers. When Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in the >1970s, he reversed the editorial content 180 degrees and the paper became a >hotbed of racism and reaction. The old-line Jewish readership became >tainted by this process and happily voted for Koch whom the paper promoted >heavily, as it now promotes Guliani. Murdoch's goal in life is to push >media to the right. When he buys a newspaper, he replaces the editors with >those who will share his right-wing agenda. The only place where this did >not work was the Village Voice where the staff would have burned the >offices down rather than promote racism and reaction. And the Daily News, once a right-wing rag absentee owned by the Chicago Trib, is now owned by a local elite liberal, Mort Zuckerman. Doug
[PEN-L:1132] Re: Speakers wanted II
Frances Bolton opines: > > Theodore Kaszynski, who lives relatively nearby and has 0 money problems. > > No, I'm serious. Recently I was reading through his manifesto for the > > first time in 2 years; once past his peculiar "leftism" constructs > > (obviously derived from vicarious observations during the '60s) one finds > > perceptions for which the left may legitimately, if conditionally, > > claim him. > > I'm not sure why you'd want to claim someone as a leftist who hates the > left. This is sort of like those postie marxists who all celebrated the > work of nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. I don't know how my casual comment connects with the odd peregrinations of Schmitt through German law and language 60-70 years ago or the current Schmittforschung on which copious newsprint is being sacrificed, however, there are here-and-breathing quasi-nazis of varying textures and flavors all over the Northwest who might profit from an earnest discussion with you (Kaszynski wasn't even one of these, but a recluse who never hooked up with a dissident group even there in the richly supplied state of Montana). Individuals may arrive at Marxism, or at any doctrinal corpus, via a tipsy journey of contradictory thoughts and blind stumbles. And they may feel themselves fully arrived, only to become vessels of antagonism vis-`a-vis some comrades nevertheless: witness the war between Louis and Boddhi. Well, I wasn't really suggesting that Michael solicit a furlough/speaking date for Kazsynski, for obviously there will be no takers at the BoP, but was just spotlighting him as the stuff of a most instructive event: an encounter with someone who is partly us, partly something else. I just think that frozen paradoxes are awfully wasteful, both for us and for them, and I'm unwilling to concede to Wall Street such a lavish gift. valis
[PEN-L:1125] Re: Re: Re: mark miller
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >I just got a note from Mark Miller saying that he has just signed off >temporarily. He has enjoyed the encounter with some "excellent people." >I admire that spirit. Oh good. I was beginning to think that Paul Davidson was the only consecrated intellectual who didn't mine duking it out with the masses. Doug
[PEN-L:1123] Re: radical speakers wanted
You're in econ, right? There's some intersting Marxist geographers at UCB. Michael Watts does economic geography, and is a charming and witty speaker. He's fantastic--sat in on his seminar a few years ago and learned alot. Also, check out Iain Boal, who's a lecture in the same dept. He's an anarcho-luddite vego social historian of technology. I moved into science & tech studies as a result of the work I did with him. Dick Walker is there, too. I think he works on California, mostly. Or Barbara Epstein is doing stuff (or she was) on new social movements. She's in Santa Cruz at the History of Consciousness Board. Awful person but doe interesting work. She's another one of those academic marxists who abuses the student workers at the library. Frances former student library worker On Fri, 21 Aug 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I may be able to finagle a few leftish speakers to come up to Chico. We > don't have much money, so the person would have to be travelling through > or residing in the Bay Area. > > Any good suggestions? > -- > Michael Perelman > Economics Department > California State University > Chico, CA 95929 > > Tel. 530-898-5321 > E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
[PEN-L:1121] Miller/Henwood/Cox
