Re: Re: Re: Argentina
Via, http://www.neravt.com/left/ Rebellion in North Argentina Support the Salta Workers Salta Strikers Newspaper Argentina: Province Erupts in Protest (Weekly News Update of the Americas) Michael Pugliese -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 8:57 AM Subject: [PEN-L:16165] Re: Re: Argentina Regarding Jim's question, I think that what I saw about Argentina is extraordinary. Usually, we can deconstruct what is going on, despite the obfuscation. The Argentina articles are almost impossible to penetrate. We know a crime is happening. We know who the villian is, but the curtains are drawn too tightly to see what is going on. Too bad Nestor left. On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 08:50:55AM -0700, Jim Devine wrote: what is this word aid? The IMF doesn't give aid -- it makes loans. There might be an aid component, if the interest rate is below-market. It's true that the IMF is making loans that private banks won't (acting as a lender of last resort), but this is more than balanced by the conditions it imposes, especially if the conditions involve (as seems likely) sticking to the extremely bad exchange-rate system Argentina has, balancing the government's budget, and reforming the financial system along more neoliberal lines. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Open government vs. capital shortage
G'day Penpals, Have been at my musing again, and doing the rounds of my fave miserabilist sites - am going to bed with the following dark forebodings ... There's a bloke called Stephen Jen, who reckons the greenback will land softly much in the way an asteroid does: In recent weeks, the dollar has failed three tests as the sole safe-haven currency. First, the dollar usually rallies on tensions in emerging markets. Pressures in Argentina have been brewing for several weeks, yet the dollar has not rallied. Second, the dollar is usually bought when tensions rise in the Middle East, but the dollar has failed to rally despite the escalating conflict in Israel. Third, the decision by the Bank of Japan to ease yesterday was a major re-orientation in policy, in my view. Despite the fact that it was totally unexpected, dollar/yen failed to make a meaningful advance. The fact that the dollar did not rally in these three situations suggests that the dollar may be losing its monopoly over safe-haven flows. I know Ellen has compelling arguments against this, but my understanding of political economy is that things don't do anything softly in a financially calibrated global system that operates at the speed of light. A lower greenback might help US manufacturing (in precisely the way seven rate cuts haven't - I noticed this last one hasn't even occasioned the usual blip-to-the-black), but it'll hit the rest of us pretty hard (for instance, all Australia's growth of the last couple of years has come via our export sectors, and we're not alone in this). So Uncle Sam's producers badly need a lower dollar, and the other six billion of us badly need a strong one, and the US badly needs us to get what we need, so we can buy the stuff your producers need us to buy (coz effective demand in the US itself has to be affected by the fact that [a] any Yank with an income must have a house full of new stuff already, [b] any Yank with a quid on the markets must have less than s/he used to have, [c] any older boomer must be very careful with whatever nestegg is left him, [d] most Yanks owe more than they've ever owed before, [e] blue-collar America is getting scourged, [f] there is a demographic trough, so fewer young folk are going to be joining the consumption queue than, and [f] energy costs have been dropping to meet a sagging market. but seem to have stopped dropping now). The BLS remind us that This Christmas could be even bluer than last. Though it is only August, retailers are bracing for what some say could be the worst holiday season in a decade. Hopes are being quashed by eroding consumer confidence, layoffs, and rising energy costs, especially in California (*WSJ*, page B1). So a lower dollar can work only if it helps US exporters, and if these producers don't have faith in that (which they might well not, given the global droop), well, then the lower dollar might mean higher capital investment costs in a time of lower projected domestic demand. In which case the lower dollar actually militates against economic recovery ... And Prudent Bear (which, miserabilist wretch that it is, just keeps getting the calls right), updates the case for a creaking buck: 'the US has a large current account deficit, in absolute terms ($400 billion plus), relative to gross domestic product (more than 4.5 per cent, the highest ratio in almost 200 years) and relative to exports (nearly 40 per cent). This growing external imbalance has occurred at a time of unprecedented private financial sector deficits, a negative household savings rate, and in the context of a rapidly slowing global economy, the source of which is largely American in origin'. You'd just about have to be a miserabilist, wouldn't you? Doug? Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage
Regarding Rob's musing about the dollar, Ellen's question was where would people flee if they dumped the dollar? Given the conditions that Rob mentioned -- turmoil around the world -- gold would be the likely spot, except that gold is an inflationary hedge. In a deflationary environment -- if that is where we are headed -- money is the hedge of choice. Is Europe or Japan that strong? How about the Aussie dollar? Maybe Cuban pesos will be looking up? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Monetary Policy
Quoting from Michael: I am seeing more and more stories doubting that a recovery is on the near horizon. Notice the quote below We think the economy has got real problems that won't be rectified quickly, said William Dudley, an economist with Goldman Sachs Co. in New York. We think monetary policy in this environment is not very effective. I think that the smashing of Greenspan's myth, along with the possible failure of monetarism and tax cuts, may open up the possibility that people might be receptive to a substantive dialogue about the economy. Certainly it will make teaching easier next week. My comment: Of course I agree with your remarks, Michael (well; monetarism is ineffective per se; tax cuts / fiscal spending not, but are in this case insufficient and badly distributed...). And I hope as well that there would be more serious discussion about the economy. However, I guess that there is lot of pressure on the media (and all types of 'consulting' bureaus) so as to give the public the impression that a recovery is imminent. That is why it surprises me the quote you made above. (Could you please, on a personal note, send me the exact reference? We may need to 'use' it). Actually, there was recently a whole article produced by Goldman Sachs (The Un-Godley Private Sector Deficit, US Economics Analyst, 27 July) where they were trying to argue precisely the opposite: that of course things are not rosy, but that a recovery would follow suit, and that monetary policy is effective... We actually included a rejoinder in our web site on this occasion, and subsequently we were contacted directly by GS... In conclusion, it all points, day by day, into a direction that confirms the analysis deployed in the Implosion ... paper and elsewhere (e.g. Dean Baker had an insightful presentation during the URPE Summer school). On the other hand, it looks to me that there is a lot of people out there who would (perhaps) agree but *will not* acknowledge the seriousness of the situation to avoid making matters worse precisely at the moment in which policymakers are trying to sell the image that their recipes are being effective...
Re: Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage
Michael Perelman wrote: Regarding Rob's musing about the dollar, Ellen's question was where would people flee if they dumped the dollar? Flee? Dumped? You could have a marginal movement out of dollar assets into euro assets without crashing asteroids and other apocalyptic fireworks. Why is it so either/or - either rentiers are locked into U.S. assets, or they'll jump all at once into EU assets? Doug
Re: deconstruction science
[was: Re: [PEN-L:16153] Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??] Steve Diamond wrote: In any case, let's look at what Maurer himself says: since he thinks finance discourse is not understandable on its own terms - Securitization, thus, is not obvious or self-evident - he is here to tell us what is really going on - and THAT is the fundamental conceit behind all of deconstructionism, postmodernism, etc. That somehow there really is something behind the wizard's curtain. isn't indicating what is REALLY going on the fundamental conceit of Marx, too (in a non-deconstructionist way)? Marx would look at something like securitization and say that common-sense understandings are hardly enough, because in capitalism, the stream of interest income corresponding to the securities has to correspond to surplus-value that's been created, so we need to understand the exploitative social relations of production ... (If the interest income flow doesn't correspond to surplus-value production, it's a redistribution from someone else's surplus-value receipts.) Indeed, the securities represent fictitious capital. = The last thing I want to do is get into a circular firing squad over deconstruction; especially because I've never read Derrida, De Man yaddah yaddah. And I hope I've made it clear I have not desire to defend or attack it on this list [those words are problematic to say the least]. But to the extent that I can understand it from my background in philosophy it is about how we go about understanding the mutability of how we go about naming social and natural kinds and the contingencies and politics of meanings that entails. It is about describing relations and our theories of reference. Human beings not only analyze, we create and there is surely a politics of creativity and thus a politics of economic time. To the extent money is a social creation that deeply connects to our understanding of time [or lack of understanding] we can analyze it in a plurality of ways. It would be as difficult to argue there is one true theory of money as it would be to argue there is one true theory of property. It seems to me that Marx's historicizing [radically temporalizing] social categories like money, property, power etc. makes certain aspects of deconstruction, as I struggle to understand it, less troublesome. But for both Marx and many other philosophical radicals the issue of who gets to determine how money and property is created is more important than how we analyze it. Indeed the whole point of analyzing it is to change the terms on which we create it or choose to forego being animals that 'need' money and property. Who gets to determine what property is and how they go about using language [and weapons] to constrain the ability of those who disagree with those acts of creativity especially when they lead to unfreedom and misery for others; from exposing via analysis and generating collective action for changing the the modes by which those relations and objects etc. are brought into being are the real questions. It is the injunctive aspects of our language/behavior that are at issue. Thus there would seem to be deep epistemic and ontic issues of justification in the *calls* to repudiate the debt; claims on a future that should not exist. For those of us who feel those *calls* are more than justified, we need to be able to tell the rentier class that any attempt to create a politics of justification over this issue rests firmly with them. If they cannot come up with a justification for why the debt must be repaid, then it's down to collective action, not philosophy. In general, looking for what is REALLY going on is a sign of doing science. Deconstruction isn't a science (as far as I can tell), but that's another issue. But like science, it tries to go beyond mere description (empiricism). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine Empiricism attempts to go beyond mere description too; indeed the varieties of empiricism is yet another issue humans worry needlessly over. Marx knew his Kant, Hegel and Leibniz. Would that today's economists knew their Davidson, Churchland, Wendt,Van Fraasen, Kim, Merrill and Quine etc. But hey that would be information overload. Ian
Re: Chinese capitalism unions
Hi Jim, The scary thing is that things are that bad for workers in China, especially in the SOE sector that what the Times reports here is pretty accurate. This is a big part of the reason for the recent censorship of the left, Maoist cadre run journal published out of Beijing. The journal has written articles discussing in open terms the situation of workers in SOEs who are actively resisting gov't sponsored privatization/pilfering of SOEs. 2-3 years ago the same left cadres were very careful to *not* embrace or write about such cases. Now they are actively publicising them to readership, in addition to frankly criticising Jiang Zemin's latest opening of the Party (for the first time openly that is) to capitalists, the argument being, i a nutshell, capitalists like workers labor and produce wealth, therefore they should be allowed positions in the CP, Labor Ministries, even unions... On an idelogical note, it is noteworthy that the Times uses as references only critics of China's labor problems who embradce neo-liberalism, namely the liberal (albeit super sharp) economist He Qinglian and the head of a liberal China labor center (I forget its offical name now) Li Qiang. They could just as well have gotten quotes from leftist economists such as Han Deqiang or Li Minqi, but then it wouldn't be the Times... Steve On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Jim Devine wrote: [from that famous pro-union newspaper, the New York TIMES, August 22, 2001.] Workers' Rights Suffering as China Goes Capitalist By ERIK ECKHOLM DONGGUAN, China The two young women were strolling through a sterile factory zone in China's roaring southeast, enjoying a rare day off. Trade union? they repeated, puzzled, when asked about workers' rights. What's that? Migrants from the same distant village, the women typified the tens of millions who have flocked to China's coast to work in factories that are mainly foreign-owned, producing electronic goods, clothing, toys and other products for export. And like many of their fellow migrants, they are willing to work 12 hours a day or more for a pittance, living 12 to a room and putting aside any questions about legal rights. One of the pair, Ms. Fu, who said she was 20 but looked 16, said that in her toy-packing job she cleared $24 to $36 a month, depending on overtime. With orders recently down, she said, she has been working only 10 hours a day and has started getting some Sundays off. Ms. Fu, who declined to give her full name, said she was not aware that her wages and hours violated local labor regulations. National law sets a basic work week of up to 44 hours with at least one day off, and the local minimum wage is $48 a month, plus higher rates for overtime. But we couldn't do anything about it anyway, she added with a shrug. With the collapse of the state industries that once dominated China, tens of millions of the workers who were long portrayed as official masters of the Communist nation have been virtually cast aside. Their official Communist-run trade union federation has often been little more than a bystander as the old companies are dissolved or sold. As private and foreign companies race ahead in newer industrial centers like this one in the southeastern province of Guangdong, a new kind of working class is emerging, one dominated by rural migrants who have no tradition of unions or the security once enjoyed in state enterprises. A large majority of the new companies have ignored the requirement to unionize or have created puppet bodies, according to Chinese and foreign labor experts. The working class of China has been marginalized, said He Qinglian, a social critic and author of The Pitfall of China's Development. For the Chinese leaders, who are trying to engineer the transition to a market economy, both the old and new arenas of labor have been sources of social instability. Already thousands of worker protests, wildcat strikes and other disputes are reported each year over everything from unpaid pensions to corruption to intolerable hazards. Through rapid economic development, the government is hoping to grow out of the problem as the benefits of a restructured economy gradually spread. In the meantime President Jiang Zemin has taken the step of trying to broaden the party's base by allowing in capitalists, which some Marxists say will only further diminish the officially hallowed status of workers. For now, inequality is growing fast, and in the years ahead, as China further opens its markets under World Trade Organization rules, labor strife and questions from abroad about fair labor practices are likely to increase. The trade union federation includes many officials who yearn to speak more forcefully for underdog workers. But a blizzard of examples, many from the federation's own newspaper, shows that unions are hamstrung by tight political control and by their mandate simply to help workers adjust to change. The
Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??
- Original Message - From: Steve Diamond [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ian, Really, you can't back down now... you were the one who introduced the piece by referring to reconstruction, after all. = What? No playful provacativeness in the headers anymore? :-) Your beef is with him not me. Just because I post a piece doesn't mean I agree with it. Like when I post Alan Greenspan or something from the NYT. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Maurer Position Associate Professor , Dept. of Anthropology Degrees Ph.D. Stanford University M.A. Stanford University Distinctions Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, 1998; Teaching Assistant Development Award, 1999; Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2000 Keywords anthropology of law; globalization; Caribbean; anthropology of money and finance; gender and kinship Research Summary My research concerns the power of law and legal institutions to shape cultural realities. My first project investigated how British Virgin Islanders craft notions of identity in terms of legal categories of belonging and citizenship, and use those notions of identity to imagine intractable differences between themselves and immigrants from other Caribbean places. The British Virgin Islands, like many other small states, is a tax haven, and as I became interested in the cultural ramifications of offshore finance, I developed a second research project. In this work, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9818258), I bring anthropological analyses of cultural forms to bear on the world of finance -- an area often assumed to be bereft of cultural content. The project investigates alternatives to financial globalization that seek to rewrite the cultural scripts of finance from the ground up. These include alternative currency movements in the US, digital cash or e-cash efforts of banking and computer companies, and Islamic banking. I am interested in what happens when people seek to redefine (or undermine) some of the taken-for-granted cultural terms of finance -- terms like money, property, capital, interest and so forth -- that are our native categories and that we rarely subject to cultural analysis.
