Tip of the day - the camera technique of mole monitoring
Tip of the Day RealAge.com Monday, February 16 Take a Picture Monitoring potentially unhealthy changes in moles may be best done with your camera. Compared to people who did only basic skin self-exams, patients in a recent study who took pictures of their own skin and used the pictures as a reference tool did a better job of detecting new moles or changes to their moles over time. Moles that change shape, or have irregular borders may have the highest risk of turning cancerous. RealAge Benefit: Actively patrolling your health can make your RealAge as much as 12 years younger. Have someone assist in taking pictures of . . . For more, go to: http://mailer.realage.com/click?q=52-LUQoIrJ4zR5IZMrMPzS_9IaOQdRR
Death squad commanders join anti-Aristide rebellion
Haitian death squad commanders join rebels in bid to topple president Aristide By Andrew Gumbel in Port-au-Prince 16 February 2004 Armed rebels demanding the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's president, were back on the offensive yesterday, pushing out from their stronghold in Gonaives into three small northern towns with the help of former army officers and death squad commanders returning from exile in the Dominican Republic. The rebels, calling themselves the Anti-Aristide Resistance Front, were reported to have retaken Dondon, a small town they briefly held last week, and attacked police in Sainte Suzanne. Both are on the way to the real prize, the northern port of Cap-Haitien, which is the country's second-largest city. Trou-du-Nord, near the Dominican border, was also reported to be under attack. Since the rebellion broke out 10 days ago, police and armed civilians loyal to the president have fought to maintain control in Cap-Haitien; burning houses of suspected opponents and intimidating others with constant volleys of gunfire. Much of the north has been without power or fuel supplies, and food convoys have not been able to get past Gonaives on the road north, raising the risk of a major humanitarian crisis. The pro-government forces now face a new challenge, as prominent members of the army that Mr Aristide disbanded in 1994 have appeared in Gonaives, claiming to have brought the men, money and firepower needed to take over the country. Visiting journalists have seen only a handful of uniformed men and no heavy weaponry, but the rebels say they are concentrating their forces in another town about 30 miles east of Gonaives. The new leaders include Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who commanded army death squads in the 1980s, following the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, and went on to found a militia called the Front for the Advancement of Progress in Haiti, which fomented trouble after the 1991 coup that toppled Mr Aristide following his first ascent to the presidency. full: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=491733 -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
The Democratic Party's imperialist past
(George Packer is a high-profile member of the Cruise-Missile left who has made his arguments in the NY Times Magazine and other such venues. He is on the editorial board of Dissent Magazine. As Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery.) A DEMOCRATIC WORLD by GEORGE PACKER Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans? New Yorker Magazine, Issue of 2004-02-16 and 23 (clip) Another approach remains available to the Democratsone that draws on the Partys own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesnt have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act arent enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraqs unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons. Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to realize that the war on terrorism is actually a war for liberalisma struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed states into the orbit of liberal democracy. In this light, it makes sense to think about the strategy and mind-set that the postwar generation brought to their task: the marriage of power and coperation. Daalder said, The fundamental challengejust as the fundamental challenge in 46 and 47 and 48 in France and Italy was to provide Italians and Frenchmen with a real constructive alternative to Communism, to defeat it politicallyis to provide people in the Islamic world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they have only despair. He pointed out that America now spends forty times more on defense than it does on foreign aid, and that half of this aid goes to Israel and Egypt. This is like the new Cold War, and weve got to fight it as a generational fight in which we need to invest, he said. As it happens, an increasing number of Democrats are pursuing this theme. Wesley Clark talks about a new Atlantic Charter that would make nato the first resort of American military power, starting in Iraq. Uncertainties, nations looking for leadership, a multidimensional challenge on a global scaleall of that is similar to the early Cold War, he told me. As is the indefinite duration of the challenge. Clark argued that natos war in Kosovo, which he conducted as Supreme Allied Commander, could become the basis for a new foreign policy. You could call it efficient multilateralismthe recognition that if you link diplomacy, law, and force, you can achieve decisive results without using decisive force. Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, has for some time advocated the extension of nato forces in Kabul to the whole of Afghanistan, and he recently called for expanding public diplomacy in the Muslim world and imposing international sanctions against countries and institutions that fund terrorism, a money flow that the Bush Administration has had little success in shutting off. In a recent debate, Kerry said, Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we havent embraced, because otherwise were inviting a clash of civilizations. Senator John Edwards, of North Carolina, proposes publishing an annual list of dissidents imprisoned around the world, and forming an organization of Western democracies and Arab countries moving toward liberalization which would be modelled on efforts to reform the former Eastern Bloc. Invoking Truman and Marshall, Senator Biden talks about a Prevention Doctrine: long-term engagement in troubled regions to head off threats before they lead to warfor example, by funding programs to destroy nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. (The Bush Administrations remarkably sluggish approach to securing loose nukes is one consequence of a policy aimed narrowly at terrorists and their state sponsors, like cards in a deck.) All these Democrats advocate a domestic policy that would acknowledge the reality of wartime, including alternative energy, tax fairness, and greater spending on security.
Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
Ahmet Tonak wrote: Any reaction to the following op-ed defense of Mankiw by Bhagwati. I observe two flaws: 1) a complete misunderstanding of competition; Bhagwati attacks Kerry because, Bhagwati thinks, Kerry is unable to see the connection between outsourcing of jobs and the improve[ment of] the competitiveness of American companies. And then he goes and says this: jobs disappear in America ...because technical change has destroyed them, not because they have gone anywhere as if this technical change a God-given or conspiratorial phenomenon rather than the very imposition of improved (I would say, intensified) global competition. IMO, Bhagwati is just stating the final conclusions he and others draw from the debate on whether stagnation and increased dispersion in U.S. manufacturing wages in the last decades were *mostly* due to trade or to skilled-biased technological change. For a summary of this literature, see the papers compiled by Robert Feenstra in the NBER book, The Impact of Trade on U.S. Wages. However, it is not fair to say that these people -- to whom Bhagwati seems to be alluding (Krugman included by the way) -- have not been aware of the link between neoliberal globalization and technological change. Much of the econometric paraphernalia in their papers is designed to get around the problem of collinearity between trade and technological change (and other data problems). So, they don't ignore that trade -- as trade policy has evolved during the years of neoliberal globalization -- is linked to technological change. That is implicit in the exercise. What they are trying to do is disentangle effects that appear mixed up together. I think this is a legitimate attempt. But Bhagwati may be relying a bit too much on ideology and old empirical work in making his assertion. He says that there is little evidence of a major push by American companies to set up research operations in the developing world, but it seems to me that he's talking about studies done in the late 1990s. I'd be much more cautious because, understandably, there's little work on what happened to U.S. labor markets during the recession and the (so-called) recovery. Steve Roach seems to believe that there's an ongoing wave of international labor arbitrage, intensified by the recession, but these are things that need to be measured first and disputed on later. 2) a racist blindfoldedness and arrogance in his unsolicited advice to Craig Barrett, chief executive of Intel; I would argue that Barrett's perception has a quality of superior understanding and realism of a functioning capitalist regarding the high quality of researchers in the South. Arrogant, perhaps, but I don't think there's any basis to say that Bhagwati's remarks are racist. He's just saying that Barrett's claims about the availability of labor abroad ready to replace U.S. skilled workers are exaggerated. And he may be right. Barrett and, more generally, U.S. CEOs with an eye on foreign outsourcing are not unbiased on this. They want to weaken the hand of the U.S. workers with the scare of people out there willing and able to do the same at much lower rates. Whether Barrett's claims are exaggerated or not is something to be shown empirically, but I don't think it's fair to label Bhagwati's remarks as racist. I have sat in Bhagwati's classes and believe he is honest. Indeed, he's impatient with people who are unwilling to follow his arguments, and his arguments are not always easy to follow, but radical economists (and the anti-globalization radicals who have harassed Bhagwati) are not always prototypes of intellectual tolerance either. The guy just happens to think that the best way to deal with poverty in the Third World is through free trade and his argument is not absurd, as it's been around since Adam Smith. And his free trade advocacy is much more nuanced that we care to acknowledge. We may have forgotten, but Bhagwati has been just as opposed to the U.S. agenda on the WTO under Bush as he's now jumping on Kerry. A few months ago, during the Cancún WTO meeting, the left was using Bhagwati's remarks in the Financial Times about how the U.S. special interests had come to gut the WTO negotiations out of any meaningful content and how the Bush administration was not really committed to trade. There was little echo of Bhagwati's complaints in the NY Times. The problem is that the U.S. media that amplify his anti-Kerry remarks tend to ignore his criticism of the U.S. trade agenda under Bush. It is anathema to some people on these lists, but in my view Marx's emphasis on the progressive character of capitalist production in certain settings is not that far from Bhagwati's insisting that capitalism in the Third World is a dissolvent of reactionary forms of privilege. As Ahmet knows, among conventional economists, Bhagwati has been one of the few who have worked seriously on the political economy of profit seeking, something that -- in spite of
Re: [Marxism] Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
Julio Huato wrote: It is anathema to some people on these lists, but in my view Marx's emphasis on the progressive character of capitalist production in certain settings is not that far from Bhagwati's insisting that capitalism in the Third World is a dissolvent of reactionary forms of privilege. As Ahmet knows, among conventional economists, Bhagwati has been one of the few who have worked seriously on the political economy of profit seeking, something that -- in spite of some terminological and methodological misunderstanding -- is not alien to the classic distinction between productive and unproductive labor. Can you hear Marx tittering in Highgate? If only socialists had studied Marx properly, they would have known all along that capitalism would triumph. Meghnad Desai gets behind the slogans in Marx's Revenge Faisal Islam Sunday May 19, 2002 The Observer Marx's Revenge Meghnad Desai Verso £19, pp383 Practical jokes, last laughs and vengeance would have been more the sphere of Groucho rather than Karl Marx. But Meghnad Desai argues that the great thinker's most prominent legacy was a huge confidence trick. Capitalism has now triumphed, it is 'the only game in town', statist socialism is 'dead', and, yes, that is what Marx had said would happen all along. Desai, a London School of Economics professor and Labour peer, performs conceptual somersaults to pursue this contention. Most of the evidence comes from Marx's economic writings, ignored by everyone apart from Desai, previously the author of a textbook on the subject. Marx's Revenge is, however, far broader than that, racing through a history of economic thought, which is vital in that it shows what incubates the contemporary