from:"Lisa"


Actually Carrol, I think in Melvin's theory the "technically" unemployed and
under employed play a significant role in revolution.  It was really
fascinating, you should read it if you have not already.

LS


on 10/10/2002 7:34 PM, Carrol Cox at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
> 
>> "Devine, James" wrote:
>> 
>> Thiago writes:
>>> there also is an issue here about what it means to be unemployed
>>> these days. It doesn't necessarily mean one is not working: [clip]
>> 
>> I think it's useful to keep unemployment _per se_ (as with the
>> official definitions) separate from these near-unemployments.
> 
> I haven't followed this thread at all yet but have merely shuffled the
> posts off into a separate Netscape folder for reading some other day.
> But the fact that it has aroused passions is, in itself, an exhibition
> of either bad political thinking or simply apolitical thinking. (As
> almost every single post I have read on energy or ecology for the past
> three years has been apolitical -- i.e., utterly detached from any
> conception whatever of how the information provided could be embodied in
> an actual mass working-class movement.)
> 
> Unemployment figures prove nothing politically whatsoever, nor can it
> make any political difference if those figures are correct or incorrect.
> Endless agonizing and polemics over the correctness or incorrectness of
> unemployment figures could only come (as Michael Hoover suggested) from
> those who have been cut off (or never connected to) concrete political
> practice. The result is that politics shrinks to the petty proportions
> of winning or losing a rhetorical battle on a maillist.
> 
> Carrol
>

Re: mucking

Title: Re: [PEN-L:31223] mucking

Oh my how you fellows amuse me (and gals, but to tell you the truth the fellows are the ones making a fuss). Let me tell you. I couldn't get off of the list when I tried, and you all are such a hoot I now eagerly await my next chunk of email. I personally am glad we don't all agree, how boring such a discussion would be. Don't be angry with each other, just think about how much more maddening the list would be if we had to deal with a segment of hand wringing liberals. And as for you, Doug and Jim, you mucking farxists, you have no idea how your considered analysis of current events keeps me sane. I am not connected to a university at the moment and though I have projects and political friends, I have precious few intellectuals to exchange ideas with. You all take each other for granted because you are university folks, but outside of the context in which your collaborate or come into conflict with your colleagues how many of you would be as sharp as you are?

Your discussions are valuable to moving forward with a plan for rebuilding hope of humanity. In my opinion this is mucking profound. I don't read all of the emails and I did not read the one referred to here, but it sounds to me like water off a duck's back.

Lisa S.

on 10/10/2002 8:14 PM, Devine, James at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

I don't remember who sent the e-mail message, but it stuck in my head. Someone made an off-hand remark about two pen-l participants (Doug and myself, seemingly) who mucked up the list or some such.

I know that Doug had a fit of anger, but I did no such thing. I'd like to know how I mucked things up. (or was the reference to some other pair of participants?)

Is it because I disagreed with the would-be consensus that US government unemployment statistics are either nothing but propaganda or as meaningless as the Enron balance sheet?

If so, that means that I mucked things up simply because I disagreed with the popular view on pen-l. If so, that's sad. When the left starts embracing an orthodoxy in this way, it's simply encouraging its further shrinkage.

Jim

Melvin Scores for Contemporary Marxism.

 serious developments in the cooperative community and would welcome the input of progressive economists.  We are looking for a way to transform the currently calcified cooperative food network before it is completely assimilated by capitalism and the collective work and assets of 30 years comes to naught.  

More later, I have to attend to some business now.  Thanks Melvin for your hunk of gold.  

Lisa S. 



on 10/10/2002 10:48 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Society has passed through several phase development since the time of Marx and Lenin and most certainly during the rise, expansion/growth of capital and its current decay. At each phase Marxist, bourgeois social scientist and the ordinary man on the street have attempted to define - describe, that, which is peculiar to their time frame or phase development. 

The contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie or what is the same, labor and capital, can be best understood today not in the relationship between the imperial centers and the former colonial areas or even in their internal unity and strife, but rather as they move in antagonism. 

An exploited class - the workers, cannot overthrow an exploiting class - capital, because together these two components of the social process constitute the self-movement of a system of production. Because these two components constitute the basis for the self-movement of the contradiction called labor and capital, their unending struggle is over the division of the social product and political liberties.  Labor and capital as a unity is not like a marriage where one side can leave the union. Labor and capital is a social contract that is written into legality that Marxist rightly call bourgeois legality. Neither component can leave - walkout or overthrow, the relationship. 

An exploited class cannot overthrow an exploiting class since together they make up the system. The serf could not and did not overthrow landed property - the nobility, whose political form was called feudalism. Neither primary component of a social relations of production can overthrow or dissolved the relationship - contradiction, of which it is a part and whose existence gives it life. 

Something else must happen that forces change and dissolution. The movement of this "something else" is called antagonism or how society - contradiction, moves in antagonism. Revolution or rather social revolution - in the Marxist meaning, cannot take place until there are new productive forces that compel society to reorganize or leap forward. New productive forces mean that a technology must come into being that replaces the human energy of a class in the production process. 

The emergence of new productive forces within feudalism undermined the basis unity of the social system. An "external force" overthrew feudalism. Its "external force" status consisted in the reality that "it" was not a part of the internal unity of serf and landowner, but a "new" development in the environment called capital and labor. The new "external force" called labor and capital did not really overthrow the social system but ushered in the political revolution that allowed for capital and labors further development. What overthrew landed property preeminence was the development in the productive forces called manufacture. 

Generations of Marxist and plain old revolutionaries in America have had to appeal to the hearts and minds of the working class in our country as capital went through its various stages of evolution. These appeals have always been important and express a fundamental decency in our class and its struggle to reform the system in favor of the people. 

Classes arise, grow and decay as part of the quantitative and qualitative evolution of production - technology. The class of farmers called sharecroppers took shape in our country in the aftermath of the Civil War.  The increased velocity of mechanization of agriculture during the late 1930s and early 40s destroyed or rather "liberated" the sharecropper from the land and moved him into the industrial infrastructure. His labor or human energy - the labor of the sharecropper, was replaced by a new application of technology. 

The sharecropper's liberation actually meant being kicked off of the land. Liberation for a class means being kicked out of specific social relations of production and being compelled to evolve further, on a new basis. Being liberated - in the class sense, does not mean some spiritual enlightenment, finding the perfect guru, developing class consciousness or enhanced karma experience but being ruined and annihilation by the ever advancing development of the means of production - fool. (Sorry, been listening to too many Rap records lately). Yea, the serf and Nobility were "liberated" just like the Indians and slaves in the core South: by being expropriated - stripped of mea

Re: [Fwd: Suicide Voters]



Wow.  This is interesting.  Really interesting.
Lisa 


on 10/10/2002 10:38 AM, ravi at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
>  Original Message 
> 
> http://abc.net.au/health/minutes/stories/s698150.htm
> An Australian study of suicide over the last century has found
> significantly increased rates when conservative governments
> have been in power compared to Labor. They've taken into
> account every factor they could think of which could have
> explained the result and the relationship persists.
> 
> [...]
> 
> So convincing were the findings that a British group has done
> an analysis for the UK and found a similar pattern there,
> with, for example, a big jump when Margaret Thatcher came to
> power. They estimated 35,000 excess deaths from suicide in the
> UK associated with Conservative rule in the 20th century.
>

Re: RE: Re: "left" discourse

2002-10-08 Thread lisa stolarski

You all should take a lesson from the coalitions who put together the mass
demonstrations...The AntiCapitalist Convergence, Another World is Possible,
Direct Action Network, Mobilization for Global Justice, World Social Forum,
and a socialist group I forget the name of all plan different types of
things for demonstrations.  Some legal marches, some reclaim the streets.
Some civil disobedience, some puppet making and shouting in the streets.
Our unifying message is so much more important than the points that divide
us.  I agree with Daniel here, none of us are Heritics.

LIsa 

on 10/08/2002 12:51 PM, Davies, Daniel at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

>> I hate to keep quoting Michael Kinsley, but he got it dead right:
>> people on the right are always looking for converts; people on the
>> left, for heretics.

Re: Re: Re: Re: employment

2002-10-08 Thread lisa stolarski

Doug, don't be mad, just say "yes, yes, perhaps I took that point for
granted when I made this other point." Sometime people just want to point
the qualitative stuff out.  We are all on the same side here, there is so
much work to do.  I hope the list won't crumble over this.
Lisa S  

on 10/08/2002 1:59 PM, Doug Henwood at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
>> I think I understand a little of what Sabri is getting at -- the
>> intellectual and accepting way we look at the statistics -- seeing
>> them as economic factorum and not as poor, suffering people.
> 
> And who the hell isn't saying that?
> 
> Is this is the best "progressive economists" can do?
> 
> Doug
>

Re: Re: employment

2002-10-07 Thread lisa stolarski

Title: Re: [PEN-L:31024] Re: employment




OK fellas,

I am going to imagine what Sabri could have meant.  JD's are not the the only perspectives on how we can treat statistics, government or otherwise.  Yes, even statistics are subject to perspective, numbers may be objective but their presentation has its purposes.  Here are some  alternative attitudes about statistics which arise from my own experiences:

we can recognize that statistics can be manipulated in order to shape public opinion
    "700 people a year die of disease x" vs. "less than .03% of the populations dies from   
    disease x."  "Crime is up 16% over the past ten years" vs. "crime is down 5% in the past 
    two years" --both of these last two statements can be true at once and used to encourage 
    differing opinions regarding what to do about crime.  
we can realize that the government has its own agenda and that the statistics the government releases and the way those statistics are handled will reflect that agenda. 
we can realize that statistics don't mean much when the point is to build a better world beginning with your own here and now.  If you donate blood to a white male victim of a freak accident in Pittsburgh you have saved a valuable life.  If you donate blood to save the 9004th Iraqi victim of cluster bombing you have saved a valuable life.  If everyone would simply do what they can to make the world a better place then it would be ridiculous to prioritize according to quantifiables.  People fulfill the needs with which they are presented no matter how those needs can be measured statistically.  

Well, I hope I have gotten us a little closer to being able to meet Sabri half way.  Too tired to keep writing. 

Lisa S. 


on 10/07/2002 9:35 PM, Devine, James at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


Like Doug, I don't get this, Sabri. What is the problem with using some (but not all) government statistics as a half-bad/half good way of understanding what's going on, in conjunction with other information and reasoning? 

There seems to be a spectrum of positions on this debate. Which do you fit? 
(1) we can reject all statistics, even as a part of a more complete analysis;  
(2) we can reject all government statistics; 
(3) we can accept some government statistics, suitably "massaged"; 
(4) we can accept some government statistics, but treat them critically; 
(5) we can accept most government statistics, as a good estimate of what's going on in the phenomenal world; 
(6) we can accept all government statistics as a good estimate of what's going on in the phenomenal world. 

Perhaps there's a 7th position: we can accept all those statistics (government-produced or otherwise) that reinforce our pre-determined political position and rect all those which conflict with that position. 

