Re: demo fervor
To avoid over-posting, I conclude by directing all to this post of yours. There it is. dms - Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 1:42 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] demo fervor What are you talking about? Greenspan's positions of responsibility is to his class, the bourgeoisie. I would not be in that position. Then who would you prefer to be in his position ? Chairman of the FRB is not a class neutral position. He is the bankers' banker. Agreed. Civility? What exactly is uncivil about calling a bourgeois scam artist and ideologue exactly that? Because in civil society in the Marxian sense, if somebody is an ideologue or bourgeois scam artist, we say that s/he is on the basis of demonstrable evidence, and the burden of proof is on the accuser. Indeed Ernest Mandel wrote once, real Marxists do not accuse, they prove their case. All human moral conduct presumes some kind of no harm policy which, positively, could be stated do unto others as you would have them do unto you or negatively, do not do unto others what you would not like them to do unto you. An implication of this type of reasoning is, take care in your judgements and partisanship, it may be better not to judge, lest you be judged alike, and we have to live with the consequences of our actions and utterances. On the basis of this idea, consistent and predictable behaviour is possible, as well as a wellformed human personality. If you start demonising, disparaging and writing off government people not simply because of what they do but who they are, then you also have to live with the consequences of that. Do you actual believe that there is some supra-class component of being chairman of the FRB? Yes, absolutely. Karl Marx has no special epistemic privilege or advantage over Al Greenspan, purely for being Karl Marx. Jurriaan
Re: declaration of war?
Just for the hell of it, tell us how you feel about Friedman and the Chicago Boys. I mean character assassination ain't nothing compared to real assassination, and that's what political economy truly is-- the movement from the former to the latter. dms - Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 2:02 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] declaration of war? I think you are correct. I already experienced this in the 1980s in New Zealand, it's just that the USA is much wealthier and so the processes work themselves out full with a greater time-lag. That is why we need good research, good argument, good professional organisation, and not lefty rhetoric and character assassinations.
Re: declaration of war?
Maybe not so stupid. It's called laying pipe -- preparing the American public for the deep cuts in social programs which are going to follow the election to deal with the deficit. I expect Bush and the Republicans to devote more than a little time talking about diverting social security payroll taxes to individual retirement savings accounts as the sweetener, and about reforming the already very limited medicare program to deal with a looming funding crisis resulting from the boomers reaching retirement age. Greenspan's authority can be enlisted in the exercise. Greenspan recognizes also that taxes are going to need to be hiked -- something neither party will talk about during the election -- and he wants to ensure that the dividend tax cuts and other advantages for wealthy investors aren't targeted. I'm not sure how much the Democrats are going to want fight the election on tax policy, anyway, given the way the Republicans frame that debate against them, or attack congressional spending cuts they know they'll largely support if they should win the presidency. I suspect they'll focus on the jobs issue instead, and only tangentially attack the class bias of the tax system, but that's pure speculation. Marv Gandall - Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 1:24 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] declaration of war? As opposed to the old policy of no class war? I don't know. Actually, I think it was just a stupid move. I mean, why say anything like this before the election? Joanna Eugene Coyle wrote: Wasn't Greenspan's little talk about cutting taxes for the rich and cutting Social Security pretty close to an open declaration of class war? Gene Coyle
Alila (Dir. Amos Gitai)
* MOVIE REVIEW | 'ALILA' No Peace in a City Teeming With Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN Published: February 27, 2004 The Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai is an acerbic social critic who likes to point fingers and pick at warts, and Alila, his acidly comic study of life in a flimsy Tel Aviv apartment complex, is a sour urban mosaic whose seedy characters, try as they might, can't get out of one another's faces. Their residence, jerry-built in a dreary working-class section of Tel Aviv, is anything but a sleek, well-appointed urban retreat basking in the sunlight; a grubby housing development baking in the heat is more like it. The building's walls are so thin that everyone's private business is made public. In one grotesquely funny scene, Hezi (Amos Lavie), a secretive older man, carries on a flaming affair with Gabi (Yaël Abecassis), a masochistic young woman besotted with his macho self-assurance. Everyone knows about the relationship because even a hand clamped over a mouth can't silence the couple's raucous lovemaking. The affair has no future. The moment Gabi begins to clutch at her brutal lover, he begins to withdraw. The movie, loosely adapted from Yehoshua Knaz's novel Returning Lost Loves, tries to juggle too many characters at once (its title means story plot in Hebrew), and in several cases their connections aren't adequately explained. A builder, Ezra (Uri Klauzner), whose illegally employed Chinese assistants toil noisily and at all hours on an unlicensed expansion of the apartment into the courtyard, has a sullen cream puff of a son, Eyal (Amit Mestechkin), who deserts the army and hides out in the city's red-light district. A stern ex-army officer, Ezra and his divorced wife, Mali (Hanna Laslo), clash bitterly about Eyal's cowardice. The father wants to disown him, but the mother is forgiving, and the surprise upshot of the boy's desertion is one of the story's unconvincing plot turns. Disgustedly observing the chaos is Schwartz (Yosef Carmon), a doddering Holocaust survivor on the brink of senility, whose peace is shattered by the apartment's expansion. When that expansion hits a snag, he is deliriously happy, his faculties miraculously restored. There really isn't a likable character in the movie, which opens today in Manhattan. The filmmaker's jaundiced view of humanity is matched by his eye for the ugly. This section of Tel Aviv is a place of dirt and mud and noise. Its physical desolation is matched by the insensitive behavior of characters hellbent on pursuing their personal agendas. In the filmmaker's view of Tel Aviv (and perhaps of Israel in general), the social contract that gave birth to modern Israel is coming unraveled, and a desperate each-man-for-himself greed has taken over. A production note informs us that there are 300,000 illegal immigrant workers from Asia, Romania, Ghana and Nigeria in contemporary Israel. And the movie conveys the sense of Tel Aviv as the flashpoint for all this diversity. Beneath the prevailing selfishness lurks the anxiety of living in a guerrilla war zone where news of suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism are reported matter-of-factly on the news all day, every day. If Alila shows a city teeming with life, it also suggests a place where no peace is to be had. Directed by Amos Gitai In Hebrew, with English subtitles Not rated, 123 minutes http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/movies/27ALIL.html * Cf. http://www.kino.com/alila/ -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/
All told, it was a fabulous year to be very rich
Billionaires list grows by a Google By Michael P. Regan | The Associated Press Posted February 27, 2004 NEW YORK -- Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and the founders of the Google search engine have landed on Forbes magazine's annual list of billionaires after a year when rallying stocks and a strong euro swelled the list to the longest it has ever been. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates remains perched atop the list for the 10th straight year but investor Warren Buffett is nipping at his heels. Gates' net worth is now estimated at $46.6 billion, still less than half the $100 billion it peaked at in 1998, but up about 13 percent from the $40.7 billion Forbes attributed to him in 2003. Buffett wins the bragging rights for reaping the best gains of the year. He increased his net worth by $12.4 billion to $42.9 billion, significantly narrowing the gap between him and Gates, with whom he competes in bridge tournaments. German supermarket magnate Karl Albrecht remained in third place, with a fortune of $23 billion. Close behind were Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, whose $21.5 billion nest egg put him just ahead of Microsoft's other co-founder, Paul Allen, who came in fifth with $21 billion. Rounding out the top 10 were Helen Walton, wife of the late Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and four members of her family. They were tied for sixth, with each worth an estimated $20 billion -- making for a Walton's mountain of money that's bigger than the holdings of Gates and Buffett combined. Billionaires with Central Florida connections include Richard DeVos, Amway founder and owner of the Orlando Magic, ranked 216 with $2.4 billion. Also on the list, William France Jr., chairman of International Speedway Corp., and James France, the company's chief executive officer. Both were ranked at 472 with $1.2 billion each. All told, it was a fabulous year to be very rich. The magazine counted some 587 billionaires around the world, up from 476 in 2003. Their total net worth jumped to $1.9 trillion from $1.4 trillion in 2003. Newcomers included Rowling and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. All three debuted with $1 billion each. There were three billionaires behind bars, including Russia's richest man, former Yukos oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsy ($15 billion), as well as Yukos shareholder Platon Lebedev ($1.8 billion) and Japanese tycoon Yasuo Takei ($6.2 billion).