DMCA 10, First Amendment 0
Does this article violate the DMCA? Friday August 17 - By Grant Gross - http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/17/207208mode=thread In the three years since the U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law's anti- circumvention provisions have now gone head to head with the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment in a handful of cases. So far, freedom of speech is getting its ass kicked by the DMCA. The DMCA's collision course with freedom of speech and the press was a topic of much conversation during a panel discussion Wednesday evening after Princeton Professor Edward Felten's team finally presented the paper describing their hack of the Secure Digital Music Initiative's watermarking technologies. Felten's continuing lawsuit asks that the anti- circumvention provisions of the DMCA be declared unconstitutional. The U.S. recording and movie industries have used those provisions as a threat against scientists and journalists who would dare to even discuss technologies that circumvent those multi- billion dollar industries' controls on what buyers do with their products. In my limited understanding of constitutional law, the First Amendment freedoms normally trump any conflicting law Congress can come up with. That's not much comfort to the editors at 2600 Magazine, who were successfully sued last year for linking to the DeCSS code, which allows Linux users to decode and play DVDs. However, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told audience members at the Wednesday panel the assumptions that the First Amendment reigns supreme can no longer be taken for granted after a judge ruled in August 2000 that 2600 Magazine is barred from even linking to the DeCSS code because of its supposed bad intent. That case, in which members of the Motion Picture Association of America sued 2600, is now being appealed. Cohn said that bad intent test is highly subjective, and I'll add, even for mainstream media that don't have the largely undeserved reputation that 2600 has as being a haven for script kiddies. It's pretty cold comfort to think that later on, someone might take a look over your shoulder and say, 'It's actually OK what you did,' Cohn said, in response to an audience question on the DMCA's impact on journalism. That isn't the kind of thing that gives a lot of journalists a lot of comfort. While some journalism groups did file statements in support of 2600, the potential impact of the DMCA on news reporting hasn't prompted a lot of protest in the mainstream media. When journalists scream about their First Amendment rights eroding, few people sit up and take notice because they think it doesn't affect them. But consider this: If you don't care about the media's ability to do its job, you probably should care that there's now a growing list of cases where the DMCA and similar laws have been used in attempts to silence free speech. Including the 2600 case, Universal v. Reimerdes (a.k.a. the New York DVD case), there's also the California DVD case, DVD-CCA v. Bunner, in which the DVD Copy Control Association sued dozens of Web sites publishers, including the Linux Video and DVD Project's Matthew Pavlovich, for allegedly violating the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act for posting the DeCSS code. Pavlovich's case, a curious one because LiViD is hosted in Germany and that's nowhere near California at last report, is also under appeal. Of course, there's also the Felten case, in which the recording industry threatened in April to sue Felten's team under the DMCA if the team released its successful compromises of the SDMI anti-copying technology. The Felten team presented its paper this week after the recording industry gave its permission, but Felten's continuing lawsuit against the recording industry and the U.S. government is based on the fact that Felten's team -- or anyone else for that matter -- has no guarantee against a DMCA-driven lawsuit for any other presentations of the SDMI material or research based on that material. Less connected to freedom of speech on its face, but one with potential impact, is the Dmitry Sklyarov case, in which the Russian programmer wasn't sued, but actually arrested, under the DMCA for trafficking in circumvention technologies. DMCA makes profiting on circumvention methods an actual crime. Like the Pavlovich case, the Sklyarov case is confusing because he was arrested while visiting the United States to talk at DefCon about his program that allows users to convert Adobe eBooks into other formats. The last time I checked, U.S. citizens weren't subject to Russian laws. So how could a news article violate the DMCA? I'd never actively flaunt law-breaking of any kind, but in the interest of journalism, let's count the ways: By linking to circumvention technology, as 2600 did. It's not out of the realm of possibility that such a news article at a for-profit Web site -- s, let's not mention any names -- could be viewed
The Non-Vanishing Budget Surplus
Current estimates by the Congressional Budget Office of the 10-year budget surplus, after netting out the tax cut, are $3.968 trillion. If you want to try and hoodwink the public and subtract Social Security Trust Fund surpluses, it's $1.484 trillion. If you want to try even harder and subtract Medicare surpluses, it's $1.087 trillion. These are after allowing for the automatic growth in costs of entitlements due to inflation and increases in beneficiaries, as well as inflation-adjusting the rest of the budget. Right now the Dems are attacking the Repugs for spending too much (in general, not military), and the Repugs are saying we want to use tax cuts to help the economy grow faster. Guess who is going to win that argument. I've a forthcoming article in The Progressive Populist on all this. I'll post a link when it's up. mbs
WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/22/01 04:00AM Spinoza and Marx would love the above; if the CB can create $ ex nihilo and risk is ultimately going to be socialized then what is the justification for the allocation of the rewards to those who don't bear the risks because they can displace them onto everyone and thus no one...What is financial risk if you can create $ out of nothing and wipe the computers clean of fiduciary duties so as to jump start the patient. (( CB: Since it was bailed out when it lost its bet, LTCM was taking zero risk. It was the opposite of a high risk taker , yet it is rewarded the most of all because it claims to take risk. ((( Is monetary risk an illusion and a foil for good old indeterminacy? I'm having a Terry Southern momentWho decided that the opposite of credit is debt? Or is forgive us our debts a code for eliminate a current accounting pathology; the buildings and crops and tools and people are still here, what's the problem? Ian
WB
[WashingtonPost] World Bank Leader Receives A Critical Accounting By Nora Boustany Wednesday, August 22, 2001; Page A14 The September/October issue of Foreign Policy carries an investigative piece that is sharply critical of World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn's style of personalized management and costly embrace of trendy ideas. The article, with a cover title of The Man Who Broke the Bank? and an inside headline of Who's Minding the Bank? was written by Stephen Fidler, U.S. diplomatic editor of the Financial Times, who began the project late last year and said by telephone from London yesterday that he had interviewed and made use of more than 100 primary sources in his reporting. Fidler writes that the bank's potential for expanding and influencing the path of the global economy has not been realized in Wolfensohn's tenure, a time when the bank's potential influence seemed to be on the verge of an unprecedented expansion. The report credits Wolfensohn with being the hardest working president the World Bank has had and its brightest and most passionate leader since Robert McNamara. But it also describes Wolfensohn's ego, his temper and his inability to deal with those challenging his views. Those traits, the magazine says, have diffused the bank's focus and sense of mission as a tool for development and have driven out some of its best staff members. Without a clear mandate or well-defined products, the institution finds itself in crisis and awash in criticism. The article also assails some of the bank's shareholder nations, including the United States, Britain, France and Germany, for behaving like absentee owners who ignore the bank except on particular occasions that serve their pet objectives. Many in the bank say Chinese political sensitivities killed a controversial anti-poverty project in western China last year, rather than real concerns about the program, according to Fidler. A World Faiths Development Dialogue to involve the world's faiths in the development process has cost the bank up to $1 million at the same time that cuts have been made in essential operating expenditures, according to Devesh Kapur of Harvard University, who is coauthor of an official history of the World Bank. To his critics, Wolfensohn has promoted favorites, ignoring bank regulations on staff advancement and prompting talentedsenior staff to leave. They also say he has caved in to New Age economic fads and interest groups, sacrificing the bank's intellectual integrity. Fidler said yesterday that Wolfensohn gets shocked when people disagree with him, he sees it as a kind of betrayal from a family member. Wolfensohn's defenders point out that he has weeded out fiefdoms and apparatchiks and that his programs have contributed to raising the level offemale enrollment in schools,reduced infant mortality rates and raised life expectancy. It represents some of the battleground over the future of the bank. Do we move forward with the new development agenda of empowering poor people, reaching out to civil society and moving beyond the simple economic analysis or do we turn the clock back to the top-down economic focus of the eighties? asked Caroline Anstey, chief of media relations at the bank. This article represents the view of those who would like to turn the clock back and to change the Wolfensohn agenda, she charged. In the article, Wolfensohn makes a strong defense of the bank and its direction. Put me aside for the moment and say I'm useless, egocentric, insecure, all the things you want to say, but don't damage the institution because you want to damage me.
Corps and NGO's
http://www.foreignpolicy.com Reluctant Missionaries By Marina Ottaway Can't shut down Big Oil? Then browbeat companies like Shell and ExxonMobil into preaching the gospel of human rights and democracy to their developing-world hosts. As appealing as this strategy seems to global do-gooders, it won't work. Not only are oil companies unsuited for the job of turning the world's most difficult neighborhoods into thriving market democracies, they're increasingly adept at passing the buck of reform to others. Beginning in the late 16th century, European countries found a way to extend their global commercial and political power on the cheap: They granted charter companies monopolies over trade in designated areas and in return required the businesses to establish and maintain order there. Charter companies played an especially important role in the expansion of the British Empire, opening up North America for settlement and conquering India and Southern Africa before disappearing in the 19th century. These companies had enormous powers. The 1621 charter of the Dutch West India Company gave it the right to make contracts, engagements and alliances with princes and natives of the countries.and also build forts and fortifications there, to appoint and discharge Governors, people for war, and officers of justice, and other public officers, for the preservation of the places, keeping good order, police and justice. Together with such powers, however, came escalating demands for moral responsibility. Missionaries insisted that the companies had the duty to facilitate the spread of Christianity, while many politicians expected the political values of their country to follow trade. The powers of the East India Company, declared British statesman Edmund Burke, have emanated from the supreme power of this kingdom. . . . The responsibility of the Company is increased by the greatness and sacredness of the powers that have been intrusted [sic] to it. It was thus proper, he concluded, that the governor of the East India Company should be hauled in front of the supreme royal justice of this kingdom and held accountable for his actions in India. Unexpectedly, the charter company concept is reemerging. At the forefront of economic globalization, transnational corporations, which have long pursued their business in developing countries with little oversight by weak local governments and even less by the international community, are being targeted by modern-day missionaries in the form of human rights and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The idea that corporate economic power entails political and moral responsibility is also gaining acceptance in some Western governments. [snip] The so-called partnership between NGOs, developed countries, and transnational corporations is beginning to look like a game in which each actor tries to pass the hot potato of reforming reluctant governments to somebody else. Neither the U.S. government, the World Bank, nor the human rights NGOs could convince the military regime in Nigeria to mend its ways in the past and cannot force change in Myanmar or Sudan today. So they saddle the oil companies with the task. And the oil companies are finding ways to pass the burden back. Above all of them, NGOs set unreachable standards, adding to the incentives of all involved to duck the burdens involved in achieving change. [snip]
Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??
(( CB: Since it was bailed out when it lost its bet, LTCM was taking zero risk. It was the opposite of a high risk taker , yet it is rewarded the most of all because it claims to take risk. ((( === Ex ante it took the risk. Ex post, the risk was diffused. Socialism of risk is just an egalitarian diffusion of risk. The calculus of diffusion of risk is the politics of finance capital. It's the ex ante/ex post issue that's problematic if we accept that 'future' is as much an act of creation as discovery. Ian
Re: Monetary Policy
Alex Izurieta wrote: In conclusion, it all points, day by day, into a direction that confirms the analysis deployed in the Implosion ... paper and elsewhere (e.g. Dean Baker had an insightful presentation during the URPE Summer school). On the other hand, it looks to me that there is a lot of people out there who would (perhaps) agree but *will not* acknowledge the seriousness of the situation to avoid making matters worse precisely at the moment in which policymakers are trying to sell the image that their recipes are being effective... So where are you going with this? At URPE, you seemed to hold up Britain in the early 90s as a kind of worst case scenario. In 1991, British GDP was off 1.5%, the only fully negative year. Politically, the Tories were disgraced, and the left purged from the Labour Party. Is this an implosion? Or are you expecting something worse? Doug
GROWING RESISTANCE IN GLOBAL SOUTH TO CITIGROUP
forwarded =[ r t s / n y c ] GROWING RESISTANCE IN GLOBAL SOUTH TO CITIGROUP MEXICAN ACTIVISTS BOMB CITIBANK/BANAMEX BUILDINGS Hi folks, August 10th's New York Times reported that 5 bombs were placed in Banamex branches; three of which went off. No injuries were reported, but the event is indicative of the growing rage in the global South regarding foreign corporate takeover of national resources. At the center of the anger is the takeover of Mexico's largest bank (Banamex) by none other than Citigroup. The Banamex merger means that Citi is now the largest bank in Mexico and the largest shareholder in the Mexican stock market. Not only is Citi the world's most destructive bank, but they are also now the largest financial institution on the planet. These bombings are only one tiny example of the massive public outcry the merger has provoked from the people of Mexico. People from all sectors of society ranging from elected officials, to community advocates to religious and cultural leaders have spoken out against this deal which would give Citi unprecedented controls over the Mexican economy and resources. Additionally, numerous American individuals and NGO's, including Rainforest Action Network, Inner City Press, the California Reinvestment Coalition and the Greenlining Institute (and some of you individually), called for the Federal Reserve to hold hearings before approving the merger. It is clear that we cannot allow Citigroup to grow to such a historic and perverse size without exploring the impact on social, environmental, and economic rights in the over one hundred countries where Citi operates. In a shocking example of how far the American regulatory system is from being either transparent of democratic our collective appeal for basic democratic process was flatly denied and last week the Federal Reserve rubber stamped the merger in record time without even the facade of public hearings. For background information on the Banamex merger and the efforts to get the Federal Reserve to stop it please consult the posts from 6/7 and 6/25 in the stop-citi list archives at : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopciti-updates/messages PLEASE NOTE : Rainforest Action Network does not engage in or promote property destruction and we work to confront violence in all its forms. The information below is passed on for educational purposes only and is not intended as an endorsement of any specific tactic. For More information on the Campaign Against Citigroup check out :http://www.ran.org/ran_campaigns/citigroup/ or contact Rainforest Action Network at 415-398-4404/1-800-989-RAIN * * * * Mexican Leftist Group Plants Bombs By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 10:39 p.m. ET MEXICO CITY (AP) -- A small leftist group said it planted explosive devices at five Mexico City branches of a bank bought last week by Citigroup, a deal that angered taxpayers who had bailed out the Mexican bank only to see it sold to foreigners at a huge profit. Three small explosives contained in tin cans detonated and two more were defused late Wednesday -- the birthday of the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. There were no reports of injuries or major damage. An unexploded grenade was found outside a branch hours later on Thursday. ``These were very homemade devices that weren't intended to cause destruction, serious damage, or to injure anyone,'' said Bernardo Batiz, Mexico City's chief prosecutor. ``The intention was clearly to call attention to this group.'' The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, or FARP, claimed responsibility for the attacks in calls to Mexican news media. FARP also warned that explosives were planted at the Italian Embassy in Mexico City and at the Senate but none were found, police said. Batiz said witnesses described the bombers as ``youths ... who warned some kids playing soccer nearby to clear out'' before planting the devices. No suspects have been arrested. Banamex released a brief statement Thursday condemning the bombings. Business at the banks continued as usual, the statement said. Earlier Wednesday, Congress had released details of fraud and insider loans -- including the names of bankers involved -- in a $100 billion rescue program that bailed out Banamex and a dozen other Mexican banks after a 1995 currency crisis. An audit showed that taxpayers absorbed losses from about $7.3 billion in insider or fraudulent loans. Under the slogan ``support transparency,'' Mexico's most influential newspaper, Reforma, ran a front-page appeal Thursday asking readers to help identify deadbeat debtors and locate their assets. Anger has mounted over the Citigroup deal, the latest in a series of buyouts that has placed almost all of Mexico's financial sector in foreign hands. Banamex President Roberto Hernandez, a friend and campaign donor of President Vicente Fox, may have gotten as much as $3 billion for selling his stake in the bank -- none of which he has to pay back
What is Neoliberalism?
What is Neoliberalism? A Brief Definition for Activists By Elizabeth Martinez [EMAIL PROTECTED] and Arnoldo Garcia [EMAIL PROTECTED] March 22, 2001; CorpWatch Neo-liberalism is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neo- liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. Liberalism can refer to political, economic, or even religious ideas. In the U.S. political liberalism has been a strategy to prevent social conflict. It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Rightwing. Economic liberalism is different. Conservative politicians who say they hate liberals -- meaning the political type -- have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism. Neo means we are talking about a new kind of liberalism. So what was the old kind? The liberal school of economics became famous in Europe when Adam Smith, an English economist, published a book in 1776 called THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. He and others advocated the abolition of government intervention in economic matters. No restrictions on manufacturing, no barriers to commerce, no tariffs, he said; free trade was the best way for a nation's economy to develop. Such ideas were liberal in the sense of no controls. This application of individualism encouraged free enterprise, free competition -- which came to mean, free for the capitalists to make huge profits as they wished. Economic liberalism prevailed in the United States through the 1800s and early 1900s. Then the Great Depression of the 1930s led an economist named John Maynard Keynes to a theory that challenged liberalism as the best policy for capitalists. He said, in essence, that full employment is necessary for capitalism to grow and it can be achieved only if governments and central banks intervene to increase employment. These ideas had much influence on President Roosevelt's New Deal -- which did improve life for many people. The belief that government should advance the common good became widely accepted. But the capitalist crisis over the last 25 years, with its shrinking profit rates, inspired the corporate elite to revive economic liberalism. That's what makes it neo or new. Now, with the rapid globalization of the capitalist economy, we are seeing neo-liberalism on a global scale. A memorable definition of this process came from Subcomandante Marcos at the Zapatista-sponsored Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neo-liberalismo (Inter-continental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neo-liberalism) of August 1996 in Chiapas when he said: what the Right offers is to turn the world into one big mall where they can buy Indians here, women there and he might have added, children, immigrants, workers or even a whole country like Mexico. The main points of neo-liberalism include: 1) THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating free enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone. It's like Reagan's supply-side and trickle-down economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much. 2) CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY- NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business. 3) DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environmentand safety on the job. 4) PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs. 5) ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF THE PUBLIC GOOD or COMMUNITY and replacing it with individual responsibility. Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves -- then blaming them, if they fail, as lazy. Around the world, neo-liberalism has been imposed by powerful financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund
Political Economy of Music
Penners, Does any good work exist on the political economy of music (popular, classical, jazz, etc), the music industry, and/or the noncommercial/private production (or consumption) of music? I'm interested in more than in current trends related to the Internet. Thanks for any leads. Eric Nilsson
Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again- !!??
