[PEN-L:2751] Re: Re: Re: 2 questions
G'day Mike Jim, I'm guessing total factor productivity is wrong in as far as it frames the actual producer as but a factor of production - one of them little ways our order unconsciously factors its bankrupt ethics/values into its 'objective science', eh? Or is Jim also talking about incommensurability here - reminding us that we can't compare TFP across time, space or sector because of stuff like technological levels and relative labour costs. I'd love to know exactly what the case against TFP is, anyway. It gets talked about all the time here - we still have a few shards of family silver left in public hands in this country, and 'efficiencies' are always the reasons we're given to justify our handing it over to the privateers (and sitting by while government wipes out unions, too, for that matter). Be nice to be a little more theoretically and rhetorically equipped for the uneven contests that ensue ... Cheers, Rob.
[PEN-L:2789] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 2 questions
As usual, Jim - many thanks for this - you're a fine man to have on a list. I especially like that 'new growth' theory - seems to get terribly close to notions like variable capital and surplus value. A little more theoretical development there, and we could be in 1857 by 2010 ... Now all I gotta do is find out what disaggregated general equilibrium theory is - and probably end up wondering why they didn't chuck out equlibrium while they were chucking out aggregation. Many thanks again. Rob. The problems with the TFP is that it assumes (1) a neoclassical aggregate production function; (2) perfect competition; (3) that "factors" of production are paid according to their contribution. The last one isn't all bad, since once one realizes that externalities (benefits or costs that don't correspond to the payment made) exist, one can start talking about labor contributing more to output than it gets paid (etc.) This is part of the "new" growth theory. But the first assumption is a problem. The aggregate production function theory has been discredited, with the intelligent neoclassicals retreating to disaggregated general equilibrium theory. Note that I don't see anything wrong with aggregating capital goods. The problem is when we use it in a production function in hopes of saying anything about distribution theory. That's the point of the Cambridge Controversy. (Shockingly, I heard one paper at an URPE session at the economics convention in early January which used that aggregate production function theory -- and the even worse Solow theory of growth and distribution, complete with the implicit assumption of Say's Law. I'll keep the presenter's name secret to hide his shame. Joan Robinson must be spinning in her grave.) Instead of talking about TFP, we can talk about labor producitivity and output per unit of measured capital goods, keeping conscious of the problems of aggregation and the large extent of our ignorance concerning economic growth and technical change when it comes to quantification. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:2790] Books on the trade unions
Who's Sticking to the Union? ANDREW HACKER New York Review, February 18, 1999 (Complete article is at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html) --From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future by Stanley Aronowitz 246 pages, $25.00 (hardcover) published by Houghton Mifflin --Combating the Resurgence of Organized Labor: A Modern Guide to Union Prevention by Alfred T. DeMaria, 544 pages, $125.00 (paperback), published by Communications Training Institute --The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance by Taylor E. Dark, 233 pages, $37.50, published by Cornell University Press --Graduate Student Unionization Controversy at Yale University by the Yale University Office of Public Affairs and www.yale.edu/opa/gradschool/gradschool.html The statistics are striking. At the end of 1997, when the most recent complete count was made, 14.1 percent of employed Americans belonged to unions, the lowest proportion since 1936. At the close of World War II, when membership was at its height, 35.3 percent of working men and women carried union cards. Currently, 41.9 percent of union members are in the public sector, up from 25.8 percent twenty years ago. During this period, also, the number of women rose from 22.7 percent to 39.4 percent of total membership rolls. Moreover, 55.7 percent of union members have attended college, almost exactly the ratio for the workforce as a whole. Among the most strongly organized occupations are firefighters (71.6 percent), flight attendants (69.4 percent), and high school teachers (56.1 percent). Only 28.6 percent of coal miners now belong to unions, and only 19.5 percent of truck drivers. The teamsters union, with the son of Jimmy Hoffa as its new president, currently has 1.4 million members, down from 2.3 million when his father was its head. (Nor is there much likelihood that these losses will be reversed, as Hoffa's support comes largely from local satraps who have shown little interest in mounting organizing drives.) During the last two decades, the wage advantage for unionized workers with private jobs has fallen by 44.1 percent, although in the public sector it has moved up 9.5 percent.1 The reasons for the fall in membership have been much discussed. One cause, clearly, has been the decline of manufacturing in America and the transfer of much manufacturing work abroad. Because of labor-saving innovations, moreover, fewer people are needed to make steel or assemble cars. As a result, 16.1 percent of US workers now work in factories, down from 22.8 percent twenty years ago. There are also fewer people on corporate payrolls, which in the past were more likely to sign industrywide contracts. In the latest available count, the 800 largest US firms employed 17.0 percent of the overall workforce, against 25.7 percent twenty years earlier. Many of these companies now have much of their work done abroad or farm it out to relatively small domestic suppliers. Nike does not make a single sneaker in the United States; many publishers are sending typesetting overseas; insurance companies are having paperwork processed abroad. At home, corporate jobs are frequently assigned to temporary workers, who are often classed as "independent contractors," and are not easily reached in union organizing campaigns. Indeed, there are fewer long-term jobs, something union seniority could once guarantee. Last year, among men aged forty to forty-five, only 39.1 percent had worked ten or more years for their current employer, compared with 51.1 percent in 1983. "Back to the Future" could have been an alternate title of Stanley Aronowitz's plea for a revitalized labor movement. The famous labor leaders of the 1930s-Walter Reuther of the auto workers, John L. Lewis of the miners, Harry Bridges of the longshoremen-haunt his pages. (How many of today's union heads can we name?) So do the heady days of sit-down strikes and face-offs with National Guardsmen. Hence, too, Aronowitz's epigraph, from the old anthem: "Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!" Reviving the labor movement won't be easy. Only one in seven workers now belongs to unions, and in the private sector it is one in ten. True, the AFL-CIO signed up 400,000 new members in 1997, ranging from hotel workers in Las Vegas and janitors in Denver to nurses in San Diego. Yet during the same year, unions lost 200,000 members, because locals were decertified or (more likely) plants and companies closed or moved away. Given the size of today's workforce, unions would have to find 15 million new members to return to their 1945 high.2 1 Most of these figures and those in the tables accompanying this review are from Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, Union Membership and Earnings Data Book (Bureau of National Affairs, 1998) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:2791] USWA President Says December Import Data Portends Disaster for AmericanSteel Industryboundary=------------2A64C558EDA76C122FF48420