Steinbrenner Buys Fenway
Steinbrenner Buys Fenway Homeless Red Sox cry foul WEB EXCLUSIVE Newsweek Updated: 4:53 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2004Feb. 24 - George Steinbrenner's buying spree continued unabated today as the New York Yankees owner purchased Fenway Park, the legendary home of the arch-rival Boston Red Sox. In buying Fenway out from under the Sox, Steinbrenner has left his Eastern Division rivals without a stadium for the first time in their history, jeopardizing the Red Sox' bid for the American League pennant. It is hard to win a championship without pitching or hitting, says David Hastings, a sports historian at the University of Minnesota. But it is virtually impossible to win without a stadium. Red Sox owner John Henry, who spent most of the day scrambling to find a high school sandlot where his team might play the 2004 season, held an emotional press conference in Boston to denounce the big-spending Yankee honcho. Damn you, George Steinbrenner, damn you! swore Henry, shaking his fist violently. But Steinbrenner's shopping day had barely begun. After closing his Fenway deal, the Yankees owner went on to outbid the Walt Disney Company for the legendary puppet characters, the Muppets. While Steinbrenner did not indicate what role the Muppet characters might play in the Yankee organization, his aggressive purchase of Kermit, Miss Piggy et al reinforced the impression in baseball circles that the Yankee owner is willing to buy anything that is not nailed down. Having assumed the $250 million contract of third baseman Alex Rodriguez, however, Mr. Steinbrenner acknowledged that he might have to economize by outsourcing second base to India. In other baseball news, North Korea's Kim Jung-Il revealed that he attempted to acquire A-Rod until he was told that A-Rod was not a piece of nuclear fuel. Andy Borowitz is the author of The Borowitz Report, winner of two 2003 Dot-Comedy Awards for Best Overall Humor and Best Satirical News
Goodbye, Lenin opens in NYC
I reviewed this film about the phenomenon of ostalgie a couple of weeks ago. It is now opening up at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas Broadway between 62nd and 63rd. Not to be missed. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Deeds of a rogue nation
Reagan Approved Plan to Sabotage Soviets Book Recounts Cold War Program That Made Technology Go Haywire By David E. Hoffman Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, February 27, 2004; Page A01 In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official. Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War, to be published next month by Ballantine Books. Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of cold-eyed economic warfare against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War. At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it. In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds, Reed writes. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space, he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982. While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy, he writes. Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10432-2004Feb26.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
He does have a point
Without directly using Mr. Kerry's name, Mr. Bush said the Democrats were an interesting group, with a lot of strong differences of opinion. They're for tax cuts and against them, the president said. For Nafta and against Nafta. For the Patriot Act, against the Patriot Act. In favor of liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/politics/campaign/27BUSH.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: He does have a point
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/27/04 9:40 AM Without directly using Mr. Kerry's name, Mr. Bush said the Democrats were an interesting group, with a lot of strong differences of opinion. They're for tax cuts and against them, the president said. For Nafta and against Nafta. For the Patriot Act, against the Patriot Act. In favor of liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts. contrary to demo officialdom and their lackeys as well as well-intended folks who correctly despise bush, kerry is not - and never has been - the electable one, simply repeating mantra over and over and over does/will not make it so, probably not surprising that those asserting that 'kerry is electable' never offered any reasons for that position, and guess one shouldn't be surprised that no one in media really pressed anybody for any reasons... michael hoover
Critique of the Brookings Institution - this time by a Russian
On 16 november 2003 I posted a critical comment on a book by Brookings Institution authors about Siberia on Marxmail and PEN-L. Here is another one by a Russian author that is much better (thanks to Chris for drawing my attention to it): Every year or so, another silly theory comes into vogue among Western Russia hands, that estimable body of scientific prognosticators not one of whom managed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union until three or four years after it had occurred. This year's trendily daft notion is that the curse of natural resources is to blame for Russia's fate. That's right: Russia's problem is that it's got far too much oil, minerals and forests-just like other famously messed-up countries, like Brazil and Venezuela. It's not the rich countries' fault for stripping these places; it 's their own fault for leading them on with provocative displays of natural wealth. Story at: http://www.exile.ru/184/book_review.html
Re: He does have a point
contrary to demo officialdom and their lackeys as well as well-intended folks who correctly despise bush, kerry is not - and never has been - the electable one, simply repeating mantra over and over and over does/will not make it so, probably not surprising that those asserting that 'kerry is electable' never offered any reasons for that position, and guess one shouldn't be surprised that no one in media really pressed anybody for any reasons... michael hoover My old friend Peter Camejo was quite insistent that Bush will steamroller over Kerry since all the big money and the media likes what he is doing. Check out the debate between him and Norman Solomon if you haven't done so already. It is highly entertaining, nearly as much so as Sex and the City. http://leftcoastradio.org -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Critique of the Brookings Institution - this time by a Russian
On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:16:19 +0100, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: This year's trendily daft notion is that the curse of natural resources is to blame for Russia's fate. That's right: Russia's problem is that it's got far too much oil, My old economics prof Steven Nickell, in relation to North Sea Oil and the UK economy, used to remark that it was curious that so many economists spent so much time on the claim that it was bad news to strike oil in your back yard, and their having done so, it was curious that they were not simply recognised as loonies and treated as a public health problem. quite a dry wit he had. He also, in relation to the empirical evidence on efficient markets theory, remarked that it was enough to make you weep, if you cared about that sort of thing. dd
A Brazilian Marxist's take on Sex and the City
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:52:56 -0500 From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Marxism] Sex and the City I would also have to confess that I became a big fan of this show over the past few months. I too, Louis, I too...But in my case that had perhaps more to do with the fact that I begen watching the show justly after I had watched my last Xena episode, therefore I had some kind of a craving for a women-centered show. Well, I believe S TC fares badly in comparision. Since I wrote I whole book on Mass Culture centered on Xena, I think I should be able to explain the reasons for my particular preferences. What made for me the charm of Xena was its unbalenced character, the fact that the abduction of the heroine as a lesbian icon by the show's fandom left its writers and producers threading on very thin ice in their attitude towards postmodern petit-bourgeois radicalism, eventually failing to justify their (conventional)closing of the show by making Xena dye for the Greater Good - and heterosexual morals. Nothing of this kind is to be found in Sex and the City, which is the usual portraying of the _via crucis_ of four dysfunctional females struggling towards their final - and willingly - acceptance of monogamy and family values, admittedly with some good jokes in-between (most of them, by the way, vernacular and leaving me somwhat at a loss as far as prompt understanding is concerned). As far as I'm concerned, my interst in S TC began to flag somewhere during the third season, when character Carrie Bradshaw decided to quit smoking in order to get back her romantic interest Aidan ( a good decision prompted by the most obnoxious, priggish reasons, to say the least). Those who, like Adorno Horkheimer, resume Mass Culture under the notion of mindless entertainment, seem to me to be unaware of the element of the pedagogics of suffering that's to be found in it, or better, what Gramsci called the ethics of Fordism, that's to say the huge amount of _internalized repression_ the lead-characters must self-inflict in order to arrive at the happy ending - the same pedagogy of suffering that seems at work in Mel Gibson's late cinematic rendering of Ultramontane Catholicism. As carrie Bradshaw must renounce tabagism for romantic love's sake, and Xena renounce Gabrielle for the Greater Good's, so Gibson's Christ must willingly embrace the most senseless torture in order to redeem Mankind (remember, by the way, that there were some very popular early heresies who, opposedly, made the Passion a sham by proposing that what had been crucified was Christ's ghost, and not the real Christ, as God cannot possibly suffer physical pain). It's in this pedagogy of suffering, perhaps, that reside the most obnoxiously reactionary traits of Mass Culture; as there is something akin in it to the acceptance of Taylorism and Henry Ford's social experiments by the working classes... Carlos Rebello -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: demo fervor