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/22/01 02:12PM (( CB: Since it was bailed out when it lost its bet, LTCM was taking zero risk. It was the opposite of a high risk taker , yet it is rewarded the most of all because it claims to take risk. ((( === Ex ante it took the risk. Ex post, the risk was diffused. ( CB: If ex post it didn't take the risk, then it didn't take the risk. The ex ante risk was an illusion. Socialism of risk is just an egalitarian diffusion of risk. The calculus of diffusion of risk is the politics of finance capital. It's the ex ante/ex post issue that's problematic if we accept that 'future' is as much an act of creation as discovery. Ian
Re: Re: Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage
At 12:46 PM 08/22/2001 -0400, you wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: Regarding Rob's musing about the dollar, Ellen's question was where would people flee if they dumped the dollar? Flee? Dumped? You could have a marginal movement out of dollar assets into euro assets without crashing asteroids and other apocalyptic fireworks. Why is it so either/or - either rentiers are locked into U.S. assets, or they'll jump all at once into EU assets? Ellen's analysis rules out the nightmare option, in which the dollar is dumped as the main reserve currency. But she didn't rule out the relatively minor option in which the dollar's value falls by say 10% during one month, did she? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Re: deconstruction science
I wrote: isn't indicating what is REALLY going on the fundamental conceit of Marx, too (in a non-deconstructionist way)? Marx would look at something like securitization and say that common-sense understandings are hardly enough, because in capitalism, the stream of interest income corresponding to the securities has to correspond to surplus-value that's been created, so we need to understand the exploitative social relations of production ... (If the interest income flow doesn't correspond to surplus-value production, it's a redistribution from someone else's surplus-value receipts.) Indeed, the securities represent fictitious capital. Ian writes: The last thing I want to do is get into a circular firing squad over deconstruction; especially because I've never read Derrida, De Man yaddah yaddah. And I hope I've made it clear I have not desire to defend or attack it on this list [those words are problematic to say the least]. nor do I. I wasn't attacking deconstruction; my point was that seeing a hidden reality behind appearances was not unique to deconstruction (contrary to what Steve seemed to be saying). But to the extent that I can understand it from my background in philosophy it is about how we go about understanding the mutability of how we go about naming social and natural kinds and the contingencies and politics of meanings that entails. It is about describing relations and our theories of reference. Human beings not only analyze, we create and there is surely a politics of creativity and thus a politics of economic time. To the extent money is a social creation that deeply connects to our understanding of time [or lack of understanding] we can analyze it in a plurality of ways. It would be as difficult to argue there is one true theory of money as it would be to argue there is one true theory of property. there's no absolutely true theory, since no mental abstraction could ever correspond exactly to the complexity and heterogeneity of concrete, empirical, reality. Some theories can do better than others, though. How good a theory is depends on what you want to get from it, of course. (If all you're interested in is predicting the price of tea, then supply demand is perfectly good, even though that theory is radically incomplete.) It seems to me that Marx's historicizing [radically temporalizing] social categories like money, property, power etc. makes certain aspects of deconstruction, as I struggle to understand it, less troublesome. the difference (as I understand it) is that Marx was a philosophical materialist (emphasizing empirical reality and human practice), whereas some or most deconstructionists are philosophical idealists (emphasizing words, texts). But for both Marx and many other philosophical radicals the issue of who gets to determine how money and property is created is more important than how we analyze it. Indeed the whole point of analyzing it is to change the terms on which we create it or choose to forego being animals that 'need' money and property. Who gets to determine what property is and how they go about using language [and weapons] to constrain the ability of those who disagree with those acts of creativity especially when they lead to unfreedom and misery for others; from exposing via analysis and generating collective action for changing the the modes by which those relations and objects etc. are brought into being are the real questions. then we agree. It is the injunctive aspects of our language/behavior that are at issue. Thus there would seem to be deep epistemic and ontic issues of justification in the *calls* to repudiate the debt; claims on a future that should not exist. For those of us who feel those *calls* are more than justified, we need to be able to tell the rentier class that any attempt to create a politics of justification over this issue rests firmly with them. If they cannot come up with a justification for why the debt must be repaid, then it's down to collective action, not philosophy. right Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: WB
At 11:02 AM 08/22/2001 -0700, you wrote: To his critics, Wolfensohn has promoted favorites, ignoring bank regulations on staff advancement and prompting talentedsenior staff to leave. They also say he has caved in to New Age economic fads and interest groups, sacrificing the bank's intellectual integrity. New Age? does that mean crystals and incense, Theosophy and watered-down Buddhism? Or does it refer to the new economy fad? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Monetary Policy
I am not sure I understand Doug's remarks (appended below), but probably it is because I was not clear in the first place. Lets see: 1) There seems to be (for me and other observers) convincing evidence that we are leading to a recession. 2) How deep and how long I do not know, but (WITHOUT EFFECTIVE POLICY CHANGES) we could think of something between the UK case and the CBO projections for the US (which are indeed being 'dramatically revised' in the last days). There were cases which were even worse than the UK, such as Sweeden (unemployment rose from 1.5% to 8.2% between 1989 and 1993), or Finland (unemployment rose from 3.1% to 16.4% in the same period!). 3) Other observers (perhaps Doug himself?) may have assessments of different 'degree' (and I could walk some way along different perceptions of this kind, simply because I do not know). Anyway, I was NOT referring in my previous email to Doug or this kind of assessments in which what is debated is the 'degree' of the implosion. 4) If you do not extract my remarks 'out of context', it may become clear (I hope; anyway this is why I am writing this again) that in my previous email I was referring to the position revealed to us by Goldman Sachs. By extension, from the feed-backs we have perceived so far, there seems to be an interest, from the political elite, in keeping up positive expectations. In other words, there are obvious reasons to believe that policy makers and their advisors want to show that money easing and the tax plan (as it stands, no more, no less) would work us well out of a recession. 5) And those reasons (implicit in point 4) are being an obstacle for serious economic analysis. This is my guess, of course. Which could be contradicted, of course. And actually, I was surprised of W. Dudley (G S)'s remarks, as quoted by Michael. You see? Perhaps I am mistaken and now 'everybody' is acknowledging that we are heading for a long period of recession, and this is opening up a serious debate about policies to prevent it. BTW, I do not think the above is contradiction with what I said at URPE or what is written in the paper. Alex Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 2:41 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:16180] Re: Monetary Policy Alex Izurieta wrote: In conclusion, it all points, day by day, into a direction that confirms the analysis deployed in the Implosion ... paper and elsewhere (e.g. Dean Baker had an insightful presentation during the URPE Summer school). On the other hand, it looks to me that there is a lot of people out there who would (perhaps) agree but *will not* acknowledge the seriousness of the situation to avoid making matters worse precisely at the moment in which policymakers are trying to sell the image that their recipes are being effective... So where are you going with this? At URPE, you seemed to hold up Britain in the early 90s as a kind of worst case scenario. In 1991, British GDP was off 1.5%, the only fully negative year. Politically, the Tories were disgraced, and the left purged from the Labour Party. Is this an implosion? Or are you expecting something worse? Doug
Fw: The Incredible Shrinking Surplus, Doug and Max...
-Original Message- From: Institute for Public Accuracy [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 10:35 AM Subject: The Incredible Shrinking Surplus Institute for Public Accuracy 915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045 (202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Wednesday, August 22, 2001 Interviews Available: The Incredible Shrinking Surplus With the White House reporting today that the current-year surplus has plummeted to $158 billion from the $281 billion projected in April, the following policy analysts are available for interviews: STEVEN KULL, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.policyattitudes.org Author of the report Americans on Federal Budget Priorities, Kull is director of the Center on Policy Attitudes, which conducted a scientific online survey to determine how Americans thought the budget should be divided. He said today: Based on what we've seen, in terms of how people prioritize the surplus, there may be significant public discomfort with the next round of tax cuts. The public has put a higher priority on education and healthcare than tax cuts. There was a feeling that if there was a substantial surplus, people could have all of the above, but as the surplus diminishes in size, the tax cut is losing its appeal. When Americans were queried about what part of the budget they wanted increased or decreased, Kull found they wanted a dramatic reduction in defense spending -- on average by 24 percent. The areas of the budget to receive the highest dollar increase were related to 'human capital.' These included educational programs -- federal support to education and job training -- and medical research. DOUG HENWOOD, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood Author of the book Wall Street and editor of Left Business Observer, Henwood said today: It's sad that the budget debate seems to have come down to Bush and the Republicans handing out tax cuts skewed to the very rich and the Democrats complaining that he's squandering the surplus. It's like a debate between two kinds of Republicans -- Reaganite supply-siders and Hooveresque austerity hounds. Why isn't anyone saying that a flush government could afford to spend on badly-needed health care, child care, and environmental initiatives? FRIDA BERRIGAN, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms Senior research associate at the World Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming article The Pentagon All-Stars, Berrigan said today: President Bush's proposed $32.6 billion increase in military spending is greater than the entire defense budgets of every country in the world except for England, Russia, China and Japan. Bush proposed a 10.5 percent increase in military spending to a whopping $343.3 billion. The proposed federal education budget is only $19.9 billion. The proposed budget for 'missile defense' alone is $8.2 billion, an increase of almost 60 percent. This is the largest military budget increase since early in the Reagan administration. MAX SAWICKY, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.epinet.org Senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming article Up From Debt Reduction, Sawicky said today: The Democratic Party since Mondale has been trying to get the Republicans on fiscal responsibility -- with disastrous results. There's been an abandonment of fiscal activism from the Democratic Party. For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again- !!??
- Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 12:11 PM Subject: [PEN-L:16184] Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again- !!?? [EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/22/01 02:12PM (( CB: Since it was bailed out when it lost its bet, LTCM was taking zero risk. It was the opposite of a high risk taker , yet it is rewarded the most of all because it claims to take risk. ((( === Ex ante it took the risk. Ex post, the risk was diffused. ( CB: If ex post it didn't take the risk, then it didn't take the risk. The ex ante risk was an illusion. === No. That's too teleological and smacks of post hoc ergo prompter hoc We have to struggle to see ex ante and ex post as an ongoing time asymmetric dynamical system. Risk is a dynamical process. You're trying to freeze the dynamics. It's akin to, but not identical with, John Wheeler's delayed choice experiments in quantum theory. That we have some but not total, leeway in configuring the accounts of the past is not the same as saying the future is already out there and thus risk is an illusion. Imagine the debt is repudiated. How far back in time would the IMF need to go to rewrite/clear the books? I would venture to guess to the very beginning of it's existence. We're talking about the erasure of information from an ongoing computational process. The larger question is why the credit/debt binary even exists for us. Look at those passages where M. is saying we need to get beyond money itself in order to be fully human. But the mere trading of risks, *taken as a given*, is only part of the story, and in many respects the less interesting part. The possibility of shifting risks, of insurance in the broadest sense, permits individuals to engage in risky activities which they would not other wise undertake. I may well hesitate to erect a building out of my own resources if I have to stand the risk of its burning down; but I would build if the building can be insured against fire. The shifting of risks through the stock market permits an adventurous industrialist to engage in productive activities, even though he is individually unable to bear the accompanying risks of failure. Of course under these circumstances, some projects will be undertaken which will turn out to be mistakes; that is what is meant by risk. But at any moment society is faced with a set of possible new projects which are on the average profitable, though one cannot know for sure which particular projects will succeed and which will fail. If risks cannot be shifted, then very possibly none of the projects will be undertaken; if they can be, then each individual investor, by diversification, can be fairly sure of a positive outcome, and society will be better off by the increased production. [Kenneth Arrow] Hence the 2nd rule when capital and credit markets miscompute time: Panic first--Robin Hahnel. Ian
Re: Re: Re: deconstruction science
I wrote: isn't indicating what is REALLY going on the fundamental conceit of Marx, too (in a non-deconstructionist way)? Marx would look at something like securitization and say that common-sense understandings are hardly enough, because in capitalism, the stream of interest income corresponding to the securities has to correspond to surplus-value that's been created, so we need to understand the exploitative social relations of production ... (If the interest income flow doesn't correspond to surplus-value production, it's a redistribution from someone else's surplus-value receipts.) Indeed, the securities represent fictitious capital. Ian writes: The last thing I want to do is get into a circular firing squad over deconstruction; especially because I've never read Derrida, De Man yaddah yaddah. And I hope I've made it clear I have not desire to defend or attack it on this list [those words are problematic to say the least]. nor do I. I wasn't attacking deconstruction; my point was that seeing a hidden reality behind appearances was not unique to deconstruction (contrary to what Steve seemed to be saying). But to the extent that I can understand it from my background in philosophy it is about how we go about understanding the mutability of how we go about naming social and natural kinds and the contingencies and politics of meanings that entails. It is about describing relations and our theories of reference. Human beings not only analyze, we create and there is surely a politics of creativity and thus a politics of economic time. To the extent money is a social creation that deeply connects to our understanding of time [or lack of understanding] we can analyze it in a plurality of ways. It would be as difficult to argue there is one true theory of money as it would be to argue there is one true theory of property. there's no absolutely true theory, since no mental abstraction could ever correspond exactly to the complexity and heterogeneity of concrete, empirical, reality. Some theories can do better than others, though. How good a theory is depends on what you want to get from it, of course. (If all you're interested in is predicting the price of tea, then supply demand is perfectly good, even though that theory is radically incomplete.) It seems to me that Marx's historicizing [radically temporalizing] social categories like money, property, power etc. makes certain aspects of deconstruction, as I struggle to understand it, less troublesome. the difference (as I understand it) is that Marx was a philosophical materialist (emphasizing empirical reality and human practice), whereas some or most deconstructionists are philosophical idealists (emphasizing words, texts). But for both Marx and many other philosophical radicals the issue of who gets to determine how money and property is created is more important than how we analyze it. Indeed the whole point of analyzing it is to change the terms on which we create it or choose to forego being animals that 'need' money and property. Who gets to determine what property is and how they go about using language [and weapons] to constrain the ability of those who disagree with those acts of creativity especially when they lead to unfreedom and misery for others; from exposing via analysis and generating collective action for changing the the modes by which those relations and objects etc. are brought into being are the real questions. then we agree. It is the injunctive aspects of our language/behavior that are at issue. Thus there would seem to be deep epistemic and ontic issues of justification in the *calls* to repudiate the debt; claims on a future that should not exist. For those of us who feel those *calls* are more than justified, we need to be able to tell the rentier class that any att empt to create a politics of justification over this issue rests firmly with them. If they cannot come up with a justification for why the debt must be repaid, then it's down to collective action, not philosophy. right Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine This is going in my save file big guy! :-) Ian
Re: Re: WB
- Original Message - From: Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 12:07 PM Subject: [PEN-L:16187] Re: WB At 11:02 AM 08/22/2001 -0700, you wrote: To his critics, Wolfensohn has promoted favorites, ignoring bank regulations on staff advancement and prompting talentedsenior staff to leave. They also say he has caved in to New Age economic fads and interest groups, sacrificing the bank's intellectual integrity. New Age? does that mean crystals and incense, Theosophy and watered-down Buddhism? Or does it refer to the new economy fad? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine = Maybe somebody gave him some acid while he was looking at the bank's books Ian
FW: [ASDnet] Wellstone bill why no AFL-CIO support?