consensus in economics. The key to understanding why Marx is tittering in Highgate Cemetery is the difference between the words Marxian and Marxist. The former refers to those who faithfully study all his works, specifically his analytical writings about the dynamics of capitalism; the latter is the reductive Bolshevism that emerged in the last century, shaped by Lenin's pamphlet on imperialism and these days incorporating a wide span of belief, including the fringes of fascism. Marx recognised this trend. On hearing of the establishment of a Marxist party in France, he famously said: 'Je ne suis pas marxiste'. But he was subsequently ignored. Marxism in the twentieth century became defined by interpretations such as Lenin's Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. In the 1920s, Das Kapital dropped off the Marxist's must-read list. Imperialism became the key text beside the Communist manifesto. Almost all debates about Marxian economics, particularly on the fall in the rate of profitability over time, were ruled out as 'uninteresting scholasticism'. 'The answers were known, Marx became a bundle of catechisms,' writes Desai. Marx developed some pioneering economics. He was the first economist to incorporate an explanation of boom and bust within his theory. He constructed a simple model to show how profit came from the exploitation of the 'surplus value' of labour. This led to the ups and downs of profitability. But in volume II of Das Kapital Marx calculates a numerical scheme of a capitalist economy which does not run into crisis and enjoys perpetual growth. The later volumes were published after his death, after Engels assembled Marx's notes. The famous words about the tendency to a falling rate of profit giving rise to the end of capitalism is hardly mentioned in volume III, argues Desai, and mentioned only as a possibility in volume I and in the Communist manifesto. So this misconception, misreading, or perhaps highly selective reading, of Marx has led to a vulgar simplificaton of what was a complex and nuanced body of work. Desai's chapter six shows why some Marxists may have skipped the surplus profit exploitation equilibrium models. These technicalities, crucial to Desai's understanding of Marx, do not trip off the tongue as lightly as the 'revolt of the lumpenproletariat'. 'Popular Marxism' took Marx's more prophetic writings on the fate of capitalism, without noting that Marx had not given a timescale. If socialism is destined to usurp capitalism, but the transition period could last many hundreds of years, as the transitions between previous modes of production like feudalism and capitalism had lasted, then the prediction is not entirely helpful. It is the political economy equivalent of Michael Fish telling us to wrap up warm because the Ice Age will return at some point. Rather than get his revenge, Desai's work seems to show Marx hedged his bets. If that is true, why should we care that his more obscure work has been vindicated? In the process of explaining Marx's Revenge, Desai illuminates the work of Smith, Hegel, Popper, Polanyi, Keynes and Samuelson. A similarly revisionist tract would show that Adam Smith was not quite the market
Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
Julio Huato wrote: I have sat in Bhagwati's classes and believe he is honest. He's also very critical of the U.S. use of the WTO to tighten intellectual property restrictions and of the confusion of capital account liberalization with trade liberalization. He's not a wind-up free-trader. When Liza Featherstone I interviewed him for our Lingua Franca piece about trade (the mag is dead, but the piece has been perserved at http://www.1worldcommunication.org/clothesencounter.htm), we found him far more open-minded, intellectually engaged, and culturally literate than just about any other economist we've ever encountered. Doug
Castro addresses conference of Economists
The Guardian, Saturday February 14, 2004 Castro: U.S. Embargo Hasn't Broken Cuba By LISA J. ADAMS Associated Press Writer HAVANA (AP) - America's economy hangs by a thread while Cuba - after four decades under a U.S. economic blockade - continues to offer free health care and boasts an infant mortality rate lower than its northern neighbor, President Fidel Castro asserted early Saturday. In a 4-hour speech to economists, Castro also took shots at President Bush, saying he couldn't debate a Cuban 9th-grader. He recited for a half-hour from a published compilation of Bush malapropisms, bent over with laughter as the audience roared. Castro also challenged Bush to be clear about how the United States plans to realize a transition to democracy in Cuba. He wondered aloud - again - if it involved a plan to kill him. The great difference between Cuba and the United States is that Cuba has learned to do a lot with very little, Castro said at the conclusion of the Sixth International Meeting of Economists on Globalization and Development Problems. Castro noted that many of the more than 1,000 attending economists from 50 countries - including some from the United States - had sharply criticized globalization and the neoliberal economic policies of industrialized nations. He lauded U.S. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel L. McFadden's keen observations - among them that the United States, with a fiscal deficit of more than $520 billion, is managing its economy like a banana republic. This economy is hanging by a thread, Castro said. Castro also lashed out at the foolishness of the U.S. economic blockade that has been in place since the presidency of John F. Kennedy, saying it hadn't stopped Cuba from surpassing the United States in many areas. The communist-run island has no illiteracy, a lower infant mortality rate than the United States, lower student-teacher ratios and higher levels of educational achievement, he said. Bush couldn't debate a Cuban 9th-grader, Castro remarked as he leaned across the podium toward applauding listeners. Castro's commentary addressed everything from free trade agreements and fluctuating currencies to the current presidential campaign in the United States. At one point - after offering his audience coffee to avoid falling asleep - Castro went on to quote various reports from the U.S. media severely criticizing Bush, the economy, U.S. unemployment and the war on Iraq. He talked at length about the Bush administration's Commission for a Free Cuba - a panel set up in October and led by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to plan a strategy for Cuba once the 77-year-old Castro is no longer in power. When the United States announced creation of the commission, Powell suggested that the goal was not to force Castro out. U.S. officials talk about a transition, but how would they make this transition? Castro asked Saturday, suggesting that the only way is to proceed with an illegal assassination using the scores of techniques they have available. Castro challenged Bush to have the courage to say whether he is using this power. Even if his days are numbered by the United States, don't feel any pity, Castro told his listeners. There is no fear. To demonstrate fear would be a mistake. ... and in any case I would have to say to this illustrious gentleman (Bush) what the Roman gladiators said: 'Hail, Caesar. Those who are going to die salute you.' -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Castro addresses conference of Economists