I wrote: strictly speaking, no propositions at all can be proved with statistics. All one can say is that your hypothesis survived a statistical test. Jurriaan writes: True, but it occurs to me that this might be too strongly worded, insofar as SOME propositions could be proved with statistics. For example, take proposition p which states that y will always greater than x. I go and measure y and I measure x and by golly, yep, I cannot find any single case where p is false. Now you could of course say, tomorrow I could encounter an example which contradicts p, and that is possible. This would demonstrate what we knew logically anyway, namely that there is no absolute proof of p, and, any counterexample of p is proof of that theorem. if the data is poorly measured, then even a case where there are no empirical counterexamples may be wrong. Jim D.
Re: demo fervor
On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:30:35 -0800, Devine, James wrote: if the data is poorly measured, then even a case where there are no empirical counterexamples may be wrong. Jim D. But Juriaan's point is surely that propositions can certainly be *falsified* by empirical evidence and if P is falsified, then it cannot be proved that P is proved. ? dd
Re: demo fervor
Bush thinks that homoskedasticity is unnatural and is going to ban any talk of it in government funded statistical studies. Only observations that are heteroskedastic will be allowed. Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 8:34 PM Subject: Re: demo fervor http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/heteroskedastic.htm which tells us that such a beast does exist. and i thought i earned my math degree with higher grades than sonofabush! I think the definition isn't very good. Heteroskedasticity and homoskedasticity really refer to the actual distribution pattern of a set of observations in relation to a norm, as far as I remember. Suppose you wanted to know what would be the best predictor of price movements. Well, you could specify some relevant variables, and then some price vectors, and then you could study how actual observed prices deviated from the level or path which you have hypothesised. That is the type of analysis which Anwar Shaikh did once in support of the 93% LTV, published in the Robert Langston memorial volume. J.
Re: demo fervor
if so, we agree. It's also extremely hard to disprove (or falsify) a proposition empirically. Most propositions have ceteris paribus clauses which can be invoked to defend the prop. For example, in macro, empirical evidence has seemingly destroyed the monetarist proposition that rapid increases in the money supply always everywhere cause inflation (since it turns out that velocity is unstable and the relevant money supply changes over time, often in an endogenously-driven way). But there are some people who honestly continue to defend this proposition. (They may be honest despite their politic positions, which are bad in my perspective.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 8:50 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] demo fervor On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:30:35 -0800, Devine, James wrote: if the data is poorly measured, then even a case where there are no empirical counterexamples may be wrong. Jim D. But Juriaan's point is surely that propositions can certainly be *falsified* by empirical evidence and if P is falsified, then it cannot be proved that P is proved. ? dd
Re: demo fervor
if the data is poorly measured, then even a case where there are no empirical counterexamples may be wrong. Jim D. Of course, that's possible, yes. J.
CIA sabotage of USSR economy?
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/27/1077676960916.html In 1982, US president Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the Soviet Union's economy through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a gas pipeline, according to a former White House official. Thomas Reed, a former Air Force secretary and member of the National Security Council, describes the episode in a book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War, to be published next month. Reed writes that the Siberia pipeline explosion was just one example of cold-eyed economic warfare against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under director William Casey during the final years of the Cold War. At the time, the US was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it. In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds, Reed writes.
Re: demo fervor
Bush thinks that homoskedasticity is unnatural and is going to ban any talk of it in government funded statistical studies. Only observations that are heteroskedastic will be allowed. Thanks. I'm not actually gay, but I had a lot of sexual harassment in the past, you end up doing things you would rather not, because of the heartless, racist, unsexy pressure to be something you are not, and of the systematic misrepresentation of who you really are by people who see themselves as Gods. Antonov Ovseyenko reports in his book The Time of Stalin that after Joseph Stalin had an academic give him private tuition in dialectics during the later 1920s, he had the academic killed off, at least the academic mysteriously disappeared. I have never been able to trace the complete details of that story though. J.
Re: demo fervor
Please, keep the number down! On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 06:58:01PM +0100, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: Bush thinks that homoskedasticity is unnatural and is going to ban any talk of it in government funded statistical studies. Only observations that are heteroskedastic will be allowed. Thanks. I'm not actually gay, but I had a lot of sexual harassment in the past, you end up doing things you would rather not, because of the heartless, racist, unsexy pressure to be something you are not, and of the systematic misrepresentation of who you really are by people who see themselves as Gods. Antonov Ovseyenko reports in his book The Time of Stalin that after Joseph Stalin had an academic give him private tuition in dialectics during the later 1920s, he had the academic killed off, at least the academic mysteriously disappeared. I have never been able to trace the complete details of that story though. J. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: demo fervor
if so, we agree. I cannot think of anytime I disagreed with you. The more I think about this, the more I think I disagree only with the people I disagree with, but, one always has to keep that critical inquiry going and not tule out the possibility you might disagree. It's also extremely hard to disprove (or falsify) a proposition empirically. Most propositions have ceteris paribus clauses which can be invoked to defend the prop. This is true, which is another reason why Benjamin Disraeli referred to lies, damn lies and statistics. However, statistics are indispensable to place the problem in proportion, and even it is not possible to conclusively prove or disprove a theorem, it is often possible to prove a margin of error, i.e. the limits within which quantitative variation can occur. This is an important corrective to rootless theorising which attaches enormous importance to something which, in the wider scheme of things, really just isn't so important. For example, in macro, empirical evidence has seemingly destroyed the monetarist proposition that rapid increases in the money supply always everywhere cause inflation (since it turns out that velocity is unstable and the relevant money supply changes over time, often in an endogenously-driven way). But there are some people who honestly continue to defend this proposition. (They may be honest despite their politic positions, which are bad in my perspective.) Yes, and Imre Lakatos explains why that is the case (showing also that Popper's idea of crucial experiments is strictly speaking false or at any rate must be relativised). When I was a university, I have a friend and he wrote a paper on this, applying the Lakatosian interpretation to the history of economic thought, with a Marxian interpretation of the objective conditions within which theorising took place. My own interest as Education student at that time, was in historical learning, i.e. from the same historical experience different people can conclude different things depending on the theories they use to interpret the experience. You have these historical learning processes and you can say at any time that in relation to a specific event, people of a particular generation drew a particular conclusion, maybe influence by their social station in life, but that conclusion was drawn, and that remains in memory as a basis for present and future evaluations or orientations. This is actually a specific problem in Marxian-type political theory, because we try to get people to draw specific lessons from real historical experience rationally understood, and not bother with false prophets or detractors and so on. Another application might be in regard to the fact, that the PNAC-type people drew particular conclusions from the experience they had in the past, and this shaped their policies, their thinking, and that experience also defines the dynamic of their thinking. Jurriaan
Re: demo fervor
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/27/04 1:19 PM Benjamin Disraeli referred to lies, damn lies and statistics. Jurriaan from 'the phrase finder': Often attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister. The source for this view is the autobiography of Mark Twain, where he makes that attribution. No version of this quotation has been found in any of Disraeli's published works or letters though. The earliest reference yet found anywhere is to a speech made by Leonard H. Courtney, (1832-1918), later Lord Courtney, in New York in 1895 - 'After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, Lies - damn lies - and statistics, still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.' It may be that Twain thought that in the 'Wise Statesman' Courtney was referring to Disraeli.