Michael Pugliese aka Herr Goebbels, wonders why the AFL-CIO isn't lobbying for this. Fascism is a matter of taste... Comrade Molotov after signing the Molotov-Ribbentroff Pact in 1939. From: Jason Schulman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/22/01 12:27:19 PM All I can say is: what the hell is the AFL's problem?!? This seems like a no-brainer to me... Wellstone Bill Promotes Worker Rights But AFL-CIO Withholds Endorsement By Harry Kelber Sen.Paul Wellstone (Dem.-Minn.) has introduced a bill that would clamp down on employers who deny workers their legal rights to choose union representation and get contract protection, but the AFL-CIO is sidestepping the issue. Wellstone's Right-to-Organize Act of 2001 (S. 1102) is an attempt to address some of the most serious obstacles under current law to workers' ability to unionize. In particular, it would amend the National Labor Relations Act to provide labor organizations with the ability to disseminate information about union representation on an equal footing with employers. Under the proposal, the employer would trigger equal time provisions by expressing opinions about unions during working hours or at the worksite. Once the triggering actions occur, the union would be entitled to use whatever means the employer used to distribute information -- for example, bulletin boards, mailboxes or worksite meetings -- and be allowed access to the worksite to communicate with employees. S. 1102 would triple the amount of back wages an employer would be required to pay for illegally discharging a worker, who could also sue for punitive damages. To help unions avoid costly, protracted pre- election disputes in which the employer has the advantage, it would require NLRB elections to be held within 14 days after the union produces signed cards from 60% of those in a bargaining unit. After workers have voted for a union, the bill would also prevent employers from refusing to sign a first contract, an obstructive tactic now used by one out of four employers. It specifies timetables for the two parties to reach an agreement, with binding arbitration if they fail to agree within 90 days. Wellstone, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Safety and Training with jurisdiction over the application of the National Labor Relations Act, may hold hearings on the bill early next year. Although many of labor's long-standing grievances are addressed forthrightly in the proposed legislation, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated international unions have neither endorsed it nor mentioned it in their publications and statements. Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO's legislative director, told The Labor Educator: We support the effort to educate the Senate and the public about the problems that workers face when they try to organize a union. Sen. Wellstone's bill will be helpful in that effort. However, at this point it would be premature to run a grassroots campaign for the Wellstone bill. Also hedging their bets were spokespersons for several major unions, who offered similarly lukewarm reactions to the introduction of the bill. No one, including Samuel, could say when or whether the AFL-CIO plans to mount a serious campaign in its behalf. For several years, the federation has been content with holding mostly ineffectual rallies, largely ignored by the public and the media, intended to show how workers are mistreated when they try to join unions. AFL-CIO leaders keep saying they won't introduce or endorse legislation like Wellstone's until the public and a majority in Congress are ready to support it, but they have no timetable in mind and appear reconciled to waiting indefinitely for the ideal moment. Meanwhile, each year about 10,000 workers are fired for trying to join a union. Because our labor laws are so full of holes, unions have a hard time winning representation elections or getting employers to negotiate. And since employers know that labor's top leaders aren't very serious about fighting back, they are emboldened to get even tougher on pro-union employees. The timid AFL-CIO stance on an issue of such supreme importance leaves active union members confused and immobilized, wondering how the labor movement can ever regain its former strength if worker rights aren't guaranteed and enforced. Our history tells us that whenever workers make some progress, it's the result of an uphill, bitter struggle against powerful adversaries, both in and out of the halls of government. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1849, Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. How do you think we won the eight-hour day and the five-day week? Flowery rhetoric about worker rights can't -- and won't -- protect the average worker who risks his or her livelihood to join a union. When the AFL-CIO leadership drops the ball on labor law reform, it's the rank-and-file and millions of unorganized workers who take
Re: FW: [ASDnet] Wellstone bill why no AFL-CIO support?
Michael, please do not take your stuff from LBO here. We want none of that. On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 02:03:01PM -0700, michael pugliese wrote: Michael Pugliese aka Herr Goebbels, wonders why the AFL-CIO isn't lobbying for this. Fascism is a matter of taste... Comrade Molotov after signing the Molotov-Ribbentroff Pact in 1939. From: Jason Schulman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/22/01 12:27:19 PM All I can say is: what the hell is the AFL's problem?!? This seems like a no-brainer to me... Wellstone Bill Promotes Worker Rights But AFL-CIO Withholds Endorsement By Harry Kelber Sen.Paul Wellstone (Dem.-Minn.) has introduced a bill that would clamp down on employers who deny workers their legal rights to choose union representation and get contract protection, but the AFL-CIO is sidestepping the issue. Wellstone's Right-to-Organize Act of 2001 (S. 1102) is an attempt to address some of the most serious obstacles under current law to workers' ability to unionize. In particular, it would amend the National Labor Relations Act to provide labor organizations with the ability to disseminate information about union representation on an equal footing with employers. Under the proposal, the employer would trigger equal time provisions by expressing opinions about unions during working hours or at the worksite. Once the triggering actions occur, the union would be entitled to use whatever means the employer used to distribute information -- for example, bulletin boards, mailboxes or worksite meetings -- and be allowed access to the worksite to communicate with employees. S. 1102 would triple the amount of back wages an employer would be required to pay for illegally discharging a worker, who could also sue for punitive damages. To help unions avoid costly, protracted pre- election disputes in which the employer has the advantage, it would require NLRB elections to be held within 14 days after the union produces signed cards from 60% of those in a bargaining unit. After workers have voted for a union, the bill would also prevent employers from refusing to sign a first contract, an obstructive tactic now used by one out of four employers. It specifies timetables for the two parties to reach an agreement, with binding arbitration if they fail to agree within 90 days. Wellstone, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Safety and Training with jurisdiction over the application of the National Labor Relations Act, may hold hearings on the bill early next year. Although many of labor's long-standing grievances are addressed forthrightly in the proposed legislation, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated international unions have neither endorsed it nor mentioned it in their publications and statements. Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO's legislative director, told The Labor Educator: We support the effort to educate the Senate and the public about the problems that workers face when they try to organize a union. Sen. Wellstone's bill will be helpful in that effort. However, at this point it would be premature to run a grassroots campaign for the Wellstone bill. Also hedging their bets were spokespersons for several major unions, who offered similarly lukewarm reactions to the introduction of the bill. No one, including Samuel, could say when or whether the AFL-CIO plans to mount a serious campaign in its behalf. For several years, the federation has been content with holding mostly ineffectual rallies, largely ignored by the public and the media, intended to show how workers are mistreated when they try to join unions. AFL-CIO leaders keep saying they won't introduce or endorse legislation like Wellstone's until the public and a majority in Congress are ready to support it, but they have no timetable in mind and appear reconciled to waiting indefinitely for the ideal moment. Meanwhile, each year about 10,000 workers are fired for trying to join a union. Because our labor laws are so full of holes, unions have a hard time winning representation elections or getting employers to negotiate. And since employers know that labor's top leaders aren't very serious about fighting back, they are emboldened to get even tougher on pro-union employees. The timid AFL-CIO stance on an issue of such supreme importance leaves active union members confused and immobilized, wondering how the labor movement can ever regain its former strength if worker rights aren't guaranteed and enforced. Our history tells us that whenever workers make some progress, it's the result of an uphill, bitter struggle against powerful adversaries, both in and out of the halls of government. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1849, Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. How do you think we won the eight-hour day and
Boulder Adopts WB Bonds Boycott and Anti-FTAA Resolution
WORLD BANK BONDS BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 22, 2001 CONTACT: Neil Watkins 202-299-0020 or Carolyn Bninski 303-444-6981 As DC Demonstrations Against World Bank Approach, Boulder City Council Adopts World Bank Bonds Boycott City Joins 4 Municipalities, 12 Unions, 10 Investment Firms in Growing Boycott WASHINGTON, DC -- Amid growing public concern in the U.S. over the policies of the World Bank and IMF, the city council of Boulder, Colorado expressed its opposition to environmentally harmful World Bank policies late Tuesday night by unanimously passing a resolution by a 5-0 margin which commits the city not to invest in World Bank bonds. The Boulder council also passed a resolution opposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The Mayor of Boulder, Will Toor, said, When we looked at the Bank's record of lending for large dams and their lending for fossil fuel projects, we found that the Bank's efforts to reform have not yet been sufficient. Given the environmental threats facing the globe, we stated that we would not buy World Bank bonds until the Bank fundamentally reconsiders its environmental policies and practices. In just the past two months, four major institutional investors have joined the growing World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign, including the American Federation of Government Employees, a 600,000 member public sector union; the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with 60 local unions in the states of California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii; the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, comprised of over 1,000 churches; and the Sisters of the Holy Cross, an international congregation of women religious. In addition, the Midstate Central Labor Council (Ithaca, NY) and Pax Christi USA have adopted the boycott. Francoise Poinsatte, a member of the Boulder city council, said, Structural adjustment programs instituted by the World Bank have contributed to a loss of social services, health, nutritional, and educational programs that are greatly needed in developing countries. By adopting the boycott, the city of Boulder is taking a stand to invest for not only financial purposes but with a goal of furthering social and environmental justice around the world. The campaign, modeled on the anti-Apartheid divestment movement, is causing the Bank serious concern. High-level World Bank officials attempted to dissuade members of the Boulder council from passing the resolution by sending several lengthy e-mails to city officials, including a 12-page position paper. World Bank officials have lobbied city council members against boycott initiatives in Madison, Wisconsin and in Los Angeles, California as well. The Boulder city council joins the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, California, and Takoma Park, Maryland; 12 unions; 7 religious institutions; and 10 investment firms in making a commitment not to buy World Bank bonds. The campaign was recently launched in Europe, and there are growing World Bank Bonds Boycott initiatives in Australia, Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. The one-year-old World Bank Bonds Boycott campaign organizes institutional investors to stop buying World Bank bonds as a means of putting political and financial pressure on the World Bank for fundamental change. The boycott demands that the World Bank Group cancel 100% of debts owed to it by impoverished countries, stops destructive 'structural adjustment' and similar policies, and ends all lending for oil, gas, and mining projects and all support for environmentally harmful projects such as dams that include forced relocation of people. ###
RE: What is Neoliberalism?
Great activist, Betita is, I worked with her and members of CofC, FRSO and ex-Line of March cadre on a conference at UC,Berkeley. Betita for having worked in the deep South in SNCC, and in the 70's being a leading member of the M-L group, the democratic Workers Party here in the 70's (remember Marlene Dixon?) never noticed any Hitlerian tendencies in this social fascist. Michael Pugliese From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/22/01 11:44:44 AM What is Neoliberalism? A Brief Definition for Activists By Elizabeth Martinez [EMAIL PROTECTED] and Arnoldo Garcia [EMAIL PROTECTED] March 22, 2001; CorpWatch Neo-liberalism is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neo- liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer. Liberalism can refer to political, economic, or even religious ideas. In the U.S. political liberalism has been a strategy to prevent social conflict. It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Rightwing. Economic liberalism is different. Conservative politicians who say they hate liberals -- meaning the political type -- have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism. Neo means we are talking about a new kind of liberalism. So what was the old kind? The liberal school of economics became famous in Europe when Adam Smith, an English economist, published a book in 1776 called THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. He and others advocated the abolition of government intervention in economic matters. No restrictions on manufacturing, no barriers to commerce, no tariffs, he said; free trade was the best way for a nation's economy to develop. Such ideas were liberal in the sense of no controls. This application of individualism encouraged free enterprise, free competition -- which came to mean, free for the capitalists to make huge profits as they wished. Economic liberalism prevailed in the United States through the 1800s and early 1900s. Then the Great Depression of the 1930s led an economist named John Maynard Keynes to a theory that challenged liberalism as the best policy for capitalists. He said, in essence, that full employment is necessary for capitalism to grow and it can be achieved only if governments and central banks intervene to increase employment. These ideas had much influence on President Roosevelt's New Deal -- which did improve life for many people. The belief that government should advance the common good became widely accepted. But the capitalist crisis over the last 25 years, with its shrinking profit rates, inspired the corporate elite to revive economic liberalism. That's what makes it neo or new. Now, with the rapid globalization of the capitalist economy, we are seeing neo-liberalism on a global scale. A memorable definition of this process came from Subcomandante Marcos at the Zapatista-sponsored Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neo-liberalismo (Inter-continental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neo-liberalism) of August 1996 in Chiapas when he said: what the Right offers is to turn the world into one big mall where they can buy Indians here, women there and he might have added, children, immigrants, workers or even a whole country like Mexico. The main points of neo-liberalism include: 1) THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating free enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone. It's like Reagan's supply-side and trickle-down economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much. 2) CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY- NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business. 3) DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environmentand safety on the job. 4) PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in
Re: Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'?
David, I have been away for several days, and clearly this thread has gone all over kingdom come. I also understand that Michael P. wishes it would go away. Furthermore, I am probably going to have to drop off the list again soon due to work crashing down on me with the new editorship. However... Well, I am not going to get into a detailed examination of exactly how the US penal code would judge these various figures. I believe that we agree that there is a spectrum of culpability that involves such issues as knowledge and intention, etc. I think it is worth moving this back up to some extent to the systemic level again. We can argue about the personal culpability of these folks endlessly (who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? blah blah...). But the systemic question was where this came in originally. Were these people dead from communism? Although Lenin's associates identified the grain seizures with some effort at communism, there was no collectivization at that time. This was in fact simply another round of wartime requisitioning that has gone on for centuries. I believe something like a quarter of the German population died during the 30 Years War. Most of that was due to requisitioning, not people actually being shot. Maybe Lenin was guilty of some sort of personal culpability because he knew (or should have known) that peasants would die. But, this was hardly systemic. This is relevant to the analysis of Stalin. His policy was not the same as Lenin's. He was not requisitioning grain. He was carrying out the first state-collectivization ever. It appears that he desired to actively kill kulaks who resisted (and many were indeed shot in the head). There is no evidence whatsoever that he actively sought a famine. I think the argument that this was a massive blunder is very strong. Now one can argue that it was systemic, a screwup of communism. Maybe. But then there were many ag collectivizations that happened after WW II in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (let's hold China aside) that did not result in famines or hardly any deaths at all. And, although arguably most of these societies might have been more ag productive under other systems, they were not disasters and nobody starved. Indeed, it was widely argued that they learned from the errors of Stalin. China of course tried something different, and this case has also been discussed at length. Again, once the GLF was over, the Chinese learned from their own mistakes. Mao apologized. Nobody starved after that. Of course, we do have the more recent case of the Kims in North Korea. They should have known better by now A final remark, and I really do not want to go on and on about this as it really has been about beaten to death (ooog!), but I do think it is worth keeping track of these distinctions about degrees of systemic failure or accident versus intention, etc. Again, there are now all these books that simply lump all these deaths together, famines with purges and on and on, and identify them as people killed by communism. What is more appalling is indeed the fact that on the Right there are now many who are indeed using these numbers and repeating them over and over to come up with the story that indeed Hitler was not so bad, blah blah. Well, obviously I find all of this rather frustrating, but I think I have about shot my wad on this one. Most of the remarks I would make further on this have now been made by (in some cases many) others. Barkley Rosser - Original Message - From: David Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 2:50 PM Subject: [PEN-L:15999] Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'? Barkley -- I am not following your argument. Let's assume that Lenin's actions in seizing food from the peasants was primarily motivated by the need to feed soldiers fighting a civil war. Under such circumstances, we could agree that Lenin did not desire the deaths of the peasants. However, Lenin surely knew that if you not only take surplus food from farmers, but the food the peasants had grown for their own subsistence, famine will result and people will die. Therefore, as set forth below, under a legal definition for purposes of legal culpability, Lenin had sufficient intent to be guilty of murder. His defense must result on the justification of the act. With respect to Stalin, he had the experience of observing the famines of the 1920s. For him (or you) to argue that he did not know or should not have known the consequences of his actions at any time in the early 1930s is simply not credible. In fact, the opposite is true -- after observing the massive peasant resistance to Lenin's policies, Stalin undoubtedly concluded that even harsher methods would be required to implement collectivization. Regarding Hoover: Did he desire that people die? No. Did he know to a substantial certainty that people would die if
Re: Political Economy of Music
I have a section on it in my forthcoming book on intellectual property. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Penners, Does any good work exist on the political economy of music (popular, classical, jazz, etc), the music industry, and/or the noncommercial/private production (or consumption) of music? I'm interested in more than in current trends related to the Internet. Thanks for any leads. Eric Nilsson -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Political Economy of Music
Performing Rites: On the value of Popular Music, by Simon Frith, Harvard Univ. Press. Blurbed by Greil Marcus. I used to read Frith and David Craig, in , Marxism Today, the Eurocommunist glossy monthly of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 80's. Rock and roll is here to pay. Rebee Garafello, or something close. Rockonomics: the Money Behind the Music. Marc Eliot, who also wrote a great bio of lefty folk singer, Phil Ochs. Three other cites, The Political Economy of Noise, by J. Attali. Univ. of Mineesota Press. Hit Men, on the music biz. Last one, book with subtitle, David Geffen, Bruce Springsteen and the ... Michael Pugliese P.S. There is great series from a university press, latest volume on heavy metal fandom. Other books in the series by Deena Metzger. If you can't track it down, gimme a holler. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/22/01 5:09:40 AM Penners, Does any good work exist on the political economy of music (popular, classical, jazz, etc), the music industry, and/or the noncommercial/private production (or consumption) of music? I'm interested in more than in current trends related to the Internet. Thanks for any leads. Eric Nilsson
Re: Re: Political Economy of Music
- Original Message - From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 2:34 PM Subject: [PEN-L:16199] Re: Political Economy of Music I have a section on it in my forthcoming book on intellectual property. == Which, of course, 'your' lawyers are busy securing intellectual property rights for. :-) Ian
Re: Re: From Brad De Long
So, Charles Mueller would obviously consider him to be an evil Marxoid. Barkley Rosser - Original Message - From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 12:55 PM Subject: [PEN-L:15990] Re: From Brad De Long I will pass commenting on what Brad wrote about death accounting, hoping that the thread will die out. With respect to Hoover, he is a mixed bag. He was a thoroughgoing racist in his work as a mining engineer. He was reputed to be very efficient in distributing food, with some exceptions, such as Hungary. From there he became the prime advocate of cartelization by way of trade associations. One common thread, was that Hoover never believed that markets and competition worked efficiently. Michael Perelman wrote: Hoover also shipped a hell of a lot of food to Europe in the aftermath of World War I--and did an amazing job of organizing the relief effort. Up until his presidency, Herbert Hoover was an amazing social plus for the world as a whole. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Malaysia
