date:20030116


--- Bill Lear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Does anyone know what arguments in favor of
 Affirmative Action are
 being presented to the Supreme Court?

In broad outline, yes. The actual nriefs are probable
availsble at Findlaw.com, so you could look it up. In
1997 I published a paper in the Ohio State Law J.
called A Not Quite Color-Blind Constitution that
surveyed the law up till then; it's on the web, type
in my name (Justin Schwartz) and the title in google.

Broadly, the defense will be arguing something like
this. The 14th amendmenr prohibits a state from
discrimination on the basis of race unless there is a
compelling state interest and the discrimination is
narrowly tailored to meet that interest. The Supreme
Court in _Regents of the U of C v. Bakke_ (1978), or
Justice Powell, anyway, held that diversity in higher
education is a compelling interest, and so a properly
designed affirmative action plan could be narrowly
tailored to meet it. 

Since _Bakke_, there has been a series of S.Ct cases
striking down affirmative action and race-conscious
programs in contracting (_Adarand_, _Croson_),
broadcasting ( _Metro Broadcasting_ [I think!] holding
diversity not to be a compelling interest in
broadcasting), and voting rediscristing. At the lower
court level, these precedents have been applied by the
First, Fifth, Eleventh, and probably other circuit
courts of appeals to education to invalidate
affirmative action plans. The state of Michigan,
defending its own plans, will try to distinguish these
cases, argue that _Bakke_ is still good law, that
higher education is a special context, and that the
Court has lots of language saying taht in principle
aff action is OK. Also it will argue the facts, that
it's necessary to overcome state discrimination in
Michigan.

 
 I was wondering about this: I constantly hear that
 we can't have
 Affirmative Action because it discriminates.

So far that is not the law. Even Justice O'Connor,w ho
has written the key cases, has always stated that
reverse discrimination may be OK in some
circumstances. She has just never found such a
circumstances herself.

  So, I
 was wondering if
 the solution was ever stated as just a very plain
 process of
 statistical adjustment. 

The argument you state below has not been adopted by
any court that I know about. It would almost certainly
be a loser with the present S.Ct and the law as it
stands. In fact the principle that aff action can be
usedto make up for societal discrimiantion (as
opposed to that due to govt action) has been
_specifically_ rejected in many recent cases. If
accepted, the argument would override the case law
outside the education context. It might have played
with the pre-Rehnquist Court that had Brennan,
Marshall, and Blackmun. Not with this court, not with
the case law we now have. Racial preferencials are
only goingto be legally justified, if at all, by
treating them as one factror among many in a mix of
factors that universities look to in promoting
diversity.

jks, esq.

 So for example, suppose
 that 36% of black
 children under the age of 6 grow up in poverty,
 versus 11% of white
 children (this is indeed approximately the ratio I
 remember from the
 last Statistical Abstract I looked at).  You do the
 math, here and all
 along the social spectrum, and you simply find a set
 of multipliers
 for things like GPA and SAT scores.  You say: The
 penalty imposed
 upon blacks from this area is approximately 1.5 GPA
 points, and 475
 SAT points; the penalty imposed upon whites from the
 same area is 0.43
 GPA points and 135 SAT points; the penalty imposed
 upon Latinos in the
 area is 1.25 GPA points and 450 SAT points; the
 penalty imposed upon
 whites living in Cambridge MA, is 0 GPA and 0 SAT
 (etc., etc.).  You
 could slice this however you like, aggregating very
 broadly or very
 narrowly (the latter is better) but the cost to
 those trampled on by
 society can surely be captured (in part) in hard
 numbers.  Has
 anyone every done this comprehensively?  Does anyone
 know if this is
 how the problem/solution is stated in legal
 argument?  I have never
 seen the penalty aspect of the problem of
 discrimination stated in
 such plain terms, though I'm sure it has been.
 
 
 Bill
 


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Re: Re: Affirmative Action case

2003-01-16 Thread Bill Lear

On Thursday, January 16, 2003 at 06:26:16 (-0800) andie nachgeborenen writes:
...
  So, I
 was wondering if
 the solution was ever stated as just a very plain
 process of
 statistical adjustment. 

The argument you state below has not been adopted by
any court that I know about. It would almost certainly
be a loser with the present S.Ct and the law as it
stands. In fact the principle that aff action can be
usedto make up for societal discrimiantion (as
opposed to that due to govt action) has been
_specifically_ rejected in many recent cases. If
accepted, the argument would override the case law
outside the education context. It might have played
with the pre-Rehnquist Court that had Brennan,
Marshall, and Blackmun. Not with this court, not with
the case law we now have. Racial preferencials are
only goingto be legally justified, if at all, by
treating them as one factror among many in a mix of
factors that universities look to in promoting
diversity.

Hmm, thanks for the references.  I wonder, though, what really counts
as societal discrimination and what counts as governmental?  If
the government spends its resources on the privileged and not on the
poor, isn't that discrimination?


Bill

Re: Re: question regarding immigration/labour migrationfrom india to the US

2003-01-16 Thread ravi

Michael Perelman wrote:
 Some of the anger against the H1-b comes from the practice of laying off
 older programmers, who become unemployable.


i can understand a conservative making this incorrect leap of logic
(i.e., the blame rests not on the h-1b workers but on the corporations),
but a left-wing radio station?

--ravi

RE: Re: Affirmative Action case

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33890] Re: Affirmative Action case

If the Supes and their appointee in the White House decide that affirmative action is _verboten_ and thus _kaput_, does that abolish athletic scholarships and (gasp) College affirmative action for alumni children?

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

-Original Message-
From: andie nachgeborenen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 6:26 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:33890] Re: Affirmative Action case

--- Bill Lear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Does anyone know what arguments in favor of
Affirmative Action are
being presented to the Supreme Court?

In broad outline, yes. The actual nriefs are probable
availsble at Findlaw.com, so you could look it up. In
1997 I published a paper in the Ohio State Law J.
called A Not Quite Color-Blind Constitution that
surveyed the law up till then; it's on the web, type
in my name (Justin Schwartz) and the title in google.

Broadly, the defense will be arguing something like
this. The 14th amendmenr prohibits a state from
discrimination on the basis of race unless there is a
compelling state interest and the discrimination is
narrowly tailored to meet that interest. The Supreme
Court in _Regents of the U of C v. Bakke_ (1978), or
Justice Powell, anyway, held that diversity in higher
education is a compelling interest, and so a properly
designed affirmative action plan could be narrowly
tailored to meet it.

Since _Bakke_, there has been a series of S.Ct cases
striking down affirmative action and race-conscious
programs in contracting (_Adarand_, _Croson_),
broadcasting ( _Metro Broadcasting_ [I think!] holding
diversity not to be a compelling interest in
broadcasting), and voting rediscristing. At the lower
court level, these precedents have been applied by the
First, Fifth, Eleventh, and probably other circuit
courts of appeals to education to invalidate
affirmative action plans. The state of Michigan,
defending its own plans, will try to distinguish these
cases, argue that _Bakke_ is still good law, that
higher education is a special context, and that the
Court has lots of language saying taht in principle
aff action is OK. Also it will argue the facts, that
it's necessary to overcome state discrimination in
Michigan.

I was wondering about this: I constantly hear that
we can't have
Affirmative Action because it discriminates.

So far that is not the law. Even Justice O'Connor,w ho
has written the key cases, has always stated that
reverse discrimination may be OK in some
circumstances. She has just never found such a
circumstances herself.

So, I
was wondering if
the solution was ever stated as just a very plain
process of
statistical adjustment.

The argument you state below has not been adopted by
any court that I know about. It would almost certainly
be a loser with the present S.Ct and the law as it
stands. In fact the principle that aff action can be
usedto make up for societal discrimiantion (as
opposed to that due to govt action) has been
_specifically_ rejected in many recent cases. If
accepted, the argument would override the case law
outside the education context. It might have played
with the pre-Rehnquist Court that had Brennan,
Marshall, and Blackmun. Not with this court, not with
the case law we now have. Racial preferencials are
only goingto be legally justified, if at all, by
treating them as one factror among many in a mix of
factors that universities look to in promoting
diversity.

jks, esq.

So for example, suppose
that 36% of black
children under the age of 6 grow up in poverty,
versus 11% of white
children (this is indeed approximately the ratio I
remember from the
last Statistical Abstract I looked at). You do the
math, here and all
along the social spectrum, and you simply find a set
of multipliers
for things like GPA and SAT scores. You say: The
penalty imposed
upon blacks from this area is approximately 1.5 GPA
points, and 475
SAT points; the penalty imposed upon whites from the
same area is 0.43
GPA points and 135 SAT points; the penalty imposed
upon Latinos in the
area is 1.25 GPA points and 450 SAT points; the
penalty imposed upon
whites living in Cambridge MA, is 0 GPA and 0 SAT
(etc., etc.). You
could slice this however you like, aggregating very
broadly or very
narrowly (the latter is better) but the cost to
those trampled on by
society can surely be captured (in part) in hard
numbers. Has
anyone every done this comprehensively? Does anyone
know if this is
how the problem/solution is stated in legal
argument? I have never
seen the penalty aspect of the problem of
discrimination stated in
such plain terms, though I'm sure it has been.

