throat singing
I just saw a fine film, "Genghis Blues," about the remarkable experiences of blues singer and musician, Paul Pena. A native of the Cape Verde Islands (formerly a Portuguese colony and now part of Guinea-Bissau), Pena played with many jazz and blues greats and composed many songs. He is blind and at the film's beginning he is living in San Francisco and not doing particularly well. His wife has died and he has just come out of a long period of depression. He has bought a short wave radio and listens to broadcasts from around the world. One day he hears on Radio Moscow some unbelievable singing. It is the harmonic or throatsinging of singers from Tuva, a land north of Mongolia. ( I remember the beautiful diamond-shaped stamps of the republic of Tannu Tuva I lusted after when I was a boy). Tuva became part of the USSR during WW2. One of Genghis Khan's greatest generals was a Tuvan. Under the Soviets, the Tuvans were not allowed to use their language, and many Russians settled there. It is the size of North Dakota, and many people there are nomadic sheepherders and horsemen. The land is extraordinarily varied and has temperatures ranging from 100 degrees F to many degrees below zero. Tuvan singers have learned to sing in their throats in such a way as to produce more than one note at the same time. You have to hear it to believe it. Remarkably, Pena is so taken with the singing that he tracks a tape down in a record store, and he learns to do it himself. Using a braille device he also begins to learn Tuvan, translating letter by letter from Tuvan to Russian to English. Through a fantasitc set of circumstances, involving the Nobel physicist, Richard Feynman (who decided to go to Tuva as his last adventure and helped to establish a Tuvan-US friendship association), Tuvan singers come to San Francisco. Pena goes and astonishes the Tuvans by throatsinging for them. They insist that he come to Tuva for a great throatsinging contest. Others get involved and it is decided that a crew will go to make a film about his visit. The trip to Tuva is an adventure, but Pena's relationship with the Tuvans is the main theme of the movie. I don't want to give it away, but I was moved to tears. What was so awful was the horror of his life in the USA compared to the beauty of his life in Tuva. To the Tuvans he was not some poor blind black man, making his way down some shaby street to the corner store, but a hero, a truly wonderful human being, talented beyond words and beautiful to see and to hear. The Tuvans' embrace of Pena and his love of them make you see what we as humans are capable of, just as his tribulations here in the land of the free do the same though from a different angle. If you get the chance, don't miss this film. Michael Yates
The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 3 Mar 2000 -- 4:19 (#394)
__ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 3 March 2000 Vol. 4, Number 19 (#394) __ CONTENTS Defense Campaigns And Prisoner Support: SEIU Local 1877, "Yahoo! Censors Workers' Voices, Abruptily Ends Virtual Leafletting Campaign, 22 Feb 00 Movie Review: Freedom Song Real Political Correctness: Religious Liberty Protection Act of 2000, S. 2081 What's Worth Checking: 15 stories -- DEFENSE CAMPAIGNS AND PRISONER SUPPORT: Yahoo! Censors Workers' Voices, Abruptly Ends Virtual LA Airport Security Workers Rally at Yahoo! Headquarters to Protest Cancellation of Internet Ad Campaign Leafleting Campaign SEIU Local 1877 22 Feb 00 SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Yahoo!, one of the leading Web portals, has cancelled an advertising campaign which sought to bring a message, via the Internet, from passenger service workers attempting to form a union at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). With the help of the Respect at LAX campaign, passenger service workers at the airport employed by Argenbright Security, an AHL Services, Inc. company, were using virtual leaflets (banner advertisements) strategically placed on Yahoo! to publicize their labor dispute and a connecting Web site, www.un-fulfilled.com. The Campaign began distribution of the virtual leaflets in mid-January, but by early February, they were informed that the advertisements were being dropped because they ran counter to Yahoo's policy in this area. However, Yahoo! reviewed the banner ad content prior to commencement of the campaign. The virtual leaflets were presented to Web users who sought information on AHL Services, or their e-commerce subsidiary, Gage Marketing, via the Yahoo! Web site. If users clicked through on the leaflets, they were then connected to the un-fulfilled.com Web site. The cancellation came just days after Administrative Law Judge James L. Rose ruled that Argenbright was guilty of committing dozens of violations of federal labor laws against these employees. The violations include 40 suspensions and final warnings stemming from a legal, protected strike by the employees in April, 1999. They also include the disciplining of another union activist and threats, both written and verbal, against the Argenbright employees. The Campaign decided to use this inventive approach since Argenbright Security had sufficiently silenced their employees, using both legal and non- legal measures to keep them from forming a union. According to SEIU Local 1877 President, Mike Garcia, "AHL has used illegal threats and intimidation to silence these workers and Yahoo!'s decision to pull the ad is an attempt to silence them once again. AHL customers who use Yahoo! have the