http://www.feer.com Mahathir to the Rescue Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is leading a charge to restructure debt-burdened conglomerates. It's long overdue, but if sustained it should attract foreign investors By S. Jayasankaran/KUALA LUMPUR Issue cover-dated August 23, 2001 SIGNS ARE MOUNTING that the tide has finally turned against politically connected conglomerates that have remained mired in debt since the Asian Crisis hit in 1997. And it is Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who is showing the muscle to tackle corporate debt-restructuring. Take events at Malaysian Resources, or MRCB, struggling under 1.8 billion ringgit ($474 million) of debt. On August 9, the government announced that two former consultants with the state asset-management agency were taking over its management. MRCB chieftain Abdul Rahman Maidin, the controlling shareholder who also had links to former Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin, resigned as chief executive but retained the figurehead position of nonexecutive chairman. The state-led initiative to hasten restructuring is winning cautious applause from investors and has demonstrated the power of the government over private companies when debt is the issue. Terence Gomez, a political economist at University Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, says the government--if it has to--decides the fate of major shareholders. Ultimately, he says, it's always been about control by the political elite. MRCB was tipped to be a target after the government in July launched a 3.7 billion ringgit takeover of United Engineers Malaysia, an affiliate of the Renong conglomerate, the country's most indebted group. If the government succeeds, it would take control of Renong from Executive Chairman Halim Saad, a protégé of Daim, because of cross-holdings between both companies. Mahathir has denied Halim is under investigation, but was frank about his fall. He is not under investigation. He's not in charge, that's all, he told reporters. The relative ease with which tycoons like Halim and Rahman are being sidelined underscores Mahathir's involvement. More broadly, however, their fate illustrates Mahathir's belated recognition that getting tough on debt-restructuring is the only way for Malaysia to attract foreign investors. If the number of international conference calls that Lai Tak Heong, the head of SG Securities in Kuala Lumpur, has taken in recent weeks is an indication, foreign interest is reviving. We're back on the radar screen, says Lai, Now we have to convince them that we're serious. Signs that the government is serious were bolstered--again on August 9--when the Corporate Debt Restructuring Committee, the state debt-workout agency, announced tough guidelines to accelerate restructuring of 29 billion ringgit in debt owed by 32 firms. New CDRC head Azman Yahya said both shareholders and banks would have to take losses and had to come up with workable plans in three months. Azman said lax management would be punished, companies could go bust if they didn't cooperate and reluctant bankers would be referred to the central bank. We've got to hit them where it hurts--their pockets, said Azman, giving himself a year to resolve the problem. There has to be discipline. It may be too early to talk of the end of Malaysia Inc.--the cosy symbiosis between the state and private sector to develop Malaysia as part of the preferential treatment for ethnic Malays, who make up more than 60% of the population. But some things are changing, say financial executives close to the government. Protecting troubled corporate favourites is barred, and also out is Daim's strategy of allowing a handpicked group of businessmen to feed on state patronage. Malay entrepreneurs may continue to emerge but they are unlikely to get the same sort of generous treatment. Officials say Malay business participation will be ensured by state-owned institutions set up for that purpose--such as the National Equity Corporation and state development agencies. Despite Mahathir's past diatribes against neo-colonialists, the officials say that foreigners may be allowed to play a bigger role in the restructuring by being invited, for example, to take meaningful stakes in strategic industries or even manage them. Meanwhile, ethnic business lines may be further blurred. Malaysian-Chinese businessmen are likely to participate in the break-up of Malay conglomerates like Renong. Malay institutional interests are equally likely to be involved in the asset sales of, for example, the Lion Group--the Chinese-owned conglomerate which, with more than 10 billion ringgit in debt, is the country's second-largest debtor. Mahathir's conversion seems to have occurred shortly before Daim resigned in June, following a series of bailouts seen by critics as benefiting government cronies. Mahathir became acting finance minister and will apparently remain there to see through the campaign. Speedier restructuring will lead to a rise in the federal government's
Re: Re: Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage
I was only responding to Rob, whom I [mistakenly?] thought was suggesting such a possibility -- not predicting anything. Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: Regarding Rob's musing about the dollar, Ellen's question was where would people flee if they dumped the dollar? Flee? Dumped? You could have a marginal movement out of dollar assets into euro assets without crashing asteroids and other apocalyptic fireworks. Why is it so either/or - either rentiers are locked into U.S. assets, or they'll jump all at once into EU assets? Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: Political Economy of Music
Dean Baker has a full-blown scheme for a non-copyright, socialized system. Check out http://www.cepr.net/ mbs I have a section on it in my forthcoming book on intellectual property. Michael Perelman
FW: [RWWATCH] ACTION ALERT: (Heritage Fndtn., Bush W.H. and Dept. of Labor)
--- Original Message --- From: Rich Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 8/22/01 2:33:55 PM RWWATCH -- August 22, 2001 (please forward) [We featured Al Ross's organization, the Institute for Democracy Studies (IDS, http://institutefordemocracy.org), several times last year in connection with their recent report on the Federalist Society. It is obvious, if you read the NYT article below, that exposing the connections of the far right is an effective strategy. So effective, in fact, that the Bush administration was afraid to have Al Ross speak at a conference that started in Baltimore today, and successfully pressured the conference sponsor to have him removed. The organization that uninvited Ross under pressure from the Bush administration is the National Industry Liaison Group, an association of mostly corporate affirmative action officers. See http://www.jhuapl.edu/NILG, and also see the version of the site as of a week ago by going to www.google.com and typing in National Industry Liaison Group and click on the Cached link of the first item found. That will give you a copy of the page when when Google last examined it. WHAT YOU OR YOUR ORGANIZATION CAN DO: Contact conference co-chair Robert Willis at: The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723-6099 [EMAIL PROTECTED]443-778-7133 and suggest that an organization that supposedly supports affirmative action should not buckle so easily to pressure to censor a group which is arguably one of the most important defenders of affirmative action (see their reports on the challenge to diversity). Also, please send a copy of your correspondence to a news outlet that might be willing to report on the facts behind Bush staffer's past stances on issues of diversity and racial justice. The media can contact IDS directly to get the scoop, at 212-423-9237. -rich cowan RWWATCH moderator p.s. The place where Robert Willis works, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, has received in excess of $250 million per year in government contracts for applied military research, much of it related to the 'Star Wars' program. ] From: Kathleen Maffei [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Rich Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: NY Times article Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 14:53:26 -0700 The following New York Times article can currently be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/21/politics/21cens.html?searchpv=day01http ://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/21/politics/21CENS.html?searchpv=day01. - Original Message - Bush Aide Accused of Having a Talk Canceled By ADAM CLYMER BALTIMORE, Aug. 20 - A trade association of corporate antidiscrimination officers, whose members depend on Labor Department approval to win federal contracts, bowed to pressure from the Bush administration and canceled a conference speaker who planned to attack conservative organizations as enemies of affirmative action, the speaker contended today. The speaker, Alfred E. Ross, said the group dropped him on the demand of a Labor Department offical, Charles E. James Jr. Mr. Ross said Mr. James had threatened that the department would not participate in the conference unless Mr. Ross was dropped from the program. Mr. James and conference organizers acknowledged that they spoke before Mr. Ross was dropped, but they would not say what they discussed. The National Industry Liaison Group replaced Mr. Ross as today's keynote speaker with Mr. James, the deputy assistant secretary in charge of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. Mr. Ross, president of the Institute for Democracy Studies, said he planned to single out the Heritage Foundation, where Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao worked before joining the administration, as one of the groups engaged in a battle to turn back the clocks on the civil rights gains of the last four decades. Mr. James met with the group's leaders on Aug. 14 in Washington, association officials said. The next morning, the group's Web site stopped listing Mr. Ross as a speaker. Today, Mr. James refused to say what he had told the group's officers. What I said, I said to that group, he said. It's their business. Mr. Ross, a 55-year-old lawyer who has taught and worked for the United Nations and Planned Parenthood, created his institute in 1999 to study challenges to bipartisan democratic consensus. Recent publications include The Assault on Diversity. According to the text of remarks he intended to deliver, Mr. Ross planned to say that the Heritage Foundation and another group closely allied with the Bush administration, the Federalist Society, have put fundamental principles of diversity and civil and constitutional rights under siege. Speaking in his place, Mr. James quoted Ms. Chao as saying his office would put assistance to companies seeking to comply with federal requirements ahead of enforcement actions. He insisted
RE: WTO/FSC
there will have to be a deal. the U.S. Congress is not going to let a bunch of frog-biters and sausage chewers tell them how to further screw up the corporate income tax. That's their turf. mbs [more secrecy?] Senator-Zoellick sees no need to appeal WTO ruling By Richard Cowan WASHINGTON, Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick does not think the United States should appeal a World Trade Organization ruling that declared a U.S. corporate export subsidy program illegal, a leading Republican senator said Tuesday.
Re: Monetary Policy
Alex, I saw your response to Goldman this morning already. I thought that I had appended the entire article. Sorry. The quote came from: Rebello, Joseph. 2001. Fed Cuts Funds Rate 0.25-Pt To 3.5%; Sees Slowdown Risk. Wall Street Journal (21 August). Alex Izurieta wrote: Quoting from Michael: I am seeing more and more stories doubting that a recovery is on the near horizon. Notice the quote below We think the economy has got real problems that won't be rectified quickly, said William Dudley, an economist with Goldman Sachs Co. in New York. We think monetary policy in this environment is not very effective. I think that the smashing of Greenspan's myth, along with the possible failure of monetarism and tax cuts, may open up the possibility that people might be receptive to a substantive dialogue about the economy. Certainly it will make teaching easier next week. My comment: Of course I agree with your remarks, Michael (well; monetarism is ineffective per se; tax cuts / fiscal spending not, but are in this case insufficient and badly distributed...). And I hope as well that there would be more serious discussion about the economy. However, I guess that there is lot of pressure on the media (and all types of 'consulting' bureaus) so as to give the public the impression that a recovery is imminent. That is why it surprises me the quote you made above. (Could you please, on a personal note, send me the exact reference? We may need to 'use' it). Actually, there was recently a whole article produced by Goldman Sachs (The Un-Godley Private Sector Deficit, US Economics Analyst, 27 July) where they were trying to argue precisely the opposite: that of course things are not rosy, but that a recovery would follow suit, and that monetary policy is effective... We actually included a rejoinder in our web site on this occasion, and subsequently we were contacted directly by GS... In conclusion, it all points, day by day, into a direction that confirms the analysis deployed in the Implosion ... paper and elsewhere (e.g. Dean Baker had an insightful presentation during the URPE Summer school). On the other hand, it looks to me that there is a lot of people out there who would (perhaps) agree but *will not* acknowledge the seriousness of the situation to avoid making matters worse precisely at the moment in which policymakers are trying to sell the image that their recipes are being effective... -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WTO/FSC
[more secrecy?] Senator-Zoellick sees no need to appeal WTO ruling By Richard Cowan WASHINGTON, Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick does not think the United States should appeal a World Trade Organization ruling that declared a U.S. corporate export subsidy program illegal, a leading Republican senator said Tuesday. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, who met with Zoellick recently, also said Zoellick was confident that, instead of a legal appeal, the United States and EU can successfully negotiate a deal that would avert any EU trade sanctions. On Monday, the WTO made public its June findings that the U.S. system of tax breaks for companies using off-shore subsidiaries to export goods is illegal. The ruling put U.S. firms in jeopardy of multi-billion-dollar sanctions by the EU. ``I've had a chance to talk to Ambassador Zoellick. He doesn't feel it's necessary to appeal it,'' Grassley said of the WTO ruling in what is commonly referred to as the Foreign Sales Corporations (FSC) case. Grassley added that Zoellick ``feels the EU is going to be somewhat flexible with the United States'' and that ``we will not be retaliated against.'' Grassley, who is in Iowa, made his remarks during a telephone news conference with reporters that was monitored here. A USTR spokesman, asked to respond to Grassley's remarks, would would not comment directly. But he added that USTR is still ``weighing its options'' in the case. DECISION NOT JUST USTR'S While USTR is a main player in the U.S.-EU export tax subsidy fight, other U.S. agencies also must weigh in on the next step to be taken. Still not clear, for example, is whether the Treasury Department and White House will come to the same conclusions as Zoellick apparently has in the handling of the dispute. In his remarks to reporters, Grassley emphasized that he thought the United States should appeal the case as a way of buying time to work out a deal with the EU. ``I am hoping Ambassador Zoellick will change his attitude and that he will appeal'' the case, Grassley added. Grassley gave no details on how Zoellick thinks a U.S.-EU deal could be negotiated if an appeal is not made. A decision by the administration on whether to appeal the FSC case is expected sometime in September. If the United States does not appeal and a settlement is not reached, the EU could move on Oct. 19 toward imposing trade sanctions on U.S. firms amounting to as much as $4 billion. But neither the United States nor EU want to see this case progress to sanctions, something that could spark a trade fight at a time when the two powerhouses are trying to work together to launch a new global trade round in November. Also unclear from Grassley's remarks is whether the US and EU might try to put off any decisions in this controversial dispute until after the Nov. 9-13 WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar. While Grassley noted the importance of the United States complying with WTO decisions, he also fretted that any legislative fix on FSC, such as altering the tax code, could put U.S. businesses at a competitive disadvantage. A U.S. Senate staff source earlier Tuesday told Reuters that any decision by the Bush administration in this trade case must come only after close consultation with Congress.
what makes happiness
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns23045 -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Title: New Scientist Mini nuclear reactor could power apartment blocks Los Angeles "bouncing" due to water storage Arms become eyes for brittlestars Sunken Venetian island to be revealed Artificial heart man says whirring is biggest change Weekend woe for younger heart attack victims New algorithms speed molecular simulations Hotmail hole leaves email open to view Smart speed bumps reward safe drivers Chilli-eating chickens repel bacteria Protein protecting freezing tissues is synthesised Managers face reprogramming after defeat Pedestrian crossing lights the way Seasonal trend in abortions linked to depression Mouth-based music control Vast tomb complex could hold Genghis Khan Breakthrough patches detect dangerous chemicals Health benefits from greenhouse gas curbs Landfill sites linked to birth defects Machine keeps organs alive for longer Cloned chickens on the menu Tobacco cash cutting tax rather than smoking Mobile phone translator service unveiled New clues to birth of the Moon Henna tattoos can cause severe skin reactions Light may have slowed down Human cloning "safer" than animal cloning World's fastest computer boots up Risk of HIV from oral sex may be "zero" Censored music protection research revealed Old drugs pull new tricks against vCJD Meet the people shaping the future of science Cheer leader Photo: Paul Elledge Everyone wants to be happy, right? Wrong, says Ed Diener, a psychologist in the emerging field of "subjective well-being"-- a professor of happiness in all but name--at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He's found that happiness is more than just a warm glow, it's firmly rooted in culture. And guess what? Money really does make you happier--but for maximum gain you have to be poor to begin with. Michael Bond asks Diener how science goes about adding to what philosophers and artists have told us about happiness over the centuries So the big question is--where do you find the happiest people in
Re: World Bank debate offer - not the first time
On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Steve Diamond wrote: Shown on CSPAN tonight, the representative from 50 Years is Enough was asked by Bloomberg News what would do about the crisis in Argentina, their representative literally had no answer. Really? I'm sorry to hear that, because it was precisely the presence of 50 Years is Enough that made me think this time might be different than the others. When I've heard Njoke Njehu or Soren Ambrose defend their position on the radio, they've seemed to be the very model of people who you'd want to defend our side: versed in the details, experienced in arguing, intelligent, reasonable, impassioned and good humored. And the running articles in the FT covering the preparations gave me at least the impression that they had a very clear idea of what's gone wrong in the past at events like this and how they think it might be righted. For example, they cited Soren saying he wanted to make sure it was a point by point debate, and not just a series of presentations one after another. So I was hoping this might actually turn a good thing, even if the Puerto Allegre attempt at debate was kind of a bust. I'll be disappointed if it just fizzles. So I'm hoping the rep you saw was merely a nervous newbie. Although I have to say, now matter which side you're on, it's a lot easier to say what went wrong in Argentina than what to do now, because whatever they do now it's going to hurt a lot. But that doesn't refute the argument that the path that got them here has obviously not worked. And that the fault is not Argentina's, but the plan they've been following. Michael __ Michael PollakNew York [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Zimbabwe
Land grab makes black farm workers homeless War veterans leave 20,000 to sleep by the roadside Special report: Zimbabwe Andrew Meldrum in Hwedza Wednesday August 22, 2001 The Guardian Twenty thousand black farm workers and their families were thrown out of their homes this week as President Robert Mugabe's war veterans intensified their campaign to destroy Zimbabwe's white farming community. The war veterans and other militant supporters of Mr Mugabe have brought 14 white-owned farms in the productive Hwedza district to a halt and forced the labourers to disperse. Many of the labourers have nowhere to go and can be seen by the side of dusty roads seeking shelter from the bitter winter nights. At least five white farmers have abandoned their land under threats of violence and 20 more farms have been forced to stop all work. The war veterans go to new properties each day. In Hwedza the campaign is led by man called Chigwedere, described by one farmer as a war lord crazed by his own power. He is creating a humanitarian crisis here, the farmer added. His aim is to rid this area of white farmers and he doesn't care how much misery he causes to our workers. Our workers are frightened and suffering and Chigwedere is preventing us from even offering them any assistance. Nearby a grey-haired man carrying a suitcase on his head stopped to catch his breath. He was too frightened to give his name. We were thrown off our farm yesterday and our family was scattered, he said. Last night we slept under a tree. We hope we can find some friends a few miles away where we can get some food and a place to sleep. Then we must keep moving because of all this trouble. On the back roads there were more families lugging their belongings in duffel bags and satchels. Some were heading for the nearby towns of Marondera and Ruwa. The war veterans are starting fires which are sweeping through hectares of dry grazing pastures. Columns of smoke can be seen rising from the rolling Hwedza countryside. It is a wave moving through this district and it might just engulf the whole country, a farmer said. They want to get all the white farmers off their land. Now they are hitting at our labour because they think that is our weak point. The focus has moved to Hwedza since the war veterans forced about 100 white families to flee their homes in the north-western district of Chinhoyi last week. Nearly 50 homes were looted and vandalised. Twenty-one white farmers who were arrested when they tried to help a besieged neighbour remained in jail last night despite Monday's high court order to release them on bail . They were not released, because officials had not yet produce the warrants for their release, the official Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation reported. By forcing white farmers off the land Mr Mugabe hopes to regain the support of the rural black population. The presidential election is due in April and Mr Mugabe, already in power for 21 years, has announced that he intends to stand for another six-year-term. The continuing disturbances caused by the land invasions are blamed by veterinary experts for an outbreak of foot and mouth disease that has hit the country and halted its once lucrative export trade of beef to Europe. The land invaders have cut fences across the country and cattle are roaming freely, a farmer said. We have already had anthrax and now it is foot and mouth. I am stuck on my farm with my cattle and no labour. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition condemned the violence yesterday, saying: The looming food shortages are a direct result of this state-sponsored anarchy. This is not land reform; this is thuggery. The government admits that its land seizure policies are reducing agriculture production. The finance minister, Simba Makoni, told MPs that they had contributed to a 54% reduction in commercial planting of maize, a staple crop.