I can't figure out how this conference came off. Edward Phelps, Jamie Galbraith, and Jim Heckman were there too. Jamie and McFadden were quoted all over the place bashing Bush. mbs -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Louis Proyect Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 11:03 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Castro addresses conference of Economists The Guardian, Saturday February 14, 2004 Castro: U.S. Embargo Hasn't Broken Cuba By LISA J. ADAMS Associated Press Writer HAVANA (AP) - America's economy hangs by a thread while Cuba - after four decades under a U.S. economic blockade - continues to offer free health care and boasts an infant mortality rate lower than its northern neighbor, President Fidel Castro asserted early Saturday. In a 4-hour speech to economists, Castro also took shots at President Bush, saying he couldn't debate a Cuban 9th-grader. He recited for a half-hour from a published compilation of Bush malapropisms, bent over with laughter as the audience roared. Castro also challenged Bush to be clear about how the United States plans to realize a transition to democracy in Cuba. He wondered aloud - again - if it involved a plan to kill him. The great difference between Cuba and the United States is that Cuba has learned to do a lot with very little, Castro said at the conclusion of the Sixth International Meeting of Economists on Globalization and Development Problems. Castro noted that many of the more than 1,000 attending economists from 50 countries - including some from the United States - had sharply criticized globalization and the neoliberal economic policies of industrialized nations. He lauded U.S. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel L. McFadden's keen observations - among them that the United States, with a fiscal deficit of more than $520 billion, is managing its economy like a banana republic. This economy is hanging by a thread, Castro said. Castro also lashed out at the foolishness of the U.S. economic blockade that has been in place since the presidency of John F. Kennedy, saying it hadn't stopped Cuba from surpassing the United States in many areas. The communist-run island has no illiteracy, a lower infant mortality rate than the United States, lower student-teacher ratios and higher levels of educational achievement, he said. Bush couldn't debate a Cuban 9th-grader, Castro remarked as he leaned across the podium toward applauding listeners. Castro's commentary addressed everything from free trade agreements and fluctuating currencies to the current presidential campaign in the United States. At one point - after offering his audience coffee to avoid falling asleep - Castro went on to quote various reports from the U.S. media severely criticizing Bush, the economy, U.S. unemployment and the war on Iraq. He talked at length about the Bush administration's Commission for a Free Cuba - a panel set up in October and led by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to plan a strategy for Cuba once the 77-year-old Castro is no longer in power. When the United States announced creation of the commission, Powell suggested that the goal was not to force Castro out. U.S. officials talk about a transition, but how would they make this transition? Castro asked Saturday, suggesting that the only way is to proceed with an illegal assassination using the scores of techniques they have available. Castro challenged Bush to have the courage to say whether he is using this power. Even if his days are numbered by the United States, don't feel any pity, Castro told his listeners. There is no fear. To demonstrate fear would be a mistake. ... and in any case I would have to say to this illustrious gentleman (Bush) what the Roman gladiators said: 'Hail, Caesar. Those who are going to die salute you.' -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Dow Chemical's Knowledge Factories
I've just had the time to read Brian McKenna's article on Dow Chemical and its impact on universities. I really liked it. It says a lot about our universities as well as about Dow Chemical. Thanks, Brian, for this article. Gene Coyle Brian McKenna wrote: Hi socialist economists, Who said, "Growth is the opate we're all hooked on?" To find out, and to learn about a phenomenon that would have Thorstein Veblen turning in his grave, see my just released article on Michigan's Dow Chemical. . . http://www.ecocenter.org/200401/dowuniversity200401.shtml To see the entire issue, in pdf format, see: http://www.ecocenter.org/200401/ftgu_jan-feb_2004.pdf Brian McKenna
Plus ca change, or famous last words ? The psychology of imperialism
From Humiliation to Hate, by Kevin C. Morris What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over -- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? - Langston Hughes As we struggle through the still smoldering haze, as the inevitable war simmers to a thunderous boil and innocent blood begins to spill over, and the American people sit idly by in the dark - uninformed and overwrought with grief and fear -- these 51 prophetic words by the great poet from Missouri may shed some much-needed light at a rather dark and confusing time. Why? so many have asked, revealing either a startlingly intense naïveté or an embarrassingly profound ignorance of world history. Why do they hate us so much? and How could they be so cruel? While the White House and many in the jingoistic journalist corps, especially the likes of Thomas Friedman and William Safire of the New York Times, rush to characterize any thoughtful examination of the so-called root causes as giving aid and comfort to our enemies, we must remember that cause and effect, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, are two sides of one fact, and that if we fail to understand why, we'll always be faced with a more frightening question: when, that is, when next? Hughes, grappling with Black America's utter angst, agony and outrage during the age of white supremacy and political, economic and legal subjugation from the not-too-distant past, posed