Doug has remarked frequently on the transformation of NYC from a liberal (in the good sense), multiracial, tolerant place into a haven for mean-spirited yuppies who put people like Koch and Guliani into office repeatedly. This transformation, like the transformation of Sandinistas into boosters for the free market, is not a function of personality changes but objective class forces. Among them is concentration of media that Mark Miller is focusing on. In the mid 60s, one of the 3 most important dailies in NY was the NY Post. Owned by Dorothy Sann, it put forward an undiluted New Deal liberalism that shaped the thinking of many of its working-class and middle-class readers. If the Daily News was the favored publication of the Irish and Black municipal workers, the Post was the favorite of Jewish schoolteachers, professionals and shopkeepers. When Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in the 1970s, he reversed the editorial content 180 degrees and the paper became a hotbed of racism and reaction. The old-line Jewish readership became tainted by this process and happily voted for Koch whom the paper promoted heavily, as it now promotes Guliani. Murdoch's goal in life is to push media to the right. When he buys a newspaper, he replaces the editors with those who will share his right-wing agenda. The only place where this did not work was the Village Voice where the staff would have burned the offices down rather than promote racism and reaction. This concentration of media not only acts on daily newspapers, it also has served to corrupt and depoliticize the alternative press. There was an excellent article in the Nation--yes, the Nation--the other week on how "radical" alternative press entrepreneurs are buying up these types of newspapers around the country and deemphasizing politics at the expense of life-style and other mainstream concerns. So what do we do about this? Doug supports Bourdieu's arguments which in my view amounts to a form of sectarianism of a highly intellectual version. It reminds me of the arguments I have had with LM supporters on the Trotsky newsgroup. When I rail against oil corporations polluting the ocean, they say that's the way capitalism operates. To demand that they stop polluting the ocean is a "reformist" demand. Part of our problem is that we lack a political voice that can articulate these kinds of demands in the fashion that they deserve. By bringing them to public attention and naming the system that is responsible--CAPITALISM--it would serve to raise consciousness and open people's minds to the value of publicly owning the means of production democratically--SOCIALISM. The best we can hope for right now are campaigns like the dreadful Nader bid, which did almost as much harm as good. It is extremely urgent that election campaigns begin to voice the message that is absolutely essential for the period we are going through: capitalism is a barbaric system and must be replaced. Which brings us to the Nation. Carroll Cox is completely correct. The defection of this magazine into the Clinton camp is one of the most shameful expressions of liberalism's bankruptcy in modern memory. When the editors told Cockburn to "go easy" on Clinton, I just gave up hope on the magazine. I read it now because of the crossword puzzle and the occasional good article such as the one on what's been happening to the alternative press. But all in all, I find the political content to be totally inappropriate to the social and economic crisis we are in. Which brings me to my final point. Doug Henwood and Carroll Cox are completely correct. We have to concentrate on building our own institutions like LBO, Counterpunch, Dollars and Sense, New from Indian Country that I all have subscriptions to. Beyond that we have to find a way to create a renewed socialist voice, one that is not attached to any of the zombie sect-cults. It should be in the spirit of the Debs socialist press or the best of the Daily Worker in the 30s and 40s after the "popular front" turn. The Daily Worker had one of the best sports pages in the country whose campaign for integration was responsible in large part for Jackie Robinson becoming a Brooklyn Dodger. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:1120] Re: Re: radical speakers wanted
On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, valis wrote: > > Theodore Kaszynski, who lives relatively nearby and has 0 money problems. > No, I'm serious. Recently I was reading through his manifesto for the > first time in 2 years; once past his peculiar "leftism" constructs (obviously > derived from vicarious observations during the '60s) one finds perceptions > for which the left may legitimately, if conditionally, claim him I'm not sure why you'd want to claim someone as a leftist who hates the left. This is sort of like those postie marxists who all celebrated the work of nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Frances
[PEN-L:1131] The excessive number of re re re<3.0.3.32.19980822092004.00721f30@popserver.panix.com><35DE4768.88CC93C7@ecst.csuchico.edu> <3.0.3.32.19980822113402.0110078c@popserver.panix.com>