BTW, I fit under #3 or #4. 
JD 


-Original Message- 
From: Sabri Oncu 
To: PEN-L 
Sent: 10/7/2002 6:12 PM 
Subject: [PEN-L:31020] Re: employment 

I said: 

> Maybe I am just a dreamer, but I am not the only one! 

After reading Jim's and Doug's comments, I came to the conclusion 
that I am the only one. 

This is sad, very sad. 

Not best, 

Sabri

Re: Jim Crow Fascism (was Re: bullying)

2002-10-04 Thread Lisa Stolarski

Title: Re: [PEN-L:30870] Jim Crow Fascism (was Re: bullying)

Hi Tom, 

I just want to repeat something I said earlier.  Maybe you missed it, it is easy to do that on this prolific list.  Fascism is a concept as well as a word with historical-polical meaning.  You can take the overall intent and structure of fascism and abstract it from its historical context to come up with a concept of "fascism" which can then be used to describe other historical phenomena with the same overall structure and intent.  This is done all of the time both in ordinary and theoretical discourse.  I don't understand what the problem is unless someone simply is afraid that the word is too controversial.  In that case we are arguing about the connotation rather than the applicability of the descriptor. There are a few ways to go with that.  You can either change your word, as in communist who might call herself a socialist to distance herself from association with the CP and the USSR, or you can use the word so as to take it back, as the anarchists have begun to do with the term "libertarian" which has traditionally been a word used by anarchists until the right wing libertarians lifted in for their own purposes in the US.  I have already argued against the first course of measure and for the second.  We might want to qualify this unique-to-our-historical-moment brand of fascism with another descriptor, but we should recognize the difference between fascism the concept and fascism the historical phenomenon so that we don't keep calling a concept anachronistic, which it really can't be.  That would be like saying every contemporary expose on virtue ethics is anachronistic since Aristotle wrote about virtue ethics 2500 years ago.  Virtue ethics has an overall structure which can have many variants, not just the one Aristotle constructed. And though virtue ethics is an old concept popularized by Aristotle, it is not anachronistic to expound today upon the overall structure of the concept. 

I have not read the numerous comments in this thread so I apologize if I have duplicated someone else's point. I am reading them backwards to the last time I posted.  The email is so busy I drown in it sometimes. 

Sorry to split hairs, Tom, but it is important for us to be able to agree upon the language we will use to discuss this very heavy shxt. As far as qualifying the term for our historical moment, I don't think "Jim Crow Fascism" has staying power. How about "Corporate Totalitarianism," or "Corporate Fascism?"

Lisa S. 

P.S.  Courtesy of the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition: 

fascism  (noun) 1.  Often Fascism.  a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.  b. A political philosophy or movement based on advocating such a system of government.  2. Oppressive dictatorial control.  

fascist  (noun) 1.  Often Fascist.  An advocate or adherent of fascism.  2.  A reactionary or dictatorial person.  [my italics].

fascist  (adj)  1.  Often Fascist.  Of, advocating or practicing fascism.  2.  Fascist.  Of or relating to the regime of the Fascisti.  

Fascisti  (noun, plural)  1.  The members of an Italian political organization that controlled Italy under the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini from 1922 to 1943.  

...

totalitarian  (adj)  Of, relating to, being or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed:  "A totalitarian regime crushes all autonomous institutions in its drive to seize the human soul."  

totalitarian (noun)  A practitioner or supporter of such a government.  

on 10/03/2002 2:06 PM, Tom Walker at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I welcome Melvin P.'s corrective to my own forgetting, which is itself
> systematic. Indeed, the overthrow of bourgeois democracy in the United
> States has always been founded on a *southern strategy* of anti-democratic
> terror that predates European fascism. To call it fascism is anachronistic,
> but to not call it fascism leaves it without a name.
> 
> "Jim Crow" perhaps carries too much of a connotation of mere discrimination
> and too much of illusion of containment -- as if it is something whose
> political consequences were confined to the south and whose historical
> dynamic has somehow been attenuated by civil rights legislation and Brown v.
> the Board of Education.
> 
> Maybe if we call it Jim Crow Fascism, we can open up a space to recall that
> this is not some exotic import or faded relic. In my post, I talked about
> the anti-labor polic

Re: RE: Re: bullying

2002-10-01 Thread Lisa Stolarski

Title: Re: [PEN-L:30788] RE: Re:  bullying

Well perhaps it might be helpful to define what I mean when I use the word 'fascist' since I brought it up. I mean a military industrial complex which increasingly seeks control of its own people as well as other peoples and nations.  I mean a political rationale which attempts to gain respect in the world forum through dominance, intimidation and dehumanization of anyone who protests its increasing grab for power or stands for a more equitable point of view.  I mean a government of elites who, by decree or in practice, strip world citizens of civil liberties, human rights and self determination.  Just as the basic concepts that signify 'socialism' or 'capitalism' or 'humanism' take many historical shapes, so does the basic concept 'fascism.'  Fascism is 83 days of 24 hour curfew in Palestine under which a person can be shot for sneaking out to go to the market for food.  Does this not recall to the mind the Warsaw ghettos.  Fascism is a newly published 'doctrine' of justification for bombing and invading a country which has attacked no-one... a 'doctrine' of justification for potentially bombing and invading a string of countries.  Fascism is the arrogance and rhetoric which attempts to justify in the name of freedom the prolonged starvation, radiation and denial of medicine to millions of Iraqi people.  It is the totalitarian mentality which answers a call for peace with the simplistic words "you're either with us or against us."  

There is nothing 'meaningless' about the Frankfurt School.  In fact, I would say that Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Benjamin, et. all, as intellectuals and Jews fleeing Germany, were intimately familiar with both the concept and the reality of fascism.   Their critique is relevant.  One cannot tacitly dismiss the first generation Frankfurt School in this discussion nor can you label and discount "the left."  We are not in a contest of sound bites and nobody is going to make me eat my words.  Most people are far more intelligent than the media assumes.  What should we care if the media decides that we have used a word that has historical context instead of a newer, more digestable, more postmodern word.  The media has interests and people are beginning to understand this.  When that German minister called it with the Hitler remark eight corporate media conglomerates gasped with indignation but billions of people around the world no doubt cried out at the news stand 'you tell it sister.'   I had not thought about it, but perhaps I prefer this 'dated' word precisely because it *has* historical and conceptual meaning.  It is an emotional word, a grave word, and I use it to describe a grave and emotional world situation.  I am not for letting the media limit my discussion by declaring certain words off limits.  If we allow this then they will keep taking away the words until we are left with horror devoid of expression.   When I see evidence of the rise of a fascist government, my own government, it is my duty and my nature to say 'yep, looks like fascism to me.'  When I hear a person express frustration at the lack of visible resistance to what is shaping up to be unchecked global military domination, the least I can do is offer my solidarity.  Maybe  this is oh-so-twentieth-century of me, but it is relevant.  I really don't care what Reuters would think.  I care what Michael thinks, and the rest of you because you are the people who matter in this discussion. 

Lisa S.

on 10/01/2002 4:47 PM, Devine, James at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> This is almost like self-enforced 'political 
> correctness' from concerned parties of the left. 
> Don't use that word 'fascist', they'll just make 
> us eat our words. 

I think the problem is that the word "fascism" has been over-used. Back in the 1960s, it became a psychological concept (following the Frankfurt School's F-scale), which moves toward being meaningless. 

> Perhaps, instead, we could say there is the 
> historic Fascism to which you refer (though again 
> we could argue til the next world war occurs if 
> Fascism, Nazism, Francoism, or even military rule 
> of Japan, among other things, were more or less 
> the same). So there is 'historic fascism' and 
> there is 'semantic fascism'. Lexico-semantically 
> speaking, the term has usefulness--such as when 
> someone calls their tyrant of a boss a fascist. 

That makes sense to me, but I think Carrol was talking about the _left_ using the word. 

> As for the current situation with the US national 
> security-corporatist state (will 2001-? be seen 
> as an aberration, the end of something, the 
> beginning of something quite different, etc.?), I 
> think we need to s

Re: bullying

2002-10-01 Thread Lisa Stolarski

I don't think your rant is mindless, Michael.  I really do believe we are
watching the rise of a "kinder, sneakier fascism."  It is just as racist and
as violent as the old fascism, but more totalitarian and therefore more
sublimated, couched in euphemisms about ending world hunger and such.

Don't be depressed.  Decide what resistance means to you and go do it.  You
might think that it is hopeless, but it's not.  Not even the cops  really
want the world the fascists are building for us.

Lisa S.   

on 10/01/2002 12:26 AM, Michael Perelman at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> When is the last time anyone stood up to the US?  Castro in the 50s?  The
> NYT says that the Europeans caved on the world court.  The Dems cave on
> everything.  Bush probably can buy the Russians and cow the French on the
> Security Council.
> 
> It is all very depressing.  I recall hearing how all the Germans left
> Hitler , but hell, I feel like a powerless German must have felt.
> 
> Depressed and feeling the need to mindlessly rant.
> 
> -- 
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>

Re: Re: Moussolini's Corporation

2002-09-27 Thread Lisa Stolarski


Yikes, Ian.  I am not familiar with tort law or any of the other laws James
mentions here.  Could you break this down a little bit for me?  What I
thinkI understand is that for the fascists public law is really the will of
private property owners because the fascists blurred the legislative and the
judicial realms.  So in enforcing the laws the powerful could change the
laws. I can't be sure since you are mentioning laws that I only have a vague
understanding of what them mean.

Hum.  If this is what the fascists were saying then I have this to say
in response.  The WTO has ruled that every labor law they have encountered,
every environmental law, etc. to be a "barrier to fair trade and therefore
"illegal under international law."

Lisa 


on 09/27/2002 1:13 AM, Ian Murray at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
> - Original Message -
> From: "Lisa Stolarski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 
>> Found this at this site
>> 
>> 
> http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/aca/hist/ibhist/ibhiststud/histlit.
>> html
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Under his new government policy, every economic activity in the country
> was
>> put under a government-appointed panel, called a corporation.
>> Representatives of management and labor, in each industry served on these
>> panels. All profits under the corporate state went to the government. The
>> Parliament became nothing more than a instrument for the corporations.
>> 
>> 
>> It seems that Moussolini's "corporation" was one that was created by the
>> state.
>> 
>> Still unraveling this mystery.
>> 
>> Lisa S.
>> 
> 
> 
>> From one of James Boyle's recent exams:
> http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/exam98.htm
> 
> 2.) "Furthermore, the realists understood, as had the classics, that the
> whole structure of the classical scheme depended upon the coherence of
> private law and the public/private distinction. Thus, the realists spent
> little time attacking the methodology of constitutional law and concentrated
> instead upon undermining the coherence of the key private-law categories
> that purported to define a sphere of pure autonomy. For example, Morris
> Cohen's Essay "Property and Sovereignty" pointed out that property is
> necessarily public not private. Property means the legally granted power to
> withhold from others. As such, it is created by the state and given its only
> content by legal decisions that limit or extend the property owner's power
> over others. Thus, property is really an (always conditional) delegation of
> sovereignty, and property law is simply a form of public law.. Realism had
> effectively undermined the fundamental premises of liberal legalism,
> particularly the crucial distinction between legislation (subjective
> exercise of will) and adjudication (objective exercise of reason.)
> Inescapably it had also suggested that the whole liberal worldview of
> (private) rights and (public) sovereignty mediated by the rule of law was
> only a mirage, a pretty fantasy that masked the reality of economic and
> political power. Since the realists, American jurists have dedicated
> themselves to the task of reconstruction"
> 
> Discuss and criticize this quotation with reference to the history of
> American tort law, using examples drawn from either the development of the
> law of product liability or the law of causation.
>

Moussolini's Corporation

2002-09-26 Thread Lisa Stolarski


Found this at this site

http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/aca/hist/ibhist/ibhiststud/histlit.
html



Under his new government policy, every economic activity in the country was
put under a government-appointed panel, called a corporation.
Representatives of management and labor, in each industry served on these
panels. All profits under the corporate state went to the government. The
Parliament became nothing more than a instrument for the corporations.