the same question, except in foresight rather than hindsight. What happens to a dream deferred? he asked so plainly, plaintively and presciently. What will happen, in other words, when the powerful overpower the powerless? When they have no court of last resort to bring their grievances, no sympathizers, no recourse, no escape, no hope? Just as the United States was eventually forced to answer to its own oppressed class, today - as the world 's sole super power - it must address the grievances of the oppressed people of the post-colonial age, or it will remain the target of their frustration, which like Hughes' raisin in the sun, may - optimistically -- just dry up or fester or stink or crust over or sag, or - more ominously - explode. Here we stand at the threshold of a new century without having scraped the mess off our boots from the last. The consequences of hundreds of years of cultural, economic and religious imperialism, that is, the imposition of power, authority and influence over others (usually darker than us), are now festering throughout the world, just as the military powers of the West conspire to keep the same system in place with a new name: globalism. And while all seems quiet on the western front, chaos and tensions are brewing everywhere else in the world (Africa, Southeast and Central Asia, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, and especially the Middle East), thanks to the economic neglect and historic denials of the self-serving, arrogant West. Summarizing the dehumanization of imperialism, Richard J. Barnet in The Roots of War (1971) wrote, The essence of imperialism, regardless of the economic system from which it proceeds, is the unjust bargain. Human beings are used to serve the ends that are not their own and in the process they pay more than they receive. And Louis Fischer in his 1950 biography of Mahatma Gandhi added, Imperialism, like dictatorship, sears the soul, degrades the spirit, and makes individuals small, the better to rule them. Fear and cowardice are its allies. Imperialism is government of other people, by other people, and for other people. Imperial humiliation, which is defined as the extreme destruction of one's self respect and dignity, is the core emotion expressed by many in the third world, (and even some right here at home). And it cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence that, just two weeks before the Twin Towers attack, both the United States and England refused to even attend the United Nations conference on race, because, as the world's primary beneficiaries of Western colonialism - they feared being held accountable for their historic injustices. And, as any psychologist will tell you, humiliation - especially when denied and dismissed -- eventually metastasizes, like a cancer, into hate. Little wonder, then, that the oppressed people of the world have become susceptible to messages of hate and violence from the likes of bin Laden because they have no other place - not even the United Nations -- to lay down their burdens. It should have been obvious that they would eventually come clambering at the towering gates of Almighty America. And even more grievously, America - like a bent-backed butler -- has stood idly by holding Israel's hat in its hand while American-made helicopter gunships, F-16 fighter jets, and armored tanks reign terror on the stone-throwing teenage Palestinian refugees of the illegally-occupied
Widening the wealth gap in the tilted economy
Just as the States are reeling from a round of budget cuts, President Bush is proposing a new federal tax break for multi-millionaires worth nearly $1 trillion over the next 20 years. A new study shows how repealing the Estate Tax on multi-millionaires will reduce the federal funds that would otherwise be available to help states provide vital public services. Source: http://www.responsiblewealth.org/ Only the richest 2 percent of our nation's families currently pay any estate tax at all. These are people with estates larger than $1 million for an individual or $2 million for a couple. Nearly half of all estate taxes are paid by the wealthiest 0.1% of the American population - a few thousand families each year. Repealing the estate tax would result in multi-million dollar tax cuts to the heirs of America's millionaires and billionaires, concentrating wealth and political power in fewer hands. Elimination of the estate tax will reduce federal revenue by $982 billion over the next 20 years, a serious blow to the Treasury at a time of unknown challenges. This revenue loss will be made up by raising taxes on lower and middle-income taxpayers and/or by cutting services to the same group. Source: http://www.ufenet.org/estatetax/ The wealth gaps between races and income levels had shrunk slightly from 1992 to 1995 but had also risen by double digits in the 1998 report. Source: http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030123/4802916s.htm According to Business Week, the average U.S. CEO earns 326 times as much as his average factory worker, a ratio much higher than Japan's or Germany's, whose CEOs earn no more than forty times as much as the average factory worker. I am one of the privileged ones, part of that elite one percent. But these facts don't make me happy- they scare me. As the gap between the top five percent and bottom fifty percent grows, so does fear, polarization, insecurity, and suffering. Its hard to see friends and others suffer from inadequate health care, low-paying jobs, poor housing, and other manifestations of a frayed and fragmented society that increasingly seems to breed despair and violence. Source: http://www.classactionnet.org/articles/responsiblewealth.shtml
Re: Dow Chemical's Knowledge Factories
Hey thanks Gene. . . it was a chore to write, but a story that had to be told. . .I''m hoping that others will pick up the baton and do for their universitywhat I did with Dow (and I only skimmed the surface). . . you socialist economist folks are tops. . .back in 1982 I attended a week -long summer institurte at Amherst's School for Popular Economics, at the age of 23. . .headed by Bowles and Gintis I believe. . .it was so very educational. . .I know URPE and the NY socialist scholar's conference do similar work. . . we need to continue getting good economic info to citizens in a manner that usese humor creative writing. . . Best, Brian
Japan: a look at the labor process