Bill

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Re: Cyprus: This country is ours rally!

2003-01-16 Thread Michael Perelman

Does this information mean that ethnic hostility is receding?  Could this
be the only place in the world where that is happening?


-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Revenge of the weeds

2003-01-16 Thread Michael Perelman

Very interesting.  Last year, Syngenta, a competitor issued a paper
warning that farmers could lose 17% of their land values.

http://www.syngentacropprotection-us.com/media/article.asp?article_id=216

as a result of this problem.


-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: RE: Re: Affirmative Action case


--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 If the Supes and their appointee in the White House
 decide that affirmative
 action is _verboten_ and thus _kaput_, does that
 abolish athletic
 scholarships and (gasp) College affirmative action
 for alumni children?
 

No, of course it doesn't. Discrimination on those
bases isn't being challenged, just on basis of race.
This is irony, right? jks

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Re: Re: Re: Affirmative Action case


 
 Hmm, thanks for the references.  I wonder, though,
 what really counts
 as societal discrimination and what counts as
 governmental?  If
 the government spends its resources on the
 privileged and not on the
 poor, isn't that discrimination?

Wealth/poverty isn't a reviewable basis of
discrimination in practical tersm. There are S.Ct
cases so saying. Sorry. If govt spends
discriminatorily on the basis of _race_, that is,
intentionally because of race, that's reviewable and
illegal. It doesn't count if it just has a disparate
racial impact unintentioanlly though, it would have to
be on purpose. There are also cases saying that.

jks

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Re: Re: RE: Re: Affirmative Action case

2003-01-16 Thread Michael Perelman

Recall how vigorously Bush I pursued antitrust action against the colleges
for trying to give scholarships to deserving (non-athlete, not legacy)
students.

 -- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Adolph Reed, Sr. (1921-2003)

2003-01-16 Thread Michael Hoover

Adolph Reed, Sr. (1921 -2003) died on January 3 after a brief illness. Reed
was a resident of Fayetteville since 1971, when he joined the political
science faculty at the University of Arkansas. He retired with the title
professor emeritus in 1994. 
A native Arkansan, like so many others of his generation in the late 1930s
Reed migrated to Chicago, where he worked as a railroad dining car waiter
and sat in on classes at the University of Chicago. The vibrant social and
political world of the city's black South Side remained a central formative
experience in his life. He was a veteran of World War II, where he saw
action in the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. He was involved
in protests by black troops against discrimination in Charleston, SC and in
Manchester, England. He never ceased to remark on the contradiction of
having been sent to fight the racist Nazis in a racially segregated United
States Army. 
After the war, Reed was among the ranks of the millions of World War II
veterans who made use of the educational benefits provided by the G. I. Bill
of Rights. He completed his undergraduate education at Fisk University in
Nashville, TN. He then pursued post-graduate education at New York
University and American University. 
Prior to coming to the University of Arkansas, Reed had served on the
faculties at Arkansas A. M.  N. College in Pine Bluff (now the University
of Arkansas-Pine Bluff) and Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA. He also
held visiting professorships at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and the University of California at San Diego. He also served on the
Arkansas and Louisiana State Constitutional Convention Committees. 
At Southern University in 1962, Professor Reed emerged as one of the most
articulate voices in a faculty protest against the university
administration's heavy-handed responses to students' civil rights activism.
These events, and his role, are chronicled in Adam Fairclough's book, Race
and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1912-1972. 
His actions in the Southern University controversy were consistent with a
lifelong commitment to social justice and demonstration of the courage of
his convictions. While at Fisk, he was editor of an independent radical
newspaper in Nashville called Give Me a Name. In the late 1940s in New
York Reed was active in the American Labor Party, and in 1948 he was a
delegate at the Progressive Party Convention that launched Henry Wallace's
presidential campaign, in which Reed was also active. He was among the
thousands who attended the famous September, 1949, concert in Peekskill, New
York, to show support for singer Paul Robeson and to protest right-wing mob
and police attacks against Robeson supporters on the site weeks before. In
the early 1950s he was a political reporter for the New York Compass. 
Reed remained convinced that both major parties are too beholden to
corporate interests, which he frequently described as the basis for the
perverted priorities of American politics. In recent years he became an
active supporter of the new Labor Party, created in 1996, and its project of
building a politics in this country based on a working class economic agenda
that cuts across other potential social divisions. All his life he lamented
what he perceived as the ruling class's success in inducing too many poor
and working people to identify the wrong enemies. He stressed the roles of
the news media, education system and organized religion in perpetuating that
situation. 
These convictions shaped his approach to intellectual and political life. He
was widely known among colleagues and in the political science profession as
a person of uncommon honesty and integrity, a witty and engaging raconteur,
big band jazz aficionado, a biting critic and a generous friend. Although he
never shied away from expressing intellectual and political disagreements,
he refused to take differences personally and could maintain friendships
with those with whom he differed sharply. His teaching philosophy was simply
to encourage students to think independently. 
These qualities endeared him to generations of students, scores of whom
retained close relations with him well into his retirement and their own
middle age. His former students recall him as a brilliant, engaging
lecturer, even when they disagreed with his views, and a common refrain of
students from the beginning of his teaching career to its end was that he
opened their eyes to the world and altered the course of their lives.
Illinois Congressman Danny Davis, for instance, credits Reed for having
shaped his political outlook. 
Professor Reed was an important force in the development of a generation of
b lack political scientists. He was a founding member of the National
Conference of Black Political Scientists and a prominent voice in the
organization throughout its formative years. He was also a founding member
of the American Political Science Association's Caucus

COPY ANY DVD TO A CD

2003-01-16 Thread bvyPete Magowan

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hflqpanqpvwklbqehxvfkmamniwaawoncnfof

new to radio archive

2003-01-16 Thread Doug Henwood

Just added to my radio archive 
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html:

January 9, 2003 Ellen Frank (of Emmanuel College and Dollars  Sense) 
and Max Sawicky (of EPI and Maxspeak.org) on the Bush tax package * 
journalist Tim Shorrock on the Korean crisis

It joins other recent shows:

December 19, 2002 Mark Hertsgaard, author of The Eagle's Shadow, on 
how the U.S. is seen abroad * Thomas Burke, author of Lawyers, 
Lawsuits, and Legal Rights, on the litigation explosion

December 12, 2002 Sara Roy (contributor to The New Intifada) on the 
Palestinian economy * Geisa Maria Rocha on Brazil and the situation 
facing Lula

December 5, 2002 Jonathan Nitzan, co-author of The Global Political 
Economy of Israel, talks about just that (and download the chapter 
[in Acrobat] on the weapondollar-petrodollar coalition) * Ghada 
Karmi, author of In Search of Fatima, talks about her childhood in 
Palestine and exile in England

and other interviews, including Alexandra Robbins on Skull  Bones * 
Joseph Stiglitz on the IMF and the Wall St-Treasury axis * Tariq Ali, 
Noam Chomsky, and Cynthia Enloe on the impending war with Iraq * 
Michael Hardt on Empire * Judith Levine on kids  sex * Christopher 
Hitchens on Orwell and his new political affiliations...

Doug

Law without morals (was Affirmative Action case)


--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 it's irony, but basic principles of ethics, if the
 Supremes are to void AA
 to advance racial and/or gender equality, then AA
 should be abolished for
 athletes and alumni children, too. . . .
 
 Of course, the law doesn't reflect ethics but
 instead the current balance of
 economic and political power, along with precedent
 (which reflects the
 balance of economic and political power in the
 past). 
 

Well, yes, but you wouldn't want the law to reflect
ethics, namely, the moral preferences of the judges
deciding the cases, would you? I mean, that's part of
the problem here. The moral questions are supposed to
be decided by the legislature, in a constitutional
case, by the ratifying process. That gives us law,
which the judges are supposed to interpret regardless
of their moral preferences. However, we have an S.Ct
that fiunds aff action morally offensive,a nd is
overriding the law to impose its moral views on the
law. In general, a comparatively morality-free process
of judicial interpretation is a good thing, not a
problem with law.