right to know that AHL is a law-breaker," he said. "While Yahoo! claims to support Internet free-speech, their decision to cancel the ad demonstrates their willingness to use censorship to prevent the public from learning that AHL has been convicted of breaking federal labor laws." Yahoo!'s decision to censor the ads runs contrary to positions that Yahoo! executives have taken in the past on free-speech issues. According to Chief Yahoo! Jerry Yang, "We (Yahoo!) try to be very inclusive of everybody's comments and everybody's opinions even if those opinions are not very favorable." (The Daily Yomiuri, March 12, 1996) Moreover, the company's general counsel, John Place, recently said in an interview, "To me, the most exciting thing about the Internet is a democratization ... everyone has a voice. It's the ultimate function of a participatory democracy." (The National Law Journal, December 20, 1999) Unfortunately the company's actions speak louder than their words. Mary Anne Hohenstein, organizing director of SEIU Local 1877 was quite disheartened by Yahoo's decision. "We believed this was an outlet where we could freely spread the worker's message," she said. "Argenbright has willfully violated the law in order to prevent its employees from exercising their rights to organize a union. The workers should have the right to share this message with the public and Argenbright's customers. Yahoo was wrong in unilaterally ending our contract to do so." Respect at LAX is one of the largest joint organizing campaigns in country, bringing together two of the fastest growing unions, the Service Employees International Union and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union to organize low-wage workers at Los Angeles International Airport. Contact: Robert Masciola, 202-898-3346; Eddie Iny, 310-330-8500, ext. 302, or cell: 310-990-0305, both of Service Employees International Union -- MOVIE REVIEW: Freedom
Los Angeles 2000: International Business & Economics Conference
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS/PAPERS. The 2000 Business & Economics Society International Conference will be held in Los Angeles / California - USA (Hyatt Regency Hotel) July 22-26. You may participate as panel organizer, presenter of one or two papers, chair, moderator, discussant, or observer. The deadline for abstract submission and participation is March 30, 2000. All papers will pass a blind peer review process for publication consideration in the 'GLOBAL BUSINESS & ECONOMICS REVIEW - ANTHOLOGY 2000', a volume of selected papers from the Conference. For more information please contact Helen Kantarelis through Regular Mail: Business & Economics Society International c/o Helen Kantarelis 64 Holden Street Worcester, MA 01605-3109, USA Tel: (508) 595-0089 or E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The WEB SITE for B&ESI is: http://www.assumption.edu/html/faculty/kantar/missb1.html
Re: Anti-capitalist computer programming
It would appear that Nicholas Thompson has very limited experience in the job market. Nicholas Thompson via Lou Proyect wrote it usually takes a high-paying job to get someone to do something really boring > -- Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archive http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada
Anti-capitalist computer programming
Washington Monthly, March 2000 Reboot! How Linux and open-source development could change the way we get things done Nicholas Thompson Naive as it may be to think that people aren't motivated by money, it is just as naive to think that people are only motivated by money. People are motivated by a variety of factors: money, recognition, enjoyment, a belief that one is doing something good for the world, and so on. We each weigh these factors and make decisions based on our perceptions of their relative importance. At different points in our lives, we give different factors different weights. When we're poor, we tend to value simply high-paying work more than we do when we're well-off; it usually takes a high-paying job to get someone to do something really boring and it generally takes a very fulfilling job to get someone to work for less than what he should normally be able to earn. Since people working on open-source projects generally earn nothing, or very little, there need to be other incentives. In Linux, there seem to be principally three. First, enjoyment. Computer programming can be addictive, exciting, and extraordinarily intense. Linux can be particularly enjoyable because almost every problem solved is a new one. If your Windows machine crashes, fixing the problem generally entails tediously working through scores of repair procedures which you may have used a thousand times. If A fails, try B. If B fails, try C. If a Linux computer crashes, anyone who repairs it is not only working on that one specific machine, he's finding a solution for the whole Linux community. Eric Roberts, a computer science professor at Stanford, once explained to The New York Times that people in the profession must be "well trained to do work that is mind-numbingly boring." This is particularly true of work on most closed-source systems where programmers must continually reinvent the wheel. But with open-source projects, the things that need to be done haven't been done before. According to one only slightly hyperbolic programmer, Ali Abdin, writing to a Linux news group about how he felt after creating his first open-source project: "The feeling I got inside when I knew that I had some code out there that I can