Preventing Working-Class Electoral Participation
The United Nations has said that at least 70 percent of eligible voters should be registered for the elections to be considered successful in Afghanistan (Steven R. Weisman/NYT, U.S. Hints of a Delay on Afghan Elections, Monday, February 16, 2004, http://www.iht.com/articles/129665.html). By the standard that the United Nations sets for Afghanistan (!), fewer than half of the election years -- in 1966, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 -- in the United States have been successful since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: * Table A- 1. Reported Voting and Registration by Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex and Age Groups: November 1964 to 2000 Source: U. S. Census Bureau Internet Release date: February 27, 2002 Last Revised: June 3, 2002 (Numbers in thousands) Total percent Total Voting-Age Total Citizen Year Population Registered 2000 202,60963.969.5 1998 198,22862.167.1 1996 193,65165.971.0 1994 190,26762.567.1 1992 185,68468.275.2 1990 182,11862.268.2 1988 178,09866.672.1 1986 173,89064.369.0 1984 169,96368.373.9 1982 165,48364.168.5 1980 157,08566.972.3 1978 151,64662.666.7 1976 146,54866.7NA 1974 141,29962.2NA 1972 136,20372.3NA 1970 120,70168.1NA 1968 116,53574.3NA 1966 112,80070.3NA http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/voting/tabA-1.pdf * Even if we disregard Bush's theft of presidency, the 2000 elections were unsuccessful ones by the UN standard. :- Ever since the Civil War abolished chattel slavery, the American electoral system has been redesigned to prevent electoral participation of the working-class majority. * CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF DEMOCRACY, UC IRVINE RESEARCH PAPERS Turnout Decline in the U.S. and other Advanced Industrial Democracies Martin P. Wattenberg University of California, Irvine Copyright 1998, Martin Wattenberg . . . In 1996, the turnout of just 49 percent of the voting age population (VAP) marked the first time that participation in a presidential contest had fallen below the 50 percent mark since the early 1920s -- when women had just received the franchise and not yet begun to use it very frequently (see Merriam and Gosnell, 1924). In 1997, not a single one of the eleven states that called its citizens to the polls managed to get a majority to vote. . . . The worst turnout of 1997 was a shockingly low 5 percent for a special election in Texas. This occurred even though Governor Bush stumped the state for a week, urging people to participate and promising that a Yes vote would result in a major tax cut. . . . The Cost of Voting More attention has been given in the literature to the costs than the benefits of voting. This is probably because one cost of voting in the United States has drawn overwhelming attention -- that of registration. The governments of most established democracies take the responsibility for registering as many eligible voters as possible. In the U.S., by contrast, the responsibility for registration lies solely with the individual. To make matters worse, some state registration laws in the past clearly sought to restrict rather than facilitate voter turnout. This was the case in the South, with its well-known provisions to prevent African-Americans from voting, but also in much of the North -- where the potential political power of immigrants threatened the early 20th century political establishment (Piven and Cloward, 1988). Some of these obstacles, such as the poll tax or literacy tests, were transparent attempts to keep particular types of people from registering; others, such as requiring citizens to appear at a county courthouse that was open just several hours a week, were not user-friendly for anyone. G. Bingham Powell's (1986) comparative analysis estimated that America's unique registration laws accounted for roughly half the difference between U.S. turnout rates and those of other advanced industrialized democracies in the 1960s and 1970s. Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone (1980) examined variation in 1972 state registration laws on 3 crucial dimensions: closing date, office hours for registration, and laws for absentee registration. They found that if the most liberal registration laws had been in effect throughout the country, turnout would have been 9 percent greater. Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980: 88) go on to confidently infer that if America adopted European-style registration then voter turnout would increase by substantially greater than this estimate. A quarter of a century after this classic analysis, aggregate data continue to show that state registration laws are related to turnout at any single point in time. Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980: 72-73) noted
Re: Preventing Working-Class Electoral Participation
Any sweeping change in technology is not without its challenges. The Election Technology Council understands that while DRE systems offer the American public substantial advantages, it is natural that questions about the security of these newer systems will be asked. The ETC is ready, willing and able to work with government election officials, academia, and industry in identifying, developing and disseminating improvements to election systems environment. Such improvements may involve equipment standards, system testing, election day operations, voter registration, integration of other ballot types (provisional, phone, mail, absentee, military), auditability and other factors. The member companies of the Election Technology Council are committed to the election systems marketplace, to product improvement and to meeting customer needs as they evolve. Launched on December 9, 2003, the Election Technology Council is a group of leading election systems vendors. The ETC will work to educate lawmakers, election officials, voters and other key constituencies about the significant benefits of electronic voting. At the same time, the Council recognizes that it must also address issues as they arise concerning the trustworthiness of DRE systems specifically and public perceptions of the electronic voting sector generally. To this end, the Council's initial projects with focus in three areas: A code of ethics for electronic voting system vendors; recommendations in the area of national standards and certification for DRE systems; security best practices. http://www.itaa.org/es/gendoc.cfm?docid=314
Draft (was dems, etc)