In the concrete case, it's not obviosu to me that
nonracial preferences are anywhere nearly as
problematic as racial ones, given our bad history and
present of race relations. I think aff action can be
justified, but anyone who doesn't see that it is at
least somewhat problematic, taht it needs to be
justified, isn't seeing straight.  Legacy aff action
is obnoxious partly because, given the history, the
legacy admits are more likely to be white. Athletic
aff action doesn't strike me as problematic at all.

jks

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RE: Law without morals (was Affirmative Action case)

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33903] Law without morals (was Affirmative Action case)

I wrote that it's a basic principles of ethics, if the Supremes are to void AA [affirmative action] to advance racial and/or gender equality, then AA should be abolished for athletes and alumni children, too. . . . Of course, the law doesn't reflect ethics but instead the current balance of economic and political power, along with precedent (which reflects the balance of economic and political power in the past).

JKS responds:
Well, yes, but you wouldn't want the law to reflect ethics, namely, the moral preferences of the judges deciding the cases, would you? I mean, that's part of the problem here.

I was talking about broad ethical principles, not the application of subjective ethics in specific cases. It's possible -- though not under capitalism unless there's a strong anti-systemic movement -- that these general principles of ethics could be used as general principles of law. Oh, I guess if you consider capitalist property rights to be a broad ethical principle, then we've already got ethical principles built into the legal system (though it seems that big capitalist property has disproportionate power -- i.e., effective or _de facto_ rights -- in the legal system compared to petty capitalist property).

As long as we have non-robotic judges, the subjective moral visions of judges will play a role. But again, I wasn't talking about that.

The moral questions are supposed to be decided by the legislature, in a constitutional case, by the ratifying process. That gives us law, which the judges are supposed to interpret regardless of their moral preferences. However, we have an S.Ct that fiunds aff action morally offensive, a nd is overriding the law to impose its moral views on the law. In general, a comparatively morality-free process of judicial interpretation is a good thing, not a problem with law.

the legislature's one of the major reasons why the balance of political and economic power is reflected in the character of the law and its enforcement.

I don't see why the legal system shouldn't reflect general moral principles. Maybe we could disagree about _which_ moral principles should apply, but you seem to be arguing in favor of amorality.

In the concrete case, it's not obviosu to me that nonracial preferences are anywhere nearly as problematic as racial ones, given our bad history and present of race relations. I think aff action can be justified, but anyone who doesn't see that it is at least somewhat problematic, taht it needs to be justified, isn't seeing straight. Legacy aff action is obnoxious partly because, given the history, the legacy admits are more likely to be white. Athletic aff action doesn't strike me as problematic at all.

The folks who oppose AA invoke issues of individual merit (SATs and the whole pile of no child left behind testing BS). The AA for alumni children and athletes goes against the principles of merit that these folks pretend to endorse.

Re: RE: Law without morals (was Affirmative Action case )


 As long as we have non-robotic judges, the
 subjective moral visions of
 judges will play a role.

Of course. As I know better than you!

 But again, I wasn't talking
 about that. 
  
 the legislature's one of the major reasons why the
 balance of political and
 economic power is reflected in the character of the
 law and its enforcement.
 

Yes, and?


 
 I don't see why the legal system shouldn't reflect
 general moral principles.

Me neither. My point is just that imposing  them isn't
the judge's proper role, even if it inevitably happens
in the interstices.


 Maybe we could disagree about _which_ moral
 principles should apply, but you
 seem to be arguing in favor of amorality. 
 

Ni, just judicial restriant. The judge's moral
preferences oughn't to be determinative. In this case,
if the 14th amendment equal protection clause doesn't
mandate color-blindness, in view of the plain
language, the legislative history, and precedent --
and it doesn't -- then it is lawless of judges to
impose that interpreattion merely because they think
that color-blindness is morally required -- even if
they are right


 The folks who oppose AA invoke issues of individual
 merit (SATs and the
 whole pile of no child left behind testing BS). 
 The AA for alumni
 children and athletes goes against the principles of
 merit that these folks
 pretend to endorse. 
 

Oh yeah, they're hypocrites. 

jks


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RE: Re: RE: Law without morals (was Affirmative Action case )

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33905] Re: RE: Law without morals (was Affirmative Action case )

I wrote:
As long as we have non-robotic judges, the
subjective moral visions of
judges will play a role.

JKS:
Of course. As I know better than you!

It's likely, but personal experience isn't always better than theoretical understanding, since personal experience is on the level of anecdotes: it can give one a vision of the trees without an understanding of the forest. (Of course, theoretical understsnding can be wrong, too.)

the legislature's one of the major reasons why the
balance of political and
economic power is reflected in the character of the
law and its enforcement.

Yes, and?

My view is that we shouldn't rely on the current legal system or the politicians -- but instead should figure out how to change the balance of power (favoring the good guys of course).

I don't see why the legal system shouldn't reflect
general moral principles.

Me neither. My point is just that imposing them isn't
the judge's proper role, even if it inevitably happens
in the interstices.

But I wasn't advocating the taking of moral stands by individual judges. Maybe I might, but I haven't thought about it enough.

Maybe we could disagree about _which_ moral
principles should apply, but you
seem to be arguing in favor of amorality.

Ni, just judicial restriant. The judge's moral preferences oughn't to be determinative. In this case,
if the 14th amendment equal protection clause doesn't mandate color-blindness, in view of the plain
language, the legislative history, and precedent -- and it doesn't -- then it is lawless of judges to
impose that interpreattion merely because they think
that color-blindness is morally required -- even if they are right

This is way off the subject under discussion (or at least what I was talking about, i.e., the contradiction between morality and the current judicial system).

The folks who oppose AA invoke issues of individual merit (SATs and the
whole pile of no child left behind testing BS). The AA for alumni
children and athletes goes against the principles of merit that these folks
pretend to endorse.

Oh yeah, they're hypocrites.

as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the strongest (and easiest) moral cases one can make is by pointing to the contradiction between moral theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy), because there's no need to develop basic moral principles (which some say is impossible). (According to Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics ended up focussing precisely on this contraecitions.)

Jim

It's not about oil

2003-01-16 Thread joanna bujes

FYI/Joanna


TheDay.com
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/mktplace/re.aspx?reIDx=0351ae00-6fa4-48d4-a333
-6c539fce14a4prntV=1

All Of Iraq's Oil Can't Pay The Cost Of A War
Iraq's Annual Oil Revenues At Present Are Only Around $10 Billion A Year.


By TRUDY RUBIN
Published on 1/14/2003

Is the United States going to war with Iraq to get its hands on Iraqi oil
fields? Nearly everyone in the Middle East thinks so. So do some Americans.

The theory is seductive. Iraq has the world's second-largest oil reserves,
with rich new fields to explore.

It's not just critics of an Iraq war who speculate about a war-oil linkage.
Conservative pundits contend that post-Saddam Iraq will turn on the pumps
and drive global oil prices down, while pulling out of the OPEC oil cartel
and replacing the unpleasant Saudis as our key oil ally. Administration
officials predict that oil will pay for all of Iraq's reconstruction  and,
some hint, for the costs of war.

The only problem with all these oil theories is that they are wrong.

There will be no fantastic oil bonanza at hand if Saddam Hussein is ousted.
After 20 years of war and sanctions, Iraq's oil infrastructure is in
disarray. It will take three or more years and $7 billion to $8 billion just
to get back to 1980 production levels of 3.5 million barrels per day,
according to experts.

Boosting production to 6 million barrels per day would take $30 billion to
$40 billion more in investment  and many more years. (So much for hopes
that the Iraqi oil tap will soon make Saudia Arabia's 8 billion barrels per
day irrelevant).

Moreover, Baghdad doesn't even have the cash to get started. Iraq's annual
oil revenues at present are only around $10 billion a year.

Even if we assume that Saddam doesn't torch the oil fields as a parting
gesture, that level of income won't begin to meet the country's immediate
needs.

There will be huge emergency humanitarian bills after a military conflict.
There will be an urgent need to rebuild basic infrastructure, like power
grids, roads, and hospitals, which will eat up $25 billion to $100 billion
more.

Do the math, and what you get is a huge shortfall. In the next couple of
years, international donors will have to pour money into Iraq. Anyone who
imagines that Iraqi oil is going to pay the $100 billion bill for a war
there is in fantasyland.

Of course, foreign investment could help speed up the oil industry's
recovery and augment Iraq's future income. But this brings us to the
political impediments to dipping into Iraqi oil.

U.S. companies might not be in a hurry to invest in an Iraq whose stability
will be shaky in the near term. Even if they are eager, they will confront
crucial issues of Iraqi nationalism  and of law.

Iraq, like the rest of the Gulf, has a state-owned oil company. No foreign
oil company has operated in Iraq since 1960. Multinationals buy Iraqi oil
for refining, but they have no equity share in the oil fields, nor do they
get any percentage of oil for services performed.

In a desperate bid for political support, Saddam promised the Russians and
the French that he would offer them a chance to develop new oilfields. But
if his dictatorship ends, any new oil arrangement will require the passage
of new laws by a new, democratically elected parliament. This process will
be time-consuming, but  if the Bush administration really means to support
democracy  it must accept the results. And the results may not be to its
liking.