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --2A64C558EDA76C122FF48420 Dear Pen-L, Here is a press release concerning steel dumping. Last week in testimony before congress our international president George Becker said, "10,000 steelworkers have already lost their jobs because of steel dumping and another 100,000 steelworkers are on the edge of losing theirs." This is not idle chit-chat on George's part---it's the facts! Compounding this problem is the world wide weakness in demand. For example, in the oil and gas industry the domestic rig count is the lowest it has been since around 1900 when drilling rig counts were first kept. Your email pal, Tom L. 440-282-6015 phone 440-282-3704 fax http://www.uswa.org/press/press012899.html --2A64C558EDA76C122FF48420 name="press012899.html" filename="press012899.html" html" html" html head meta NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0" meta NAME="Template" CONTENT="C:\PROGRAM FILES\MICROSOFT OFFICE\OFFICE\html.dot" titleUSWA President Says December Import Data Portends Disaster for American Steel Industry/title /head body LINK="#FF" VLINK="#800080" BGCOLOR="#FF" font FACE="Arial Black" SIZE="5"u p align="center"USWA NEWS RELEASE/p /u/fontfont FACE="Arial Black" SIZE="4" pFor Distribution, Thursday, January 28, 1999 /p /fontfont FACE="Arial Black" pContact: Gary Hubbard (USWA/Wasington) 202/778-4384 dir dir pMarco Trbovich (USWA/Pittsburgh) 412/562-2442/p /dir /dir /fontfont FACE="Arial Black" SIZE="5" p align="center"USWA President Says December Import Databr Portends Disaster for American Steel Industry/p /fontfont FACE="Arial" p/fontfont face="Times New Roman"Washington, D.C. (Jan. 28) #150; George Becker, President of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), said today that release of the U.S. Commerce Department#146;s report on steel imports quot;offers clear evidence that jawboning and trade case filings simply will not prevent the collapse of the American steel industry.quot;/font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"While acknowledging a modest decline in the December level of imports, Becker said that if dumping continues at last month#146;s levels, quot;it will wipe out a basic industry that employs 150,000 American workers. Because major exporters like Japan haven#146;t agreed to a thing, there#146;s nothing to stop them from dumping more in the future.quot;/font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"Becker said the December import figures dramatize the need for immediate passage of legislation imposing temporary quotas on steel imports at pre-crisis levels, coupled with a comprehensive policy to prevent U.S. markets from continuing to be used as the dumping ground for the worldwide glut of steel./font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"The politically powerful 750,000-member USWA is pressuring for quota legislation that will be introduced in Congress in the near future by U.S. Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-IN) and U.S. Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-WV)./font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"Such a bill, if enacted, would curtail dumping by requiring our trading partners to limit steel shipments into the U.S. to pre-crisis levels. The USWA cites the December figures released by the Commerce Department as still astronomically higher than pre-crisis levels./font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"quot;If you only compare December with November,quot; Becker said, quot;it#146;s like missing the forest by looking at a tree.quot; He said December#146;s numbers reveal that historically high steel imports from Japan and Russia are still sky high./font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"quot;By annualizing the December number, you come up with foreign dumping that#146;s eating up almost 30 percent of the market #150; a lot more than before the crisis.quot; He added that while there had been a slight reduction in imports from Russia and Japan, other countries are quot;joining the parade of nations illegally dumping steel.quot;/font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"Becker pointed out that the December numbers reveal Japan is still dumping at a rate 170 percent higher than it was two years ago./font/p pfont face="Times New Roman"quot;Those who celebrate these unprecedented levels of lawlessness,quot; he said, quot;won#146;t be fooling anybody but themselves.quot;/font/p p align="center"font face="Times New Roman"# # #/font/p hr pa href="http://www.fairtradewatch.org/Standup.html"Return to Stand Up for Steel Index/a/p pReturn to a href="index.html"Press Release Directory/a/p p align="center"font size="2"a href="../default2.htm" target="_top"HOME/a | a href="../frameset_organize.html" target="_top"ORGANIZE/a | a href="../frameset_news.html" target="_top"NEWS/a | a href="../frameset_Services.html" target="_top"SERVICES/a | a href="../frameset_map.html" target="_top"MAP/a | a href="../frameset_rapid.html" target="_top"RAPID RESPONSE/a | a href="../frameset_help.html" target="_top"HELP/a | a
[PEN-L:2793] Re: Re: Re: Re: AIDS and the blow back
Michael Perelman wrote: The disease metaphor worked because diseases do not always respect such barriers. Doug Henwood wrote: Build gated communities? No they don't but I think you're underestimating the preference of the privileged to insulate themselves as much as possible from a problem rather than facing it head on. From the first, the response to AIDS has been to ignore its threat to "normal" (i.e., affluent white suburbanites) people, and stigmatize it as a disease of queers, junkies, and racial minorities. Unless lots of people in Scarsdale and Topeka start falling ill, the "normal" people will continue to believe this and act accordingly. I'm sorry to repeat myself on this to the point of boredom, but most intellectuals overestimate the power of reason in politics. Doug
[PEN-L:2794] Re: blow back again
I agree with everything that you wrote. I only mentioned the idea of disease because insulation is difficult and because it strikes at the person and raises deep fears that other social problems do not. Doug Henwood wrote: No they don't but I think you're underestimating the preference of the privileged to insulate themselves as much as possible from a problem rather than facing it head on. From the first, the response to AIDS has been to ignore its threat to "normal" (i.e., affluent white suburbanites) people, and stigmatize it as a disease of queers, junkies, and racial minorities. Unless lots of people in Scarsdale and Topeka start falling ill, the "normal" people will continue to believe this and act accordingly. I'm sorry to repeat myself on this to the point of boredom, but most intellectuals overestimate the power of reason in politics. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2797] Re: AIDS and the blow back n-1
Quoth Doug, in conclusion: I'm sorry to repeat myself on this to the point of boredom, but most intellectuals overestimate the power of reason in politics. ^^^ Say it yet again, Doug; till they get it. It's a deadly delusion. valis
[PEN-L:2801] Re: BLS Daily Report
BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1999 "This economy is the wonder of the economic world," Robert Dederick, consultant with the Northern Trust Co., tells the Bureau of National Affairs. "This is rewrite the [economic] textbook time. While the consumer continues to buy as if there is no tomorrow, the housing market is rip-roaring, and inflation is in check. It's a central banker's dream in a world that is a central banker's nightmare." Will wonders never cease? My advise for aspiring textbook rewriters -- wait and see. Wait and see. Judging strictly from the current volume of exuberant hyperbole, a hard rain is going to fall. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:2799] BLS Daily Report
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_01BE4EC9.47001F40 BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1999 The U.S. economy continued to outpace expectations, logging growth of 5.6 percent at an annual rate in the last 3 months of last year. The Commerce Department says solid consumer spending, business investment in equipment, home building, and an improvement in exports lifted gross domestic product to the strongest growth rate since the second quarter of 1996, when it advanced 6.1 percent. ... One measure of inflation, the GDP chain price index, increased 1.0 percent for the year - compared with 1.9 percent in both 1997 and 1996 - which made it the smallest increase since the index rose 1.0 percent in 1959. One has to go back to 1950 for a lower gain, when it rose 0.9 percent. ... (Daily Labor Report, page D-3). __The United States last year achieved the best combination of strong economic growth, low inflation, and low unemployment in more than 3 decades. The unexpectedly strong quarter pushed growth to 4.1 percent since the end of 1997, the largest such increase since 1984. Moreover, shortly before the end of the year, the economic expansion that began in April 1991 became the longest in U.S. peacetime history. ... Economists attributed the exuberant growth to a combination of influences, including low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment, and a spending spree by consumers emboldened by fatter paychecks and stock portfolios. ... (Washington Post, Jan. 30, page A1). __A year of pleasant economic surprises ended with the biggest one of all: a last minute burst of growth that surpassed even the most bullish predictions. ... 