share with people is indescribable... I felt on top of the world, that I can program anything...I felt as mother would feel giving birth to a child, giving it life, for the first time." Secondly, and similarly, Linux programmers are motivated by a feeling that they are changing the world and developing an operating system that really works. Torvalds laid out this philosophy well in a speech this summer: "I don't resent Microsoft for making lots of money. I resent them for making bad software." Thirdly, but most significantly, Linux programmers seem motivated by prestige and, in particular, respect from their peers. Having "hacked the kernel" (contributed to the core of the operating system) gives programmers a certain stature--much as completing a four-minute mile does among runners--and, since the program is open source, everyone knows exactly who contributed what. I was once introduced to a programmer described as "the guy who wrote all the Ethernet device drivers!" as though I was meeting Jonas Salk "who came up with the cure for polio!" And, in fact, Linux programmers often discuss their work as falling in the tradition of eminent scientists. As three well-known programmers put it in the introduction to their book Open Sources: "It would be shortsighted of those in the computer industry to believe that monetary reward is the primary concern of open source's best programmers... These people are involved in a reputation game and history has shown that scientific success outlives financial success... When the history of this time is written a hundred years from now, people will perhaps remember the name of Bill Gates, but few other computer industrialists. They are much more likely to remember names like... Linus Torvalds." Importantly, this philosophy may well be helping Linux develop creatively. There is a great deal of psychological research that shows that people actually do more creative work when they aren't motivated primarily by money. Tell a child that you'll pay her for reading a book and she'll read it with little imagination. Have one group of college poets think about getting rich and famous through their writing, according to research done by Harvard Professor Teresa Amabile, and they tend to turn out less creative work than a second group that's just asked to write poems. Is it possible that Linux programmers created such an extraordinary operating system in part because they were driven by other factors and weren't doing it for the money? I asked Professor Amabile if the implications of her research cross over to open-source programming and whether it could explain some of the remarkable innovations that have come from people working without pay. "Yes," she responded, "this [w
Re: The two Americas II
from Dispatches by Michael Herr: Page 2, "At the end of my first week in country I met an information officer in the headquarters of the 25th Division at Cu Chi who showed me on his map and then from his chopper what they'd done to the Ho Bo Woods, the vanished Ho Bo Woods taken off by giant Rome plows and chemicals and long, slow fire, wasting hundreds of acres of cultivated plantation and wild forest alike, 'denying the enemy valuable resources and cover.' "It had been part of his job for nearly a year now to tell people about that operation; correspondents, touring congressmen, movie stars, corporation presidents, staff officers from half the armies in the world, and he still couldn't get over it. It seemed to be keeping him young, his enthusiasm made you feel that even the letters he wrote home to his wife were full of it, it really showed what you could do if you had the know-how and the hardware. And if in the months following that operation incidences of enemy activity in the larger area of War Zone C had increased "significantly," and American losses had doubled and then doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you'd better believe it. . . ." Page 223, "I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn't done that to them." Page 229, "The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in the sane world, and if much of it was sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. . . . And after enough years of that, so many that it seemed to have been going on forever, you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a six-week low, only eighty GI's had died in combat, and you'd feel like you'd just gotten a bargain." Tom Walker
Re: The two Americas
These two Americas only exist "anecdotally" (that is to say in narratives of lived experience). Statistically, things have never been better. Unemployment is at a 30 year low and inflation is under control. One doesn't have to fudge the numbers. All one has to do is fudge the conditions of life that are fictionally accounted for by the numbers. "Peter Kiernan, a senior executive at the Goldman Sachs Group, attended an Ivy League party last fall where one recent graduate boasted he would own a fleet of personal airplanes by age 30. " 'I don't just want wealth,' " Mr. Kiernan said the young man told him. " 'I want plane wealth.' " "His father was in and out of prison. His mother, evicted from her own home, sent him and his brother to live with an uncle in a dilapidated house here, just north of Flint. There, he did not even have his own bed and fell asleep in a place that neighbors say was filled with noise, drugs and guns. Tom Walker
IMF succession