There's nothing to suggest the right wants to publicly get behind the draft, or at least a massive untrained draft as in Vietnam. Hollings's and Rangel's bills are probably going to die in committee, and Rumsfeld and Bush love to talk about how effective the all-volunteer force is. At the same time the SSS is restructuring and preparing new draft boards. There was a lot of noise about this a few weeks ago, when the agency had job postings on its Web site for draft board positions and then abruptly took them down. I think the right would prefer to keep the military as it is, all volunteer, for the sake of the 'patriotic' rationale Ralph outlined below, but that may be impossible if we invade another country before we leave Iraq and Afghanistan or if the situations in those countries continue to worsen. The SSS also admits that it may have to draft trained personnell (doctors and translators) because they are difficult to recruit and hard to retain. My guess is, if it comes to this, it will come by way of a quiet EO and not through Hollings's or Rangel's bills. For a good read, check out the SSS Register at http://www.sss.gov/PDFs/NovDec2003-Register.pdf. The article on the perfomance plan is full of some great corporate-governance language. It reads like a memo to white-collar workers who are about to be laid off (or affected by a RIF, to use the language of a tech company where I recently temped), which it is: 'To be honest, not everybody in the Agency will be happy with the outcomes . . . change is not easy when you've grown accustomed to doing things in certain ways. But status quo is not an option.' Brian Ralph Johansen wrote: What of the contradiction here: if the right really wants to get behind a draft, why is it that the sponsors in the House are Conyers and Rangel, who would be in favor because 1) selective service this time would, in the bill drafted, not allow loopholes for the privileged, and 2) the absence of a 'patriotic' rationale for this blighted war in the minds of more and more people could very well spell disaster for the sitting administration? Ralph - Original Message - From: Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 3:20 PM Subject: Re: dems, etc snip * For Immediate Release: Wednesday, January 8, 2003 Contact: Andy Davis (202) 224-6654 Hollings Sponsors Bill to Reinstate Military Draft Senator cites current heavy use of reserves and national guard, need for shared sacrifice WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings last night introduced the Universal National Service Act of 2003, a bill to reinstate the military draft and mandate either military or civilian service for all Americans, aged 18-26. The Hollings legislation is the Senate companion to a bill recently introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). Specifically, the bill mandates a national service obligation for every U.S. citizen and permanent resident, aged 18-26. To that end, the legislation authorizes the President to establish both the number of people to be selected for military service and the means of selection. Additionally, the measure requires those not selected specifically for military service to perform their national service obligation in a civilian capacity for at least two years. Under the bill, deferments for education will be permitted only through high school graduation. . . . http://hollings.senate.gov/~hollings/press/2003108C06.html * snip
History's ironies
(William F. Browder is Earl Browder's grandson. His Hermitage Capital Management is described in the article as the largest foreign investment fund in Russia. Earl Browder was the leader of the CPUSA during WWII. Shortly after the Cold War began, Stalin dumped him because he was seen as too conciliatory to the West.) Investors Rally Around Putin, Discounting Alarm of Critics By Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, February 26, 2004; Page A14 MOSCOW -- To his fierce and increasingly worried critics, President Vladimir Putin is a grave threat to post-Soviet democracy, a would-be authoritarian intent on building capitalism with a Stalinist face, as one reformist leader put it. But investor William F. Browder sees it differently. Never mind the arguments about a creeping coup by Putin's KGB colleagues, the war in Chechnya, the state takeover of television or even the jailing of Russia's richest man. To Browder, Putin is a true reformer, the one ally of Western capitalists who have come to Russia to create a new market economy but have found themselves adrift in a sea of corrupt bullies. What's the worst-case scenario? asked Browder, who has bet $1.3 billion in the investment fund he runs on the success of the Putin presidency. That I misjudged and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But I just don't think the objective here is Stalinism. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7272-2004Feb25.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: He does have a point
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/27/04 10:32 AM My old friend Peter Camejo was quite insistent that Bush will steamroller over Kerry since all the big money and the media likes what he is doing. Check out the debate between him and Norman Solomon if you haven't done so already. It is highly entertaining, nearly as much so as Sex and the City. re. pc - whom i voted for in 76 when he was, according to 2004 green party prez candidate guide, Presidential nominee of Socialist Workers Party -- a militant, Trotskyist communist party. Since then, his strident leftist views have evolved into the democratic socialism of the Green Party that he now espouses - why doesn't he run for city council or mayor of where ever he lives instead of wasting time, money, and effort on go nowhere campaign for prez, green party website lists 'goodly' number of green elected officials (probably most in nonpartisan elections but hey...) ... michael hoover fwiw, here's complete pc bio at green party prez candidate guide: Peter Camejo is back on the national political scene after an absence of nearly 25 years, only he's much changed since he last ran for President. Camejo was 1976 Presidential nominee of Socialist Workers Party -- a militant, Trotskyist communist party. He won ballot status in 30 states and captured 90,000 votes. Since then, his strident leftist views have evolved into the democratic socialism of the Green Party that he now espouses. I tried to make changes inside the SWP, and it was very difficult. I guess it's like being in the Catholic Church and suggesting that Mary wasn't really a virgin or something, explained Camejo. A longtime progressive activist, he marched in Selma with Martin Luther King in the early 1960s, protested the Vietnam War, and advocated environmental protection policies. He also became a successful financial executive as chair and co-founder of Progressive Asset Management, a broker-dealer firm which promotes socially responsible investments. Camejo also created the Eco-Logical Trust for Merrill Lynch, the first environmentally-screened fund of a major firm. He was an active Nader supporter in 1996 and 2000. In 2002, Camejo was the Green nominee for California Governor (382,000 votes - 5% - 3rd place). During the Gray Davis gubernatorial recall election in 2003, he was again the Green candidate for Governor (242,000 votes - 3% - 4th place). In both those elections, Camejo polled well enough during the campaign to be included in the various televised gubernatorial debates. Camejo is now running for the Green nomination for President in the March 2nd California primary ballot. However, he says he is only running as a favorite son candidate and has made it clear he is not actually seeking the nomination -- but then he pops up as a speaker at Presidential candidate forums in other states. A related link is Draft Camejo, a group seeking to convince Camejo to make a full-fledged run for the Green nomination in 2004.