1998 was the third consecutive year that the economy had expanded at a nearly 4 percent pace. For all of 1998, the GDP increased 3.9 percent. ... (New York Times, Jan. 30, page A1). __The U.S. economy charged into 1999, suggesting that it will remain resistant to financial turmoil abroad for the foreseeable future. ... The report also showed that two of the economy's weak spots in 1998 - manufacturing and exports - appeared to be turning around. ... (Wall Street Journal, page A2). The U.S. economy continues to confound experts, surging when many expected it to cool. "This economy is the wonder of the economic world," Robert Dederick, consultant with the Northern Trust Co., tells the Bureau of National Affairs. "This is rewrite the [economic] textbook time. While the consumer continues to buy as if there is no tomorrow, the housing market is rip-roaring, and inflation is in check. It's a central banker's dream in a world that is a central banker's nightmare." ... Analysts interviewed still expect the economy to slow soon, but that are surprised at its vitality in this longest peace-time expansion in U.S. history. Most of the data released in January involved economic conditions at the end of the fourth quarter of 1998. But the strength of December and a January consumer confidence level near a historical high indicates strong momentum going into the new year. ... "The most notable report was the employment report," said the chief economist with Daiwa Securities America. ... Among the surprises, the employment report showed job growth at a robust 378,000 in December, and an unemployment rate, at 4.3 percent, that has not been lower in 30 years. "We think January is going to be a strong employment report, but not s strong as December," the senior economist with Macroeconomic Advisers in St. Louis said. Jobs supply the fuel for spending, and spending has driven this expansion. ... (Daily Labor Report, page D-1). The January unemployment rate, due out Friday, is forecast to be 4.4 percent according to the Technical Data Consensus Forecast in The Wall Street Journal (page A6). The December unemployment rate was 4.3 percent. Nonfarm payrolls are expected to increase by 180,000, compared with a rise of 378,000 in December. --_=_NextPart_000_01BE4EC9.47001F40 b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQWAAwAOzwcCAAIACwAdADsAAgA/AQEggAMADgAAAM8HAgAC AAsAHQA7AAIAPwEBCYABACEAAABERUU3NjEyQzhCQkFEMjExODg4RTAwQzA0RjhDNzgzMQA+BwEE gAEAEQAAAEJMUyBEYWlseSBSZXBvcnQAkAUBDYAEAAICAAIAAQOQBgBIDAAAHEAAOQCg mrpGyU6+AR4AcAABEQAAAEJMUyBEYWlseSBSZXBvcnQAAgFxAAEWAb5OyVcf LGHn37qLEdKIjgDAT4x4MQAAHgAxQAENUklDSEFSRFNPTl9EAAMAGkAAHgAw QAENUklDSEFSRFNPTl9EAAMAGUAAAgEJEAEAAACHCQAAgwkAAGUQAABMWkZ1 RwHs2v8ACgEPAhUCpAPkBesCgwBQEwNUAgBjaArAc2V0bjIGAAbDAoMyA8UCAHDccnESIAcTAoB9 CoAIzx8J2QKACoENsQtgbmcxODAzMwr7EvIB0CBCgkwF8ERBSUxZB/BARVBPUlQsBdBPCk4YwFkZ gEZFQlIoVUFSGQAxGYAxOQca8AqFCoVUaGUgVVAuUy4gBZFuA3B5GiAcoXQLgApQZCB0VG8gCGB0 CrBjHCBlvHhwBZABkB1AAiBzGYBJFMBnZwuAZyAJwG8Id3RoHdBmIDUutDYgHoByHjACMCAewJ8h EAOgAHAdYAdAIHIewF8cIAuAHaAcEQtgcwVAM3YgBGACMGgEICAxIrN53mUKwBxwG/MIUG0HgCDB
[PEN-L:2804] Re: Re: Re: Re: Russia
Jim, Recently in Sacramento, David Marshall of the CPUSA spoke about the Russian crisis and the responses of the Communist parties. In a nutshell, despite the awful suffering of the population at the hands of we know who (ex-nomenklatura and U.S. capital), he was encouraged during his recent visit by the grassroots efforts underway to make the political system work for the Russian people. Regards, Seth Sandronsky Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 06:54:26 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:2718] Re: Re: Re: Russia Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Saith I: f the Weimar/Russia analogy holds, we should expect fascism to rise to the top in Russia soon. quoth Maggie: Jim, haven't a number of fascists already won significant numbers of votes in Russian elections? I can't remember the guys name, but I saw a 60 min interview with some guy who impressed me as being fascist, crazy, and charismatic -- a deadly combo. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Vladimir Zhirnowsky (sp?), a.k.a. Russian Limbaugh? He's gained a lot of popularity (though my untutored impression is that he's peaked). I was familiar with him, but that's not what I was talking about. I was thinking of the general imposition of Mussolini-type fascism (or worse) on Russia as a whole. A coup by the military perhaps, not only to restore Law and Order to Russia (while junking the sham democracy and the subservience to the US/IMF) but to save the miltary's own bacon (since they're in big trouble too). It will involve heavy Russian nationalism and probably antisemitism. It might even portray itself as left-wing, attacking the growing societal inequality (a flashback to the Peruvian coup of 1968). But then again, I've been predicting something like that for several years now and it hasn't happened. Yeltsin still hangs on. My inability to predict is probably based on inadequate understanding of the Russian situation. So I hope that someone on pen-l chimes in with more information and analysis. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
[PEN-L:2806] Re: Real Republican motives
I'll believe this when Gary Hart enters the 2000 Demo primaries on a platform of restoring transparency to presidential philandering. Charles Brown wrote, How about this as a real motive behind the seemingly self-destructive Republican continuing press on impeachment ? They are trying to get rid of the Independent Counsel statute. It originated after Watergate , and Republicans have always disliked it. Republican Presidents have been its main targets. Just as Reagan undid the New Deal by running deficit spending into the ground, the powers-that-be are using the same method to destroy the Indep. Counsel law: run it into the ground so everybody hates it. The Republican goal is to strengthen the office of the Presidency in the long run. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:2795] Re:virtuous circles
Doug Henwood asked, I've given up trying to get a response to this sort of thing from the cranks on PKT. Any reactions here? In a word, "hubris". So today's WSJ article on Keynes says: quote But the 1990s boom has also had a distinctly reverse-Keynesian flavor. Countries that made the tough decisions to reduce their deficits have thrived, as supportive financial markets rallied, further discrediting the old Keynesian thinking. For a 1996 report on fiscal policy around the world, IMF economists conducted a detailed study of 62 attempts by industrial countries over the prior quarter-century to get their finances in order. The study concluded that the 14 cases where governments had been the most draconian -- notably Denmark and Ireland in the mid-1980s -- resulted in the fastest growth. "The simple 'Keynesian' view of fiscal consolidation is that lower government purchases or higher taxes reduce aggregate demand," the report said. Instead, it concluded, "there may be a virtuous circle between economic growth and debt-ratio reduction." /quote regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:2800] Re: AIDS and the blow back n-1
Valis wrote, Quoth Doug, in conclusion: I'm sorry to repeat myself on this to the point of boredom, but most intellectuals overestimate the power of reason in politics. ^^^ Say it yet again, Doug; till they get it. It's a deadly delusion. Belief in the "power of reason in politics" is most akin to the fixation in the mind of a stalker that the object of his affliction is running away from true love. Sorry to be so bleak. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:2802] photo exhibit - every worker is an organizer
[COMMENT: Anyone who is in or visits the DC area should try to take in this show. If you've admired the labor journalism of David Bacon, you will be even more moved by his exceptional skills as a photojournalist who captures the world through the lens of a union activist and organizer (he is and has been both). Don't miss it!] "Every Worker is an Organizer -- Farm Labor and the Resurgence of the United Farm Workers" Forty-one photographs by David Bacon The George Meany Memorial Archives Gallery 1 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20903 January 29 - May 28, 1999. Exhibit hours: Weekdays, 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Closed weekends and holidays-- February 15 and April 2. For directions, call 301/431-5451. Every Worker is an Organizer Farm Labor and the Resurgence of the United Farm Workers Forty-one photographs by David Bacon Farm labor is a key element historically in the photographic documentation of social reality in the US, and in particular the documentation of social protest. Dorothea Lange, Hansel Meith, Otto Hegel, and the generation of the 1930s and 1940s left a body of work showing the extreme exploitation of farm workers, documenting the early farm labor organizing efforts, part of the great labor upsurge of those decades. The iconography of social documentary photography was shaped by images like Lange's mother and children in Nipomo, or those of the Pixley cotton strikers packed onto the back of a truck under their banner "Disarm the rich farmer or arm the workers for self-defense!" or the growers with their rifles waiting in ambush. The first two decades of the growth of the United Farm Workers was undoubtedly one of the most-photographed social protests of the civil rights era. It too had its icons -- the line of marchers on their way from Delano to Sacramento, silhoutted against the sky, or Cesar Chavez weakened by his fast, at the side of Robert Kennedy. When Chavez died, the union was at the nadir of its power, after twelve years of Republican governors had subverted the intent of the nation's first farm labor law, and after growers had abrogated contracts and ignored union election victories representing tens of thousands of workers. In 1994, under its new president, Arturo Rodriguez, and the continuing leadership of its cofounder, Dolores Huerta, the UFW began a new effort to rebuild its strength and power. On a second march from Delano to Sacramento, the union and its leaders brought their message of the resurgence of the union to thousands of workers on a month-long peregrinacion. In some of the world's largest agricultural corporations, the union used its associate member program, La Union del Pueblo Entero or The Union of the Whole People, to reorganize and begin winning contracts. Within two years, it had won 13 new contracts representing 6000 workers. In 1996, the UFW, together with the Teamsters Union and the organizing and field services departments of the AFL-CIO began