Bill Rosenberg is trying to help me figure out the problem. For now, maybe you can just manualy delete some of the re's. I also find them annoying. Louis Proyect wrote: > (By the way, what is the deal with the fucked up listproc software which > throws "re's" in front of a subject heading like the cascading brooms in Walt > Disney's "Sorcerer and the Apprentice"?) > -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1118] Re: radical speakers wanted
Our honorable moderator advertises: > I may be able to finagle a few leftish speakers to come up to Chico. We > don't have much money, so the person would have to be travelling through > or residing in the Bay Area. > > Any good suggestions? Theodore Kaszynski, who lives relatively nearby and has 0 money problems. No, I'm serious. Recently I was reading through his manifesto for the first time in 2 years; once past his peculiar "leftism" constructs (obviously derived from vicarious observations during the '60s) one finds perceptions for which the left may legitimately, if conditionally, claim him. valis
[PEN-L:1124] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Media Ownershp and pen-l style
my synapses finally worked: it was Colonel McCormack who ran the Chicago TRIB as his own personal empire, seemed to sympathize with the Nazis, and got into trouble with Roosevelt for allegedly leaking US secrets to the Japanese during WW2. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:1119] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Media Ownershp and pen-l style
>I am saddened by the demise of the Nation. I used to love the New Republic also >in the days that Ridgeway and Kopkind ran it. I think this goes too far: Cockburn, Pollit, and (even) Hitchens make the Nation worth it. I liked Hitchens a lot on the issue of Trotsky and Orwell finking to the authorities. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:1116] Re: Re: Re: This list has some great kidders
C. Rob, You ask whether under Keynesianism "Is credit not always available, and is that credit not generally available at much more stable and realistic rates than 'free markets' can offer over time?" and I would say "No" to both. In terms of rationality, how often are government spending projects really rationalized to economic need? I would say not often. That means that while credit is available in nominal amounts it is not targeted to need. After all, there is only so much that can be done with infrastructure and defense budgets. As for adding to availability of credit, government credit is not fungible. It pays for project X and waits for revenue to pay off the debt. The authorities that "own" the bridges and tunnels, etc. are not fungible capitals. You can't buy stock in them. The money is consumed and not re-invested. Not to be supply-side about it, but credit in the private sector does go into the big pool of capitalist accumulation wherefrom it can be drawn as funding for new industry. The reason that works is that capitalists don't keep their money under their beds. They put it into savings instruments. That means that a huge proportion of accumulated cash can re-circulate since wealth is predominantly paper. Of course if too many capitalists demand cash for their paper, you have a panic and a crisis. Absent crisis, you have the famous "multiplier" effect, which is really just leverage, as I see it. When the government invests, the best one can hope for is that "profitable" government debt will simply reduce, after some period of time, the indebtedness of the government. That *may* lower interest rates, but it may not. In any event the total effect is small. Private credit, on the other hand, can provide leverage. It seems to me that a very small increase in the degree to which a nation's productive assets are leveraged will dwarf even the most ambitious government spending because, as we know, leverage begets leverage. The way I see, it finance capitalism is simply a way to leverage the productive assets of a country more effectively (under capitalism, of course). One particular advantage finance capitalism has over Keynesianism is that Keynesianism finances a few industries more than others. That creates a "narrow" market. One of the worrisome (by which *I* mean "delightful", at least to a Marxist) things about the present U.S. equity market is that it's so narrow. A few years ago, the broader you bought across the well-capitalized averages, the better you did. Germany, by comparison, has been seeing run-ups in anything new that comes across the tape. I think that within five years you will be able to pick stocks blindly out of the Nikkei and do well. As you suggested, the Japanese style of Keynesianism leads to disaster and I think it is because when the government tries to broaden out its investment, that leads inevitably to cronyism. There is not, at present, a system that expresses the true economic will of the people across the economy in the form of credit. Socialism anyone? peace