Re: A Brazilian Marxist's take on Sex and the City
Car.os wrote: As carrie Bradshaw must renounce tabagism for romantic love's sake, and Xena renounce Gabrielle for the Greater Good's, so Gibson's Christ must willingly embrace the most senseless torture in order to redeem Mankind (remember, by the way, that there were some very popular early heresies who, opposedly, made the Passion a sham by proposing that what had been crucified was Christ's ghost, and not the real Christ, as God cannot possibly suffer physical pain). It's in this pedagogy of suffering, perhaps, that reside the most obnoxiously reactionary traits of Mass Culture; as there is something akin in it to the acceptance of Taylorism and Henry Ford's social experiments by the working classes... Oh, for sure. You nailed it. My favorite part of xena was the Gabrielle stuff. As for SATC, the first couple of seasons were OK, but you're so right about the stultifying happy endings. I mean radical solutions included 1) an interfaith marriage, 2) an interclass marriage, 3) an older woman/younger man marriage, and 4) a cinderella marriage. Marriage, marriage, marriage, marriage. Yawn. As for the Christ blood gore. That's truly scary. Because essentially what it says is if they could do this to god, what have you got to complain about? How far will you go to prove your righteousness? How many of your children will you sacrifice? This is bad, bad, bad. The horror before the horror. I hate to think what that might be. Joanna
Re: He does have a point
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/27/04 10:32 AM My old friend Peter Camejo was quite insistent that Bush will steamroller over Kerry since all the big money and the media likes what he is doing. Check out the debate between him and Norman Solomon if you haven't done so already. It is highly entertaining, nearly as much so as Sex and the City. re. pc - whom i voted for in 76 when he was, according to 2004 green party prez candidate guide, Presidential nominee of Socialist Workers Party -- a militant, Trotskyist communist party. Since then, his strident leftist views have evolved into the democratic socialism of the Green Party that he now espouses - why doesn't he run for city council or mayor of where ever he lives instead of wasting time, money, and effort on go nowhere campaign for prez, green party website lists 'goodly' number of green elected officials (probably most in nonpartisan elections but hey...) ... michael hoover I have it on good authority that Peter Camejo actually doesn't intend to run for president -- he (probably along with several other candidates currently running in the Green primaries) is a placeholder for Ralph Nader. The Green Party needs to run a presidential candidate, especially in war times, since it is the executive branch of the federal government that determines foreign policy, making life-and-death decisions on matters of war and peace. Running candidates in winnable local elections alone doesn't allow the Green Party to publicize its foreign policy. Besides, on issues of local governance, there are much fewer differences between the Green and Democratic Parties than at higher levels anyway. -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/
Reply to a Bad Subjects editor
Charles Bertsch wrote: Havven't they given you tenure yet, Louis? Oh, that's right. I forgot. Nice to hear from an old, um, whatever. Bertsch, I had no fucking idea who you are, but don't ever write me provocative shit out of the blue about tenure ever again. I am a computer programmer at Columbia University and the closest I get to professors is when I pass them on the campus on my way to the library that most of them never use. I left a message on your machine at work to let you know that I don't like getting unsolicited hostile emails, especially when I can't connect them to any political question that matters to me or that I have taken a position on publicly. Since I have a high profile on the Internet, I figured that you were some pissed off academic at U. of Arizona, but why I had no idea. After putting two and two together, I did a google search on Bertsch and Bad Subjects and discovered that you are one of the bullshit artists that puts that cyber-rag out. If you had a beef about what your pal Aldama wrote about Cuba, you should have made that clearer. I have half a mind to put you and all your postmodernist pals on Marxmail where we can teach you a thing or two about Marxist theory. You people should be ashamed at yourself. You accuse the Cuban government about running drugs without ANY EVIDENCE, not even from the reactionary press. I understand that postmodernism is about relative values of truth, but this should not inspire you to write the kind of lies that are normally found in David Horowitz's FrontPage. Louis Proyect Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: science in the corporate interest; yet another iteration
* Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] posted: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16954 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16954 In Science in the Private Interest... Dear Eubilides - thanks, an interesting article. No solutions (perhaps naturally). Some factual errors - regarding the restoration of Dr Olivera's reputation. In any of this, as any trooper knows, mud sticks. This has definitely happened to Dr.O. It did not help that her red flag on the drug - was not corroborated after (as far as I know the later literature). This has tended to obscure the generic message. More worrying is the lack of solutions in a situation where the trend for scientists to be forced into an un-seemly and dirty bed with the companies is growing. The reality is that: i) Peer funding is getting harder harder; ii) Research that in a prior day could have been done on a shoe string good will, is pretty difficult nowadays; iii) Universities are simultaneously demanding more publications in better journals; begin cut off at the knees in terms of state funding. An obvious impasse. Richard Horton shows the problem well. But he does remain somewhat 'agnostic' on the solutions. He is a little more forthcoming in person, but even with a few GT's was cautious! The solution - well - as a Ml-ist I hesitate to say the obvious! It is in truth, a very difficult situation. the intense competition at all the 'usual' agencies is getting virtually impossible. Only 15% of applications to the Canadian Inst Hlth Res will get funded. I know the NIH is about as bad, if not worse. Wonder what the reformists on the list would proffer as solutions? Hari Kumar
Zoellick in India
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2105/stories/20040312001805000.htm WTO Frictions to the fore SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN The recent visit of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick to India with the stated aim of resuming global trade negotiations only serves to highlight the continuing discord between the two countries on a range of trade issues. ROBERT ZOELLICK, the United States Trade Representative, stopped in New Delhi for a meeting with Union Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley on February 16. His visit was part of a cycle involving other major trading nations, and the purported agenda was nothing less than the resumption of stalled global trade negotiations. But the official statement issued on the occasion was almost cursory on this main item of the agenda, confining itself to a formal reiteration of both countries' intention to engage constructively in moving the negotiations forward. This almost routine statement though, was overshadowed by a very public articulation of discord on a range of other issues. Jaitley focussed on the new protectionist fervour possessing the U.S., leading to exploratory legislation in some States that would severely curtail the freedom currently enjoyed by firms to outsource key business functions to overseas service providers. The Jobs for America Act that has recently been tabled in the U.S. Senate by leading Democratic Party legislators effectively moves this process from the State to the federal level. Among other things, the proposed law would require U.S. companies that plan to lay off 15 or more workers to make a full public disclosure of where they intended to relocate the jobs and provide satisfactory explanations for their decision. It is strange, said the Indian Minister that on the one hand people are talking about opening of markets and on the other hand, banning business process outsourcing. And in puncturing the U.S. demand that India should liberalise its agricultural trade, Jaitley minced no words: Our agriculture is fragile as it is not subsidised, as in the U.S. Zoellick for his part held out the assurance that the outsourcing controversy was not all that it had been made out to be. Trade opening would benefit all sides through job growth. And if India were to liberalise, it would create a context of increasing trade that would effectively neutralise the outsourcing controversy. Much progress could be achieved, he said, if India and the U.S. were to look at the areas on which they agreed: like the elimination of trade-distorting export subsidies in agriculture and the reduction of domestic support. The U.S.' top trade negotiator could not have been unaware of the odds he faces. Senator John Kerry, who is rapidly emerging as the most likely challenger to President George Bush in the November elections, routinely chooses the figure of Benedict Arnold, the emblematic representative of high treason in U.S. history, to castigate the business leaders who he alleges have been exporting jobs from the U.S. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of Bush's council of economic advisers, recently made bold to suggest that outsourcing was just another way of doing business that was probably good for the U.S. economy. The qualified endorsement of outsourcing as an economic plus for the U.S. economy, it transpired, had been prudent, since Bush has studiedly chosen to distance himself from his top adviser's opinion. His political fortunes increasingly threatened by weak economic fundamentals, the U.S. President recently issued the bravura claim that his first term in office would end with 2.6 million new jobs in place for the U.S. workforce. He has since been rather reluctant about being held to that standard of numerical precision. The last six months have reportedly seen job-growth of the order of 360,000. The economist Paul Krugman has estimated that to work itself out of the slump it is currently in, the U.S. economy would have to add jobs at the rate of about 275,000 every month. The total employment in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) sector currently stands, in the estimation of the industry association, at less than 250,000. The number of jobs created in this sector during 2003-04 would, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), be in the range of 74,000. Adjusting for differences in relative wages and infrastructural endowments - which have a bearing on the investment required to create an extra job - this would be the equivalent of fewer than 30,000 jobs in the U.S., or a mere 2,500 additional jobs every month. In relation to the magnitude of unemployment in the U.S., the impact of outsourcing is quite obviously marginal, rendering the overheated rhetoric about Benedict Arnold businessmen just a little ludicrous. Zoellick's visit to India nevertheless signals that this item could prospectively be moved onto the agenda of global trade negotiations. The U.S. since the failure of Cancun, has shaped its response along two