It seems that Moussolini's "corporation" was one that was created by the
state.  

Still unraveling this mystery.

Lisa S.

Bush - Hitler Comment

2002-09-26 Thread Lisa Stolarski


Question:

How relevant do you all think the Bush-Hitler comment was?  I think that
German Chancellor was right on...the "war on Iraq" is a strategically timed
diversion from an ailing economy prior to an important election.  Hitler was
known for employing political diversions.  Considering Saddam has been doing
what he is doing for several years it makes sense that Bush and the
republicans would want to exploit this issue for the benefit of the
election.  

Can anybody give me a synopsis of the German economy prior to the invasion
of the Sudatenland?  I know it was bad and there was a huge war debt being
paid by the German people.  How did their economy then compare or contrast
with our economy now? I think it is telling that the Germans might try to
warn of us fascist or protofascist tactics used by the Bush administration.
Who would know better the seductive appeal of fascist rhetoric?  Logged on
to a site which displays old German propoganda, their version of the
invasion of the Sudatenland seems pretty reasonable.  The Nazis, after all,
declared they were liberating oppressed German people in Austria.
Interestingly, Britain and France went along on the first conquest--they
were willing to give up the Sudatenland to avoid stepping to the Germans and
only opposed Hitler when he moved on Poland.

Also, did any of you read about Bush's family's assets being frozen in 42
because they were trading with the enemy?  Also, do any of you know anything
about alleged Nazis coming to the US and joining the Republican Party in the
late 40s and early 50s?  I had checked this out some time ago and the
sources seemed to be coming from a major French paper but I can't remember
the name of it.  

I found several references to the Moussolini quote on the net but never did
find the source.  Still looking.  Someone asked for the source of "Fascism
should rightly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and
corporate power." If it is out there, eventually I will find it.

Lisa S.

Re: humor

2002-09-24 Thread Lisa Stolarski


Now THAT'S funny.  Lisa S.


on 09/24/2002 5:42 PM, Doug Henwood at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Devine, James wrote:
> 
>> is there an on-line discussion group that specializes in humor?
>> is it called borscht-belt-l?
> 
> Don't forget <news://alt.politics.socialism.trotsky>!
> 
> Doug
>

Re: raising min wage

2002-09-18 Thread Lisa Stolarski

How about this.  Marx is right about many things and this is one of them: as
the rich get richer and fewer in number and the poor get poorer and
constitute almost everybody, what you have is a recipe for extreme social
unrest.  Moral and humanitarian arguments aside, this situation is
expensive--to spend millions on security and beating people up every time
the World Bank meets?!? And this waste is expressed in countless other ways
as well. Polarization of the classes necessarily moves the state and now the
stateless rogue capitalists toward fascism, this is the only way to put down
such civil unrest without concessions.  We even see this trend emerging in
the US. Keysne did not invent the welfare state simply because he was a nice
guy, the social safety net was an insurance policy for capitalism that it
would not push the world to the brink of class war. Structural adjustments
such as raising inflation without raising the wage are a breach of that
insurance policy.  Capitalism is racing a Farari on a short pier these days
and State Farm has closed it's offices. See you all in the river.

Lisa S.

"Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is a merger of state
and corporate power."
 - Benito Mussolini

on 09/18/2002 12:37 PM, Forstater, Mathew at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I'm trying to collect a list of arguments for raising the minimum wage,
> especially those that apply in 'developing' nation contexts.  Fairness,
> equity, social justice arguments and/or efficiency/economic/macro
> arguments are all fine.  Do people know of any good articles, books,
> websites that catalogue these arguments?  Also, I'd be interested in any
> newer or less well known arguments people may have. (send on or off
> list--I'll collect the ones I get off list and submit them at the end).
> Also I'd be interested in counter-arguments to the usual arguments
> against raising minimum wages. Thanks, Mat
>

Re: Re: Re: congress and the banks

2002-09-17 Thread Lisa Stolarski


Ok, I give up. I'll stay on the list.  You all are a bunch of groovy
economists and I could probably learn something.

Lisa S.  


on 09/17/2002 7:02 PM, Michael Perelman at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> This is a very interesting discussion, especially with the rapid
> vertical/horizontal consolidation of the banking system, accompanied with
> a weakening of the regulatory system as well as the ability to obscure
> actions through international transfers.  Isn't this a pretty sure recipe
> for disaster?
> -- 
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>

Re: Re: Re: autism and autistic economics

2002-09-12 Thread Lisa Stolarski

Title: Re: [PEN-L:30210] Re: Re: autism and autistic economics

Gosh Ian, this is interesting. What are the principles of these two types of economics?

HOw about:

4. the new emerges from the decomposing

on 09/13/2002 2:57 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

In a message dated 9/12/02 11:17:51 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

Recently, I was trying to convince my son, who has Asperger's Syndrome
(borderline autism), that nothing can ever be perfect. This goes against his
perfectionism, a common symptom of AS, which encourages him to give up too
easily -- since perfection is unattainable. Then I continued, with a list:

1. Nothing is ever perfect.
2. Change is normal.
3. The future is uncertain.

Then it struck me, that these represent major oppositions to the dominant form
of autistic economics, i.e., neoclassical economics, which values perfect and
static models of an imaginary world with no uncertainty.

Can anyone think of what to add to the list?

Beings perish.

Institutions become obsolete.

Ian

A fall in the pit a gain in your wit.

Fight fail, fight again, fail again fight on to final victor.

As you grow someone is at the next level waiting for you.

The magic and beauty is in the discovery.

Girls, who can understand them? Women, who can really know them?

I looked in the mirror today and saw a different person and said "were did you come from and what are you doing in my pajamas?"

The taxman has his foot on my neck and he don't even lived in our neighborhood.

Lean on the bank for a minute and they learn on you for a life time.

You are bigger than you think, smaller than you can imagine and twice as important.

Don't leave a corner of milk in the container.

Leave the big piece of chicken for Dad. He might not eat it but want to look at it before he goes to bed.

The only thing perfect is life is Mom. If you don't believe me ask her.

What lights up the dream you see is the sun of your imagination.

Ask your mother.

Divide the impossible by the probable and you might get close to the answer.

Eyes only see. The mind produces vision.

Paper money is an agreement between between me and the grocery and this agreement lets us eat.

Living on easy street is hard.

The dog house is not that bad.

God is hard to understand.

I'm still growing up with out getting any taller.

God said we cannot ask questions after 8:00 pm, except to Moma.

Moma knows where air comes from. Ask her.

Dad had an accident when he was young and forgets the answer. Ask Mom, she has a real good memory. She has never had any accidents.

New to list, what's it about?

2002-09-12 Thread Lisa Stolarski


Hey Pen-L list:

I signed up to this list because I am interested in alternative economy, is
that what you guys mainly talk about?  A few day I have been reading, and
the topics seem to vary.  I am down with collectives, cooperatives and local
currency, etc.  I generally feel that corporate capitalism can be neither
reformed nor taken by force and that our only hope is to build an economic
culture that ignores it until it goes away. I admit, this could take
hundreds of years, but so did the demise of feudalism.

Anybody on this list hear about how the Midwest's Blooming Prairie wholesale
food distribution cooperative is about to sell out to United Natural Foods?
This is quite distressing considering that  BP touches about 30% of the
cooperative market.  I have heard mumbling about dirty tricks by Whole Foods
but nothing that can be substantiated.  Anybody know the history of the
relationship between United Natural Foods Inc. and Whole Foods?  Someone
from Whole Foods, incidentally sits on the board of BP.

Lisa, Pittsburgh

Johannesburg

2002-05-20 Thread Lisa Murray


Published on Sunday, May 19, 2002 in the Observer of London
Why The Earth Summit Matters

Instead of worrying about the trivia of hotel bills and travel arrangements,
we should recognize that one of the most important global summits of the
decade risks being wrecked by the rich north.

by Ian Willmore

The media was in full cry last week at John Prescott and Margaret Beckett
for racking up impressive hotel bills during what was presented as a giant
junket to Bali. So were Margaret and John just engaging in a mutual taste
for sybaritic living?

Well, no. Bali was the admittedly exotic venue for a preparatory meeting for
one of the most important international summits for a decade, the Earth
Summit, which will take place in Johannesburg in August this year. This will
be the first major inter-governmental conference dealing with sustainable
development since Rio in 1992.

There is plenty to talk about. The world economy has outrun the capacity of
national Governments and international institutions to regulate and control
it. In particular, the largest transnational corporations now wield enormous
economic and political power. The number of multinational companies jumped
from 7,000 in 1970 to 40,000 by 1995. If they were states, 50 companies
would now appear in the list of the world's largest one hundred economies.
The five largest companies in the world have combined sales greater than the
total incomes of the world's poorest 46 countries. Multinational companies
now hold 90 per cent of all technology and product patents.

The growing power of corporations has been accompanied by worsening
inequality both within societies and between states. In 1960, it is
estimated that the richest fifth of the world's population, almost all
living in developed countries, were 30 times richer than the poorest fifth,
almost all living in developing countries. By 1997 the top fifth were 74
times richer, and the figures are believed to have got worse since then.

Corporate power is also often associated with irresponsibility towards local
populations and the wider environment - Asia Pulp and Paper rampages through
the rainforests of Indonesia, using money provided by Barclays Bank;
Exxon-Mobil lobbies to destroy the Kyoto agreement on climate change and
Balfour Beatty planned to evict thousands of Kurds to build the destructive
Ilisu Dam.

A key issue at the Earth Summit will therefore be corporate accountability.
Many environment, development and labor organizations - and some
Governments - want the Summit to agree on the principle of internationally
binding rules to control corporate behavior and ensure that they can be held
accountable for their actions. This campaign is backed by political
institutions such as the European Parliament. But it is being resisted by
the British Government among others, and of course by the United States.

Even some of the G77 group of developing countries have reservations,
fearing that a Treaty in this area might simply be used as an excuse by
developed countries to deny them access to markets. The hypocrisy of the
United States and EU, on the one hand demanding progress towards an ever
stronger World Trade Organization while on the other hand jumping to protect
their steel industries from external competition, shows just why this
concern exists.