THE ZEIT GIST Enduring life in the Japanese company You're not alone if you find working for a Japanese 'kaisha' difficult By KAORI SHOJI The Japan Times: Feb. 17, 2004 It's probably just as difficult to find a happily employed Westerner in a Japanese company as it is to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I have yet to come across a Western worker who has found the Japanese workplace to be comfortable, inspiring, psychologically fulfilling or ultimately rewarding. They point out the structural rigidity, lack of personal office space per person, the breakdown in communications, the antiquated protocol masquerading as tradition, the general mistreatment of female staff, to name just a few. The Japanese kaisha (company) is just plain yucky. But to any non-Japanese who has ever felt compelled to voice these feelings, I offer, by way of apology and regret, the reassurance: don't worry, the Japanese feel exactly the same way. The Japanese view of the kaisha is similar to how President George W. Bush described marriage in his State of the Union address -- an enduring institution. Or maybe just an institution for endurance. My friend Satomi, now working 10 years for the same publishing house in Jimbocho, says every work day is about bearing up: See all these gray hairs? That's what working for that kaisha has done to me. Satomi has seriously considered quitting at least 30 times in her career. She bitches endlessly to anyone willing to listen. But deep down, she knows she'll never leave. Her discomfort with her job has come full circle so that now she's actually (perversely) comfortable. She's okay with the yuckiness and knows how to cope, yes, much like a marriage. For the American (or the westernized) this logic is worse than alien, it's defeatist. The Westernized want things to improve, to work. They cannot comprehend the reason why changes and adjustments so clearly for the better, take such a long time in coming or don't come at all. Why do things take such time in a Japanese company? Why does management always sidestep the most important issues and go off (seemingly arbitrarily) on another tangent? Why, why, why? The Japanese are also beating their heads on that gray, cold concrete wall but there's a deep-seated resignation passed down through the generations, that the individual can never win against the kaisha and besides the individual never counted in the first place. What's more important is that the institution will survive, since it's the institution that's directly plugged into the Japanese economy: the closest thing we have to a national identity. So they beat their heads but they'll also go about doing business as usual. And whatever changes are brought about come at the slow, labored pace of a snail that has suffered a stroke. The fact is, the Japanese often look for job satisfaction in ways that have no direct connections with the job itself. For example, there is the enormous emphasis on douki (colleagues who had entered the company in the same year). A douki is a cross between sibling and comrade -- the unwritten agreement is that all douki will stick together, whatever happens. They work together, organize drinking parties, invite each other to their weddings, keep in touch and communicate for decades, often until retirement. Never mind that some of your douki can be royal pains in the lower extremities. The mere fact that you and these people all became employees at the same time enhances affection and excuses the bumps. It's the shared memories you see, of having cut your teeth at the same time. Other things they look forward to in the workday are things like ocha (tea or coffee break) in the mornings, often immediately after clocking into work. The Japanese office may claim to start business at 9 a.m. sharp but in actuality, no one really feels like work until 10 or 10:30. First, they observe the ritual of going off to the local coffee shop for a quick mooningu (morning breakfast service) and reading the paper, smoking and chatting, before moseying back to the office. This deliberate procrastination slows up the workday, which is largely the reason for people having to linger around until 8 or 9 p.m. before they get the resolve to board the train for home. One American lawyer working for a Japanese shosha (trading house) was so incensed at what she saw as an unnecessary frittering away of time, that she circulated an elaborate office memo that exhorted people to start at 9, be as productive as possible during the day and finish by 6. It was politely acknowledged but ultimately ignored. It's ridiculous, she says. Much of the famed 13-hour workdays can be remedied if only people will change their work habits, which they simply refuse to do. She also resented that much of office communications and relationships depended on informal camaraderie fostered outside the workplace (i.e., pubs and cafes): it's unfair to those
Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
Doug Henwood wrote: He's also very critical of the U.S. use of the WTO to tighten intellectual property restrictions and of the confusion of capital account liberalization with trade liberalization. He's not a wind-up free-trader. Jagdish Bhagwati wrote [my remarks in brackets]: The starvation of the WTO and the financial indulgence of the Bretton Woods institutions are not fortuitous. The influential Quad powers -- the EU, the United States, Japan, and Canada -- will resolutely not augment the absurdly lean WTO budget. This, of course, reflects the cynical business of voting. At Bretton Woods institutions, it is weighted. At the WTO, things work by consensus. You do not need to be a profound observer to predict that resources and action will go then to the Bretton Woods institutions. We therefore have the supreme incoherence, some would call it even hypocrisy, of the richest nations asking the WTO to undertake sophisticated studies and to manage a Social Clause while denying the WTO resources to do this or pretty much anything else. Evidently, the WTO then must take on these agendas but rely for their management (under the high-sounding rubric of policy coordination) on the foreign legion of a (G7-dominated and hence reliable) leadership and staff at the World Bank and the IMF. If you think that I am exaggerating, let me cite you just one telling example. As regards intellectual property protection (IPP), demanded insistently by the United States and then by other rich countries, most economists believe that having patents at twenty-year length (as put into the WTO) is, from the viewpoint of worldwide efficiency, suboptimal, just as having no patents almost certainly is also. Many also consider it to be a transfer from most of the poor countries to the rich ones and hence as an item that does not belong to the WTO, whose organizing principle should be the inclusion of mutually gainful transactions, as indeed noncoercive trade is. But the only institution whose staff was allowed to write clearly and skeptically about it at the time of the Uruguay Round was the GATT, whereas the World Bank played along with IPP, even trying to produce reasons why it was good for the poor countries. Even now, despite all the talk about poverty alleviation, the World Bank's staff, research, and aid are being used, I suspect, in a way that, instead of calling into serious doubt the economic logic of IPP, can be interpreted as contributing to the know-how that will eventually enable rich countries to get poor countries to set up administrative machinery to enforce intellectual property rights for the benefit of the rich countries. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