Re: Re: nice Herbert Hoover
(in ref. to the quoted below) Didn't Hoover use food as a political tool in famine-threatened, post-war Europe (ca. 1919)? I seem to recall he kept food from going to people in communist areas. A convincing argument under the circumstances, probably, as in: Better fed than red. --Chris Brady J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote: [Hoover:] an evil Marxoid. [???] Hoover, he is a mixed bag. He was a thoroughgoing racist in his work as a mining engineer. He was reputed to be very efficient in distributing food, with some exceptions, such as Hungary. Michael Perelman wrote: Hoover also shipped a hell of a lot of food to Europe in the aftermath of World War I--and did an amazing job of organizing the relief effort. Up until his presidency, Herbert Hoover was an amazing social plus for the world as a whole.
Re: Zimbabwe
[From down Rob Schaap's way..Michael Pugliese suggested...] http://www.greenleft.org.au/ Gwisai: `The time for toy internationals is over'
william dudley
I was just going over some publications, cleaning up my desk. Any archaeologists out there want to join me? I found a copy of the CES ifo Forum Spring 2001 with a pessimistic article by Dudley -- the person Alex asked about. He says that the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions index is tighter than before the Fed started tightening. The Fed needs to get the dollar down and the stock market back up. To do this, they are going to have to ease monetary policy much more aggressively over the next six months. Put simply, the virtuous circle has turned vicious. It going to take time and monetary and fiscal accommodation to engineer a reversal of the current trend. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'?
Barkley -- Let me preface by thanking Michael for indulging me. That said, on to the polemics. You want to stress the systemic issue. In other words, even if Lenin committed murder, the murder should be attributed to the idiosyncracies of Lenin and the circumstances he faced, and not to the inherent nature of communism as a governing philosophy. To a certain extent, I think this is undisputable, in the sense that the Lenins and Stalins of the world are unique and transcend any specific political philosophy. It is also undisputable that Lenin and Stalin are not the inherent heirs of Marx, nor in turn is Marx the end all and be all of the Left. However, it is also undisputable that people who consciously attempted to actualize Marxist values and communism killed a lot of people. A lot of people. Some intentionally, some recklessly, some negligently. And the political structures they created permitted tyrants like Stalin to thrive and wield power. And such occurrences were not limited to Russia -- similar things happened again in disparate places, such as China, Cambodia and North Korea. Therefore, the systemic question is not so easy. It is easy to explain away specific incidents in isolation. Lenin faced foreign invasion and civil war. Stalin was a uniquely paranoid tyrant. Etc. But if the same problems occur in varied circumstances spread over many years, the system, and the actualizing philosophy, must be questioned. I think it was Jean Francois Revel who said something like capitalism is judged by its results, but communism is judged by its promises. That never seemed fair to me. David Shemano David, I have been away for several days, and clearly this thread has gone all over kingdom come. I also understand that Michael P. wishes it would go away. Furthermore, I am probably going to have to drop off the list again soon due to work crashing down on me with the new editorship. However... Well, I am not going to get into a detailed examination of exactly how the US penal code would judge these various figures. I believe that we agree that there is a spectrum of culpability that involves such issues as knowledge and intention, etc. I think it is worth moving this back up to some extent to the systemic level again. We can argue about the personal culpability of these folks endlessly (who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? blah blah...). But the systemic question was where this came in originally. Were these people dead from communism? Although Lenin's associates identified the grain seizures with some effort at communism, there was no collectivization at that time. This was in fact simply another round of wartime requisitioning that has gone on for centuries. I believe something like a quarter of the German population died during the 30 Years War. Most of that was due to requisitioning, not people actually being shot. Maybe Lenin was guilty of some sort of personal culpability because he knew (or should have known) that peasants would die. But, this was hardly systemic. This is relevant to the analysis of Stalin. His policy was not the same as Lenin's. He was not requisitioning grain. He was carrying out the first state-collectivization ever. It appears that he desired to actively kill kulaks who resisted (and many were indeed shot in the head). There is no evidence whatsoever that he actively sought a famine. I think the argument that this was a massive blunder is very strong. Now one can argue that it was systemic, a screwup of communism. Maybe. But then there were many ag collectivizations that happened after WW II in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (let's hold China aside) that did not result in famines or hardly any deaths at all. And, although arguably most of these societies might have been more ag productive under other systems, they were not disasters and nobody starved. Indeed, it was widely argued that they learned from the errors of Stalin. China of course tried something different, and this case has also been discussed at length. Again, once the GLF was over, the Chinese learned from their own mistakes. Mao apologized. Nobody starved after that. Of course, we do have the more recent case of the Kims in North Korea. They should have known better by now A final remark, and I really do not want to go on and on about this as it really has been about beaten to death (ooog!), but I do think it is worth keeping track of these distinctions about degrees of systemic failure or accident versus intention, etc. Again, there are now all these books that simply lump all these deaths together, famines with purges and on and on, and identify them as people killed by communism. What is more appalling is indeed the fact that on the Right there are now many who are indeed using these numbers and repeating them over and over to come up with the story that indeed Hitler was not so bad, blah
Re: RE: Re: Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'?
David, I don't think that this is very constructive. You say that people were killed to actualize communism. My God. I don't want to continue with the death accounting -- I wish that Barkeley had not revived this presumably dead thread -- but millions of people have been killed to actualize capitalism. I just watched Life and Debt yesterday, devoted to the promises of the IMF and the devastation that capitalism created in Jamaica. I think that this thread should be left to die. On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 06:18:01PM -0700, David Shemano wrote: Barkley -- Let me preface by thanking Michael for indulging me. That said, on to the polemics. You want to stress the systemic issue. In other words, even if Lenin committed murder, the murder should be attributed to the idiosyncracies of Lenin and the circumstances he faced, and not to the inherent nature of communism as a governing philosophy. To a certain extent, I think this is undisputable, in the sense that the Lenins and Stalins of the world are unique and transcend any specific political philosophy. It is also undisputable that Lenin and Stalin are not the inherent heirs of Marx, nor in turn is Marx the end all and be all of the Left. However, it is also undisputable that people who consciously attempted to actualize Marxist values and communism killed a lot of people. A lot of people. Some intentionally, some recklessly, some negligently. And the political structures they created permitted tyrants like Stalin to thrive and wield power. And such occurrences were not limited to Russia -- similar things happened again in disparate places, such as China, Cambodia and North Korea. Therefore, the systemic question is not so easy. It is easy to explain away specific incidents in isolation. Lenin faced foreign invasion and civil war. Stalin was a uniquely paranoid tyrant. Etc. But if the same problems occur in varied circumstances spread over many years, the system, and the actualizing philosophy, must be questioned. I think it was Jean Francois Revel who said something like capitalism is judged by its results, but communism is judged by its promises. That never seemed fair to me. David Shemano David, I have been away for several days, and clearly this thread has gone all over kingdom come. I also understand that Michael P. wishes it would go away. Furthermore, I am probably going to have to drop off the list again soon due to work crashing down on me with the new editorship. However... Well, I am not going to get into a detailed examination of exactly how the US penal code would judge these various figures. I believe that we agree that there is a spectrum of culpability that involves such issues as knowledge and intention, etc. I think it is worth moving this back up to some extent to the systemic level again. We can argue about the personal culpability of these folks endlessly (who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? blah blah...). But the systemic question was where this came in originally. Were these people dead from communism? Although Lenin's associates identified the grain seizures with some effort at communism, there was no collectivization at that time. This was in fact simply another round of wartime requisitioning that has gone on for centuries. I believe something like a quarter of the German population died during the 30 Years War. Most of that was due to requisitioning, not people actually being shot. Maybe Lenin was guilty of some sort of personal culpability because he knew (or should have known) that peasants would die. But, this was hardly systemic. This is relevant to the analysis of Stalin. His policy was not the same as Lenin's. He was not requisitioning grain. He was carrying out the first state-collectivization ever. It appears that he desired to actively kill kulaks who resisted (and many were indeed shot in the head). There is no evidence whatsoever that he actively sought a famine. I think the argument that this was a massive blunder is very strong. Now one can argue that it was systemic, a screwup of communism. Maybe. But then there were many ag collectivizations that happened after WW II in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (let's hold China aside) that did not result in famines or hardly any deaths at all. And, although arguably most of these societies might have been more ag productive under other systems, they were not disasters and nobody starved. Indeed, it was widely argued that they learned from the errors of Stalin. China of course tried something different, and this case has also been discussed at length. Again, once the GLF was over, the Chinese learned from their own mistakes. Mao apologized. Nobody starved after that. Of course, we do have the more recent case of the Kims in North Korea. They should have known better by now
Fw: World Bank debate offer - not the first time
The 50 Years is Enough rep was Soren Ambrose, so I expected something reasonably substantive, but he punted. Stephen F. Diamond School of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Zimbabwe
ZIMBABWE: Socialists confront Mugabe dictatorship http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism%40lists.panix.com/msg2.html Mugabe `talks left, acts right' Tafadzwa Choto, ISO Zimbabwe's national coordinator, urged activists protesting at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane in October not to be taken in by Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe's anti-imperialist rhetoric. Mugabe talks left but acts right, she told GLW. The West is now hostile to Mugabe because he can no longer guarantee the profits for their capitalists. They were friends until 1996, because Mugabe loyally implemented the World Bank's Economic Structural Adjustment Program. In 1996, the workers started to rise up against ZANU-PF's IMF and World Bank policies. That is when the friendship broke. ZANU-PF has grasped the significance of the anti-capitalist demonstrations that have taken place in the West. So Mugabe is taking an `anti-imperialist' stand and denouncing the IMF and World Bank. But in Zimbabwe, he doing completely the opposite. He is privatising university services, his police shoot striking workers, there are no medicines in the hospitals, he has outlawed strikes. Today, he hammers the IMF and World Bank, but his ministers are attending their meetings and promising to repay their loans. This anti-imperialist rhetoric is believed by some people on the left, not only here in Zimbabwe but also in other parts of the world. They see him as someone who is moving in the right direction. They ask us, `Why are you supporting the Movement for Democratic Change instead of supporting Mugabe and his government?'. They don't understand the need to move with the workers. Mugabe doesn't have the support of the workers anymore. ZANU-PF did not manage to win even one seat in the urban areas in last year's election. We are going to send a statement to be read at the CHOGM demonstration exposing the hypocrisy of Mugabe and exposing Mugabe for the dictator he is. His government is a puppet of the IMF and the World Bank, which has caused untold suffering to the Zimbabweans. Gwisai: `The time for toy internationals is over' Gwisai: `The time for toy internationals is over' Munyaradzi Gwisai, the Zimbabwe ISO's charismatic young MP, told Green Left Weekly that new possibilities have opened up for the left internationally. The collapse of the Stalinist movement, which discredited socialists in the eyes of the working class, and the rise of the new anti-corporate movement, symbolised by the Seattle demonstrations, have set the scene for the re-emergence of a credible left. It is critical that we intervene in these struggles. The struggles in Zimbabwe are at the cutting edge of these struggles in peripheral capitalist societies. The challenge for the left in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the two leading bourgeois states in southern Africa, and also internationally, is the regroupment of the left. The tasks and possibilities we are on the verge of an international recession require the left to provide alternative ideological leadership for this movement. This means that revolutionary socialists have to begin to work together. The time for `toy internationals' is over. That is why we think the Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conference is very important. We see that quite a number of revolutionaries from different traditions will be coming together in Sydney next Easter. We are fully behind this kind of thing and, indeed, we are beginning the same interactions with left groups in the region, in particular South Africa. We think the left, regionally and internationally, has a big challenge to get over the sectarianism of previous years, to link up with the new movement and build through these sort of united fronts. -Original Message- From: Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Lbo-Talk@Lists. Panix. Com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 6:15 PM Subject: [PEN-L:16213] Re: Zimbabwe [From down Rob Schaap's way..Michael Pugliese suggested...] http://www.greenleft.org.au/ Gwisai: `The time for toy internationals is over'
Oh, and democracy
[NYT] August 23, 2001 NEWS ANALYSIS [aka spin] From No Aid to a Bailout for Argentina By JOSEPH KAHN WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 - Despite negotiations that covered 12 days and several midnight bargaining sessions, many of the people involved in emergency talks to bail out Argentina's floundering economy went to lunch on Tuesday believing that the United States would say no to new aid. Bush administration officials had taken office declaring their intention to end President Clinton's repeated bailouts of chronically ailing economies like Argentina's. And Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill lamented in negotiating sessions over the past week that nobody seemed to be thinking creatively about ways of alleviating the country's debt problems without more loans. Publicly, he fretted about American plumbers and carpenters who pay taxes and wonder what in the world we're doing with their money. But by late Tuesday afternoon, Mr. O'Neill appeared to have changed his mind, and the administration voted to support the International Monetary Fund's plan to provide $8 billion in new loans for Argentina on top of a $13.7 billion package the country received just eight months ago. Ostensibly the administration's shift occurred because Argentina agreed to restructure its debt. The new I.M.F. loan program also pressures private lenders to help Argentina reschedule some loans. But while those are novel provisions for an international bailout, they represent a 30-degree tack, rather than the 180-degree turn- around that the Bush administration had once indicated it preferred when it came to repeat borrowers at the financial bailout window. The decision underscored that even at times when the United States holds most of the cards - it is the largest single shareholder in the I.M.F. and is generally thought to have veto power over new loans - it finds it difficult to deny an urgent request from an ally. It also cannot simply walk away from the interventionist financial diplomacy of the Clinton administration. That is, at least in part, because after a decade of fast-paced economic integration it is hard to separate financial rescues from other foreign policy priorities the Bush administration puts higher on its agenda, like free trade, open stock and bond markets, even democracy. You have to worry about collateral damage to the global financial situation, free trade, and open economies, said Edwin M. Truman, a former Treasury and Federal Reserve official who worked on many international financial rescues. It's not like you can just categorically turn off the bailout switch. President Bush has stressed the need to expand ties with Latin American leaders and has pushed a plan to create a hemispheric free trade zone modeled on Nafta. That goal would likely have receded had Argentina collapsed after its leaders got a polite no to their aid request from the United States, people involved in the talks said today. It is no coincidence that Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, today invited Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay to join the United States in reviving the so-called Four-Plus-One trade group that pushed for trade expansion in the first Bush administration. Mr. Zoellick called free trade an engine of economic growth for Argentina and the region that would supplement the I.M.F. rescue package. The Bush administration also has come under repeated fire, especially from European allies, for abandoning international commitments made during the Clinton years, including agreements to reduce global warming, control germ warfare and to crack down on tax evasion. White House officials have recently been scrambling to demonstrate that they value cooperative relations with major allies. Scuttling a rescue for Argentina could have undermined that. Interestingly, many economists agree with Mr. O'Neill's skeptical approach. Argentina's problems have become severe enough that new loans are seen as having no more chance of success - and maybe less chance - than the last round agreed to during the final months of the Clinton administration. Argentina's economy has been shrinking for three years. Falling exports and capital flight has threatened its ability to repay some $128 billion in dollar- denominated foreign loans. But while it is hardly a model for economic development among emerging markets, Argentina has often followed the advice of the I.M.F. In the early 1990's it committed itself to keeping its peso equal to a dollar in an effort to tame inflation, and overhauled its banking system, which was mired in mismanagement. Moreover, political support for fiscal austerity and open markets is shaky, both in Argentina and neighboring Brazil. Some fear a popular backlash if the experiments fails. If these talks had not had a positive result, we would definitely have had effects - political, economic and in other areas - that we all definitely wanted to avoid, Daniel Marx, Argentina's finance secretary, said
Fw: [ASDnet] Economic report of the President