one of the most ambitious organizing drives in the country. They took as an objective the organization of the entire central California coast strawberry industry, employing 25,000 workers. That ongoing struggle, still in progress, has pitted workers and their union against mass firings, blacklists, company unions, and the use of the legal structure to subvert workers' efforts. Last year, the union also continued to organize the country's largest vegetable companies. After gaining a contract with its old adversary, Bruce Church, workers at the second-largest vegetable grower, D'Arrigo Brothers walked out on strike. The photographs in this exhibit document this most recent period in the union's life. They show the determination of the marchers on their way to Sacramento. They document the organizing drive in Watsonville, and the strike at D'Arrigo. These images start with the working lives of people themselves. Strawberry pickers bend over double in the rows, working in the most painful labor imaginable, one which over years permanently damages the spine. These photographs show as well the extreme youth of farm workers today, where the average age has fallen to 20 and below, and include teenagers laboring in lettuce and strawberry fields. They document the culture of recent immigrants, many from the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, where Spanish itself is a second language to their own dialects. Like all workers, farm laborers take pride in the skill it takes to do their jobs, their bravery in the face of dangerous conditions (farm labor has one of the highest occupational injury rates of all US employment), and the social contribution they make in providing food for millions of people. The images include date palm workers, grape pickers and broccoli harvesters, and explore the connection between labor at work and the terrible living conditions in small farm worker towns. But these are not images of
[PEN-L:2805] Real Republican motives
How about this as a real motive behind the seemingly self-destructive Republican continuing press on impeachment ? They are trying to get rid of the Independent Counsel statute. It originated after Watergate , and Republicans have always disliked it. Republican Presidents have been its main targets. Just as Reagan undid the New Deal by running deficit spending into the ground, the powers-that-be are using the same method to destroy the Indep. Counsel law: run it into the ground so everybody hates it. The Republican goal is to strengthen the office of the Presidency in the long run. Charles Brown
[PEN-L:2807] economic stars
from the editors of Lingua Franca's "egghead" column in SLATE: Economic Star Power The Economist's survey of rising young stars in the economics profession found that this decade's hot young economists are the same people it named to the list 10 years ago. "Where are the Paul Krugmans of yesteryear?" the magazine asked, wondering why so few junior members of the field have crossed over into the public sphere. The answer seems to be that the very youngest generation is doing work that is too technical and too mathematical to attract much attention or be applied to questions of policy. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:2808] Cuba: Urgent Action Alert!
February 1, 1999 Dear Colleague, Global Exchange, the nonprofit internationalist organization based in San Francisco, California, has organized educational tours to the developing world for the past ten years. Our very popular Cuba tours have focused on every aspect of Cuban society (art and culture, religion, education, women's issues, economic and environmental issues and public health, to name but a few.) We are probably the second largest provider of travel services to Cuba in the U.S. and our trips have spawned many activists and organizations now working to end the U.S. embargo of Cuba. In September of this year, Global Exchange received a "cease and desist" order from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the Treasury Department, ordering us to stop organizing travel to Cuba for U.S. citizens and to provide the names of all participants on such trips since March 1996. Global Exchange will not comply with this order. The mission of Global Exchange is to build people to people ties between the U.S. and the developing world. It is our view that ordinary U.S. citizens have not only a right, but a responsibility to inform themselves as fully as possible of the realities of other nations and cultures, especially those with which the U.S. government may have a conflictive relationship, as is the case with Cuba. A commitment to the development of a better informed and more active citizenry is a major goal of Global Exchange. This latest Treasury Department action against us -- based on an overly broad interpretation of the archaic 1919 Trading with the Enemy Act and an overly narrow interpretation of the travel restrictions themselves-- is but one in a long history of outrageous infringements on the right of U.S. citizens to travel. These violations of an internationally recognized human right, committed by a government that repeatedly holds itself up as a model of democracy and human rights, must be resisted. We at Global Exchange view the cease and desist order as a significant threat but also an incredible opportunity. We have begun the complicated task of putting all of the pieces together for a major struggle with OFAC. We have garnered the legal support of the Center for Constitutional Rights. We have formally requested a meeting with the Treasury Department to discuss our now four year old application to be licensed as a Cuba travel service provider. Global Exchange is one of the best suited organizations in the country to qualify for a Cuba travel providers license. Each of our trips has a "clearly defined educational purpose," which is a category of licensable travel according to OFAC's own regulations. We have submitted numerous license requests to OFAC in the past several years, to no avail. Typically, we do not even receive a response, as in the case of the Travel Service Providers license we applied for in 1994. Given our history of challenging the travel restrictions, from spearheading the Freedom to Travel Campaign to our ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against OFAC in 1994-95, we have clearly been the victim of OFAC's discriminatory practices. Global Exchange has taken over 5,000 people to Cuba in the last 10 years, with the number of delegations increasing each year. In 1999, despite the obstacles OFAC has thrown in our way, we will organize over 20 tours to Cuba. The trips contribute to the development of a significant constituency of highly committed people working to end the embargo. Our past trip participants include Ann Bardach, whose New York Times exposé on links between the Cuban American National Foundation and exile terrorist Luis Posada made headlines across the U.S. this summer; Delvis Fernandez Levy, founder of the Cuban American Alliance and an increasingly important moderate exile voice on the Cuba question; and A.W. Claussen, former President of the World Bank and current member of Americans for Humanitarian Trade. On a lighter note, we are the fiscal sponsor for the highly successful Send a Piana to Havana Campaign of Benjamin Treuhaft, who first visited Cuba on one of our tours. As one of the most well-known and widely respected providers of educational travel to Cuba, we must defend ourselves from this frontal assault on our work. We will use this opportunity to draw national attention to the travel restrictions and hopefully build the support necessary to effect their demise. As we build our case with Treasury on the right of ordinary citizens to travel, we need to have the support of the organizations, progressive and mainstream, that supported our Freedom to Travel Campaign and lawsuit during 1993-1996. We hope that you and your organization will be in a position to assist us again on this all important issue. It is imperative that we act immediately as the Administration is currently reviewing the travel regulations and intends to make its changes -- if any -- before the middle of February. See the Urgent Action
[PEN-L:2810] Re: USWA President Says December Import DataPortends Disaster for American Steel Industry
At 09:06 AM 02/02/99 -0500, Tom L. wrote: Dear Pen-L, Here is a press release concerning steel dumping. Last week in testimony before congress our international president George Becker said, "10,000 steelworkers have already lost their jobs because of steel dumping and another 100,000 steelworkers are on the edge of losing theirs." This is not idle chit-chat on George's part---it's the facts! Compounding this problem is the world wide weakness in demand... Shouldn't we begin from the "world-wide weakness in demand" rather than so-called dumping? One points to the problem being world capitalism; the other tends to points at workers in other countries. Becker said the December import figures dramatize the need for immediate passage of legislation imposing temporary quotas on steel imports at pre-crisis levels, coupled with a comprehensive policy to prevent U.S. markets from continuing to be used as the dumping ground for the worldwide glut of steel... Such a bill, if enacted, would curtail dumping by requiring our trading partners to limit steel shipments into the U.S. to pre-crisis levels. Writing from Canada, it is now obvious that steel exports from Canada will be a major target this year in the trade disputes that are escalating between Canada and the US. Canadian nationalists will complain about US protectionism while advocating Canadian protectionism. Perhaps they will agree that the 'real' culprit isJapan, or Korea or I find that some people often go along with nationalist and protectionist views because they highlight the plight of workers suffering from how capitalism operates. However, because progressive-minded people can't go all the way down the nationalist road, the Pat Buchanans of the world win this argument. Hasn't this approach, including the definition of "dumping" imposed by rich countries, proven to be a reactionary dead end for the labour movement? Bill Burgess