The same story could be told about other key issues. The Bush administration
has made it clear that it does not want any new global agreements since Rio.
It is even trying to unravel some of the progress gained over the last
decade. For example it wants to restrict the use of the precautionary
principle in decision making. This principle has of course been at the
center of trade confrontations between the USA and the EU over restrictions
on hormone treated beef and GM food.

Oil producing nations - especially Saudi Arabia - are also trying to prevent
energy from becoming a major issue at the Summit. They are supported in this
by the USA, which is intent on preventing any mention of the Kyoto Treaty,
which of course was reneged on by the Bush Administration. The European
Union and others want progress in developing renewable energy, especially in
delivering energy to communities who do not have access to electricity, but
in the face of US opposition progress may be slow at best.

Developed countries must make solid commitments at a domestic and at an
international level before the Earth Summit, including timetables, targets
and finance. Without this, the Earth Summit will be little more than an
expensive photo opportunity for world leaders. But the omens are not good.
At the last preparatory meeting held in New York in April, Governments
failed to deliver the promised a 'Program of Action'. This was meant to
include commitments to action, identify barriers to progress and ways of
removing them, and also agree necessary financial support. This is now the
main focus of the meeting in Bali.

Other issues to be discussed at the Earth Summit include water

Re: Share options and executive pay

2002-05-18 Thread Lisa Murray

- Original Message -
From: "Ulhas Joglekar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "pen-l" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 5:50 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:26072] Share options and executive pay

Economist.com

Share options and executive pay

Coming clean on stock options

Apr 25th 2002 | NEW YORK
>From The Economist print edition

A more interesting argument is that the theory of efficient financial
markets does away with the need to expense options. Efficient-market theory,
at the heart of so-called modern financial economics, argues that a share
price accurately reflects all available information relevant to the value of
a company. Thus, provided all the information necessary to calculate a
firm's true profits is disclosed, it does not matter what the firm reports
as its profits. Even if a firm ignores the cost of options when calculating
its profits, the market will not.
One problem is that economists have identified weaknesses in the
efficient-market theory. Arbitrage does not work as it should. Investors who
know the true value of a share do not necessarily drive out investors who
are ignorant. The psychological biases of investors appear to affect share
prices. Markets, in other words, are not truly efficient-and shareholders
may be misled by reported profits that exclude the cost of options.

=

Is there *any* non-circular definition of efficiency as applied to the
various markets that exist under actually existing capitalism? Daniel
Bromley has tried to identify them and has, like a good institutionalist
would, failed to find one. So why the persistence of the concept?

Ian

Terry Eagleton

2002-05-17 Thread Lisa Murray


History gets the last laugh

Capitalists were triumphant when they saw off socialism. But will they live
to regret it?

Terry Eagleton
Saturday May 18, 2002
The Guardian

One of the darker ironies of the 20th century is that socialism proved to be
least possible where it was most necessary. To go socialist, you need
material resources, democratic traditions, cooperative neighbours, a
flourishing civil society, an educated populace; and it was just these vital
ingredients of the project which colonialism had denied to its premodern,
poverty-stricken clients. As a result, one bitter irony bred another: the
effort to build socialism in these dismal conditions led straight to
Stalinism, and a bid for freedom twisted inexorably into its monstrous
opposite.

The present century looks set to be dominated by a rather different sort of
irony. Capitalism greeted the millennium with one arm brandishing The Wealth
of Nations and one foot triumphantly planted on the corpse of its socialist
rival; yet scarcely had the century turned before this victory began to look
suspiciously pyrrhic. Indeed, we may yet see the capitalist world glancing
nostalgically back at the socialist project it screwed so effectively.
Socialism, after all, is out to expropriate the propertied classes, not to
exterminate them. Its weapons are general strikes and mass struggle, not
anthrax and dirty nuclear bombs. Its aim is for people to live in plenty,
not for them to scavenge their scanty grub from war-scarred urban deserts.
Socialism was the last chance we had of defeating terrorism by transforming
the conditions which give birth to it; and those who helped to send it
packing - not least those among them whose offices are rather high off the
ground - ought to be licking their lips for the taste of ashes.

Could it be, then, that in defeating socialism, capitalism will turn out to
have undone itself into the bargain? What if those who run the show have
turned up their noses at the one thing that might have guaranteed their
survival, physically if not politically? Marx described the working class as
capitalism's gravediggers; but to see these useful functionaries off the
premises may simply be to end up digging your own grave. For the wretched of
the earth have not of course retired; they have simply changed address.
Whereas Marx looked for them in the slums of Bradford and the Bronx, they
are now to be found in the souks of Tripoli and Damascus; and it is
smallpox, not storming the Winter Palace, that some of them have in mind.

To this extent, The Communist Manifesto has been both challenged and
vindicated. It was right to predict that poverty and wealth would polarise
sharply on a global scale; and it was right, too, that the dispossessed
would rise up against their rulers as a result; it was just thinking more of
mills than the World Trade Centre, trade unions rather than typhoid. But if
Marx really was wrong about the working class, then this is bad news for the
transnational corporations, since what one might see as having stepped into
their shoes then has the savagery of despair, not the confidence of
collective strength. Those who announce that Marx's industrial proletariat
has sunk without trace should be reaching for the anti-radiation tablets,
not for the champagne.

A few years back, there was much dust and heat about the "end of history".
What this portentous phrase meant was that since capitalism was the only
game in town, significant political conflicts were now as passé as
sideburns. This is both obtuse and untrue, but that's not the point: we knew
that much before September 11. It is rather that we now have dramatic
evidence that the end of history might eventually spell the end of history
in a rather less metaphysical sense. The fact that capitalism now has no
real rivals in the official political arena is precisely what causes the
unofficial rancour that can blow enormous holes in it, including nuclear
ones.

Socialism may have seemed a dark threat to those with most to lose from it,
but at least it is a secular, historically-minded, thoroughly modern creed,
a bastard offspring of liberal enlightenment. It has a deep-rooted contempt
for political terrorism, whether it denounces it as immoral or just
petty-bourgeois. Unlike fundamentalism, whether of the Texan or Taliban
variety, it doesn't dismiss alternative life-styles or symbolist poetry or a
cellarful of chianti; it just inquires why these things somehow always end
up in the hands of a few. Unlike fundamentalism, too, it is earth-bound and
iconoclastic, sceptical of high-minded ideals and absolutes.

The same might be said of American pragmatism, which always preferred
turning a fast buck to brooding on the infinite. But the more terrorism
occupies the space vacated by socialism, the less pragmatic America is bound
to become. Indeed, it may well end up defending itself from Islamic
fundamentalists by becoming every bit as fearful of freedom as they are, in
which case it w

RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.

2001-03-24 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> Except that Dubya is opposed to ergonomic rules. Nader is supposed to 
> like them--but he likes being a publicity hound more...
> 
> 
> Brad DeLong
*

Apologies, Michael.

Brad, grow up. Your Ivy League edumakation is showing.

Ian

Upgrading the Yellow Peril for another Cold War

2001-03-24 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


[You knew this was coming...]



US told to make China its No 1 enemy

US told to target China

Special report: George Bush's America

Martin Kettle in Washington
Saturday March 24, 2001
The Guardian

A historic shift of emphasis in United States military deployment from Europe to
Asia, with China supplanting Russia as America's principal foe, is at the heart
of the Bush administration's long awaited defence strategy review, according to
reports in Washington.
Outlines of the potentially epochal rethink of the US's global strategic
priorities were given to President George Bush by his defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld at a private meeting at the White House on Wednesday, the Washington
Post reported yesterday.

"The president was complimentary, he appreciated the policy discussion, and gave
the indication that the topics were indeed what he had in mind," a Pentagon
official told the paper.

More than 50 years after the struggle to deter the Soviet Union in Europe became
the centrepiece of US military strategy in the aftermath of the second world
war, the Rumsfeld review has concluded that the Pacific Ocean should now become
the most important focus of US military deployments, with China now perceived as
the principal threat to American global dominance.

The review says, in effect, that Washington should abandon the long-standing
doctrine that the US military must always be prepared to fight two major world
conflicts simultaneously, the reports quote officials as saying.

By elevating China to the status of global enemy number one, the review clearly
foreshadows an American turn away from Europe, or at least from the levels of US
engagement and attention which have existed for the lifetime of most Europeans.

Mr Bush ordered the strategy review immediately on taking office. It is the most
important of three complementary reviews intended to shape US military
priorities in the 21st century. The other two are on nuclear weapons and missile
defence options, and on service pay and conditions.

The huge distances involved in the Pacific mean that the Pentagon must give
additional priority to "long-range power projection", the report says.

This means putting fresh resources into airlift capacity to enable the US to
move troops, vehicles and weapons many thousands of miles from bases in America
to the frontline in Asia at short notice.

The report says the threat from hostile missiles is likely to become so serious
that the US can no longer afford to risk its largest and most expensive ships,
the Nimitz class aircraft carriers, in forward positions. As a result, the navy
will be told to stop building big ships and to concentrate on speed and
manoeuvrability, including a new generation of smaller carriers, to avoid them
becoming targets.

The threat from weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons, against American military targets means that US allies may
begin to question the advisability of allowing Washington to have bases in their
countries, the Pentagon suggests. The report says this is another reason why
long-range supply capacity needs to be increased.

The review does not make recommendations about particular weapons systems, but
there is no doubt in Washington that missile defence shields will form a central
part of the new strategy.

Other key elements of what would be, in effect, a rearming of the US military
are likely to include a greater role for long-range bombers and for unmanned
aircraft. The F-22 fighter programme is likely to face cutbacks, though there is
speculation that it will not be scrapped.

The sweep of the review is so comprehensive and its conclusions so radical that
the publication of the final report later this year is likely to set off a whole
series of turf wars within the US military, as the armed services scrabble for
influence and funding in the new era.

Washington's decision to turn more of its guns and missiles towards China came
as it was confirmed that a senior colonel in the Chinese people's liberation
army has defected to the US while visiting as part of a military delegation. The
defection, which apparently took place at the end of last year or in January,
involved an unnamed officer in the foreign affairs department of the army
general staff.

US Treasury secretary on "patient capital"

2001-03-24 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray





March 24, 2001
Treasury Secretary Ruffles Feathers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:46 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Asked if he had any words of assurance as millions of
investors watched their stock portfolios melt down this past week, the
president's chief economic spokesman demurred. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
did not see much benefit in opining on day-to-day market movements.

That reticence struck many as unusual. Not only had past secretaries spoken
calming words during turbulent times, but Wall Street's volatility is one of the
few things about which O'Neill has not made his opinion known recently.

During his first two months in office, O'Neill has managed to infuriate market
traders, perplex currency and bond investors, irk a powerful Democratic senator,
muddle the president's tax message and outrage conservatives with a memo on
global warming.

To O'Neill's supporters, the blunt-speaking former chief executive of aluminum
giant Alcoa, who bears a resemblance to Harry Truman, is bringing a refreshing
dose of candor.

Others wonder if the miscues are becoming a distraction for the administration's
leading salesman on behalf of President Bush's $1.6 trillion, 10-year tax cut.

``It is always hard for someone who has been a chief executive officer to move
into a political position where you have to be more careful about what you say.
But he has made more than the usual number of political and financial
stumbles,'' said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Corp.