If the Baath Party survives, or some general makes a coup, it might be
conceivable they would give the U.S. some oil contracts, says oil expert
Fereidun Fesharaki of the East-West Center in Honolulu. But if they have
proper elections ... you can't predict. You might have a nationalist
government which doesn't want equity sharing or to give the U.S. the oil.

Prime case in point: After the Gulf War, American companies expected to be
invited to develop new Kuwaiti oilfields. Kuwait's government was willing,
but the elected parliament refused.

For similar Arab nationalist reasons, many experts expect that a new Iraqi
government would stay in OPEC.

Iraq was a founding member of OPEC, says Amy Myers Jaffe, senior energy
adviser at the James A. Baker III Institute in Houston. You can't eradicate
a country's history because they have a new government.

That history  which includes British colonial rule  will require the
United States to handle the oil issue with care after an Iraq war.

Iraq has many oil experts, inside and outside the country, who can manage
the industry. Control should be turned over to them once oil proceeds are
weaned from U.N. supervision under the oil-for-food program.

An elected Iraqi government may give contracts to U.S. companies or not. But
any heavy-handed U.S. pressure is likely to boomerang and confirm the
beliefs of those who think the war was only about oil.

Even though, in reality, Iraq's fields are not up for grabs.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board

Law without morals (was Affirmative Act ion case )


--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I wrote:  
   As long as we have non-robotic judges, the
   subjective moral visions of
   judges will play a role.
 
 JKS: 
  Of course. As I know better than you!
 
 It's likely, but personal experience isn't always
 better than theoretical
 understanding, since personal experience is on the
 level of anecdotes: it
 can give one a vision of the trees without an
 understanding of the forest.
 (Of course, theoretical understsnding can be wrong,
 too.) 

True, but apart from having seen the subjective moral
visions of many different judges operate on actual
cases up close and friendly for four years, I like to
think I have theoretical understanding too. I've even
written on the topic, the paper's seeking a home.
ANyway, I can tell you from personal experience that
in ordinary judicial decision, evenw hen judgesare
doing their jobs (and not going against the moral
judgment of the legislature or the Constitution's
framers and ratifiers), personal moral judgment enters
in, among otherplaces, in discretionary decisions, as
well as in what bothers the judge. Judge Cummings was
once verey disturbed by a plausible argument of a
criminal defendant (bank robber) that there was racial
discrimination involved in his jury choice, but
couldn't be othered about what I thought was a
troublesome aspect of his sentencing. This was because
he hated discrimination, but thought that criminals
deserved what they got, pretty much. 

  
 My view is that we shouldn't rely on the current
 legal system or the
 politicians -- but instead should figure out how to
 change the balance of
 power (favoring the good guys of course).

Yes, why not both?

 But I wasn't advocating the taking of moral stands
 by individual judges.

Good.


 Maybe I might, but I haven't thought about it
 enough. 

You shouldn't. Advocate it that is. Think about is
another matter.

 
 This is way off the subject under discussion (or at
 least what I was talking
 about, i.e., the contradiction between morality and
 the current judicial
 system). 

I think the confusion arises because you are attacking
the immorality of the law, as you see it, not focusing
narrowly (as I am) on the role of the judge. Hence
judicial system is misleading.

 
 as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the
 strongest (and easiest)
 moral cases one can make is by pointing to the
 contradiction between moral
 theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy),
 because there's no need to
 develop basic moral principles 

I think that's cheap, actually, not strong. 

(which some say is
 impossible). 

But no one except philosophers really believes that.

(According to
 Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics ended up
 focussing precisely on
 this contraecitions.)

Not West's strongest argument in my view.

jks

__
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ABC voting on war

2003-01-16 Thread Paul Zarembka

  Results of the voting so far:

  This week's question is

  Do you believe there is a case for war against Iraq?

   Yes
14%

   No
86%

   9977 votes counted

Vote at http://www.abc.net.au/news/poll1/vote/

***
Confronting 9-11, Ideologies of Race, and Eminent Economists, Vol. 20
RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY,  Paul Zarembka, editor, Elsevier Science
 http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka

Revolution in Cyprus

2003-01-16 Thread Chris Burford

At 15/01/03 22:52 -0800, you wrote:

More than 50,000 in Northern Cyprus means more than 80,000,000 in
the US. This is some kind of a revolution I would say.

Best,
Sabri

++



I agree.

After waiting for decades you pinch yourself to believe it, but sometimes 
there are qualitative changes. About 10 days ago there was the 
unprecedented criticism of Dentash by the leader of the new ruling party in 
Turkey.

But this demonstration, so long awaited, has not been unprepared, even if 
it was invisible to us. Warm salutes to the tens of thousands of communists 
and democrats from both communities who have worked so long for this. I 
know something must have been happening under the surface, because they 
have long been many Turkish and Greek Cypriots living side by side in north 
London, without any violence. That will be a tribute to their marxist roots 
in their respective communities, working on the old fashioned principles of 
proletarian internationalism, whether they are Stalinist or eurocommunist 
by disposition.

The demonstrators carrying olive branches are similar to those carrying 
carnations at the fall of Salazar. This is like the fall of the Berlin wall.

The revolution depends on the conjucture of crucial economic and political 
factors. It includes the fact that the Turkish ruling class could no longer 
go on ruling with regard to Cyprus in the same way. It includes the 
thousands of protests to the European Union by those opposed to Turkish 
human rights abuses, and the refusal of Europe to admit Turkey without 
changes in human rights.  It involves the ability of marxists and 
communists to blend with their own communities and still not totally lose 
their influence, even while having to make major compromises with the 
capitalist tendencies that are sweeping aside petty national differences.

There may still be many more difficulties and much more patient work to be 
done. And a revolution does not always occur on one day. But the day of 
this demonstration by a quarter of the population of northern Cyprus may be 
the true day of the Cypriot revolution.

Chris Burford
London

Re: RE: Re: RE: Law without morals (was Affirmative Act ioncase )

2003-01-16 Thread Carrol Cox



 Devine, James wrote:
 
 as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the strongest (and
 easiest) moral cases one can make is by pointing to the contradiction
 between moral theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy), because
 there's no need to develop basic moral principles (which some say is
 impossible). (According to Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics
 ended up focussing precisely on this contraecitions.)
 

Engels  in 1885 (Preface to the First German Edition of POP):

*
 The above application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social
product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the
sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed
indicates in the above-quoted passage, it is incorrect in formal
economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to
economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest
part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it.
If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has
nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this
economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx,
therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the
inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily
taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only
that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact.
But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same
be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral
consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one
time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the
fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made
their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and
untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed
behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal
more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus
value.*

Carrol

P.S. On an entirely different topic. The local anti-war group just
purchased a half page ad in the local paper to print the NION statement
with over 110 local signatures. I just met the group's treasurer while
shopping,  she told me that one contributor had called and asked how
much more money we needed -- he would make up the difference!!! A lot of
people really hate this war. We lack sufficient cadre locally, and
collected the signatures and money for the ad mostly by word of mouth
and e-mail. Had we the cadre and organization, I'm sure we could have
collected hundreds more.

Re: Re: Revenge of the weeds

2003-01-16 Thread Chris Burford

At 16/01/03 09:02 -0800, you wrote:

Very interesting.  Last year, Syngenta, a competitor issued a paper
warning that farmers could lose 17% of their land values.

http://www.syngentacropprotection-us.com/media/article.asp?article_id=216

as a result of this problem.



Yes, remarkable further evidence. It shows from the mouths of the 
capitalists themselves how nature prevents them from just selling a 
commodity in disregard of its inter-relationship with the social and 
natural environment.

This passage in the article you cite,

The farm managers polled said a vigilant approach to resistance management 
is important. Nearly half, 47 percent, said they require their renters to 
use crop and herbicide rotation practices to avoid resistance, and 54 
percent said they would make this mandatory in the future. Also, 70 
percent said the use of these practices influence their tenant selection today.


shows how they have to manage the whole social and environmental process.

Although they are talking about crop rotation, the impact on land values 
makes me think by association with land and crop rotation, such as the 
three-field system of the feudal middle ages. Human societies have to 
manage their resources or perish. That may include complex social relations 
far transcending the encounter of commodity units of abstract exchange value.

In so many ways capitalism is running up against its limits to accumulate 
exchange value on the basis of private ownership of means of production of 
commodities. Serious analysis increasingly has to make the social nature 
and implications of commodities transparent.

These news items have stripped away the fetishistic power of  Roundup Ready.

Chris Burford

London

Morality Engels

Title: Morality Engels

I wrote:
as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the strongest (and
easiest) moral cases one can make is by pointing to the contradiction
between moral theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy), because
there's no need to develop basic moral principles (which some say is
impossible). (According to Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics
ended up focussing precisely on this contraecitions.)