- Original Message - From: Julio Huato [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you think that I am exaggerating, let me cite you just one telling example. As regards intellectual property protection (IPP), demanded insistently by the United States and then by other rich countries, most economists believe that having patents at twenty-year length (as put into the WTO) is, from the viewpoint of worldwide efficiency, suboptimal, just as having no patents almost certainly is also. Many also consider it to be a transfer from most of the poor countries to the rich ones and hence as an item that does not belong to the WTO, whose organizing principle should be the inclusion of mutually gainful transactions, as indeed noncoercive trade is. But the only institution whose staff was allowed to write clearly and skeptically about it at the time of the Uruguay Round was the GATT, whereas the World Bank played along with IPP, even trying to produce reasons why it was good for the poor countries. Even now, despite all the talk about poverty alleviation, the World Bank's staff, research, and aid are being used, I suspect, in a way that, instead of calling into serious doubt the economic logic of IPP, can be interpreted as contributing to the know-how that will eventually enable rich countries to get poor countries to set up administrative machinery to enforce intellectual property rights for the benefit of the rich countries. = What I don't get is how he can look at that one example as an exemplar of lobbying-cum rent seeking and yet not see that capitalism is littered with so many examples of the same throughout it's history as to raise so many legitimation issues even for a cultured academic technocrat such as himself who might, perhaps, believe in the deep concordance between liberal democracy and capitalism. So, at the outset, we must ask: can we think of politics anywhere without cronies? Political cronies are, of course, the politicians' friends and supporters. We call them friends here and cronies over there. After all, we write the script and the check. But that does not alter the facts as we find them. Thus, does President Clinton not have his cronies? Surely they include Barbara Streisand, Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger and Steven Spielberg in Hollywood. There are others he befriends on Wall Street. His new home in Chappaqua was to be financed , until public exposure and outcry threw a spanner in the works, by an indirect loan from a well-known crony, Mr. Terry MacAuliffe. One can therefore well imagine that an Asian intellectual, looking at Washington, would find our politicians with cronies just the way we find politicians with cronies in Asia. The play is the same; only the actors differ. http://www.columbia.edu/~jb38/crony_cap.pdf ** Insert and/or substitute economist[s] in the quote below and one wonders what kind of cognitive dissonances JB goes through after seeing so much of his own hard labor being smashed on the rocks of rent-seeking... From A Claire Cutler's Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the Global Political Economy A knowledge structure that privileges expert knowledge through the juridification, pluralization, and privatization of international commercial relations and the operation of liberal-inspired commercial laws that reify the autonomous 'legal subject' provide the ideological foundation for assumptions concerning the inherent superiority of private legal ordering in the regulation of international commerce. A mercatocracy of lawyers, merchants, corporations, and governments maintains this thought structure by limiting entry to lawyers trained to believe in the superiority of private law. It works through both consensual and coercive methods to silence voices of dissent. Corporate global hegemony operates ideologically by removing private international law from critical scrutiny and review, producing apparently consensual private arrangements. However, these arrangements, in fact, operate coercively in that they reinscribe asymmetrical power relations between buyers and sellers, employers and workers, insurers and insured, lenders and borrowers, shipowners and cargo in their contractual arrangements and the very fabric of the law. The apparent consensual nature of these 'private' relationships contributes to their characterization as neutral and apolitical, inhibiting the development of a critical understanding of private international law...Global authority is increasingly resting upon fragile foundations as competing social forces contest their peripheralization and marginalization in the global political economy. The inability of the mercatocracy to bind these segments by delivering on the rhetoric of globalization and promises of efficiencies, economic development, and justice suggests the emergence of an historic bloc based on fraud. To Gramsci, supremacy based on fraud signals a 'crisis of
Gordon Brown and the ever failing anti-poverty paradigm
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=492148 Brown: We are 150 years off our targets in tackling world poverty By Ben Russell and Philip Thornton 17 February 2004 Gordon Brown warned that key global targets for reducing poverty by 2015 might not be met for 150 years as he made an impassioned plea to world leaders yesterday to double aid to the poorest countries. The Chancellor used a conference of diplomats and aid organisations in London to warn that urgent action was needed to have any chance of hitting the millennium goals for halving poverty, cutting child deaths and improving education in the Third World by 2015. He said: If we let things slip, the millennium goals will become just another dream we once had, and we will indeed be sitting back on our sofas and switching on our TVs and, I am afraid, watching people die on our screens for the rest of our lives. We will be the generation that betrayed its own heart. Mr Brown called on the international community to support British proposals for a new international finance facility (IFF), to double aid from $50bn (£26bn) to $100bn a year, and urged developed nations to take action on international trade. His comments will raise expectations