[PEN-L:2811] Photo exhibit on farmworkers
"Every Worker is an Organizer -- Farm Labor and the Resurgence of the United Farm Workers" Forty-one photographs by David Bacon The George Meany Memorial Archives Gallery 1 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20903 January 29 - May 28, 1999. Exhibit hours: Weekdays, 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Closed weekends and holidays-- February 15 and April 2. For directions, call 301/431-5451. Every Worker is an Organizer Farm Labor and the Resurgence of the United Farm Workers Forty-one photographs by David Bacon Farm labor is a key element historically in the photographic documentation of social reality in the US, and in particular the documentation of social protest. Dorothea Lange, Hansel Meith, Otto Hegel, and the generation of the 1930s and 1940s left a body of work showing the extreme exploitation of farm workers, documenting the early farm labor organizing efforts, part of the great labor upsurge of those decades. The iconography of social documentary photography was shaped by images like Lange's mother and children in Nipomo, or those of the Pixley cotton strikers packed onto the back of a truck under their banner "Disarm the rich farmer or arm the workers for self-defense!" or the growers with their rifles waiting in ambush. The first two decades of the growth of the United Farm Workers was undoubtedly one of the most-photographed social protests of the civil rights era. It too had its icons -- the line of marchers on their way from Delano to Sacramento, silhoutted against the sky, or Cesar Chavez weakened by his fast, at the side of Robert Kennedy. When Chavez died, the union was at the nadir of its power, after twelve years of Republican governors had subverted the intent of the nation's first farm labor law, and after growers had abrogated contracts and ignored union election victories representing tens of thousands of workers. In 1994, under its new president, Arturo Rodriguez, and the continuing leadership of its cofounder, Dolores Huerta, the UFW began a new effort to rebuild its strength and power. On a second march from Delano to Sacramento, the union and its leaders brought their message of the resurgence of the union to thousands of workers on a month-long peregrinacion. In some of the world's largest agricultural corporations, the union used its associate member program, La Union del Pueblo Entero or The Union of the Whole People, to reorganize and begin winning contracts. Within two years, it had won 13 new contracts representing 6000 workers. In 1996, the UFW, together with the Teamsters Union and the organizing and field services departments of the AFL-CIO began one of the most ambitious organizing drives in the country. They took as an objective the organization of the entire central California coast strawberry industry, employing 25,000 workers. That ongoing struggle, still in progress, has pitted workers and their union against mass firings, blacklists, company unions, and the use of the legal structure to subvert workers' efforts. Last year, the union also continued to organize the country's largest vegetable companies. After gaining a contract with its old adversary, Bruce Church, workers at the second-largest vegetable grower, D'Arrigo Brothers walked out on strike. The photographs in this exhibit document this most recent period in the union's life. They show the determination of the marchers on their way to Sacramento. They document the organizing drive in Watsonville, and the strike at D'Arrigo. These images start with the working lives of people themselves. Strawberry pickers bend over double in the rows, working in the most painful labor imaginable, one which over years permanently damages the spine. These photographs show as well the extreme youth of farm workers today, where the average age has fallen to 20 and below, and include teenagers laboring in lettuce and strawberry fields. They document the culture of recent immigrants, many from the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, where Spanish itself is a second language to their own dialects. Like all workers, farm laborers take pride in the skill it takes to do their jobs, their bravery in the face of dangerous conditions (farm labor has one of the highest occupational injury rates of all US employment), and the social contribution they make in providing food for millions of people. The images include date palm workers, grape pickers and broccoli harvesters, and explore the connection between labor at work and the terrible living conditions in small farm worker towns. But these are not images of passive exploitation, designed to elicit a sympathetic response. They are a documentary record of the efforts workers have made to rebuild the strength of their union. One image shows Rodriguez and Huerta washing the feet of the union's founders the Thursday before Easter, according to Catholic custom, but also in a sign
[PEN-L:2809] Re: virtuous circles
On Tue, February 2, 1999 at 10:11:11 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes: So today's WSJ article on Keynes says: But the 1990s boom has also had a distinctly reverse-Keynesian flavor. Countries that made the tough decisions to reduce their deficits have thrived, as supportive financial markets rallied, further discrediting the old Keynesian thinking. For a 1996 report on fiscal policy around the world, IMF economists conducted a detailed study of 62 attempts by industrial countries over the prior quarter-century to get their finances in order. The study concluded that the 14 cases where governments had been the most draconian -- notably Denmark and Ireland in the mid-1980s -- resulted in the fastest growth. "The simple 'Keynesian' view of fiscal consolidation is that lower government purchases or higher taxes reduce aggregate demand," the report said. Instead, it concluded, "there may be a virtuous circle between economic growth and debt-ratio reduction." I've given up trying to get a response to this sort of thing from the cranks on PKT. Any reactions here? Let me throw in my 2 cents' worth... My understanding was that Keynes's ideas (as opposed to "Keynesian") were directed at an economy that was sputtering badly, and were designed to revive it. My simplistic understanding is that there is a "demand gap", and you can use government spending to close it. However, there need not always be a "demand gap", either actually present in the economy, or "latent" (in the sense that should government spending drop, the gap appears). So, I guess I question whether Keynes himself really had in mind what seems to be attributed to him. Didn't Keynes believe that a spiral downwards could be caused by fear? Well, what if "confidence" were restored not by spending but by beating up the workers? We know profit levels have been at record levels, so this seems a reasonable crutch. Finally, Jamie Galbraith had or has a grad student doing some work showing the remarkable continuity of government spending levels. Bill
[PEN-L:2819] last post
Friends, I forgot to state that the book review (actually it is a review article) from which I quoted, written by Yanis Varoufakis, appears in "Science Society," Winter 1998-99, pp. 585-591. michael yates
[PEN-L:2821] Re: Re: Re: Re: Chimpanzees, AIDS and ecology
In a message dated 99-02-01 23:23:26 EST, Jim Devine inquires: I forget... does "IMF" stand for International Milton Friedman or International Mother F**kers? I believe that the two alternative names are interchangeable. But perhaps we could build a probit model to test for their relative importance? maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2824] Re: postmodernism and neoclassical economics