Carrol quotes Engels:
The above application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social
product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the
sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed
indicates in the above-quoted passage, it is incorrect in formal
economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to
economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest
part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it.
If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has
nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this
economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx,
therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the
inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily
taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only
that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact.
But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same
be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral
consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one
time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the
fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made
their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and
untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed
behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal
more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus
value.

I generally agree with the above, except for the bit about the
inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily
taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree which seems to be based in Marx's optimism rather than in scientific analysis of capitalism of his day. (After all, it didn't collapse. Or did I miss something?)

Anyway, I was not advocating the contradiction between our morality and capitalism in my passage quoted above. Rather contradiction is between capitalism's official morality (equal opportunity, etc.) and capitalism's reality. In Marx's CAPITAL, for example, it seems to me that Marx took the idea that many political economists of his day believed, i.e., that products sold (approximately) in proportion to their labor-value, or the capitalist's own view that I worked for it, goddamn it, so it's mine as assumption. He then showed that exploitation could and did exist anyway, because workers were dominated in the hidden realm of production and thus produced surplus-value.

Jim

RE: Law without morals

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33908] Law without morals

I wrote:
My view is that we shouldn't rely on the current
legal system or the
politicians -- but instead should figure out how to
change the balance of
power (favoring the good guys of course).

JKS writesYes, why not both?

maybe we should use the legal system (e.g., to defend anti-war demonstrators or suspect Arabs persecuted by the Bushmasters) but we can't _rely_ on it or trust it. The US legal system, for example, is a creature of the capitalist system. There are interstices where dedicated lawyers can work successfully to defend and extend civil liberties, for example, but the overall deck is stacked. (sorry about the mixed metaphor.)

me:
But I wasn't advocating the taking of moral stands
by individual judges.

him:
Good.

Maybe I might, but I haven't thought about it
enough.

him:
You shouldn't. Advocate it that is. Think about is
another matter.

Call me an academic (I'm sure that He Who Should Not Be Named would), but I reject this kind of appeal to authority. _Why_ is it verboten for judges to take moral stands? I can imagine that it would be better if they were to do so openly rather than doing it covertly, as they typically do now. But again, I haven't thought about this issue. I'd rather hear an argument against it than mere assertion. (It reminds me of the plaintiff's lawyer in the civil case I was a juror for, who simply asserted that his case was good.)

This is way off the subject under discussion (or at
least what I was talking
about, i.e., the contradiction between morality and
the current judicial
system).

I think the confusion arises because you are attacking
the immorality of the law, as you see it, not focusing
narrowly (as I am) on the role of the judge. Hence
judicial system is misleading.

I never was focusing on the role of the judge. How did the focus become only on the role of the judge? In this thread, I was _always_ talking about the legal _system_.

JKS:I think that's cheap, actually, not strong.

again, an appeal to authority!

In a world where there is no moral consensus, I see nothing wrong with a cheap criticism of hypocrisy. Noam Chomsky, for example. uses that kind of critique regularly, and with good effect.

(which some say is
impossible).

JKS:But no one except philosophers really believes that.

Should we ignore philosophers and go with what the non-philosophers say, even when the latter could be wrong?

(According to
Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics ended up
focussing precisely on
this contraecitions.)

JKS:Not West's strongest argument in my view.

_why_ is it weak? just because you say so?

My impression is that West doesn't present enough evidence for his case. But once you think of the mature work of Marx in these terms, it makes more sense. Marx clearly is morally committed, but does not argue in terms of capitalism is immoral. Instead, he does stuff like comparing the realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham (the official capitalist morality of his day) and the reality he sees in production and in capitalist society as a whole of Capitalist Supremacy, Inequality, Exploitation, and Rule by Profit.

Jim

Re: Law without morals (was Affirmative Act ion case )

2003-01-16 Thread Waistline2

In a message dated 1/16/03 3:28:18 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

I think that's cheap, actually, not strong.

(which some say is
impossible).

But no one except philosophers really believes that.

(According to
Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics ended up
focussing precisely on
this contradictions.)

Not West's strongest argument in my view.

jks

I have read Cornel West major philosophic writings over the course of the past 25 years. I personally like Cornel and have followed his career as a bourgeois philosopher for the past two decades. This means that I am taken the opportunity to become familiar with his following published writings. "Prophecy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982), his CO-authorship of "Theology in Americas: Detroit 2 (1982) - an I attended the events talked about, Prophetic Fragments (1988), "The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989), "The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought," (1991) "Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991), "Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism. Volume One: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (1993), "Race Matters" (1993) and "Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993).

Cornel is a bourgeois philosopher and my brother - in the intimate sense of the word. Everything he writes is more than less riveted to the Negro Question - that is the matter of the black African slaves brought to America and who evolved into a distinct peoples.

Thus when I read 9 post about Affirmative Action and none of them talk about the real black people affected and why affirmative action evolved in the first place I am reminded of the infantile conceptualization of the degenerate petite bourgeois intellectual. To reduce affirmative action to ethics and morality is simplemindedness and chauvinism of the highest waters.

No.

Affirmative action arose as the direct result of the mechanization of agriculture and the need to break the social barriers that prevented the integration oft he black masses in the industrial infrastructure. A legal analysis of this process would of course use the Hayes Tilden Agreement as precedence - and before that the Dred Scott Decision of 1839 . These "moral" questions of legal rights as property were in fact questions concerning the accumulation of capital. Affirmative action has a moral dimension but has never been a moral question except to the property owners and their intellectual lackeys.

I assure you that owning me and my children, which requires substantial armed force to impose, is not a moral and ethical question at its base but a question of material wealth and force. Force only appears as a moral and ethical question to that sector of the intelligencia tied to the class applying the force.

Ethics are market relations and morality is something that has not been defined by the writers of the 9 post. I have some ideas about the genesis of morality as it erupts from human agency and is transformed on the basis of the changes in the material power of production.

The apparent chauvinism of the writers of the 9 post on this subject does not arise from some innate theory or feelings of racial superiority, although that might be there, but "consumption theory." This matter of oppressing peoples and oppressed peoples has been considered by generations of "scholars" on "both sides." Is not "affirmative action" a matter of addressing grievances expressed by the oppressed peoples?

Now Corneal West has coined the concept "the conditions of the absurd" in contradiction to the philosophic concept of "tragedy" - which arose as a philosophic concept of predestination - inevitability.

But, then again this is an economic talk line.

Melvin P.

Re: Morality Engels

2003-01-16 Thread Carrol Cox



 Devine, James wrote:
 
 
 I generally agree with the above, except for the bit about the
 inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is
 daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree 
 which seems to be based in Marx's optimism rather than in 
 scientific analysis of capitalism of his day. (After all, it 
 didn't collapse. Or did I miss something?)
 

No, you didn't miss anything I'm afraid. :-)

I agree that collapse is not inevitable, but it also seems to me that
_some_ part of the claim may be upheld. The collapse of capitalism is
_necessitated_ by its own internal dynamic -- but that doesn't mean it's
going to happen. It is the nature of capitalism to be self-destructive,
to necessitate its surpassing (as in Luxemburg's socialism or
barbarism), as one might say that acute appendicitis necessitates
surgery. But contingency ultimately rules.

Carrol

Artificial economic inefficiency

2003-01-16 Thread Bill Lear

I'm curious what the technical name for this sort of barrier to
economic efficiency is.  Has anyone ever cataloged this sort of
thing?  I'd be very interested if so ...


Bill

 Printer industry seeks to keep lock on cartridge profit
 By Dawn C. Chmielewski
 Mercury News
 
 Your printer and ink cartridges are sharing secrets that keep you
 shelling out outrageous prices for refills.
 
 Lexmark admits it designed its new generation of laser printers to
 work only with Lexmark toner cartridges, not cheaper no-name
 refills. And it's making a federal case out of it.
 
 Lexmark is suing a maker of generic toner cartridges, claiming it
 illegally cracked the ``secret handshake'' that links cartridge with
 printer. Without the secret code, no document will print.
 
 Static Control Components, a generic cartridge maker in North
 Carolina, developed a microchip that speaks the same language. That,
 according to Lexmark, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
 which makes it a federal crime to circumvent a technological lock that
 protects copyrighted works -- like, say, a printer program.
 
 This blatant anti-consumer behavior on Lexmark's part helps explain
 why we continue to pay Tiffany prices for a product that costs about
 $3 to make. And we don't even get the chic powder-blue box to make us
 feel special about the purchase.
 
 Lexmark is just one of a number of big-name printer companies that
 uses chip technology as a padlock to keep exclusive hold on the
 lucrative market for printer supplies, which Gartner Dataquest says
 accounts for 53 percent of Lexmark's revenue.
 