Does anyone on pen-l have anything to say about the succession struggle at the IMF? I think that it's interesting that in an era when the US political elites consider affirmative action -- not to mention quotas -- in hiring to be totally beyond the pale, they insist that the IMF head be from (Western) Europe. Also, if the African finance ministers' candidate (Stanley Fischer) is out because he's from the US, how about Rudiger Dornbusch, who's from Germany and wrote the leading intermediate macroeconomics textbook with Fischer? Sure, he's a pig, but he's pretty honest about his piggery. Doug has collected some juicy quotes by the man. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: The two Americas
>"This young boy appears not to have many advantages in life," said Arthur >A. Busch, the Genesee County prosecutor, who said the boy probably would >not be charged and was released today to an aunt. this mollycoddling goes against the Spirit of America of these days! If we are to be Tough on Crime, shouldn't this alleged 6-year-old be tried as adult and warehoused in an adult prison where he can accumulate human capital? -- Rudy G. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
The two Americas
NY Times, March 3, 2000 Pondering That Indiscreet Charm of the Superrich: Nothing Left to Buy? By LAURA M. HOLSON Rex Golding, a partner at Softbank Technology Ventures, has made a lot more money than he had ever expected. But even among the circle he associates with, things are getting a little out of hand. "My 6-year-old is starting to say things like, 'their house is bigger,' " Mr. Golding said, recalling a recent drive through his neighborhood in Menlo Park, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. "She knows the different cars. It is troubling to me." Peter Kiernan, a senior executive at the Goldman Sachs Group, attended an Ivy League party last fall where one recent graduate boasted he would own a fleet of personal airplanes by age 30. " 'I don't just want wealth,' " Mr. Kiernan said the young man told him. " 'I want plane wealth.' " (clip) === The New York Times, March 2, 2000 A Life of Guns, Drugs and Now, Killing, All at 6 By DAVID BARBOZA His father was in and out of prison. His mother, evicted from her own home, sent him and his brother to live with an uncle in a dilapidated house here, just north of Flint. There, he did not even have his own bed and fell asleep in a place that neighbors say was filled with noise, drugs and guns. And on Tuesday, the police say, the 6-year-old got his hands on one of those guns, stuffed it in his pants pocket and went off to first grade, where he killed a classmate. Today, cars paused outside the white clapboard residence, as passers-by tried to get a look at the home of a troubled child, a boy who the police say did not fully comprehend what he did when he used a .32-caliber handgun on the 6-year-old girl, Kayla Renee Rolland. She was shot once in the chest just before 10 a.m. Tuesday in front of a group of about 22 first graders as they made their way into the hall of the Theo J. Buell Elementary School. The boy put the gun in a desk after the shooting and simply walked away. Kayla was rushed to the Hurley Medical Center. She was pronounced dead at 10:29 a.m., less than an hour after the shooting. Questioned by detectives, the boy did not cry, the police said, and afterward sat and drew pictures. "This young boy appears not to have many advantages in life," said Arthur A. Busch, the Genesee County prosecutor, who said the boy probably would not be charged and was released today to an aunt. (clip) Louis Proyect (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
Phillips curve, manpower channeling and NAIRU
Over the past couple of days I transcribed and sent to the Pen-l list two texts from the 1960s, "Creating Jobs through Shorter Hours" and "Channeling". I now want to juxtapose quotes from those two articles and ask what does this have to do with the phillips curve and NAIRU? >From Creating Jobs (November 1962): "Unemployment has been mounting steadily and is threatening to increase further because of automation and other technological innovation and because of an increased rate of labor force expansion due in the mid-1960s as postwar babies enter the job market. >From Channeling (July 1965): "An unprejudiced choice between alternative routes in civilian skills can be offered only by an agency which is not a user of manpower and is, therefore, not a competitor. In the absence of such an agency, bright young men would be importuned with bounties and pirated like potential college football players until eventually a system of arbitration would have to be established." The first quote refers to a looming labor surplus (or 'reserve army of unemployed'). The second to the inflationary aspect of potential future labor shortages in strategic areas. Channeling stuns both birds with the same stone by the induction of 18-year old males into a higher educational holding pattern, "Many young men would not have pursued higher education if there had not been a program of student deferment." In practice, the educational warehousing of labor only stuns the unemployment and inflation birds temporarily. It defers the demographic/technological unemployment problem to the future and redirects the wartime inflation problem to the civilian economy without the need for messy procurement, price controls or rationing. My question is this: in the history of the debate over the Phillips curve, the trade-off between inflation and unemployment and NAIRU has there ever been any attempt to estimate the macroeconomic effects specifically of a policy of manpower channeling? Tom Walker