O'Neill's independent thinking became apparent early. During his Senate
confirmation, he rejected the idea that Bush's tax cut should be sold as an
antidote for a recession even though the president at the time was promoting it
that way.

On his first trip to Wall Street as Treasury chief, O'Neill had to placate
executives unhappy with his comments in a newspaper interview that Wall Street
traders were people who ``sit in front of a flickering green screen'' all day
and were ``not the sort of people you would want to help you think about complex
questions.''

It was not long before O'Neill saw how powerful they were. They sent the value
of the dollar down sharply after O'Neill seemed to suggest in another interview
a change in America's strong-dollar policy.

O'Neill had to move quickly to clarify those remarks. Similarly, he had to
clarify later comments that sent the price of Treasury bonds plunging
temporarily because his words were seen as critical of a Treasury program to buy
back debt.

O'Neill said he was continuing to learn ``things you can't talk about if you are
Treasury secretary.'' Market analysts had their own take: The former corporate
executive was inexperienced in the ways of Wall Street, and it was showing.

``A Treasury secretary needs to be someone who understands markets and can stand
up at the right moment and make statements that people can believe and have
confidence in,'' said David Jones, chief economist at Aubrey G. Lanston & Co. in
New York. ``O'Neill has gotten off on the wrong foot.''

O'Neill's comments on bonds came at a briefing on Bush's budget that also
featured a tense exchange in which reporters repeatedly challenged him and other
administration officials to disclose what percentage of the tax cut would go to
the nation's wealthy.

Afterward, O'Neill mused, ``I've got to learn to control my temper.'' But the
next day, O'Neill, who often responds to questions with the brusqueness of a
business leader used to telling subordinates what to do, found himself in hot
water with Democrats at a Senate Budget Committee hearing.

Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia lectured O'Neill on the finer points of Senate
courtesy after O'Neill had interrupted the questioning of freshman Sen. Debbie
Stabenow, D-Mich. During the exchange with Stabenow, O'Neill said he wondered
whether people did not understand the Medicare program or ``whether it's just
convenient not to understand.''

It was Republicans' turn to fume after an O'Neill memo to the president urging
action on global climate change was leaked to the press, riling conservatives
who wanted to know why the Treasury secretary was offering advice on the issue.
O'Neill's aides say he was simply writing a confidential memo to Bush on an
issue then being debated in the administration.

O'Neill has been the subject of critical newspaper editorials and a biting
parody in the New Yorker magazine over his decision to hold onto about $100
million in Alcoa stock and stock options.

O'Neill argues that his decision was approved by government ethics officers and
he will refrain from taking any actions that could affect Alcoa interests.

But critics see the decision as an unwanted diversion for a new administration
trying to establish its claim of following higher ethical standards than the
Clinton administration.

Asked about the criticism, O'Neill spokeswoman Michelle Davis said

RE: Re: Re: Re: ergonomics, etc.

2001-03-23 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> 
> And Nader was in their pitching, telling self-identified Democrats 
> not to vote for Gore...
> 
> 
> Brad DeLong


As was 'Dubya; welcome to the world of free speech.

Ian

RE: Cheney

2001-03-21 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



>
> Thanks to Cheney, all is clear now.  Saving the Earth is bad for business.
>
> Seth


*
Or, as some of the technerds in Redmond and Kirkland, WA I've met over the past
three years say [poking fun at enviro-devastation]: "earth first, we'll get to
the other planets later."

Ian



> It's official: Cheney has lost the rest of his mind
> by Lisa & Ian Murray
> 22 March 2001 01:29
>
> <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0321-03.htm>
>
> ``We do not support the approach of the Kyoto treaty,'' Cheney said.
>
> ``If you're really serious about greenhouse gases, one of the solutions to
> that problem is to go back, and let's take another look at nuclear power,
> use that to generate electricity without having any adverse consequences,''
> Cheney said.
>
>
> _
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
>

It's official: Cheney has lost the rest of his mind

2001-03-21 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




``We do not support the approach of the Kyoto treaty,'' Cheney said.

``If you're really serious about greenhouse gases, one of the solutions to that
problem is to go back, and let's take another look at nuclear power, use that to
generate electricity without having any adverse consequences,'' Cheney said.

RE: structuralism

2001-03-20 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



>
> Does anyone have any opinions on the merit of structuralism
> in social science?
>
> Andrew Hagen
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]


"It's a forest."

"No, it's a stochastically distributed population of trees, shrubs, undergrowth
and detritus."

"No it isn't."

"Yes it is."

"No it isn't"

"It is both."

It is neither."

"There's no such thing as society"; Margaret Thatcher.

Ian

Minerals and protection rackets in th Congo

2001-03-20 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


Full article at:


Vital Ore Funds Congo's War
Combatants Profit From Col-Tan Trade
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 19, 2001; Page A01


MUMBA, Congo

The hillside bears a gouge like a wound, and as the sun slides behind it, the
miners put down their shovels and climb up the crumbling walls of their trenches
by the hundreds. The fortunate ones clutch tiny plastic bags of black sand, a
pound of which counts as a windfall. Twice a week a man called Pierre will come
with his soldiers and pay as much as $10 for it.

No one working in the mine is quite sure why.

"We don't know the importance of col-tan," said Martin Nkibatereza, leaning on
his shovel. "I mean, how is it useful?"



Col-tan -- short for columbite-tantalite, an ore rich in the element tantalum --
is nothing less than the wonder mineral of the moment. In processed form,
col-tan is vital to the manufacture of advanced mobile phones, jet engines, air
bags, night vision goggles, fiber optics and, most of all, capacitors, the
components that maintain an electric charge in a computer chip. Last Christmas,
when shoppers fumed at the shortage of PlayStation 2 platforms on which to play
make-believe war, the reason was a global shortage of the black sand that
Nkibatereza leaves his hut at dawn to collect -- provided the shooting from a
real war has not forced him once again to spend the night hiding in the bushes.

Col-tan is an ingredient in that war as well.

The two wars that have ravaged Congo for four of the last five years have been
funded by minerals, a substantial portion of which are siphoned off for leaders
of the armies fighting them. And in Congo's eastern section, home to some of the
richest col-tan ore deposits in the world, the mineral in recent months achieved
a prominence commensurate with its value, which spiked spectacularly in the
closing months of 2000.

The first time the world price doubled, Congolese peasants who had been mining
gold were instructed to forsake it for col-tan. When the price doubled again --
and then again and again, to more than $200 a pound -- the rebel group that
controls the area declared a monopoly on exports.
[snip]

RE: RE: Re: Monetary deflation

2001-03-19 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> If you could explain to me how monetary deflation can arise from private
> market relations and not the actions of a central bank(s), I would be very
> interested.
> 
> David Shemano
***



Ian

RE: Re: WTO illegal you ask?

2001-03-19 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


They can use  the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary
Measures; articles 2,5,&6 and all the stuff that's in the Annex.

Ian

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Jim Devine
> Sent: Monday, March 19, 2001 9:23 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:9137] Re: WTO illegal you ask?
>
>
> BTW, why aren't US bans of European beef illegal under the WTO rules?
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
>

WTO illegal you ask?

2001-03-19 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray





March 19, 2001


Air Force Proposes Plan to Help Boeing With Sale of Planes

By JAMES DAO


WASHINGTON, March 18  In a twist to the Pentagon's growing efforts to bolster
the defense industry, the Air Force has devised an ambitious plan to help
Boeing, the world's biggest commercial jet producer, sell a version of its
latest jumbo military transport plane to private cargo companies.

The plan calls for the Air Force to provide an unusual array of financial
incentives to encourage private carriers to buy the transport plane, the C-17
Globemaster, including guaranteed government transport business, a Pentagon
promise to buy back C- 17's from firms that go bankrupt, and even subsidies up
front.

In exchange, the private haulers would be required to make their C- 17's
available to the Air Force for war and other emergencies.

The plan is subject to the approval of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld,
who has yet to review it, and Congress, where the C-17 program will be pitted
against other big- ticket programs facing cuts.

But for Boeing, the plan could help create a market in oversized commercial
cargo planes potentially worth billions of dollars, more than enough to keep its
C-17 line in Long Beach, Calif., humming into the next decade. Without new
orders, the 8,500-worker plant there is expected to close within five years. The
plan would begin with the sale of 10 of the planes to commercial cargo companies
at a total cost of $1.6 billion.

"We see this as win, win, win, for the Air Force, for Boeing and the air cargo
industry," said George P. Sillia, a Boeing spokesman in Long Beach.

But Pentagon watchdog groups say the proposal underscores an alarming trend
toward government- business partnerships that weaken Pentagon oversight of the
defense industry and raise questions of favoritism. The partnership may diminish
the Air Force's desire to hold a contractor to the strictest accountability,
these critics warn, and may result in the buying of weapons that are not
necessary.

"These cozy relationships have always existed," said Danielle Brian, executive
director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group that
has studied the C-17 program. "But this is more overt than in the past. And
that's a disaster for taxpayers."

Industry experts say the C-17 proposal is groundbreaking in its foray by the
military into the private sector. Although the Pentagon has in the past
authorized contractors to sell commercial versions of military equipment, this
would be the first time in memory that it would help do the selling by offering
such broad financial incentives, the experts said.

And with many defense contractors asserting that they have been dangerously
weakened by shrinking military budgets, such forays could become more common,
the experts said.

"It's a sign of the times," said Richard Aboulafia, an expert in military
aircraft with the Teal Group, a consulting firm. "A fiscally weakened Department
of Defense, declining markets and an industrial base that has over-capacity are
potent recipes to encourage a more interventionist approach," Mr. Aboulafia
said. "There is no question we'll see more of this."

Military fiscalism update; or how technolibertarians will bring "us" new and improved imperialism and surveillance capabilities

2001-03-18 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Massive Spy-Satellite Program to Cost Billions
Aerospace: Southland firms will get a major boost from top-secret, two-decade
effort. Its scope could dwarf the Manhattan Project.