 The nation's leading maker of printers, Hewlett-Packard, and another
 big printer-maker, Epson, use smart chip technology in their ink
 cartridges to serve as electronic dipsticks, informing the printer how
 much ink is left.
 
 When the ink is gone, the printer stops working until the consumer
 replaces it with a new cartridge -- with a new chip. Refills won't
 work.

Re: Re: Morality Engels


- Original Message -
From: Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED]


 I agree that collapse is not inevitable, but it also seems to me that
 _some_ part of the claim may be upheld. The collapse of capitalism is
 _necessitated_ by its own internal dynamic -- but that doesn't mean
it's
 going to happen. It is the nature of capitalism to be
self-destructive,
 to necessitate its surpassing (as in Luxemburg's socialism or
 barbarism), as one might say that acute appendicitis necessitates
 surgery. But contingency ultimately rules.

 Carrol

===

Hyman Minsky used to say there were 57 varieties of capitalism. If we're
on, say, our 3rd or 4th version, I'm not sure the planet can handle
trying out the remaining possible variations should each future
successive model seriously undermine its own social structure of
accumulation.

Ian

RE: Re: Re: Morality Engels

2003-01-16 Thread Forstater, Mathew

Hyman Minsky used to say there were 57 varieties of capitalism.

I think it is getting to the point where more people have said Minsky
said it than he actually said it himself. He always said it was 57
pickles. I thought it was ketchup. In any case, I always wondered, are
there really so many varieties of capitalism?  

Well, maybe not.  It turns out, the 57 was completely arbitrary. The
rest is history indeed!

From the Heinz web site:

What is the significance of 57? 

The Heinz 57 Varieties slogan is synonymous with the name
Heinz. Our corporate history tells us that in 1896, Henry John
Heinz noticed an advertisement for 21 styles of shoes. He
decided that his own products were not styles, but varieties.
Although there were many more than 57 foods in production at the
time, because the numbers 5 and 7 held a special significance
for him and his wife, he adopted the slogan 57 Varieties. Thus, a
new advertising campaign was launched for Heinz 57 Varieties -
and the rest is history!

http://www.heinz.com/jsp/consumer_faq.jsp#11

Re: RE: Law without morals


 
 maybe we should use the legal system (e.g., to
 defend anti-war demonstrators
 or suspect Arabs persecuted by the Bushmasters)
 but we can't _rely_ on it
 or trust it. 

I agree.


  But I wasn't advocating the taking of moral stands
  by individual judges.
  him:
 You shouldn't. Advocate it that is. Think about is
 another matter.
 
 Call me an academic (I'm sure that He Who Should Not
 Be Named would), but I
 reject this kind of appeal to authority. 

What appeal to authority? What authority? I was just
giving you advice.

_Why_ is it
 verboten for judges to
 take moral stands? 

Because in a society that claims to be democratic,
it's not their job. They're supposed to interpret the
law. The moral judgments are made by the legislators.
Of course, as we have noth said, even if they try to
do their job their views will come into play. But we
don't want Scalia saying, I think abortion is immoral,
so I'll vote to allow states to make it illegal. We
want him to say: the Constitution, as interpreted by
this Court, unfortunately protects a woman's right to
choose, and I, unfortunately, have to vote to uphold
Roe and Casey.

I can imagine that it would be
 better if they were to do
 so openly rather than doing it covertly, as they
 typically do now. But
 again, I haven't thought about this issue. I'd
 rather hear an argument
 against it than mere assertion.

I have a 60 page paper on the subject looking for a
home, some of the argument is summarized above, shall
I email it to you?

 
 I never was focusing on the role of the judge. How
 did the focus become
 only on the role of the judge? In this thread, I was
 _always_ talking about
 the legal _system_. 

Because you used the expression judicial system. ANd
we weretalking about the Court's upcoming review of
aff action, i.e., the behavior of judges.

 
  as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the
  strongest (and easiest)
  moral cases one can make is by pointing to the
  contradiction between moral
  theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy),
  because there's no need to
  develop basic moral principles 
 
 JKS:I think that's cheap, actually, not strong. 
 
 again, an appeal to authority! 

No, it's not. Unless you take me to be saying that you
should believe what I said because I think so and I'm
holding myself out to be an Authority, which I don't,
except on the content of the law, where I actually am
an authority at least hereabouts.

 
 In a world where there is no moral consensus, I see
 nothing wrong with a
 cheap criticism of hypocrisy. Noam Chomsky, for
 example. uses that kind of
 critique regularly, and with good effect. 

I don't think it has particularly good effect. It
diverts attention from the underlying badness of the
actions to the formal inconsistency between the
pronounced justification and the action. It's
essentially a liberal critique, not in the good sense
of liberal, but in the wishy washy sense. The problem
with, e.g., the phony defense of color blindness as
promoting merit is not that people don't act
consistently with it, but that in a racist society,
colot blindness leads to oppression.

 
 (which some say is
  impossible). 
 
 JKS:But no one except philosophers really believes
 that.
 
 Should we ignore philosophers and go with what the
 non-philosophers say,
 even when the latter could be wrong? 

As a sometime philosopher, I'd say, definitely. There
is no proposition so absurd that some philosopher has
not maintained it. When philosophers generate silly
puzzles about thinks that no one really doubts, e.g.,
whether the real world is real, whether we can make
moral judgments at all, whether there are other minds,
the proper response, if one cares enough about it, is
to diagnise where they went wrong and what false
presuppositions led them to doubt things where no real
grounds for doubt exists.

 
 (According to
  Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics ended
 up
  focussing precisely on
  this contraecitions.)
 
 JKS:Not West's strongest argument in my view.
 
 _why_ is it weak? just because you say so?

No, because I think that's not Marx's approach, such
as it is, to ethics. He's not an exposer of hypocrisy,
except incidentally. 
 
 My impression is that West doesn't present enough
 evidence for his case. But
 once you think of the mature work of Marx in these
 terms, it makes more
 sense. Marx clearly is morally committed, but does
 not argue in terms of
 capitalism is immoral.

That is obviously true, although Marx clearly is
outraged by capitalism.

 Instead, he does stuff like
 comparing the realm of
 Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham (the
 official capitalist morality
 of his day) and the reality he sees in production
 and in capitalist society
 as a whole of Capitalist Supremacy, Inequality,
 Exploitation, and Rule by
 Profit. 

But this isn't an expose of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is
the tribute vice pays to virtue (Wilde); the hypocrite
knows he's being a phony. Marx's theory of ideology
deoends on the

RE: Re: Morality Engels

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33916] Re: Morality  Engels





I wrote:
 I generally agree with the above [quote from Engels], except 
 for the bit about the
 inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is
 daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree 
 which seems to be based in Marx's optimism rather than in 
 scientific analysis of capitalism of his day. (After all, it 
 didn't collapse. Or did I miss something?)


Carrol writes:
No, you didn't miss anything I'm afraid. :-)


I agree that collapse is not inevitable, but it also seems to me that
_some_ part of the claim may be upheld. The collapse of capitalism is
_necessitated_ by its own internal dynamic -- but that doesn't mean it's
going to happen. It is the nature of capitalism to be self-destructive,
to necessitate its surpassing (as in Luxemburg's socialism or
barbarism), as one might say that acute appendicitis necessitates
surgery. But contingency ultimately rules.


this discussion reminds me of a book I have on Marxism and Utopianism (unfortunately I don't have it here and so can't give a complete reference). It argues that the really big difference between M and U is not that pointed up by the later Social Democrats, Stalinists, etc., which emphasizes the scientific nature of their version of M and the objective laws of motion of capitalism driving it to revolution (socialism or barbarism -- or a combination of the two?). Rather, it was a difference of _tactics_ and _strategy_. The U's had blueprints which they showed to people and set up colonies to show that their version of U would work well (usually under the benevolent leadership of an Owen-like figure). On the other hand, M and Engels believed that there were objective tendencies in real-world history that could make the working class more powerful, even able to set up democracy (which necessarily had to be socialistic). So instead of blueprints, they favored helping the working class liberate itself.