In a review of "In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda" (edited by Ellen Wood and John Foster, Monthly Review 1997), economics professor, Yanis Varoufakis of the Univ. of Sydney, says, "Come to think of it, the asymptotic limit of postmodern fragmentation is the neoclassical general equilibrium economic model. In both cases, the only admissible social explanation springs from differences in preferences (and if identities are freely chosen, in identities) which are constructed in such a manner that they ban any comparison across persons. As for social relations, these are reduced to interplay, voluntarism and exchange. Freedom is defined in negative terms, and structural exploitation is axiomatically rendered meaningless. Above all else, both neoclassicism and postmodernity espouse a radical egalitarianism that is founded in the rejection of any standard by which the claims of one group (or one person) are more deserving than those of another. Moreover, both fail to provide a principle that promotes, in the context of their radical egalitarianism, respect for the other's difference or utility. If indeed postmodernity is analytically indistinguishable (at least in the limit) from neoclassical economic method, is there any doubt about this book's pertinence? After all, the whole purpose underpinning the emergence of the neoclassical economic project, at a time when Marx's "Capital" was beginning to bite, was to rid economics initially, and social science later, of history." What do list members think of this? I think that this is a little unfair to the PoMos in that a lot of them see individual "preferences" as socially conditioned, wherease neoclassicals see them as exogenously determined and beyond scientific analysis. Most PoMos would reject any pretentions of being scientific, too. On the other hand, when I read Wolf Resnick, I got the distinct impression that their main message was that "everything depends on everything else" which is the tautological message of neoclassical general equilibrium theory, too. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
[PEN-L:2813] Re: virtuous circles
On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Doug Henwood wrote: So today's WSJ article on Keynes says: quote The [IMF] study concluded that the 14 cases where governments had been the most draconian -- notably Denmark and Ireland in the mid-1980s -- resulted in the fastest growth. Ho ho ho. The IMF has outdone itself: this is Bubble-thought at its finest! Ireland was a ravaged neocolony in the early Eighties; the boom was a result of extensive EC subsidies (amounting to 1-2% of GDP in the mid-Eighties, and steadily rising to 5% of GDP today), which funded infrastructure, education, etc. As a result, Ireland has pulled very close to the UK in per capita income terms. Denmark piggybacked onto what we might call "OPK" (Other People's Keynesianisms), namely the vast Central European credit expansion of the mid-Eighties. Denmark also avoided huge budget deficits in the early Nineties because it never deregulated its economy the way the Swedes and Norwegians did, nor suffered from collapsing Soviet markets, the way Finland did. But expecting the truth from the IMF, that vicious gang of monetarist vampires criminally responsible for so much of the economic and social carnage afflicting Africa, Latin America, and now much of Southeast Asia, is a stretch, now isn't it. -- Dennis
[PEN-L:2815] Re: Andy Warhol
Friends, This is a very fine post, and we should reflect on it. I really love Andy Warhol. I recommend a visit to the Warhol Museum on Pitsburgh's seedy North Side. It's a great museum. Warhol was born into poverty in Pittsburgh, and whatever one can say about his lifestyle, I have never heard a family member say a bad thing about him. What is more, he had his mother come to live with him not long after he went to NYC. I wonder what she thought about it all. She wrote commentaries for some of his paintings and these appear right on the canvas. Warhol's paintings tell us something profound about our society, that at its heart, it is as empty as it can be. And an empty society is bound to generate a lot of empty production whether it be endless shopping malls or art. Of course, Warhol offers us no transcendance, that is for us to achieve. michael yates michael yates Louis Proyect wrote: Ben Shahn is an icon of the working-class and revolutionary 1920s and 30s. Jackson Pollock emerges from this milieu, but becomes transformed by ex-Trotskyist art critics into a symbol of cold-war liberalism. The respective schools they spoke for--social realism and Abstract Expressionism--came to an end because the objective conditions that gave birth to them came to end. By the mid 1950s, nobody could paint murals in public spaces depicting a heroic, immigrant working-class for the simple reason that it had ceased to exist. By the same token, nobody could pretend that painting large monochromatic or drip-spattered canvases was pushing the artistic envelope, when you could find such canvases in corporate boardrooms across the country. When Andy Warhol moved to NYC in 1958 after graduating from the Carnegie Art Institute (now part of Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh, he knew that Abstract Expressionism had no future. He wasn't quite sure what would take his place, so he kept his eyes open while pursuing a career as a commercial artist and window-dresser. His drawings for upscale clients such as Bonwit-Teller appeared in quarter-page ads in the NY Times and made him a lot of money. Interestingly enough, these works were heavily influenced by the "faux naif" style of Ben Shahn, giving them a whimsical, folk art quality. Some of his earliest gallery shows were inspired by these commercial works and helped to establish his reputation in the NY art scene. His work as a window-dresser could be a topic for an entire article that compared the careers of L. Frank Baum and Warhol. Although Baum is best known as the author of "Wizard of Oz," he also started out as a window dresser, seeking out assignments with retailing magnates who shared his love for Madame Blavatsky's brand of spiritualism. Baum's Emerald City was meant to evoke department stores like Marshall Fields in Chicago, where consumerism, theosophy and a personal-improvement brand of Christianity were thrown together in a distinctly American goulash. Despite Warhol's cynical exterior, he had a strong affinity for new age spiritualism while climbing his way to the top of the art world. Billy Name, his chief assistant at the Factory--his famous studio--was a theosophy devotee who talked Warhol into the benefit of crystals, which he wore everywhere. Like Baum, Warhol believed in the magic of department stores and shopping. The big difference between the two is that Warhol did not believe in much of anything else, while Baum remained a booster of American capitalism in all its dimensions. Perhaps Warhol would have become a Pop Artist without a background in commercial art, but it is safe to say that it must have accelerated his decision to take up this new style. He first became aware of it through the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who had both begun to appropriate bits and pieces of the everyday world in their paintings, such as advertising, grocery store merchandise or comic strips. Pop Art was undoubtedly a reaction to the overweening pretensions of the Abstract Expressionist school, which had invested figures like Jackson Pollock with a saintliness hard to take seriously. While people like Clement Greenberg were busy deifying Pollock, De Kooning and Rothko, young Turks like Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol understood that the art world was more about image and marketing than anything else. Since the ex-Trotskyists probably retained a smidgen of their 1930s radicalism, it must have been particularly galling to see high culture wedded to advertising in Pop Art. The liberal intelligentsia generally had no use for Madison Avenue, as evidenced by Arnold Toynbee's clarion call in 1961: "The destiny of Western civilization turns on the issue of our struggle with all that Madison Avenue stands for more than it turns on the issue of our struggle with Communism." Warhol could not disagree more with Toynbee and later declared that "Buying is much more American than thinking and I'm as American
[PEN-L:2823] Re: Re: Re: AIDS and the blow back
William S. Lear wrote:
No they don't but I think you're underestimating the preference of the
privileged to insulate themselves as much as possible from a problem rather
than facing it head on. From the first, the response to AIDS has been to
ignore its threat to "normal" (i.e., affluent white suburbanites) people,
and stigmatize it as a disease of queers, junkies, and racial minorities.
Unless lots of people in Scarsdale and Topeka start falling ill, the
"normal" people will continue to believe this and act accordingly. I'm
sorry to repeat myself on this to the point of boredom, but most
intellectuals overestimate the power of reason in politics.
I'm not sure I follow. You say the "privileged" would rather
"insulate themselves" from the AIDS problem "rather than facing it
head on". I agree. Why bother with a disease you think only affects
"others", particularly when you are privileged ("affluent white
suburbanites") and can live a life of isolated ease?
There's a question of whether they can successfully insulate themselves
from microbes. They may think so, but pathogens are devious, persistent
little buggers.
However, I don't
see how your last sentence follows from this. First, how does it
follow, and second, what exactly do you mean? Who exactly are you
referring to and could you give us an example?
It's very hard to persuade affluent Americans that the problems of the poor
can be their problems too someday, or that ecological crisis could have any
bearing on them. No doubt many, even most, people who drive SUVs consider
themselves environmentalists of some sort. You can present all kinds of
reasoned stats on rising surface temperatures and climatic instability, or
on the risks of infection of "normal" populations, and they won't believe
you. And if any of the threats become too real, it's likely they'll opt for
containment (incarceration, quarantine) or private sector solutions
(private schools, air filters, bottled water) over more humane approaches.
Maybe it's just that I saw Blade Runner the other night.