-Original Message- From: Duane Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 8:38 PM Subject: [ASDnet] Economic report -- A very long time ago, the President use to issue an annual report called The Economic Report of the President. It was a useful, thick, analysis of the economy, trends in the economy, and directions. I remember this from my grad students days. I looked on the web, and on the Whitehouse web site. Apparently, this document is no longer produced. What does exist is the budget, etc. Does anyone know if a full economic report is still produced, and what is its title? Duane Campbell The preceding is a personal opinion. Try not to post more than daily. ==^ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://igc.topica.com/u/?b1dj8W.b2KaoW Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^
Re: Fw: [ASDnet] Economic report of the President
- Original Message - From: Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: pen-l [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 9:27 PM Subject: [PEN-L:16220] Fw: [ASDnet] Economic report of the President http://w3.access.gpo.gov/eop/
Re: PEN-L digest 1098
I've tried a number of times to unsubscribe, temporarily from PEN L, but with no success. Will you please unsub me at this point? Thanks very much. [When I initially tried to sub to PEN L, I had trouble. Once on, I found I couldn't post. Now, after three days of trying, I can't get off of it. I think you should streamline and finesse your operation. Thanks very much. Hunter Gray - Original Message - From: Progressive Economics [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Progressive Economics [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 10:00 PM Subject: PEN-L digest 1098 PEN-L Digest 1098 Topics covered in this issue include: 1) Democracy Now Staff Suspended by michael perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2) Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3) Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Steve Diamond [EMAIL PROTECTED] 4) Re: Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5) Pilger on the telly by Michael Keaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] 6) Try not to gloat by Michael Keaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] 7) BATsman caught at slip by Michael Keaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] 8) Open government vs. capital shortage by Michael Keaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] 9) deconstruction science by Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10) Mens rea of political leaders /Hoover'sguilt by Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] 11) Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12) Re: Mens rea of political leaders /Hoover'sguilt by Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 13) Chinese capitalism unions by Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 14) Re: Argentina by Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 15) Re: Re: Argentina by Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 16) Re: Re: Re: Argentina by Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 17) Re: Open government vs. capital shortage by Rob Schaap [EMAIL PROTECTED] 18) Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage by Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 19) Monetary Policy by Alex Izurieta [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20) Re: Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage by Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 21) Re: deconstruction science by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 22) Re: Chinese capitalism unions by Stephen E Philion [EMAIL PROTECTED] 23) Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 24) DMCA 10, First Amendment 0 by Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] 25) The Non-Vanishing Budget Surplus by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Max Sawicky) 26) WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] 27) WB by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 28) Corps and NGO's by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 29) Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 30) Re: Monetary Policy by Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 31) GROWING RESISTANCE IN GLOBAL SOUTH TO CITIGROUP by Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 32) What is Neoliberalism? by Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] 33) Political Economy of Music by [EMAIL PROTECTED] 34) Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!?? by Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] 35) Re: Re: Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage by Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 36) Re: Re: deconstruction science by Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 37) Re: WB by Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 38) Monetary Policy by Alex Izurieta [EMAIL PROTECTED] 39) Fw: The Incredible Shrinking Surplus, Doug and Max... by Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 40) Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again- !!?? by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 41) Re: Re: Re: deconstruction science by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 42) Re: Re: WB by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 43) FW: [ASDnet] Wellstone bill why no AFL-CIO support? by michael pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 44) Re: Re: From Brad De Long by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 45) Re: FW: [ASDnet] Wellstone bill why no AFL-CIO support? by Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 46) Boulder Adopts WB Bonds Boycott and Anti-FTAA Resolution by Robert Naiman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 47) RE: What is Neoliberalism? by michael pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 48) Re: Fw: The Fall of 'Challenge'? by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 49) Re: Political Economy of Music by Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 50) RE: Political Economy of Music by michael pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] 51) Re: Re: Political Economy of Music by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 52) Malaysia by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 53) Re: Re: Re: Re: Open government vs. capital shortage by Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 54) WTO/FSC by Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 55) RE: Re: Political Economy of Music by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Max Sawicky) 56) FW: [RWWATCH] ACTION ALERT: (Heritage Fndtn., Bush W.H. and Dept. of Labor) by
Re: Monetary Policy
At 22/08/01 15:37 -0400, Alex Izurieta wrote: 1) There seems to be (for me and other observers) convincing evidence that we are leading to a recession. 2) How deep and how long I do not know, but (WITHOUT EFFECTIVE POLICY CHANGES) we could think of something between the UK case and the CBO projections for the US Much as I am in favour pursuing progressive reforms, isn't capitalism a self-organising system which will be very resistant to policy changes that aim to prevent a long term recession? One way or other, they will be thwarted by the unconscious workings of the system. Less dynamic societies have social systems that can cope with a periods when the flow of surplus product to the elite is somewhat reduced - eg during periods of poor harvests. But the dynamics of capitalism are such that if the surplus does not continue to grow, a proportion of the elite, and all those dependent on them, have to become idle for a long period of time until they are gradually absorbed into economic activity again. That is how the system eventually adjusts and organises itself in a self-perpetuating fashion. Very dynamic, but on average over time, one that works at less than full capacity. Any alterations in the availability of money or credit, may give a temporary illusion that people could risk getting back into economic activity again, but these measures come up against a real, if sometimes rather flexible, ceiling: at certain stages it is impossible for one part of the economy to continuing to consume as much as it has been, if the other part of the economy is to continue to accumulate as much as it is. This leads to a problem of circulation. Lack of confidence is much more the result of these inexorable processes, than the cause. What policy changes could meet the objection that they must be more than psychological window dressing, and overcome the massive intertia in the dynamics of this self-organising system? Chris Burford Lonon
Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??
Ian, Really, you can't back down now... you were the one who introduced the piece by referring to reconstruction, after all. In any case, let's look at what Maurer himself says: since he thinks finance discourse is not understandable on its own terms - Securitization, thus, is not obvious or self-evident - he is here to tell us what is really going on - and THAT is the fundamental conceit behind all of deconstructionism, postmodernism, etc. That somehow there really is something behind the wizard's curtain. Well, as someone who spent a little time actually working in and around securities, I can tell you that securitization IS obvious and self-evident to anyone who spends the time acquiring the skillset to understand it - just like any other field of knowledge. Nothing controversial in that, I should hope. The problem here is that Maurer clearly has not taken even the time that a non-securities professional needs to take to speak intelligently about the very real problems associated with fictitious capital. And that leads to his confusion of the term securitization with the completely different concept of a security interest. Of course, there is the possibility that he is purposely trying to make this all sound far more magical and unapproachable than it really isbut I really don't want to go down that road. Stephen F. Diamond School of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??
At 21/08/01 21:41 -0700, Ian wrote: He does go into how one material medium's relation to time--paper--affected the bundling of asset streams and how computer programs for bundling, unbundling and rebundling in the quest for the dream of liquidity and market clearing is effecting a shift in the meaning of property rights that we've gotten from the legal realists through Berle and Means. That was broadly how I read the article. More sophisticated electronic ways of doing financial business highlight the fact that paper contracts are symbols too. This leads to greater complexity about what can actually be done in the transfer of assets, and what an asset, or a bit of property, is. I see this article as evidence of developing knowledge by the intelligenstia who manage and administer finance capital, while the units of finance capital become ever larger, and ultimately more abstract in representing vast masses of dead labour. It is a symptom of how the capitalist system is teetering on the edge of its breakdown when its servants no longer find it rational, and yet it is dependent on them. == Well it seems to be a very real issue of how to manage the computational complexities enabled by mathematics, the fact that math can model and prescribe all kinds of economic time and whether they are a harbinger of an improvement in forcasting robust asset streams or are creating problems of information overload for the received view of property rights. The essay goes into a paper by law professor Charles Mooney published in the Cardozo Law Review in 1990 [I perused the Cardozo website and noticed a Steve Diamond had written a piece on Autopoiesis in America, that you Steve, 'fess up?] Paper created legal problems and efficiency problems in back in the late 60's and early '70's and the then head of the SEC came right out and said electronics was going to augur a big change in the meaning of property akin to what happened late in the 19th century under people like Justice Holmes and others.As Maurer states the chains of fiduciary obligations have the potential to come undone and cause, what the literature terms 'systemic risk'; the possibility that the whole system, based on future obligations to settle trades promised during the course of the trading day, will collapse. Granted, this has always been a possibility under capitalism, but perhaps what we're seeing is the need to insure the potentially disastrous consequences of the computability of an enormous spectrum of risks and volatility in asset trading taking precedence over property rights. Mooney puts it thus: Modern securities markets have moved so far beyond the movement of pieces of negotiable paper that the property law construct is inadequate and unworkable. Whatever rules might emerge, there is a need to push the legal regime 'beyond negotiability' and, perhaps, 'beyond property.' Everyone in a market place bears risk, and any attempt to redefine the right to make profits from others labour on the grounds that entrepreneurs have a monopoly of risk, should be firmly resisted. Workers take considerable risk, with much less certainty, in living in a certain location and acquiring certain skills with the risk of prolonged unemployment always over their heads. === Well risk is like the game of musical chairs rather than a casino; you want the other guy to have a monopoly on it. Capital mobility is the opposite of capital commitment. Finance capital has attention deficit disorder. It doesn't want to commit to anything but the next sure thing which, of course, there is none. So it bundles and rebundles asset/risk porfolios in some abstract space-time of algorithms, leveraging [credit inflation] as fast as their software allows them to. LTCM showed what happens at the limits of current computational competence. However I do sense that risk management is the Achilles heel of capitalism. The more they try and manage risk (for example in the important and growing area of health management) the more they have to explore socially stable ways of organising the economic activity, including the risks, which can now be very expensive. Time to watch the health of insurance firms, reinsurance firms and securities regulators With leveraging there will always exist a remote possibility of a chain reaction, a cascading sequence of defaults that will culminate in financial implosion if it proceeds unchecked. Only a modern central bank, with its unlimited power to create money, can with a high probability thwart such a process before it becomes destructive. Hence, central banks will of necessity be drawn into becoming lenders of last resort. But implicit in the existence of such a role is that there will be some allocation between the public and private sectors of the burden of risk of extreme outcomes. [Alan Greenspan] Spinoza and Marx would love the above; if the CB can create $
Pilger on the telly
Rob writes: I'm watching Stanley Fischer assure John Pilger (who's positing the debt-as-stick argument) that debt is not a problem for the world's poor (all they need is education and an incorruptible government, after all isn't debt a good thing when we want something? [beaut analogy, Stan]), and that the IMF did not support the Suharto regime (and that the 1965 slaughter and the ET masscare constituted the 'suppression' of 'some rights'). Quite angry he was, too. = I saw this the other night, having had it taped for me in the UK and posted over. It's absolutely astonishing stuff, and essential viewing for everyone. I had thought of writing up some kind of review of it, but you've beaten me to the punchline. The New Rulers of the World was broadcast on 18 July on ITV, Britain's flagship commercial channel. It's amazing that this stuff goes out at all, and, perhaps, especially amazing that it's on ITV. However, as past posts have documented, the refashioning of the BBC into an uncritical mouthpiece of state propaganda, courtesy of John Birt and his mission to explain ethos, has placed critical analysis on very shaky ground in that once-august institution. Tony Judt's description of BBC1 as RAI-Uno without the good looks is absolutely spot-on. Carlton Television's sponsorship of Pilger is interesting, however, not least because Carlton's Michael Green was, until very recently, a high profile Conservative Party supporter and aggressive advocate of media liberalisation. However, such is the market for Pilger's very astutely packaged journalism that not even Carlton can deny its place, it seems. Certainly, if you go to Pilger's web site, you will find a very comprehensive and professionally designed affair (see http://pilger.carlton.com/). How Pilger manages to persuade his interviewees to submit themselves to the most awful personal humiliation is quite something. In Death of a Nation, his documentary about East Timor, he collared the UK Foreign Office minister, the late Derek Fatchett, to explain why it was that, with a supposedly ethical foreign policy, Britain was still shipping armaments, including Hawk fighters, to Indonesia, for use in East Timor. Fatchett became fidget, as he squirmed uncomfortably and more or less admitted it was a bit anomalous, having at first offered the weak excuse that these shipments were going out under rules made by the preceding Conservative government and that New Labour had now tightened up these rules. Not surprisingly, among only two people who refused to be interviewed for his next documentary, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq was Robin Cook. The other was Saddam Hussein. Pilger's interview with Stanley Fischer is exquisite. Fischer is a picture of barely controlled rage at the impertinence of a non-economist like Pilger questioning the reasoning behind IMF policies. This professional arrogance is also communicated, though much more reassuringly, by Joseph Stiglitz's successor at the World Bank, Nicholas Stern. Stern assures Pilger that while economists can get it wrong some of the time, they get it right more often that non-economists. Whew! Just as well the economists are looking after us. But Fischer will not even admit of any wrong-doing by the Stepford Economists of the IMF, and denies any plausibility whatsoever to the logic behind Pilger's point regarding the crippling debt burdens afflicting emerging market economies. Fischer's main point to Pilger is that the IMF is engaged in attacking the corruption of those regimes/victims it is assisting with loans. Never mind the consequent unravelling of the patrimonial states it was content to support during the Cold War. These were the artificial creations of colonialism in which corruption, as defined by Western liberalism, was more or less essential to the continuity of the state form. In the case of Indonesia, this was understood by those who sanctioned the acquisition of East Timor and the subsequent bloody subjugation of that territory, a quarter of whose population was slaughtered for the sake of the front line against communist SE Asia. This logic still plays out today, as the glove-puppet newscasters of the dreadful BBC World report unrest in Aceh, attributing blame to the nationalistic policies of Sukarno and the inheritance of his daughter, all the while ignoring the 32 year interregnum that was presided over by our son of a bitch Suharto. And, incidentally, the next time someone wants to chime in with ritual body-counts in order to discredit (yet again) the communist legacy, the manner of Suharto's putsch and its backing by the humanitarians of the free world is also touched upon by Pilger, who does not skip over the unpleasant fact that, with US and British support (intelligence especially), over one million communists were slaughtered to ensure the smooth succession of Sukarno by Suharto. Pilger has the human interest angle covered very well, except that instead of the usual
Try not to gloat