By PETER PAE, Times Staff Writer


 A team of Southern California aerospace companies is covertly recruiting
engineers across the country for a new generation of spy satellites under what
analysts believe is the largest intelligence-related contract ever.
 The supersecret project for the National Reconnaissance Office is estimated
to be worth up to $25 billion over two decades, providing a major boost to the
Southland's aerospace industry and solidifying the area's dominance of high-tech
space research.
 Equipped with powerful telescopes and radar, the nation's newest eye in
space is expected to form the backbone of U.S. intelligence for several decades,
analysts said. The satellites will be farther out in space and harder to detect
than the massive spy probes that currently orbit the Earth. They will also be
able to fly over and take pictures of military compounds anywhere in the world,
in darkness or through cloud cover, with far more frequency.
 Company officials are restricted from talking about the highly classified
contract, but Roger Roberts, general manager of the Boeing Co. unit in Seal
Beach overseeing the project, gave a hint of its scope.
 The endeavor will require 5,000 engineers, technicians and computer
programmers over the next five years, and that will just be for the initial
design and development of the satellites, he said.
 That figure doesn't include thousands more who will be required to assemble
the satellites, most likely at Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo, and
thousands of workers employed by hundreds of subcontractors and parts suppliers
such as the 1,900-employee Marconi Integrated Systems in San Diego. Sending the
satellites into space will also require new rockets, which should also bolster
the launch industry.
 The need for engineers has been so great that two months ago Boeing opened
a recruitment office in Sunnyvale, where it is targeting both dot-com survivors
and Lockheed Martin Corp. engineers who built many of the spy satellites now in
orbit. After dominating that business since the 1950s, Lockheed lost the new
contract to Boeing.
 John Pike, a Washington, D.C.-based military space consultant, believes
that in all, the work could eventually mean jobs for at least 20,000 people in
California.
 "Lots of kids will be sent to college, lots of swimming pools are going to
get built and a lot of people will spend their career working on this project,"
Pike said.
 Still, most state officials said they know little about the project.
 "I don't think most people are aware of how big this is," said Mike
Marando, spokesman for the California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency. "We
know California benefits substantially, but by exactly how much we just don't
know."
 The National Reconnaissance Office hasn't helped. The enigmatic agency
announced the contract in a three-paragraph news release posted on its
bare-bones Web site little more than a year ago. The project is officially known
as Future Imagery Architecture.
 Despite slowly opening itself up in recent years, the NRO still remains one
of the most secretive government agencies. Even its innocuous logo--a space
probe circling the globe--was a secret until 1994.
 Besides saying it awarded the contract to Boeing "to develop, provide
launch integration and operate the nation's next generation of imagery
reconnaissance satellites," not much else has been revealed.
 Virtually everything else about the contract--its dollar amount, the number
of satellites to be built, who is doing what and where, and the capabilities of
the satellite--is secret. Even the duration of the contract is deemed
classified.
 "This program is so secret that most of the people who work on it won't
have a good sense of what they are doing," said Loren Thompson, a defense
analyst at the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute.
 Still, aerospace analysts have been able to draw some conclusions through
past reconnaissance programs based on public information gleaned from different
sources, such as watching the size and frequency of rocket launches carrying
secret spy satellites.
 Analysts generally agree that the number of satellites involved in the new
program will be at least a dozen to two dozen, compared with roughly half a
dozen spy satellites now in orbit. The new models are likely to be significantly
smaller and cheaper than the current generation of spy satellites, which cost
about $1 billion each, weigh 15 tons and can take up to 18 months to build.
 With a bigger constellation of satellites, the probes will be able to
revisit and take pictures of an area more frequently than the current versions.
The need is driven in part by i

Patrick Bond on meta-globalization


[So, is the Aids medicine litigation being pursued in SA courts to avoid being a
WTO dispute settlement body decision that would have been yet another nail in
that institution's coffin?]





Globalization from Below
by Patrick Bond

(Review of `Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity,' by Jeremy
Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, Cambridge, MA, South End Press.)

There are more than a dozen new english- language books aimed mainly at an
audience of international-justice activists, strategists and intellectuals.
I've got the pleasant task of reading these in my role as coordinator of a
seminar of 20 masters and doctoral students which starts next week in
Johannesburg.

Because it raises issues so well and so forthrightly, honestly considers
competing arguments, I chose to make one book-- Globalization from
Below--required reading (as I will do again in a similar seminar at York
University in Toronto this summer).

But let me disclose quickly that my enormous admiration for
Connecticut-based writer/film-maker Jeremy Brecher and his coauthors Tim
Costello and Brendan Smith (hereafter `BCS') has not kept me from engaging
in lively e-mail debates with Jeremy over analysis, strategy and tactics.
This review is written in that spirit of comradely give-and-take.

Like so much of their previous work (e.g. Global Village or Global Pillage,
which is also a compelling video), the latest BCS primer offers a very fine
mix of empirical observations, political commentary, forays into
intellectual debates, programme- construction, and applied tactical
suggestions. The style is warm, friendly, readable, and efficient. At 164
pages, this is an ideal little back-pocket tome to pull out on those long
bus-rides to the next demo in Quebec City, Genoa, Gothenburg, Washington,
Jo'burg or wherever. I hope everyone in the ZNet community will get a copy
and consider its line of argument enthusiastically and carefully
(http://www.southendpress.org).

The greatest strength of the book, in my view, is its assessment of
nonviolent social movement theory. BCS draw upon relevant practical examples
as well as deep-theory arguments by Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ken
Sharp and Michael Mann. From warnings of how social movements tend to fail
comes a `Lilliput strategy' that works through myriad people's movements,
coordinated by radically-decentralised network structures that, tactically,
gain advantage in NGO-Swarm mode.

BCS, the Rand Corporation and The Economist magazine agree that the merits
of a swarm are that it `has no central leadership or command structure; it
is multi-headed, impossible to decapitate. And it can sting a victim to
death.'

That's fine for defense, but what happens once Our Team moves to offense?
BCS bravely offer a `Draft Global Program' (similar to one introduced with
BCSs' help by Rep. Bernie Sanders in the US Congress). It's a roadmap that
covers virtually the entire international terrain of contemporary eco-social
struggle. Yet I don't find it completely satisfying, since it mixes up
campaigning strategies and specific sectoral demands. (Not that anyone else
has constructed a better international-scale manifesto.)

BCS also deliberate fruitfully upon weaknesses and contradictions in both
the organisational forms and the strategic paths chosen by movement leaders
from South and North. This is difficult terrain, with no easy formulas. On
the society-nature contradiction, BCS endorse tobacco control advocacy as a
transcendental example, and the `Just Transition' process of socialising
costs involved in cleaning our fouled environments.

On First/Third World debates concerning resource allocation, BCS lean
overheavily (in my opinion) towards international-scale regulation of wages,
health/safety, and environmental conditions. Correctly, they slag off Jimmy
Hoffa Jr for his `some guy in a loincloth' xenophobia during the debate over
normalising trade relations with China. In contrast, the BCS recipe for
international solidarity entails dialogue, mutual aid, joint struggles,
common norms and programs, cultural accommodation and conflict attenuation.

Still, as helpful a text as this is, I have concerns about the formulation
`globalization from below,' especially in a context in which many of friends
are saying, `roll back globalization!'

First, I think it's important to more effectively locate the source of what
we call economic globalization: capitalist crisis. Notwithstanding their
coverage of diverse political-economic and geopolitical readings, BCS don't
really consider *why* globalization has emerged with such a vengeance this
past quarter-century. Their descriptive list of surface-level phenomena is
no substitute for seeking globalization's root causes.

Here in South Africa, for example, the leading intellectuals of the African
National Congress wrote a paper in 1998 arguing that `It is precisely
declining profitability in the most advanced economies that has spurred the
last quarter of

RE: Monkeys on tricycles


And to think back when the www was taking off, Wired had a front page piece on
the death of advertising :-).

Ian

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Louis Proyect
> Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2001 6:44 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:9099] Monkeys on tricycles
>
>
> This NY Times article might be a "Rosetta Stone" for interpreting the bear
> market of 2001. It explains why only one-half of one percent of all website
> ads are read. (I take great pride in never having clicked one of these
> stupid things, especially the ubiquitous "can you hit the monkey on the
> tricycle" ad, whatever it was selling.) This means that a high-flyer like
> Yahoo would sooner or later hit the brick wall, as would every "content"
> based website like salon.com, etc. So when advertising revenue dries up,
> Internet startups are forced into bankruptcy. When you have a bankruptcy,
> you have fire sales. What these outfits had to sell was PC's, routers and
> servers. When this stuff hits the second-hand market, especially at a time
> of dwindling demand, there is less of a market for new stuff. That's why
> Compaq, CISCO and Sun are not meeting earnings quotas. When these companies
> begin to lay off people, there is less demand for SUV's, vacation travel
> expenses and new homes. Thus the earnings expectations for Chrysler,
> American Airlines and construction companies is effected. All this because
> of monkeys on tricycles!
>
> ===
>
> NY Times, March 17, 2001
>
> Web Site Ads, Holding Sway, Start to Blare
>
> By SAUL HANSELL
>
> Until recently, advertising on the Internet stayed in one place and didn't
> speak until spoken to, or at least clicked on.
>
> Now, as even the biggest Internet sites struggle with a sharp decline in ad
> revenue, sites are letting their remaining advertisers occupy a much larger
> portion of their pages, as well as create ads that move, make noise and
> otherwise do whatever it takes to attract attention.
>
> Big advertisers, especially the traditional companies that spend billions
> burnishing their images on television, have long complained that the oblong
> spaces they have been able to buy on Internet sites are too small to tell a
> persuasive story. But most sites were afraid that bigger and bolder
> advertisements would irritate their users. Now that sites have plenty of
> users and fewer advertisers, their priorities are shifting quickly.
>
> For example, a cork pops out of a Champagne bottle in an advertisement
> recently placed atop the movie page of the iWon.com portal. It bounds
> behind the listings and over the reviews and ultimately crashes into an
> image of a cremation urn in another ad on the side of the page.
>
> If that's not enough to catch a user's attention, the loud crashing sound
> surely is. (Those who click on either ad are whisked to a site selling
> videotapes of "Meet the Parents," a movie in which a cork and an urn have
> an unfortunate coming together.)
>
> "Too many people involved with the Internet have been too shy about
> advertising," said Scott Kurnit, chief Internet officer of Primedia, the
> publishing company that bought About .com, the big Web portal he founded.
> "The ads are too small and not intrusive enough."
>
> So About.com is redesigning its site to permit larger advertisements and
> ones that incorporate 5- to 15- second video clips. As with television,
> where ads eat up eight minutes every half-hour to pay for what the viewer
> sees, Mr. Kurnit says Web users will need to accept these new types of
> advertising.
>
> "If I'm giving you something of value at no cost, I will charge you with
> your time, not your money," he said.
>
> Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/technology/17WEB.html
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
>

Wall Street and the CIA; together again





[Sometimes banker's just say the darnedest things :-)!]


Colorful Outsider Is Named No. 3 at the CIA

By Vernon Loeb and Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 17, 2001; Page A03



A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, a cigar-chomping former investment banker and martial
arts enthusiast, was named yesterday executive director of the CIA, bringing a
fast-paced management style to the agency's No. 3 job.

Central Intelligence Agency Director George J. Tenet announced the appointment,
saying he treasures Krongard's "wise counsel and 'no-nonsense' business-like
views."

Krongard, 64, former head of Alex. Brown & Co., an investment bank based in
Baltimore, joined the agency three years ago as a counselor to Tenet. He
switched careers shortly after helping engineer the $2.5 billion merger of Alex.
Brown and Bankers Trust New York Corp., gaining $71 million in Bankers Trust
stock.

Few of his former colleagues were surprised by his decision to trade a $4
million salary and stock options for the far less remunerative job of Tenet's
consigliere.

A graduate of Princeton and the University of Maryland Law School, Krongard has
a fondness for extreme military-style activities. Even as a banking executive,
he trained with police SWAT teams for recreation and worked out with a kung fu
master.

To impress -- or intimidate -- visitors, the former Marine officer would
demonstrate lightning-fast moves for disabling an attacker.