Doug
[PEN-L:2812] Common sense will sink us yet
=== Under the above title, I forwarded Doug's Brian Barry quote from "Thatcherism" to a correspondent in the Deep South. Presently the following analysis / prophecy came back, entitled "Common sense and vampires." Whaddya think, class? valis I've been thinking a lot about addiction lately, not because I work for a nonprofit company that does drug, alcohol and tobacco prevention, but because a priest friend of mine remarked the other day that the vampire is, or rather evokes, the archetype of addiction. The more I think about it, it is true. (I'll connect this up to the social/economic scene in a second.) Dracula's home was an abandoned monastery in Transylvania (crumbling of Christian hegemony). He was an old man, and to revive himself he had to suck the blood of a willing female. (The key word is willing.) Because of his charm, females would allow him to drink their blood and as a result become zombies, bereft of the ordinary human emotions. It's an archetypal perversion of the Eucharist, by the way. The priest pointed out that the addict likewise must prey upon another, such as a co-dependent spouse or lover, and the victim must be willing and believe that s/he is saving the addict. The charm of the addict enables him to convince the victim to make the sacrifice. Family members of addicts frequently describe themselves as zombies. It occurred to me yesterday that Wall Street has all the characteristics of the addictive archetype. It's charming, makes a few people very rich, proclaims that its welfare and reinvigoration are essential, and requires new victims on a regular basis to willingly make the sacrifice. Since WW2, here are the major victims (omitting non-Americans like the Iraqis, Guatemalans, Salvadorians, Brazilians, Iranians, Vietnamese, East Timorese and Indonesians): 1. 58,000+ young Americans in Vietnam (1960-1974). (This exercise in patriotic sanguinity stoked the coffers of Wall Street over a decade.) 2. The lower middle (blue-collar) class (1972-1984). This started with Nixon and Schultz's affirmative action program specifically designed to split up the unions, and culminated with Reagan's firing of the striking air traffic controllers. The unions lost the war at that point. The NLRB was stacked with Republican appointees charged to ignore the law. 3. The middle (managerial) class (1980-1992). Downsizing, globalization, outsourcing, leveraged buyouts and merger mania put a lot of white collar folks on the street, only to find jobs paying considerably less. The willing victims, evangelized by the cult of the free market, willingly sacrificed themselves for the official god and voted for Reagan and Bush. 4. The poor (1989-96). Welfare reform, workfare, Medicaid cuts, cuts in public housing, increases in homelessness, doubling of prison beds, the war on drugs, the attack on civil liberties, etc. "Ending welfare as we know it." More unemployed means lower wages, lower taxes, and higher profits. Slurrrp! 5. The elderly (1997-). The privatization of Social Security. This is the most obviously blood-sucking move of them all. Divert SS tax revenue directly into the stock market, which is living on borrowed time with a world collapse slowly making its way to our shores; an extra $100 billion or so would prop up stock prices for a long time. Reinvigoration! 6. After the elderly are robbed the next class will be the professionals. Health care professionals are under attack at the moment through managed health care. Professors and education professionals have been experiencing a slow decline for some time, but I predict that the attack will be savage when it comes. There have already been attempts to put university classes online and claim the electronic materials thus generated as intellectual property by the institution. The brave new world envisioned by the vampire will not need intellectuals -- in fact, it already regards free thought as dangerous. People who think don't willingly become victims. 7. Lawyers will be the last obstacle, because they are one of the main instruments used by the vampire. With the abolition of serious tort litigation, the law firms specializing in defense will downsize by, I suspect, 60 to 70 percent. Plaintiff lawyers have already seen a drastic reduction in their own numbers, simply through the consolidation forced by the legalization of law services advertisement. Since there will be a lot of competent lawyers on the street without any place to go, the surplus of lawyers will ultimately fall subject to Ricardo's Iron Law. Some will hang up their shingle and attempt to go it alone. Sole practitioners, however, make most of their income from the lower middle class, which is being crushed. As those fees continue to plummet, fewer persons will apply to law school and become lawyers. Those lawyers unable to support themselves in a world where legal
[PEN-L:2818] Bad Writing Awards (fwd)
BECAUSE EVERY STRUGGLING GRAD STUDENT NEEDS SOMETHING TO ASPIRE TO
Philosophy and Literature announces Winners of the Fourth Bad Writing Contest
(1998)
Full text at http//www.cybereditions.com/aldaily
We are pleased to announce winners of the fourth Bad Writing Contest
sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature.
The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages
found in scholarly books and articles published in recent years. Ordinary
journalism, fiction, departmental memos, etc. are not eligible, nor are
parodies entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic
journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where
unintended self-parody is so widespread.
Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S. are
among those who wrote winning entries in the latest contest.
Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and
comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley,
admired as perhaps "one of the ten smartest people on the planet,"
wrote the sentence that captured the contest's first prize. Homi K. Bhabha,
a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of postcolonial studies,
produced the second-prize winner.
"As usual," commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature,
"this year's winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who
have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must
know
what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all
published by distinguished presses and academic journals."
Professor Butler's first-prize sentence appears in "Further Reflections on
the Conversations of Our Time," an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics
(1997)
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of
hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and
rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of
structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes
structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights
into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of
hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power."
Dutton remarked that "it's possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such
writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to
praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest people on the
planet'."
This year's second prize went to a sentence authored by Homi K. Bhabha, a
professor of English at the University of Chicago. He writes in The Location
of Culture (Routledge, 1994)
"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline
soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories,
superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the
desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of
splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory
modality."
This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters of the University of
Iowa, who describes it as "quite splendid enunciatory modality, indeed!"
Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol in the U.K.,
supplied
a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled Twelve Views of
Manet's "Bar" (Princeton University Press, 1996)
"As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the
biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet's work of
"Les noms du p=E8re," a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus ("Les
Non-dupes errent"), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of
paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred
introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically
irreducible dyad of the mother and child."
Stewart Unwin of the National Library of Australia passed along this gem from
the Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997). The author is
Timothy W. Luke, and the article is entitled, "Museum Pieces Politics and
Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History"
"Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive
means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly,
the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social
tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life's
everlasting quest for survival, and canonizing now dead individuals as
nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An
anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating
and classifying such necroliths in the museum's observational/expositional
performances."
The passage
[PEN-L:2822] Re: virtuous circles
In a message dated 99-02-02 10:11:07 EST, doug quotes a keynesian article: For a 1996 report on fiscal policy around the world, IMF economists conducted a detailed study of 62 attempts by industrial countries over the prior quarter-century to get their finances in order. The study concluded that the 14 cases where governments had been the most draconian -- notably Denmark and Ireland in the mid-1980s -- resulted in the fastest growth. "The simple 'Keynesian' view of fiscal consolidation is that lower government purchases or higher taxes reduce aggregate demand," the report said. Instead, it concluded, "there may be a virtuous circle between economic growth and debt-ratio reduction." Keynes view on debt (at least the way I understand it) was that debt was good when the economy was stalled at a less than full employment equilibrium. When an economy was expanding, I do believe he was opposed to continuing debt. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2814] Andy Warhol