It's war as Major takes on Thatcher over leadership Nicholas Watt, political correspondent Wednesday August 22, 2001 The Guardian John Major will today throw his weight behind Kenneth Clarke in the Tory leadership contest, intensifying the party's civil war in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's provocative intervention. As the party embarks on its most serious round of bloodletting in years after Lady Thatcher warned that Mr Clarke would be a disaster for the Tories, Mr Major will praise the former chancellor as the candidate best placed to reach out to the middle ground. The former prime minister, who has never forgiven Iain Duncan Smith for his role as one of the Maastricht rebels in the mid 1990s, will appear on Radio 4's Today programme this morning as ballot papers drop on to the doormats of 300,000 Tory party members. This will be followed by a lengthy article in this week's Spectator magazine. The presence of two former Tory prime ministers, who loathe each other, on opposing sides in the Tory leadership contest will intensify what is turning into a bruising civil war. Mr Clarke, who will face Mr Duncan Smith in their only public debate of the campaign on BBC2's Newsnight tonight, tore into Lady Thatcher within hours of her warning. On the Today programme, he accused Lady Thatcher of holding extreme views on Europe which had prompted her to plot against Mr Major. Pointedly refusing to use her title, Mr Clarke said: Mrs Thatcher was heavily involved in encouraging people to rebel against Maastricht. I think Mrs Thatcher was more disloyal to John Major than Ted Heath ever was to Mrs Thatcher. Mr Duncan Smith said that nobody should be horrified by Lady Thatcher, who was a very successful prime minister. But the Clarke camp wheeled out a succession of grandees to warn that a victory for the Thatcher favourite would lead to electoral oblivion. Lord Heseltine, the former deputy prime minister, asked on The World at One: Is Margaret's endorsement going to help that generation of younger people that we've got to attract back? I don't think myself that that is the case. Ann Widdecombe, the shadow home secretary, said that Lady Thatcher should have kept her views private. Lady Thatcher became prime minister 21 years ago. It is time to move on. The force of the Clarkeites' response reflected their anger that the former prime minister believes she owns the party after she backed the winners in the last two contests - Mr Major in 1990 and William Hague in 1997. But their remarks reflected a feeling that Lady Thatcher's blunt language has provided the Clarke camp with a chance to tap into fears among many party members that Lady Thatcher's hold over the party has contributed to its catastrophic performance in the polls. Full article at: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,540590,00.html Michael Keaney Mercuria Business School Martinlaaksontie 36 01620 Vantaa Finland [EMAIL PROTECTED]
BATsman caught at slip
Penners Hot on the heels of the state-sponsored scuppering of Michael Portillo's attempt to lead the Conservative Party (many agree he would have been the strongest candidate able to work out an internal compromise and win back votes) comes the latest timely revelation, this time concerning Europhile Kenneth Clarke, who is, realistically, the candidate with most ability to make the Conservatives electorally appealing. Once again The Guardian is the instrument of choice, as it laboriously details the muck dirtying Clarke's hands. If this damages Clarke's campaign sufficiently to allow punk Thatcherite rival Iain Duncan Smith to win, it's goodbye Conservative Party. Clarke company faces new smuggling claims Duncan Campbell and Kevin Maguire Wednesday August 22, 2001 The Guardian Kenneth Clarke, currently embroiled in an increasingly acrimonious bid for the Tory leadership, today faces a major embarrassment through his boardroom connection with the cigarette manufacturer British American Tobacco. New evidence from a whistleblower suggests that, during Mr Clarke's tenure as deputy chairman, the controversial firm has been using a Swiss subsidiary and bank account secretly to control a worldwide smuggling network. The whistleblower is a former director of the firm's offshore agents in the Caribbean. He says: BAT ran the whole show and has handed over a sheaf of documents backing his claim. But Mr Clarke maintains that he did not know what was going on. He has previously publicly defended BAT's integrity to MPs. But he now says he did not at the time in fact have any detailed knowledge of the day to day activities of BAT's Swiss operation. Because of the high tobacco duties levied by most governments, there is a big market in smuggled cigarettes on which no taxes have been paid and which can be sold cheaply under the counter. Firms like BAT can make large profits and expand their sales if cigarettes that they manufacture and export duty free are purchased by smugglers. BAT insiders estimate that up to a third of BAT's £1bn annual profits in recent years, have been the fruits of cigarette smuggling, not only in Latin America, but mainly in China, as well as Africa and Asia, and such markets as Vietnam, where Kenneth Clarke returned from a recent BAT trip seeking official entry to the Vietnamese market. The new evidence has been obtained by the International Consortium of International Journalists (ICIJ), a US-based group of investigative journalists, linked to the non-profit Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, who have published a series of exposures accusing BAT of black marketeering. Mr Clarke responded to those allegations last year with an ambiguous admission that BAT does not actually seek to prevent smuggling. He said the cigarette firm faces a dilemma because it wants to keep up with its rivals. He wrote in the Guardian: We act, completely within the law, on the basis that our brands will be available... in the smuggled as well as the legitimate market. But the latest material shows the company going much further. The documents may be a smoking gun because they suggest BAT not merely colluded with smugglers in the past, but is centrally organising the process and collecting hundreds of millions of pounds worth of black market proceeds. This raises the possibility of criminal proceedings against some BAT executives, while laying Mr Clarke open to charges not only of foolishly lending his name to a misbehaving company, but of misleading the Commons. Mr Clarke, who became £100,000-a-year deputy chairman in 1998, assured parliament's all-party health committee in February 2000 that as a member of the BAT board audit committee he had investigated the allegations. He said: I ... seek to ensure that the company follows the highest standards of probity. The Guardian asked him last week whether he had in fact been aware of his Swiss subsidiary's activities. He replied: As a non-executive director of the parent company, I do not... have any detailed knowledge of the day to day activities of the company. When we put the information to him yesterday, while he was out campaigning, he said: I know nothing of the detail of the allegations... At the present time I am in no position to investigate them myself. BAT would reply, he said. The newly disclosed files show billions of cigarettes being shipped into Latin America in circuitous BAT transactions involving Swiss banks and Caribbean hideaways. They were legally shipped, without any tobacco tax being paid on them, to BAT's agents in the tiny Dutch-speaking island of Aruba, a few miles off the coast of Venezuela. From there, the cases of cigarettes were transhipped to the mainland and smuggled by middlemen into Venezuela and neighbouring Colombia, to be sold cut-price in the streets. For much of the 1990s the proceeds appear to have gone back to a BAT company in Woking, Surrey - BAT (UK and Export) Ltd - and payments were made
Open government vs. capital shortage
Publish or be damned London Underground's attempt to conceal the PPP report erodes our right to freedom of information John Kampfner Wednesday August 22, 2001 The Guardian Tomorrow sees a new twist in the tragicomic battle for the tube. Three appeal court judges will consider a leave to appeal by London Underground to prevent publication of an independent report into the value for money of the public-private partnership. It might sound dry and technical - but it's extremely important. It will set a new benchmark for freedom of information (or lack of it, as is usually the case in this country), and for the way the government wants to handle the final stages of its much- derided policy of carving up and selling off the capital's transport network. The report, by accountants Deloitte Touche, was supposed to be presented to the London Transport board on July 18. Suddenly, on the eve of that meeting, Bob Kiley was sacked as its chair. Kiley, brought in by Ken Livingstone to sort out the tube mess, was preparing to discuss that report with his directors, along with a separate one on safety prepared by a company of consulting engineers. Not only was he removed, but London Underground immediately slapped an injunction on the Deloitte Touche report. That injunction was granted for seven days. When tube officials asked the high court to extend it, permission was refused. They then sought permission to appeal. For those in government not possessed by the Treasury's ideological fervour of the PPP, or its equally strong hatred of Livingstone and Kiley, this is the latest in a series of embarrassing and unnecessary fights. Everybody hates what we're planning, even though they don't know the details, says one official. In public relations terms, Kiley and co have run rings around us. How London Underground and the government let them do so is beyond me. It is part soap opera, part trench warfare. Contempt for the quality of the underground management is not confined to the mayor's office or Transport for London (TfL), Kiley's fiefdom. Many in Downing Street believe this latest legal battle was one too far - the big one, over the government's right to press ahead with the PPP, had already been won a month ago. Although the details cannot be disclosed, it doesn't take a sleuth to realise why the government and the fall guys at London Underground didn't want it published, and why Kiley did. It is hardly expected to give a ringing endorsement to PPP and the terms of the deals being worked out with the preferred bidders for the three sets of lines. But, given that the scheme can't be stopped now, refusal to publish suggests a typical Whitehall obsession with secrecy and a fear of the political repercussions. The official line, that publication would jeopardise commercial confidentiality, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. TfL has already agreed to delete from the published version parts that might affect negotiations with the bidding companies. Anyway, the whole process has been riddled with leaks from all sides that show scant regard for the sensitivities of the private consortia. The latest occurred in Monday's Financial Times, which reported that the companies would be fined if they fell behind on upgrading the lines. This was government or London Underground spin at its best (or worst), giving an impression of being tough, although the small print suggests that the improvements required and the deadlines set will be somewhat more flexible. After all, the companies are playing it tough. They know that ministers are desperate to close the deals. They were supposed to be wrapped up at the start of the year, and they haven't even announced the preferred bidder for one of the sets of lines. The spin doctors are also feeding negative stories about Kiley's time as head of the New York mass transit system. Whichever way the judges declare tomorrow, the prospects for travelling Londoners remain miserable. If the report is published, commuters are likely to see yet another compelling argument against the PPP. If it isn't, their suspicions about the competence of the system and the candour of those running it will be confirmed. Meanwhile, London Transport management will, in time-honoured fashion, stumble haplessly from crisis to crisis. Kiley and Livingstone will play the victims, with consummate skill, and Gordon Brown will bury his head in the sand, determined to press on, come what may. This, say other ministers, is his problem. It wasn't John Prescott's finest hour either, but he's no longer in charge of transport. The man who is, Stephen Byers, wistfully calls it the inheritance. He has tried to build bridges with the mayor, and intriguingly didn't put his name to the sacking of Kiley, leaving it to an official in his department. It would be, as one senior Whitehall figure put it, hard to construct a more absurd situation than the one they have all found themselves in. Assuming he doesn't
deconstruction science
[was: Re: [PEN-L:16153] Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??] Steve Diamond wrote: In any case, let's look at what Maurer himself says: since he thinks finance discourse is not understandable on its own terms - Securitization, thus, is not obvious or self-evident - he is here to tell us what is really going on - and THAT is the fundamental conceit behind all of deconstructionism, postmodernism, etc. That somehow there really is something behind the wizard's curtain. isn't indicating what is REALLY going on the fundamental conceit of Marx, too (in a non-deconstructionist way)? Marx would look at something like securitization and say that common-sense understandings are hardly enough, because in capitalism, the stream of interest income corresponding to the securities has to correspond to surplus-value that's been created, so we need to understand the exploitative social relations of production ... (If the interest income flow doesn't correspond to surplus-value production, it's a redistribution from someone else's surplus-value receipts.) Indeed, the securities represent fictitious capital. In general, looking for what is REALLY going on is a sign of doing science. Deconstruction isn't a science (as far as I can tell), but that's another issue. But like science, it tries to go beyond mere description (empiricism). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Mens rea of political leaders /Hoover'sguilt
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/21/01 04:50PM In reply to Charles: CB: I would acquit Lenin of homicide on the defense of necessity. It would not change my opinion of Lenin and his leadership. Res ipsa loquitor. ((( CB : Proletarian jurisprudence of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, J.D., member of the bar of Russia.
Re: WB/IMF reconstructing capitalism yet again - !!??
Steve Diamond wrote: Re: Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance Bill Maurer.. [snip] Who is Bill Maurer? In what post from whom was he introduced? What is this post about? Carrol
Re: Mens rea of political leaders /Hoover'sguilt
http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9903/0798.html http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0101/0357.html Michael Pugliese -Original Message- From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 7:55 AM Subject: [PEN-L:16160] Mens rea of political leaders /Hoover'sguilt [EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/21/01 04:50PM In reply to Charles: CB: I would acquit Lenin of homicide on the defense of necessity. It would not change my opinion of Lenin and his leadership. Res ipsa loquitor. ((( CB : Proletarian jurisprudence of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, J.D., member of the bar of Russia.
Chinese capitalism unions
[from that famous pro-union newspaper, the New York TIMES, August 22, 2001.] Workers' Rights Suffering as China Goes Capitalist By ERIK ECKHOLM DONGGUAN, China The two young women were strolling through a sterile factory zone in China's roaring southeast, enjoying a rare day off. Trade union? they repeated, puzzled, when asked about workers' rights. What's that? Migrants from the same distant village, the women typified the tens of millions who have flocked to China's coast to work in factories that are mainly foreign-owned, producing electronic goods, clothing, toys and other products for export. And like many of their fellow migrants, they are willing to work 12 hours a day or more for a pittance, living 12 to a room and putting aside any questions about legal rights. One of the pair, Ms. Fu, who said she was 20 but looked 16, said that in her toy-packing job she cleared $24 to $36 a month, depending on overtime. With orders recently down, she said, she has been working only 10 hours a day and has started getting some Sundays off. Ms. Fu, who declined to give her full name, said she was not aware that her wages and hours violated local labor regulations. National law sets a basic work week of up to 44 hours with at least one day off, and the local minimum wage is $48 a month, plus higher rates for overtime. But we couldn't do anything about it anyway, she added with a shrug. With the collapse of the state industries that once dominated China, tens of millions of the workers who were long portrayed as official masters of the Communist nation have been virtually cast aside. Their official Communist-run trade union federation has often been little more than a bystander as the old companies are dissolved or sold. As private and foreign companies race ahead in newer industrial centers like this one in the southeastern province of Guangdong, a new kind of working class is emerging, one dominated by rural migrants who have no tradition of unions or the security once enjoyed in state enterprises. A large majority of the new companies have ignored the requirement to unionize or have created puppet bodies, according to Chinese and foreign labor experts. The working class of China has been marginalized, said He Qinglian, a social critic and author of The Pitfall of China's Development. For the Chinese leaders, who are trying to engineer the transition to a market economy, both the old and new arenas of labor have been sources of social instability. Already thousands of worker protests, wildcat strikes and other disputes are reported each year over everything from unpaid pensions to corruption to intolerable hazards. Through rapid economic development, the government is hoping to grow out of the problem as the benefits of a restructured economy gradually spread. In the meantime President Jiang Zemin has taken the step of trying to broaden the party's base by allowing in capitalists, which some Marxists say will only further diminish the officially hallowed status of workers. For now, inequality is growing fast, and in the years ahead, as China further opens its markets under World Trade Organization rules, labor strife and questions from abroad about fair labor practices are likely to increase. The trade union federation includes many officials who yearn to speak more forcefully for underdog workers. But a blizzard of examples, many from the federation's own newspaper, shows that unions are hamstrung by tight political control and by their mandate simply to help workers adjust to change. The plight of workers and the constricted role of unions have also become a subject of formal international inquiry now that China has ratified the International Convention on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, which explicitly calls for free labor unions. China exempted itself from that clause, arguing that its federation of unions already speaks for workers. All efforts by workers to create independent groups have been crushed, with a number of organizers sent to prison or labor camps. The minister of labor and social security, Zhang Zuiji, speaking earlier this year, said China's workers enjoyed free association in conformity with Chinese conditions and that no one has been detained or imprisoned for legitimate trade union activities. All the rights and interests of workers have been protected, the minister said, adding that the government was still working to bolster the social security system and strengthen the role of unions in helping laid-off workers adapt. Indeed, the All-China Trade Union Federation is now struggling to regain members and to entrench itself in the foreign-owned and private companies that have become the leading edge of China's growth. In the 1990's union membership fell from 130 million to perhaps 90 million by 1999, according to a union official who spoke on condition of anonymity. With a new campaign, the federation hopes to
Re: Argentina
At 08:24 PM 8/21/01 -0700, you wrote: [NYT] August 22, 2001 Argentina Gets $8 Billion Aid From the I.M.F. By JOSEPH KAHN WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 - After nearly two weeks of negotiations, the International Monetary Fund announced tonight that it would provide up to $8 billion in emergency aid to Argentina to stabilize its economy. what is this word aid? The IMF doesn't give aid -- it makes loans. There might be an aid component, if the interest rate is below-market. It's true that the IMF is making loans that private banks won't (acting as a lender of last resort), but this is more than balanced by the conditions it imposes, especially if the conditions involve (as seems likely) sticking to the extremely bad exchange-rate system Argentina has, balancing the government's budget, and reforming the financial system along more neoliberal lines. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Argentina
Regarding Jim's question, I think that what I saw about Argentina is extraordinary. Usually, we can deconstruct what is going on, despite the obfuscation. The Argentina articles are almost impossible to penetrate. We know a crime is happening. We know who the villian is, but the curtains are drawn too tightly to see what is going on. Too bad Nestor left. On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 08:50:55AM -0700, Jim Devine wrote: what is this word aid? The IMF doesn't give aid -- it makes loans. There might be an aid component, if the interest rate is below-market. It's true that the IMF is making loans that private banks won't (acting as a lender of last resort), but this is more than balanced by the conditions it imposes, especially if the conditions involve (as seems likely) sticking to the extremely bad exchange-rate system Argentina has, balancing the government's budget, and reforming the financial system along more neoliberal lines. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