The purpose of his exercise regime was not just to stay fit, he once said, but
to increase toughness and discipline. To that end, he would thrust his hands
repeatedly into buckets of dried rice or absorb blows to the stomach from a
heavy medicine ball.

He maintained a shooting range on the park-like grounds of his home on the
northern edge of Baltimore, and kept a walk-in safe stocked with Cuban cigars.

His rhetorical style, blunt and colorful, sets him apart on the seventh floor of
CIA headquarters. In an interview yesterday, Krongard described his past duties
as those of a "minister without portfolio" whom senior managers felt comfortable
talking to about "sticky subjects."

"I really didn't have a dog in any fights," he allowed, "and I was able to
broker some things."

But Krongard exhibited the requisite secretiveness when asked to explain his
interest in intelligence and how he came to land a job in Tenet's inner circle.
If you go back to the CIA's origins during World War II in the Office of
Strategic Services, he explained, "the whole OSS was really nothing but Wall
Street bankers and lawyers."

Given the CIA's insular nature, outsiders who assume top posts often arouse
suspicion. That was certainly true in the case of Nora Slatkin, a Capitol Hill
staffer and Pentagon official who served as executive director from 1995 to 1996
under then-CIA Director John M. Deutch.

One former agency official said yesterday that he found it "absolutely
astounding" that Tenet installed Krongard in such an important job. "When you
meet him, he tells you to punch him in the stomach to see how tough he is," the
former official said.

But Krongard received a rave review from former deputy director of operations
Jack Downing, an agency legend. "I have a lot of respect for Buzzy," Downing
said. "He knows business and financial markets and all that. But he's been privy
to everything since he's been there, sitting at George's right hand, so he
certainly knows the agency. I personally would be very happy to serve in that
agency with Buzzy as executive director."

Krongard described his new role as that of a chief operating officer and vowed
to keep everyone focused. "If you ask me, 'What is your one biggest priority?'
it would be to do everything I can . . . to support our two basic missions here,
operations and intelligence," he said. "If you don't worry about who gets the
credit, you can accomplish an awful lot."

Greider on the Repugs Trojan Horse


Full article at: 

Published in the April 2, 2001 issue of The Nation
Stockman Returneth
Washington Seems About to Replay History as Farce
by William Greider

Twenty years ago this season, when another new Republican President arrived in
Washington to push for massive income-tax reductions, I was having breakfast
every other Saturday morning with David Stockman, the brainy young budget
director, and collecting his insider account of the Reagan revolution. Stockman
was the enfant terrible who implemented the supply-side agenda and promised to
achieve the improbable--reduce taxes dramatically and double defense spending,
while cutting other federal programs sufficiently to produce a balanced budget.
It didn't work out that way. Ronald Reagan's great legislative triumph of 1981
destabilized federal fiscal policy for nearly two decades, creating the massive
structural deficits that were not finally extinguished until a few years ago.
Washington seems about to replay history as farce, albeit on a less threatening
scale. It prompts me to reflect on what, if anything, was learned from the
revolution.
My private sessions with Stockman stretched over nine months and led to a
controversial magazine article, "The Education of David Stockman," in which I
disclosed the contradictions and internal swordplay behind Reaganomics, but the
real sensation was Stockman's own growing doubts and disillusionment with the
doctrine. Both of us were excoriated in the aftermath. The Gipper likened me to
his would-be assassin John Hinckley. Stockman was roasted for duplicity and
cynical manipulations; for concealing the truth about the looming deficits while
Congress plunged forward in fateful error. Stockman was guileful, yes, but it
was his intellectual honesty that shocked Washington. That brief moment of
truth-telling resonates with the current delusions and deceptions. A lot of what
he said twenty years ago seems painfully relevant.

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," the
budget director confided during intense budget-cutting battles in the spring of
1981. That admission should be engraved over the door at the Treasury, the
Capitol and the White House. Projections of fabulous budget surpluses that
provide the premise for this year's political action are no less airy-fairy.
Nonetheless, official fantasy becomes the operating truth, so long as everyone
bows to it. Stockman's wishful forecasts on economic growth were nicknamed Rosy
Scenario by his colleagues, but now the Congressional Budget Office has matched
his rosiness. The economy is expanding this year by 2.4 percent and faster next
year, according to the CBO. Actually, right now it's headed into the zero-minus
territory known as recession.

Stockman's boldest accounting gimmick--reporting $40 billion in budget cuts but
declining to identify them--was dubbed by insiders "the magic asterisk." Bush
has already topped him with his "magic blueprint" and the miraculous
"trillion-dollar reserve" he saves and spends at the same time. The new
President has not actually issued a real budget, only a "blueprint" that leaves
out the grisly, painful details of what spending will get whacked. Dubya sounds
like the Red Queen: Tax cuts first, punishment later! Congressional nerds
protest, but Bush intends to ram through his tax cuts before anyone has been
given an honest picture of the fiscal consequences.

"Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront?" Stockman exclaimed to me
twenty years ago. "The hogs were really feeding." As the Reagan White House lost
control of the action, Democrats and Republicans engaged in a furious bidding
war to see which party could deliver more tax breaks and other boodle to the
special-interest hogs (Republicans won, but the Dems gave it a good try). The
Bushies recognize this danger and are trying to wall off the usual business
greedheads from exploiting the same opening this year. The deal-making may still
begin, however, if the White House is a few votes shy and needs to seduce a few
hungry senators with special favors. As Stockman learned, if you buy one
senator, you might have to buy them all.

Another of Stockman's vivid metaphors is the centerpiece for 2001--the "Trojan
horse" approach to rewarding the rich. Giving everyone the same percentage rate
cut sounds fair, but actually delivers most of the money to the very wealthy,
who pay the top rate. Supply-side doctrine "was always a Trojan horse to bring
down the top rate," Stockman revealed. "It's kind of hard to sell trickle-down
economics, so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that
was really trickle down." This year's new wrinkle is a Keynesian twist. Instead
of talking about rich investors who need a little encouragement to invest in
America, Bush talks about the waitresses who need a little cash to pay off their
credit-card debts.

The most disturbing difference I see in 2001 is political--the role reversal

The Beef trade...

2001-03-15 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray





ANALYSIS-U.S. ban on EU meat could be trade time bomb



BRUSSELS, March 15 (Reuters) - A U.S. ban on European Union meat over
foot-and-mouth disease may be an understandable short-term reaction but if it
persists, it risks escalating into a new transatlantic trade row, analysts said
on Thursday.

The temporary embargo, sparked by the spread of the foot-and-mouth virus from
Britain to France, would then join other lingering EU-U.S. disputes over
bananas, hormone-treated beef, gene-altered crops and U.S. export taxes.

``The key thing here is whether the ban is temporary or not. At the moment it's
too early to tell but if it was continued it would be a problem,'' Paul Brenton,
a trade economist at the Centre for European Policy Studies, told Reuters.

``It will be interesting to see how the United States authorities respond in two
or three weeks' time if the disease has died down here.''

Under international trade rules, governments can take short-term action such as
blocking imports if they believe public or animal health is at risk.

Difficulties arise when such temporary measures slide into more permanent
territory, although lawyers agree the issue is still a legal grey area.

The EU was taken to the World Trade Organisation over its decade-old ban on U.S.
hormone-treated beef. The WTO ruled that such a permanent curb had to be
justified by scientific evidence and could not simply be based on a perception
of risk. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said on Tuesday she would do
everything to prevent the entry of foot-and-mouth, a virus that can spread
through a country's cattle, sheep, pig and goat population like wildfire,
ruining meat production.

It is not harmful to humans.

EU PLAYS DOWN TRADE WAR FEARS

EU Food Safety Commissioner David Byrne on Wednesday called the U.S. measures
``excessive and unjustified'' and threatened to go to the WTO if they remained.

``We will, of course, be explaining the measures already in place which ensure
that such restrictions are not necessary. If necessary we will make full use of
our bilateral contacts and our WTO trade arrangements to have these restrictions
lifted,'' he told the European Parliament on Wednesday.

But EU officials played down Byrne's remarks on Thursday, saying he had received
assurances from Veneman that the import curbs would be reviewed at the earliest
opportunity.

``This is not about a new EU-U.S. trade dispute, this is a veterinary and
sanitary issue...and at this stage we are certainly not seeking recourse to the
WTO,'' Anthony Gooch, spokesman for EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, told
reporters.

Lawyers said the U.S. action was justifiable in the short term given the
devastating effect foot-and-mouth has had on Britain's countryside and farming
community.

``The U.S. action is consistent with the mechanisms the EU has in place
internally to restrict exports of meat and livestock,'' Craig Pouncy at Brussels
law firm Herbert Smith told Reuters.

``If the U.S. move goes beyond the temporary, then there may be a problem but as
it stands it's an entirely understandable short-term reaction,'' he said.

But others said Washington may have been a little heavy-handed in applying a ban
to all 15 EU countries when foot-and-mouth was confined to Britain and one
French region.
``It wasn't the most subtle response. They certainly didn't worry about
over-reacting,'' Brenton said.

``It's difficult to see why Scandinavian products, for example, should be
affected.''

Beate Gminder, spokeswoman for EU Commissioner Byrne, said the EU had expected a
more ``proportional'' ban.

``The common approach laid down in international standards to eradicate an
animal disease is to restrict exports from the affected region,'' she said.

``This principle of regionalisation has always been applied by the EU.''

RE: Ex-Convicts in the Labor Market

2001-03-15 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> Casualties of the war on drugs & crimes are coming home.  We have to
> stop the war _and_ create a society in which ex-convicts can find
> good jobs, or else we can never diminish racism, much less abolish
> it.   Yoshie

*   New York Times 15 March 2001

Flood of Ex-Convicts Finds Job Market Tight

By PETER T. KILBORN

NEW ORLEANS - After a decade-long surge of people into the nation's
prisons, sociologists and economists are warning of a new challenge
for the labor force: the steady stream of people coming out.

The prison population soared in the 1990's, to 2 million from 1.2
million, and now tens of thousands of inmates are leaving prison each
year, having completed their sentences or been granted parole.
Though these ex-convicts are under pressure to find jobs and rejoin
society, labor experts say that many have become the untouchables of
the work force.
**

Perhaps you could ask Brad what the Pareto optimal solution to this problem is,
given the exogenous constraint of current obsessions with fiscal discipline by
the neoliberal state.

Ian

"We're not a political party, we're a business"





Taking a Right Turn on K Street
Lobby Firms Face Political Reality, Head for Parity Between Democrats and
Republicans

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 14, 2001; Page A23



The day after President Bush's inauguration, Patton Boggs blanketed its lobby in
bunting and mounted a copy of the inaugural seal along with a message to the
lawyers and staff who had toiled in Florida on the contested election: "Thank
you for making it happen."

Coming from a traditionally Democratic law firm widely known for its lobbying,
this display of enthusiasm for a GOP victory sent an unmistakable signal to the
firm's clients and the city's broader political network: Patton Boggs had
recognized that the Republicans were here to stay.

The event marked the culmination of a shift that began in 1994. In trade
associations and lobbying firms across Washington, Republicans are assuming
positions of power that have been occupied for years by Democrats.