for Britain's presidency of the G8 industrialised nations next year, which Tony Blair has pledged to make a development presidency. The Chancellor's speech was welcomed by campaigners yesterday, but opposition MPs and aid groups warned that Britain must do more to increase aid spending and open world markets to developing countries. Mr Brown said that progress towards key millennium development goals for 2015 was so slow that in some parts of the world they would take more than a century to achieve at current rates. He said: On current forecasts, sub-Saharan Africa will achieve our target for reducing child mortality not by 2015 but by 2165. This is not good enough. The promise we made was for 2015, not 2165. He said that the first target of the millennium development goals - to ensure by 2005 that girls are given the same opportunities in education as boys - would be missed, while targets to establish universal primary education by 2015 would not be met until 2129 at current rates. Mr Brown also warned of slow progress towards targets for halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty in some parts of the world, saying that: Our best estimate is that it will not be achieved in sub-Saharan Africa for more than 100 years. Bono, the Irish rock star, called on delegates, who included the Live Aid founder Bob Geldof, to dramatise the cause of world poverty just asGeldof had dramatised the plight of Africa nearly 20 years ago. We need to get people on to the streets asking why we are breaking these promises, he said. He told Mr Brown: At a moment like this we need some very big ideas. You and Tony need to be the Lennon and McCartney of progressive geopolitics. What we need here is not love. All we need here is cash. Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who hosted yesterday's event at the Treasury, contrasted the £2.3bn spent in England on pet food and pet care products in 2002 and the $700bn spent by Americans on beverages with the money allocated for alleviating poverty. John Bercow, the shadow International Development Secretary, said: While the developed world practises protectionism on a grotesque scale it is hardly surprising that the poorest countries in the world cannot compete. It is time for the OECD to slash distorting subsidies, cut trade barriers and offer the poorest people on the planet a decent deal. UN goals for 2015 Halve the number living on $1 a day or suffering from hunger VERDICT: Some progress Ensure all children complete primary schooling VERDICT: Failing End disparity in education between girls and boys VERDICT: Failing Cut death rate in under-fives by two-thirds VERDICT: Failing Reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters VERDICT: Failing Halt spread of Aids and other major diseases VERDICT: Failing Halve the number living without access to drinking water VERDICT: Failing Develop global partnership for development VERDICT: Failing
My Review of Lembcke's Tailwind Tale, in Critical Sociology
below's an excerpt, the full review is at http://tinyurl.com/ywwml It's from this spring edition of Critical Sociology, which is available for subscribers at http://tinyurl.com/ytqc8 The Valley of Death expose in June 1998 was a highly promoted kickoff edition of the program NewsStand: CNN and Time. The report was based on the memories of a number of vets who claimed to have participated in the raid and to have killed American defectors. It also highlighted the affirmation of their accounts by Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970 and John Singlaub, a former high ranking third chief for covert operations in Vietnam. Within 24 hours the spectacular revelations were being subjected to doubt and or were outright discredited. CNN conducted an in-house investigation that concluded the report was deeply flawed; fundamental weaknesses were cited in the way interviews were both conducted and interpreted to fit the producers understanding of what happened during the Tailwind raid, several important witnesses it turned out were not actually present during the Tailwind operation, and key sources for the story backed away from the story as reported by CNN. The fallout brought a virtual end to the journalistic careers of the main source of the reportage, the program producers April Oliver and Jack Smith. Defenders of Valley of Deaths producers (especially of April Oliver who played the leading role in the interviews and script writing) cried foul, claiming that CNN caved into the loud and relentless roar that came from Veterans groups and important figures in the military and foreign policy establishment such as Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger. On the left, Olivers defenders were many and just as ardent, including Amy Goodman, producer of Pacifica Radios Democracy Now, media critic Alex Cockburn, the media watchdog FAIR among others in their rally against CNNs caving in and backing away from a story that incriminated the US military. They argue that this was the real reason for the almost immediate rebukes Oliver received from CNN and others, not the sources or how the sources were interpreted. Lembcke, in a review of the transcripts and Olivers rebuttals of the in-house rebuttal, shows that there was in fact considerable evidence that Oliver did engage in manipulation of her sources words and relied on persons whose claims were inflated to say the least. However, this is not the focus of Lembckes argument in Tailwind Tales. In fact, he spends only one small chapter critiquing the journalistic methods of Oliver. Instead, he focuses on what both mainstream critics and many of Olivers leftist supporters have overlooked, namely the backgrounds and political motivations of those who spun the Tailwind Tales in the first place. And it is this issue that makes up the bulk of Lembckes book and that makes it a very important contribution to the sociological imagination. In a nutshell, Lembcke demonstrates that instead of scrutinizing whether or not the sources for the CNN Tailwind story were misused, a far more important question, especially for opponents of US foreign policy on the left, should be, why Oliver and CNN chose to believe the claims of far-right paramilitary operatives who had a history of spinning all kinds of stories of paranoiac conspiracy and intrigue to promote a far right wing militarist-nativist political agenda. For that matter, why would supporters of Oliver want to ignore such an orientation and its contribution to the subtext of the CNN storyline? Lembcke then proceeds to root out, much as he did in Spitting Image, the contribution of impressions and national memory of the Vietnam War in popular culture sources that contributed to many of the claims that appeared in the Tailwind tale...