Jim

British Marxist Historians the Study of Social Movements

2003-01-16 Thread Yoshie Furuhashi

Making Social Movements: The British Marxist Historians and the Study 
of Social Movements, June 26-28, 2002, Edge Hill College of Higher 
Education, England, 
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/AJconfTimetable.htm

Colin Barker (Manchester Metropolitan University)
A Modern Moral Economy: Edward Thompson and Valentin Volosinov Meet 
in a North Manchester Protest
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Barker-modernmoraleconomy.pdf

David Seddon (University of East Anglia)
Food Riots, Past and Present: Globalisation and Contemporary Popular Protest
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/food_riots_paper-David_Seddon.pdf

Mark Boden (London School of Economics)
British Marxist Historiography and the Question of 'Absent' 
Bourgeoisie: A Critique
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/BritishMarxistHistoriography-MarkBoden.pdf

Dorothy Thompson (Author: The Chartists)
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Dorothy%20Thompson.pdf

Paul Blackledge (Leeds Metropolitan University)
All That Moves Is the Market: Perry Anderson's Historical Pessimism
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Andersonshistoricalpessimism-PaulBlackledge.pdf

Sean Scalmer (Macquarie University, Australia)
The Problem of Decline: Demobilisation and the Fracturing of Working 
Class Politics
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/TheProblemDecline-Sean_Scalmer.pdf

Neil Davidson (The Open University)
Regional Peasant Revolt and Religious Radicalism during the Scottish 
Bourgeois Revolution
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/PEASANT_REVOLT-Davidson.pdf

Edwin Roberts (California State University, Long Beach)
From the History of Science to the Science of History: The Role of 
Scientists and Historians in the Shaping of British Marxist Theory
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/EdwinRoberts-Historyofscience.pdf

Bollette M. Christensen (University of Copenhagen)
Constructing a Social Movement (Attac in Denmark)
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/B-Christensen-Constructing_a_Social_Movement.pdf

Sigrid McCausland (The Australian National University)
Movement and Class: the Anti-Uranium Movement in Australia
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/SigridMcCausland-AntiUraniumMovement.pdf

James Holstun (State University of New York, Buffalo)
Brian Manning and the Dialectics of Revolt
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Holstun%20-%20Manning%20and%20Dialectics.pdf

Geoff Kennedy (York University, Toronto)
Digger Radicalism and Agrarian Capitalism
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/DiggerRadicalismAgrarianCapitalism-GeoffKennedy.pdf

Ulrich Oslender (University of Glasgow)
The Return of the primitive rebel? Reflections on the Colombian 
Conflict Today
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/UlrichOslender-primitiverebel.pdf

Philip Shasko (University of Wisconsin)
From Primitive Rebels to Conscious Revolutionaries: The Macedonian 
Struggle as a Social Movement, 1878-1912
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Shashko-PrimativeRebel.pdf

Henrique Espada Lima (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil)
Historical Microanalysis and Social History: Historiographical 
Exchanges between British Marxist History and the Italian 
Microhistory Debate
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/EspadaLima-HistoricalMicroanalysisandsocialhistory.pdf

Keith Flett (London Socialist Historians Group)
Whistling into a Typhoon: A Moral Economy of Anti-Privatisation
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Whistlingtyphoon-KeithFlett.pdf

Trevor Bark
Crime Becomes Custom -- Custom Becomes Crime
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Trevor%20Bark%20-%20Crime%20becomes%20custom.pdf

Mi Park (London School of Economics)
Ideology and Lived Experience: A Case Study of Revolutionary 
Movements in South Korea, 1980-1995
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Mi%20Park%20-%20Ideology%20and%20Lived%20Experience.pdf

Sara Motta  (London School of Economics)
Argentinian Popular Protest in the 21st Century: The Making of a 
Subject of History or a Reaction of an Angry Crowd?
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/ArgentinaMotta.pdf

Alan Johnson (Edge Hill College)
Christopher Hill and the Study of Social Movements Leadership
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/Johnson%20-%20Leadership%20as%20Capacity.pdf

Wade Matthews  (University of Strathclyde)
The Poverty of Strategy: Socialism and the British Marxists
http://www.edgehill.ac.uk/research/smg/pdf%20-%20Conference/ThePovertyofStrategy-WadeMatthews.pdf

Antonio Negro (Universidade Federal de Bahia)
A Limited Number of Ideas for an Unlimited Social History. Notes on 
Brazilian Trends

interlocking directorates study

2003-01-16 Thread Peter Dorman





Here is a link to the article on interlocking directorates that has been
indexed in several places recently (including ATTAC). The title is "The
Network Topography of the American Corporate Elite, 1982-2001" by Gerald
Davis, Mina Yoo and Wayne Baker.

http://experiments.gsia.cmu.edu/speakers/Davis.pdf

Peter

RE: Re: RE: Law without morals

Title: RE: [PEN-L:33920] Re: RE: Law without morals

I wrote:
I reject this kind of appeal to authority.

JKS writes: What appeal to authority? What authority? I was just
giving you advice.

_your_ authority, since you didn't justify the advice in any way. It was your Word: therefore I was expected to accept it.

me: _Why_ is it
verboten for judges to
take moral stands?

JKS: Because in a society that claims to be democratic,
it's not their job. They're supposed to interpret the
law. The moral judgments are made by the legislators.

it claims to be democratic, but it's a democracy dominated by money power. If I were to develop an argument against judges taking moral stands, it would be based on the view that most such behavior would be pointless (since it would be overturned on appeal). Further, if it wasn't overturned, it's likely because it reflects the shared (class) interests of judges, one that's very much like the petty bourgeoisie of old.

Still, I would admire a judge who threw a spanner in the works to block the attack on Iraq.

JKS:Of course, as we have noth said, even if they try to
do their job their views will come into play. But we
don't want Scalia saying, I think abortion is immoral,
so I'll vote to allow states to make it illegal. We
want him to say: the Constitution, as interpreted by
this Court, unfortunately protects a woman's right to
choose, and I, unfortunately, have to vote to uphold
Roe and Casey.

but isn't this just covert taking of a moral stand? isn't he and the other four going to cloak their anti-choice decision in constitutional-sounding mumbo-jumbo (full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing), just as they did in the Gore vs. Bush decision? Why do you trust Scalia to say what he means? or to mean what he says?

I can imagine that it would be
better if they were to do
so openly rather than doing it covertly, as they
typically do now. But
again, I haven't thought about this issue. I'd
rather hear an argument
against it than mere assertion.

I have a 60 page paper on the subject looking for a
home, some of the argument is summarized above, shall
I email it to you?

since I am not a lawyer (to paraphrase a late President), that would be useless to me. Is there any way to paraphrase it? what are the assumptions you start with? what kind of logic do you use? is it a socio-economic analysis of the legal system?

me:
I never was focusing on the role of the judge. How
did the focus become
only on the role of the judge? In this thread, I was
_always_ talking about the legal _system_.

JKS: Because you used the expression judicial system. ANd
we weretalking about the Court's upcoming review of
aff action, i.e., the behavior of judges.

The judicial system is pretty much identical to the legal system, while a system cannot be reduced to mere behavior of individuals.

In any event, the Supremes' decision is completely different from the standard run-of-the-mill judge. They aren't subject to any kind of appeal, so they can simply make the kind of moral judgement you abhor (and dress it up in legal lingo) and there's nothing anyone can do about it until the balance of power changes so that reasonable people can be appointed to the Court.

I had written:
as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the
strongest (and easiest)
moral cases one can make is by pointing to the
contradiction between moral
theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy),
because there's no need to
develop basic moral principles

JKS:I think that's cheap, actually, not strong.

again, an appeal to authority!

JKS replies: No, it's not. Unless you take me to be saying that you
should believe what I said because I think so and I'm
holding myself out to be an Authority, which I don't,
except on the content of the law, where I actually am
an authority at least hereabouts.

maybe you aren't the Authority, but why should I believe what you say? (and we are not talking about the content of the law.)

In a world where there is no moral consensus, I see
nothing wrong with a
cheap criticism of hypocrisy. Noam Chomsky, for
example. uses that kind of
critique regularly, and with good effect.

JKS: I don't think it has particularly good effect. It
diverts attention from the underlying badness of the
actions to the formal inconsistency between the
pronounced justification and the action. It's
essentially a liberal critique, not in the good sense
of liberal, but in the wishy washy sense.

interesting critique of Chomsky.

The problem with, e.g., the phony defense of color blindness as
promoting merit is not that people don't act
consistently with it, but that in a racist society,
colot blindness leads to oppression.

that's more the Marx version. He pointed to the contrast between capitalist rhetoric and the actual structure of the system. Chomsky does this too, sometimes.

(which some say is
impossible).

JKS:But no one except philosophers

RE: Re: Re: Morality Engels

Hyman Minsky used to say there were 57 varieties of capitalism.

I think it is getting to the point where more people have said Minsky
said it than he actually said it himself. He always said it was 57
pickles. I thought it was ketchup. In any case, I always wondered, are
there really so many varieties of capitalism?

Well, maybe not.  It turns out, the 57 was completely arbitrary. The
rest is history indeed!

=

What, economists make folklore? Shocking!


If capitalism[s] can be modeled in a hyperspace of possible of
ecological-economies.


Ian

wto and the byrd amendment

US Faces WTO Pressure to Repeal Trade Measure
Thu January 16, 2003 04:43 PM ET
By Doug Palmer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States faced pressure on Thursday from
the World Trade Organization to repeal a controversial trade protection
program that has paid out more than $500 million to American steel
companies and other firms over the past two years.