Re: Reply to a Bad Subjects editor
And exactly why is this on the Pen L list? Sounds like a personal problem. You want help with this problem? Contact me offlist. dms - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 6:44 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Reply to a Bad Subjects editor Charles Bertsch wrote: Havven't they given you tenure yet, Louis? Oh, that's right. I forgot. Nice to hear from an old, um, whatever. Bertsch, I had no fucking idea who you are, but don't ever write me provocative shit out of the blue about tenure ever again. I am a computer programmer at Columbia University and the closest I get to professors is when I pass them on the campus on my way to the library that most of them never use. I left a message on your machine at work to let you know that I don't like getting unsolicited hostile emails, especially when I can't connect them to any political question that matters to me or that I have taken a position on publicly. Since I have a high profile on the Internet, I figured that you were some pissed off academic at U. of Arizona, but why I had no idea. After putting two and two together, I did a google search on Bertsch and Bad Subjects and discovered that you are one of the bullshit artists that puts that cyber-rag out. If you had a beef about what your pal Aldama wrote about Cuba, you should have made that clearer. I have half a mind to put you and all your postmodernist pals on Marxmail where we can teach you a thing or two about Marxist theory. You people should be ashamed at yourself. You accuse the Cuban government about running drugs without ANY EVIDENCE, not even from the reactionary press. I understand that postmodernism is about relative values of truth, but this should not inspire you to write the kind of lies that are normally found in David Horowitz's FrontPage. Louis Proyect Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
Sabri Oncu : Heteroskedastic means non-constant variance. If you look at the way the data varies with time, the fluctuations are larger initially and the fluctuations attenuate as the time progresses, although they appear to get larger again towards the end. Moreover, you just have 13 observations. I would never reach any conclusions with that many observations. Q: Is this the same as regression to the mean? Thx H
Re: Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
Haven't we beaten this poor pony to death yet? Somebody produced an array of number showing that the Republican Party has consistently had support from a significant portion of the working class-- at least since 1952. Big deal. That's a surprise? We need statistics for that? I note in passing that hey, since 1980 or something the trend is downward. Another non-big deal. Certainly the observation, not a conclusion, but the observation is just as meaningful or not as the observation that the Republicans have had support. And from that we get X number of transmissions about the validity of statistical theory, etc. Personally, I think there is much more to be gained from the concrete analysis of the concrete conditions of exchange, production, overproduction, and profit, here and now, then and there, or any combination thereof. My remark about elections and trends was a throwaway remark, reflecting, in my opinion, the throwaway nature of election statistics. dms - Original Message - From: Hari Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 7:23 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor] Sabri Oncu : Heteroskedastic means non-constant variance. If you look at the way the data varies with time, the fluctuations are larger initially and the fluctuations attenuate as the time progresses, although they appear to get larger again towards the end. Moreover, you just have 13 observations. I would never reach any conclusions with that many observations. Q: Is this the same as regression to the mean? Thx H
Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
Q: Is this the same as regression to the mean? Thx H Hi Hari, Good to hear from you! How is our mutual friend doing? It is not the same as regression to the mean. Regression to the mean is a different concept associated with that those below the mean will do better and move up, whereas those above the mean will do worse and move down, we hope, of course. Best, Sabri
Re: Reply to a Bad Subjects editor
I agree. I am not sure that this belongs here. On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 07:16:26PM -0500, dmschanoes wrote: And exactly why is this on the Pen L list? Sounds like a personal problem. You want help with this problem? Contact me offlist. dms - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 6:44 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Reply to a Bad Subjects editor Charles Bertsch wrote: Havven't they given you tenure yet, Louis? Oh, that's right. I forgot. Nice to hear from an old, um, whatever. Bertsch, I had no fucking idea who you are, but don't ever write me provocative shit out of the blue about tenure ever again. I am a computer programmer at Columbia University and the closest I get to professors is when I pass them on the campus on my way to the library that most of them never use. I left a message on your machine at work to let you know that I don't like getting unsolicited hostile emails, especially when I can't connect them to any political question that matters to me or that I have taken a position on publicly. Since I have a high profile on the Internet, I figured that you were some pissed off academic at U. of Arizona, but why I had no idea. After putting two and two together, I did a google search on Bertsch and Bad Subjects and discovered that you are one of the bullshit artists that puts that cyber-rag out. If you had a beef about what your pal Aldama wrote about Cuba, you should have made that clearer. I have half a mind to put you and all your postmodernist pals on Marxmail where we can teach you a thing or two about Marxist theory. You people should be ashamed at yourself. You accuse the Cuban government about running drugs without ANY EVIDENCE, not even from the reactionary press. I understand that postmodernism is about relative values of truth, but this should not inspire you to write the kind of lies that are normally found in David Horowitz's FrontPage. Louis Proyect Marxism list: www.marxmail.org -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: Greenspan on Social Security
Is this, perhaps, the old "guns vs butter" revisited? Is it possible that 2/25 will become a date to remember along with 9/11. What if the Iraq war was not about "oil" but about protecting the US dollar as the reserve currency by which oil is bought and trade valued? How much room is there in the US budget once the entitlements are stripped out? Remember that towards the end Rome was forced to give soldiers land so that they could have incomes that would finance their roll in the military. I wonder if the National Guard might not be an interesting variance in today's world? And Rome didn't think that debasing their currency in the world market was a good thing for exports in a free trade world. Funny thing about those econometric models thoughts? tom abeles dmschanoes wrote: All you need to know about Greenspan is that he's the guy who wrote a letter of recommendation to the Federal Home Loan Banking Board (remember them? regulated the SLs pre Reconstruction Finance Fiasco) to get Charles Keating the charter for Lincoln Savings and Loan. Guy's got the integrity and spine of a tapeworm. dms - Original Message - From: "Michael Perelman" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 9:09 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Greenspan on Social Security Is Greenspan working for the Dems.? Make the tax cuts permanent, cut social security to make the economy grow faster. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
GAO report on outsourcing the State
February 27, 2004 COMPETITIVE SOURCING Greater Emphasis Needed on Increasing Efficiency and Improving Performance GAO-04-367 http://www.gao.gov/ [click through to the report]
Re: Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
dms: Personally, I think there is much more to be gained from the concrete analysis of the concrete conditions of exchange, production, overproduction, and profit, here and now, then and there, or any combination thereof. Hey dms! Tell me how you are planning to conduct that concrete analysis? I once had a student in my partial differential equations class who told me that because we were studying some concrete physical problems, things should have been much simpler. What that young fellow did not realize was that what we were studying were not some concrete physical problems but some simplified abstractions of them. This was why our mathematical tools, however difficult they may be to comprehend, worked. When it comes to real concrete physical problems, our mathematical tools fare quite poorly. Here is another anecdote: I had a very smart Chinese research brother. That is, we were the students of the same professor. He once told me that every year in China thousands of amateur mathematicians used to submit solutions to the Chinese Academy of Sciences of Fermat's then unsolved last problem. Of course, all those solutions were wrong. And my Chinese brother concluded his story with this: You cannot go to the moon by bike! You need a space craft for that... Best, Sabri
Re: declaration of war?