Ben Shahn is an icon of the working-class and revolutionary 1920s and 30s. Jackson Pollock emerges from this milieu, but becomes transformed by ex-Trotskyist art critics into a symbol of cold-war liberalism. The respective schools they spoke for--social realism and Abstract Expressionism--came to an end because the objective conditions that gave birth to them came to end. By the mid 1950s, nobody could paint murals in public spaces depicting a heroic, immigrant working-class for the simple reason that it had ceased to exist. By the same token, nobody could pretend that painting large monochromatic or drip-spattered canvases was pushing the artistic envelope, when you could find such canvases in corporate boardrooms across the country. When Andy Warhol moved to NYC in 1958 after graduating from the Carnegie Art Institute (now part of Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh, he knew that Abstract Expressionism had no future. He wasn't quite sure what would take his place, so he kept his eyes open while pursuing a career as a commercial artist and window-dresser. His drawings for upscale clients such as Bonwit-Teller appeared in quarter-page ads in the NY Times and made him a lot of money. Interestingly enough, these works were heavily influenced by the "faux naif" style of Ben Shahn, giving them a whimsical, folk art quality. Some of his earliest gallery shows were inspired by these commercial works and helped to establish his reputation in the NY art scene. His work as a window-dresser could be a topic for an entire article that compared the careers of L. Frank Baum and Warhol. Although Baum is best known as the author of "Wizard of Oz," he also started out as a window dresser, seeking out assignments with retailing magnates who shared his love for Madame Blavatsky's brand of spiritualism. Baum's Emerald City was meant to evoke department stores like Marshall Fields in Chicago, where consumerism, theosophy and a personal-improvement brand of Christianity were thrown together in a distinctly American goulash. Despite Warhol's cynical exterior, he had a strong affinity for new age spiritualism while climbing his way to the top of the art world. Billy Name, his chief assistant at the Factory--his famous studio--was a theosophy devotee who talked Warhol into the benefit of crystals, which he wore everywhere. Like Baum, Warhol believed in the magic of department stores and shopping. The big difference between the two is that Warhol did not believe in much of anything else, while Baum remained a booster of American capitalism in all its dimensions. Perhaps Warhol would have become a Pop Artist without a background in commercial art, but it is safe to say that it must have accelerated his decision to take up this new style. He first became aware of it through the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who had both begun to appropriate bits and pieces of the everyday world in their paintings, such as advertising, grocery store merchandise or comic strips. Pop Art was undoubtedly a reaction to the overweening pretensions of the Abstract Expressionist school, which had invested figures like Jackson Pollock with a saintliness hard to take seriously. While people like Clement Greenberg were busy deifying Pollock, De Kooning and Rothko, young Turks like Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol understood that the art world was more about image and marketing than anything else. Since the ex-Trotskyists probably retained a smidgen of their 1930s radicalism, it must have been particularly galling to see high culture wedded to advertising in Pop Art. The liberal intelligentsia generally had no use for Madison Avenue, as evidenced by Arnold Toynbee's clarion call in 1961: "The destiny of Western civilization turns on the issue of our struggle with all that Madison Avenue stands for more than it turns on the issue of our struggle with Communism." Warhol could not disagree more with Toynbee and later declared that "Buying is much more American than thinking and I'm as American as they come." (This is quoted on page 76 of David Bourdon's "Warhol," (Abrams, 1989), which provides most of the details for this article. I can not recommend this book highly enough. Not only is it scrupulously fair to Warhol, it is also beautifully written. As Warhol is an icon of the 60s and 70s, such a book can only succeed as social history. Everything you ever wanted to know and more about psychedelic dance parties, underground movies and Studio 54 is in there.) Jackson Pollock had a skeleton in his closet. He had decided to make a quick buck and allowed Vogue Magazine to use several of his paintings as a backdrop in a March 1, 1951 article on the latest French fashions. Photographed by Cecil Beaton, the Richard Avedon of the time, the models look perfectly congruous against the drip paintings, seen from our contemporary vantage point. One of the drawbacks of Abstract Expressionism is that it lends itself to co-optation because of its stubborn refusal
[PEN-L:2825] Re: postmodernism and neoclassical economics
I'll leave it to others to compare pomo with GET. I find it interesting that Varoufakis writes for Science Society. He is a game theorist with a refreshingly unorthodox take on the strengths and limitations of the field. His "critical introduction" to game theory with Shaun Hargreaves Heap is top notch, and I am looking forward to his new economics textbook. (Did anyone else take a peak at the ASSA meetings? Looks good, no?) Peter Dorman
[PEN-L:2820] Re: Individualism (was Re: Re: AIDS and the blow back3.0.1.32.19990201122711.00b29da0@popserver.panix.com3.0.3.32.19990201110822.006ce850@lmumail.lmu.edu v04011707b2dc25721b22@[166.84.250.86]
A new area for individual action to stay ahead of failures is in electric power. A number of otherwise inciteful people are extolling the benefits of "getting off the grid." There are some new small electric generating technologies that appeal to people. Put one in your garage or on your roof and you can be off the grid and perhaps generating cleaner electricity than from the system grid. But this is a replay of destroying public transit with the private auto. And it has powerful adverse implications for lower income people. The capital cost of self-generation at the home will be high, so low-income people will be left on the grid, which over time may be allowed to deteriorate like public transit. In addition, of course, the society will have more generating capacity than would be necessary to serve the load. this is because each business/dwelling would own capacity to serve its peak demand, so that the total would be much larger than the diverse peak of all together. Beyond that, those self-owning capacity -- your local super-market or office building, along with industrial enterprises -- would want to sell INTO the grid when they were not fulling utilizing the capacity of the self-owned generation. They would want to sell at a high price, and buy when needed (when equipment was down, for example) at a low price -- i. e. get guaranteed stand-by service at a low price. So this sort of individualism will have a high and inequitable price. It is probably coming THIS YEAR to your public utility commission for some decisions. Gene Coyle Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: Disease and blowback. In repsonse to the posts by Brad and Jim, I remember a semester ago talking about poverty to my class. Many listened politely for fear of offending the instructor rather than out of interest. Then, I spoke of pockets of poverty breeding diseases, such as t.b., which are becoming immune to antibiotics and threaten to blow back on the affluent. Then the mood of the class shifted to "what can we do?". Build gated communities? One of my favorite quotes, which I think I've posted here before: "I think it must be conceded that it is possible to create a society in which the response to market failure is not a swing to socialism, but an exacerbation of individual efforts to stay ahead by making and spending yet more money. Does the public health service have long waiting lists and inadequate facilities? Buy private insurance. Has public transport broken down? Buy a car for each member of the family. Is air pollution intolerable? Buy an air filtering unit and stay indoors. Is what comes out of the tap foul to the taste and chock-full of carcinogens? Buy bottled water. And so on. We know it can all hapen because it has: I have been doing little more than describing Southern California." -- Brian Barry, from an essay in book Thatcherism, edited by Robert Skidelsky (Chatto), quoted by Christopher Huhne in Manchester Guardian Weekly, 1/8/89 Doug
[PEN-L:2816] Re: Re: AIDS and the blow back
On Tue, February 2, 1999 at 10:21:06 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes:
Michael Perelman wrote:
The disease metaphor worked because diseases do not always respect such
barriers.
Doug Henwood wrote:
Build gated communities?
No they don't but I think you're underestimating the preference of the
privileged to insulate themselves as much as possible from a problem rather
than facing it head on. From the first, the response to AIDS has been to
ignore its threat to "normal" (i.e., affluent white suburbanites) people,
and stigmatize it as a disease of queers, junkies, and racial minorities.
Unless lots of people in Scarsdale and Topeka start falling ill, the
"normal" people will continue to believe this and act accordingly. I'm
sorry to repeat myself on this to the point of boredom, but most
intellectuals overestimate the power of reason in politics.
I'm not sure I follow. You say the "privileged" would rather
"insulate themselves" from the AIDS problem "rather than facing it
head on". I agree. Why bother with a disease you think only affects
"others", particularly when you are privileged ("affluent white
suburbanites") and can live a life of isolated ease? However, I don't
see how your last sentence follows from this. First, how does it
follow, and second, what exactly do you mean? Who exactly are you
referring to and could you give us an example?
I'm cautious about batting about terms like "reason" when coupled with
"politics". Expecting people to behave "reasonably", that is, in ways
which would help, say, the most number of people, would save our
resources, would provide goods and services more efficiently and
safely, etc., given current institutional structure is, well, quite
unreasonable. However, given the institutional structure, I think
many of the choices made, perhaps most, are quite "reasonable". I
think that most people are capable of reasoning fairly well --- they
know enough not to pay much attention to politics and to leave it to
the ten or fifteen percent of people who can afford to purchase
participation in it.
Bill
[PEN-L:2817] postmodernism and neoclassical economics
Friends, In a review of "In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda" (edited by Ellen Wood and John Foster, Monthly Review 1997), economics professor, Yanis Varoufakis of the Univ. of Sydney, says, "Come to think of it, the asymptotic limit of postmodern fragmentation is the neoclassical general equilibrium economic model. In both cases, the only admissible social explanation springs from differences in preferences (and if identities are freely chosen, in identities) which are constructed in such a manner that they ban any comparison across persons. As for social relations, these are reduced to interplay, voluntarism and exchange. Freedom is defined in negative terms, and structural exploitation is axiomatically rendered meaningless. Above all else, both neoclassicism and postmodernity espouse a radical egalitarianism that is founded in the rejection of any standard by which the claims of one group (or one person) are more deserving than those of another. Moreover, both fail to provide a principle that promotes, in the context of their radical egalitarianism, respect for the other's difference or utility. If indeed postmodernity is analytically indistinguishable (at least in the limit) from neoclassical economic method, is there any doubt about this book's pertinence? After all, the whole purpose underpinning the emergence of the neoclassical economic project, at a time when Marx's "Capital" was beginning to bite, was to rid economics initially, and social science later, of history." What do list members think of this? michael yates