The WTO appeals body in Geneva ruled that the United States was in
violation of world trading rules with the so-called Byrd amendment that
requires the Customs Service to distribute the anti-dumping duties it
collects to the U.S. companies that complained of unfair trade
practices. U.S. steel and ball bearing companies are among the biggest
beneficiaries.

Although the U.S. Trade Representative's office said the United States
would comply with the ruling, it stopped short of saying it would ask
Congress to repeal the popular program -- as demanded by European Union
Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy.

We are reviewing the report to assess the best compliance options and
will discuss these with the (House) Ways and Means Committee and the
(Senate) Finance Committee and all other interested members of
Congress, USTR said in a statement.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican,
issued a similarly couched statement, while expressing disappointment
with the ruling.

I'll work with the administration and my colleagues before deciding
next steps, Grassley said. Of course, we need to comply with our WTO
commitments, win or lose.

Democrats, including the senior West Virginia senator for whom the
provision is named, said the WTO had no right to tell the United States
how to use the money raised by the anti-dumping duties.

Contrary to the WTO's findings, the Byrd Amendment is fully consistent
with our international obligations, Sen. Robert Byrd said. It does not
violate any agreement; rather, it is based on a concept that is not
addressed by WTO agreements.

Congress passed the Byrd amendment -- officially known as the Continued
Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act -- in 2000 over the advice the former
Clinton administration, which warned it would increase tensions with the
EU and other trading partners.

The measure allows companies that have persuaded the federal government
to impose anti-dumping or countervailing duties on unfairly priced
imports to receive the money raised by those duties. Customs paid out
$329 million to companies under the program in 2002, up from $207
million in 2001. Previously, funds raised by duties went into the
general treasury.

Congressional and industry sources have said the Bush administration
could propose a repeal of the Byrd amendment in its upcoming 2004
budget.

That would please the EU and other countries including Australia,
Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, South Korea and Mexico that brought the
case to the WTO.

In the end, this (WTO panel) decision may not matter much -- as I
suspect there is little support in Congress for implementing it, said
Montana Sen. Max Baucus, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Finance
Committee.

Rep. Sander Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Ways and Means
panel, said he would oppose any effort to repeal the Byrd amendment.
Instead, the United States should pursue negotiations on the issue in
the WTO, he said.

A spate of unfavorable WTO rulings -- including a multibillion-dollar
case brought by the EU over U.S. tax breaks for exporters -- are eroding
U.S. support for the WTO, Levin said.

Re: Rates of Profit: Recent Estimates\Japan

2003-01-16 Thread Fred B. Moseley


Hi Paul,

Thanks again for your comments.  A couple of responses below.



On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Paul_A wrote:

 Fred,
 
 This has been very useful.  Thanks for the stimulating posts.  The point 
 about debt and financial fragility really must be kept as a prime issue.
 
 You asked for reactions about Japan and nationalizing the bank debt.  I 
 understand that by new proposal you mean it is a new alternative to the 
 U.S. pushed proposal of a classic bankruptcy\deflation with assets being 
 sold off cheaply (and bought by you-know-who).  I also understand you are 
 not asking about the political morality of the proposal, just how would it 
 work out from the macro economic perspective of nation states and capitals.

Right, I am mainly interested in a general theoretical analysis of the
extent to which government policies could avoid, or minimize, the
necessity of bankruptcies in order to reduce debt burdens.  In order to be
more effective, I imagine that the government bail-outs would also have to
include  writing off some of the debt of borrowers, not just taking over
the bad loans of the banks.  But this would of course cost the government
even more.  And even if debt burdens are reduced, these
bankruptcy-avoidance policies still do nothing to raise the rate of
profit.


 Doesn't the analogy to Latin America remind you of just how 
 outrageous it was in the early '80s that their massive debt, largely 
 private or non-sovereign, was nationalized without even a bargaining 
 process or concessions?  What cowardly and selfish leadership; how 
 disingenuous of the Bretton Woods institutions to help push this along.


Are you sure about this?  I thought that most of this earlier Latin
American debt was governent debt from the beginning.  Please explain
further.  What were the main private sectors whose debt was taken over by
the government?


Thanks again.

Comradely,
Fred

Re: RE: Re: RE: Law without morals


 
 me:  _Why_ is it
  verboten for judges to
  take moral stands? 
 
 JKS: Because in a society that claims to be
 democratic,
 it's not their job. They're supposed to interpret
 the
 law. The moral judgments are made by the
 legislators.
 
 it claims to be democratic, but it's a democracy
 dominated by money power.

So that makes it OK for unelected judges (or judges
who are elected to interpret the law) to impose their
personal prejudices?


 If I were to develop an argument against judges
 taking moral stands, it
 would be based on the view that most such behavior
 would be pointless (since
 it would be overturned on appeal).

If it went against the law, and the higher court
didn't share the prejudices (and was also lawless).
Apparantly it doesn't bother you if judges are
lawless.

 Further, if it
 wasn't overturned, it's
 likely because it reflects the shared (class)
 interests of judges, one
 that's very much like the petty bourgeoisie of old.

Well, judges aren't a class. But they tend to share
the class prejudices of their class, professionals and
govt bureaucrats.
 
 
 Still, I would admire a judge who threw a spanner in
 the works to block the
 attack on Iraq. 
 

That would be really stupid as well as lawless. My
judge on the DCt very properly threw out of court a
legal challenge to the Kosovo intervention (which
intervention I opposed). Judges aren't empowered to
make foreign policy.

 J

 We
 want [Scalia] to say: the Constitution, as
interpreted by
 this Court, unfortunately protects a woman's right
 to
 choose, and I, unfortunately, have to vote to uphold
 Roe and Casey.
 
 but isn't this just covert taking of a moral stand?

Deference to democratic authority is not a covert
moral stand.

 isn't he and the other
 four going to cloak their anti-choice decision in
 constitutional-sounding
 mumbo-jumbo (full of sound and fury, but signifying
 nothing), just as they
 did in the Gore vs. Bush decision? 

Of course.

Why do you trust
 Scalia to say what he
 means? or to mean what he says? 

I don't trust him. But I'd want him to say he was
bound by the law, and to be bound by the law, even if
the law offended him deeply.

 
 I have a 60 page paper on the subject looking for a
 home, some of the argument is summarized above,
 shall
 I email it to you?
 
 since I am not a lawyer (to paraphrase a late
 President), that would be
 useless to me. 

Ni, it's pretty much straught philosophy. You could
follow it. You won't like it -- I'm very judicially
conservative (if politically radical) -- but you are
fully competent to understand and critique it.

Is there any way to paraphrase it?
 what are the assumptions
 you start with? 

Unjustified.

 what kind of logic do you use? 

Faulty.

is it
 a socio-economic
 analysis of the legal system? 
 

No.


 
 The judicial system is pretty much identical to the
 legal system, while a
 system cannot be reduced to mere behavior of
 individuals. 

Well, if you want to use words that way. It's not how
I use legal system, especially if I am talking about
legislation.

 
 In any event, the Supremes' decision is completely
 different from the
 standard run-of-the-mill judge. They aren't subject
 to any kind of appeal,
 so they can simply make the kind of moral judgement
 you abhor (and dress it
 up in legal lingo) and there's nothing anyone can do
 about it until the
 balance of power changes so that reasonable people
 can be appointed to the
 Court. 


Quite right. That's why it's especilaly important for
them be honest and law-abiding.

 
 maybe you aren't the Authority, but why should I
 believe what you say? (and
 we are not talking about the content of the law.)

Because I am so wise and clever.


 
 JKS: I don't think [critique of hypocrisy] has
particularly good effect.
 It
 diverts attention from the underlying badness of the
 actions to the formal inconsistency between the
 pronounced justification and the action. It's
 essentially a liberal critique, not in the good
 sense
 of liberal, but in the wishy washy sense.
 
 interesting critique of Chomsky. 


Do you find it persuasive?


  Should we ignore philosophers and go with what the
  non-philosophers say,
  even when the latter could be wrong? 
 
 JKS:As a sometime philosopher, I'd say, definitely.
 There
 is no proposition so absurd that some philosopher
 has
 not maintained it. When philosophers generate silly
 puzzles about thinks that no one really doubts . . .
 the proper response, if one cares enough about it,
 is
 to diagnise where they went wrong and what false
 presuppositions led them to doubt things where no
 real
 grounds for doubt exists.
 
 I didn't say _obey_ or _believe_ what philosophers
 say (not to mention what
 _all_ philosophers say). I said that we shouldn't
 ignore their points.
 Philosophical reflection should not be ruled out.

Of course. Least of all by me. But my point stands.

We seem to agree about Marx, only I don't call his
appriach a critique of hypocrusy.

jks

Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Law without morals