Here's an interesting take: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17969 The Class Warrior.. Struggle continues, Mike B) --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think you are correct. I already experienced this in the 1980s in New Zealand, it's just that the USA is much wealthier and so the processes work themselves out full with a greater time-lag. That is why we need good research, good argument, good professional organisation, and not lefty rhetoric and character assassinations. J. - Original Message - From: Eugene Coyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 7:19 AM Subject: [PEN-L] declaration of war? Wasn't Greenspan's little talk about cutting taxes for the rich and cutting Social Security pretty close to an open declaration of class war? Gene Coyle = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
- Original Message - From: Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 11:34 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor] Hey dms! Tell me how you are planning to conduct that concrete analysis? Sabri ___ Ask and you shall receive... A CASE OF CURIOSITIES: UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF OVERPRODUCTION For every capitalist, profit appears as a function of cost-- as the discrepancy between cost and price. The capitalists as a class speak about value added in production, but that value added doesn't appear as a material component of the production process itself. Its materialization assumes form as a price bestowed, granted, by the market exchanging all commodities. It, profit, appears as a gift, a blessing, magic, arbitrary, chimerical, a miracle requiring priests, police, and quick hands. No capitalist can account concretely for the value generated in the production process. There is no accounting line item for the value of things obtained without cost, for value expropriated without compensation. There can't be. The expropriation is concealed within the form of compensation itself, which is of course, wages. And the value expropriated is the surplus value from wage-labor. Everything has its price and everything has a cost. In the confusion of the two every capitalist experiences glee and misery, triumph and despair, meat and poison. Cost is the disease and price is the cure. And vice versa. All of capitalist production tends, by necessity, to become overproduction. To the individual capitalist, overproduction is an unfortunate byproduct of attempts to reduce the costs of production, or the misreading of the markets. In reality, only through overproduction can the surplus value expropriated through wage-labor be transformed into a relation of profit to the capital it mobilizes; only the maximum production forcing all surplus values into the markets provides even a minimum return. The realization of a portion of the expropriated value requires the circulation of all values. This process contains the capitalist dream of value added, sure. And it contains within the dream a reality of devaluation, of a productive apparatus too expensive, not in the costs of production in relation to market prices, but in the relation of profit to capital as a whole. Case 1: Steel-- Overproduction in a Down-sized Place. When confronting a decline in the rate of profit, capital's usual course is to call on the army to rearrange certain relations of debt, of wages, of the existing profits themselves. Behind every free market there's a death squad ready for deployment. But in 1973, the US military was fully occupied licking its wounds after a ten year tour of Southeast Asia. The military was in no shape to come to the phone. So capital turned to the next best thing, oil, to do the rearranging. OPEC answered on the first ring. Oil prices spiked and all the profits of all the exchanges in all the markets entered that great pipeline belonging to the seven sisters. And their banks. And a funny thing happened on the way home from the bank. The inflated price of oil took its toll on behalf of the petroleum companies, sure. But the cascade of petrodollars, the general price inflation accompanying the inflated price of oil propelled manufacturing industries to accumulate hard assets, to expand the fixed asset base of production with the depreciating dollars realized in the markets. Between 1973 and 1980, the net stock (measured on the historical cost basis) of manufacturing fixed assets doubled. Manufacturing profits did not do quite as well in general, peaking in 1978 at $89.7 billion before falling back to $76.3 billion in 1980, a gain of 75 percent from 1973. Profits for the durable goods industry collapsed, rose to a peak of $45.5 billion in 1978, and collapsed again to $18.3 billion in 1980, below 1973's $25 billion. Profits for the primary metal industries, i.e., steel , peaked in 1974 at $5.0 billion but dropped to $2.6 billion in 1980. For the entire period, this sector's profits averaged $2.4 billion per year, essentially showing no growth from 1973 on a year to year basis. The market mechanisms of price had done half a job, on employment levels and living standards. But half won't do. Capital hit the redial button on its phone. The steel industry accounted for, then as now, approximately 3 percent of total energy consumed in the US. This time, when the phone rang, it was OPEC 2, and it was calling collect. The industry was asset heavy and profit short; capacity large and utilization small. It wasn't that OPEC caught steel short. Rather, OPEC 2 caught the industry going long. In 1980, the US steel industry production capacity was estimated at 155 million net tons. The utilization rate was 53% as shipments measured 85 million net tons. Net shipments shrank to 60 million net tons in 1982. The industry recorded losses for
Re: Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
Hey dms! Tell me how you are planning to conduct that concrete analysis? Sabri ___ Ask and you shall receive... And I just took a look at what you sent. It is full of statistical obscurantism and inferences from them, possibly some of which are wrong because with your comments you demonstrated your lack of understanding of the tools you are using quite nicely. You cannot go to the moon by bike! You need a space craft for that... Best, Sabri
Re: Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
Please go right ahead and do a better analysis of the two industries in question using your spacecraft.. Challenger or Columbia? - Original Message - From: Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2004 12:15 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor] Hey dms! Tell me how you are planning to conduct that concrete analysis? Sabri ___ Ask and you shall receive... And I just took a look at what you sent. It is full of statistical obscurantism and inferences from them, possibly some of which are wrong because with your comments you demonstrated your lack of understanding of the tools you are using quite nicely. You cannot go to the moon by bike! You need a space craft for that... Best, Sabri
article on MR website
I have an article posted on the Monthly Review website (www.monthlyreview.org) titled "Can the Working Class Change the World?" It is a write up of a talk I gave to the Marxist School in Sacramento. Comments welcome. Michael Yates
Re: Stats OED: [Was Re: demo fervor]
Please go right ahead and do a better analysis of the two industries in question using your spacecraft.. Challenger or Columbia? Neighter Challenger or Columbia. In my language it is called: Ananin Ami! If you don't know what it means, go and check a Turkish dictionary! Best, Sabri
Re: Goodbye, Lenin opens in NYC
Yes emphatically not to be missed, and not to be under-estimated despite its wit and good humour. Allow me absolutely to agree:- This is not just about nostalgia for chintzy objects that might be regarded as a German version of camp. It is also about a growing disenchantment with the new capitalist world that they had assumed would be a kind of utopia It is on many levels. One is the destruction of a coercive narrow idealististic society by an increasing pre-occupation with commodities. It is the commodities of the east that are mocked, although Spreewald gurken no doubt could be tasty enough. But it is the horror of the far more massive victorious consumer society of the west that indirectly is questioned. The intrusion of a massive advertisement for Coca Cola, is counterbalanced later by an extraordinary image of an admonitory statue of Lenin, being carried through the air by a helicopter, reproving the naive communist stalwart for having forgotten perhaps a deeper meaning of socialism. And perhaps a realisation that although it is the hunger for the commodities of the East Germany (the title is a pun) that is ridiculed, the more sophisticated and extensive domination of commodities is found in the society of the west. There must be something more significant to human relationships than what happens in between purchasing commodities. Its massive popularity in Germany suggests it has struck deeper chords than a remarkably good comedy film with many clever cinematic allusions. See it more than once with a gap of a few weeks. Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 2:21 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Goodbye, Lenin opens in NYC I reviewed this film about the phenomenon of ostalgie a couple of weeks ago. It is now opening up at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas Broadway between 62nd and 63rd. Not to be missed. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