"You have a Republican trifecta," said veteran lobbyist Anthony Podesta, who
just brought on Dan Mattoon -- the man who helped steer the House GOP's
successful reelection campaign -- as an equal inPodesta's lobby shop. "The wave
of the future is to work this way, to be bipartisan. This is what our clients
want, and we try to do what our clients want."

Podesta, whose brother John just finished serving as former president Bill
Clinton's chief of staff, is not alone. Miami-based Greenberg Traurig in
December lured away one of the closest confidants to House Majority Whip Tom
DeLay (R-Tex.) and several of his colleagues from Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas
Meeds.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, brash leaders such as DeLay
vowed they would force K Street to hire like-minded partisans if they wanted
access to decision makers on Capitol Hill. But with a Democrat still in the
White House, many firms and associations did not dramatically change their
offices' political makeups.

Now that Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress,
however, high-powered firms are in bidding wars over talented GOP Hill staffers,
while trade groups are filling new vacancies with Republicans.

GOP lawmakers are taking the opportunity to press their case and install as many
allies as possible downtown. Just last week, Senate GOP Conference Chairman Rick
Santorum (Pa.) held a meeting with several lobbyists in which they agreed to
come up with a list of candidates for several high-profile vacancies, including
ones at AARP, the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Telecom Association.

Many of these groups are facing a recruiting crunch, trying to bring in top GOP
operatives at the same time these candidates are considering plum posts in the
Bush administration. Officials from half a dozen firms made their pitch to
Mattoon, for example, over lunch in restaurants such as Sam & Harry's and the
City Club. One of Mattoon's friends received an even more flattering offer from
a law firm that was courting him: a $50,000 check he could keep in his pocket
until he decided whether to sign up.

"The fact is we've held the majority for four successive terms, and as Democrats
retire, as they move on, you're going to see more and more Republicans," said
Rep. John A. Boehner (Ohio), a senior Republican with close ties to K Street. "I
would call this an evolution, not a revolution."

Ironically, this flurry of hiring is making downtown more bipartisan, not less.
With a 50-50 split in the Senate and a narrow margin between the parties in the
House, most businesses are relying on a mix of Republican and Democratic
lobbyists.

Fox Broadcasting, for example, has made it known it is looking for a Democrat to
soften its Republican image. Joint ventures such as Quinn Gillespie &
Associates, a partnership between former Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn
and Ed Gillespie, who served as spokesman for House Majority Leader Richard K.
Armey (R-Tex.), are flourishing.

Patton Boggs partner Benjamin Ginsberg, who served as legal counsel to the Bush
campaign and helped oversee Bush's recount effort in Florida, said the close
balance between the parties has forced many firms to move to the middle.

"You look out in America and there's pretty much parity out in the country,"
Ginsberg said, adding that when he arrived at the firm "people would sort of
come up to me in the elevator and tell me they were Republicans. That doesn't
happen anymore."

Republicans are still at a disadvantage within Patton Boggs's public policy
group, numbering 40 compared to 60 Democrats. But since 1994, the section has
hired more Republicans than Democrats, helping to narrow the gap.

Other firms have taken even bolder steps to court conservatives. Greenberg
Traurig recently brought on DeLay ally Jack Abramoff, known for his close ties
to Hill leaders and aggressive lobbying style, along with seven other lobbyists,
including former D

Re: RE: Re: RE: government as a racket


[This is precisely what Tilly and Thomson consider part and parcel of the "ever
present origins" of capital that still hang with us]




Oil firms stoke up Sudan war

Christian Aid report accuses foreign companies of complicity in mass
displacement and killing of thousands
Boom time for few signals misery and death for many

Victoria Brittain and Terry Macalister
Thursday March 15, 2001
The Guardian

Oil companies operating in Sudan are complicit in the systematic depopulating of
large areas of the country and atrocities against civilians, tens of thousands
of whom have been killed and displaced from the areas around the oil fields,
according to a report to be published today.

Christian Aid, in a searing report on the consequences of Sudan's new oil
bonanza, accuses the oil companies of deep involvement in the government's war
machine against southern civilians.

The companies are protected by government forces and allow their airstrips and
roads to be used by the military, while the revenues from oil are funding
expansion of the war, the report says.

The report includes dozens of eyewitness accounts from villages where people
have been driven out by bombing and ground attacks.

"Oil has brought death," said one Nuer chief, Malony Kolang. "When the pumping
began, the war began. Antonovs and helicopter gunships began attacking the
villages. All the farms have been destroyed, everything around the oil fields
has been destroyed."

Christian Aid's report calls on foreign oil companies - from Canada, Sweden,
China, France and Austria - to suspend their operations in Sudan. It also calls
for BP and Shell to divest their shares in firms whose parent company is
involved.

The report accuses the oil companies of trying to distance themselves from the
catastrophe of southern Sudan by claiming they are not responsible for the
behaviour of companies in which they are shareholders.

BP said last night it had no intention of disposing of its interests in
PetroChina "because there is no reason why we should". The Chinese company, in
which BP bought a $578m stake 12 months ago, is not active in Sudan, although
its parent group, China National Petroleum Corporation, (CNPC) is.

Toby Odone, a spokesman for BP, insisted there was no operational connection
between PetroChina and CNPC. "When PetroChina did its IPO [listing on the US
stock market] it assured the Securities & Exchange Commission that it had no
interests in Sudan because of the sanctions issue," he explained.

A Shell spokesman said it had no exploration or production interests in Sudan
either directly or through its Chinese partner Sinopec. Dave Stuart said:
"Although Sinopec did at one stage control interests in Sudan as a result of the
restructuring of the Chinese state oil industry, that stake was moved back to
CNPC during 1999."

He said Shell would not agree to Christian Aid demands that it withdraw from its
shareholding in Sinopec because there was no connection between Sinopec and
CNPC.

Rolls Royce admits it provided 34 diesel engines to help pump oil along a
1,000-mile pipeline from Sudan's oil fields to an export terminal on the Red
Sea.

Martin Brody, a Rolls Royce spokesman, said the company always took advice from
the British government on where it could do business but also had its own
criteria. He added: "As a supplier of equipment we always take a responsible
view of our actions. We gave a lot of information to Christian Aid and will need
to look at its report in more detail."

Glasgow-based Weir Group is also being criticised for a £20m contract to provide
equipment for pumping stations on the same pipeline. Emrys Inker, a spokesman
for Weir, confirmed its involvement in Sudan but said all the work had been done
with the approval of the Department of Trade and Industry and the British
government.

Weir had no comment on accusations that it is complicit in human rights abuses,
or on speculation that it is involved in a second contract to supply pumps.

The report gives harrowing details of the lives of refugees from the oil areas
who have walked hundreds of miles to very precarious areas of southern Sudan,
already wracked by decades of civil war.

"All the villages along the road have been burned," said John Wicjial Bayak, a
local official driven from a village close to the main road built for access to
the oil fields. "You cannot see a single hut. The government doesn't want people
anywhere near the oil."

One man described fleeing the bombing with six of his grandchildren to hide in a
forest. "We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top," he said. "We
stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit."

Systematic attacks on the villages began in March 2000, according to village
chiefs. One was bombed 10 times before government troops finally burned out the
residents.

Across southern Sudan life is on a knife-edge and the government's strategy of
banning aid flight

RE: Re: RE: government as a racket



> The actually-existing government in the U.S. (and all or most other
> capitalist countries) is a racket because it's run by the capitalists and
> their agents (though not necessarily in the latter's long-term class
> interest, since individual capitalist interest groups -- or their agents --
> can dominate decision-making and long-term interests are often unknown).
> However, to the extent that the state can be subordinated to democratic
> rule, it can move away from being a racket.
*

Can it really? Can electorates overcome Arrow's aporias on preference formation
and coherence [as opposed to mere contested aggregations of voter blocs]? How is
this related to class formation given the heterogeneity and conflicts of
interests that all voters - and non-voters - have? Why should citizens even give
consent to the institutional forms that channel [or don't] their interests; how
do we get beyond adversarial democracy, in other words, even if collective
action on the basis of successful class composition is achieved -- how would we
get stability without rigidity along with a serious attenuation of coercion?

Ian

RE: government as a racket



 For some time, Ian has been referring to the government as a racket.  I
 thought that he and the rest of you might enjoy what I picked up in the
 first few pages here:
***

I got on to this line of thinking after reading David Held's chapter on
Schumpeter's "competitive elitism" in "Models of Democracy" a few years ago.
Schumpeter rejects the idea of a public good and/or public interest [this partly
explains conservatives love for his ideas]. When you mix that with Thomas
Ferguson's "the Golden Rule" which is an extensive look at the history of how
political party formation in the US has been tied to huge sums of cash from
rivalrous capitalist blocs, well...

I then happened upon Charles Tilly's work and things really started clicking
with regards to Marx' statement in the Grundrisse: "Bourgeois economists delude
themselves with the notion that better production is possible under a modern
police system than under the law of the mailed fist, for example. They simply
forget that the latter is also a law and that the right of might still lives on,
in another form, in their constitutional state."

I'm really interested in the contestability that accompanied the origins of
territorialization under the Westphalian system because it's real hard,
historically, to separate the origins of the corporate form from mercenarism,
banditry, privateering and the like and their relation to the idea of revolution
and legitimation. Lots of these forms still exist and thrive in various parts of
the world today and, in conjunction with the various ways Westphalian
sovereignty is contested by the free trade paradigm, makes for a interesting
rethink of legitimacy, coercion and the very meanings of crime, regulation and
law. Ecologically, our current political territories are totally misdrawn and
thus severely hamper the formation of administrative and political co-ordination
in solving "transboundary" pollution and other problems related to the
production of goods and services. Thus the tensions between local-global in the
ecopolitics debate and the need to contest policy sovereignty etc. in a manner
that both challenges the very assumptions of the free trade paradigm [somebody
somewhere is always already being protected and externalizing the costs of that
protection], yet looks askance at liberal notions of sovereignty, "national
power" and autarky as well.


Ian


"Mercenaries, Pirates & Sovereigns" by Janice Thomson
"War Making and State Making as Organized Crime"
and "Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1992" by Charles Tilly
"The Protection Racket State:Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War
in El Salvador" by William Stanley

Worker ownership at [dis]United unravels

2001-03-13 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




March 14, 2001


Management: Employee-Ownership Experiment Unravels at United

By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN

It was trumpeted on the cover of Business Week as a beacon for corporate America
and hailed by none other than the conservative columnist George F. Will as "a
promising new chapter in the history of capitalism." After workers bought a
majority stake in United Airlines in the summer of 1994, creating the world's
biggest employee-owned company, managers began referring to them as "owners" and
the airline changed its motto to "fly our friendly skies."

But as anyone who has flown United recently can attest, something has gone
terribly wrong.

Last summer, United's pilots, which own the single largest stake in its parent,
the UAL Corporation, staged a thinly veiled work slowdown during contract
negotiations; United was forced to cancel thousands of flights. By fall, the
machinists, the other big group of employee owners, followed suit. The airline
took the machinists to court, accusing them of conducting an illegal job action.
Their union is threatening to strike. The turmoil inconvenienced tens of
thousands of customers, placed the airline at the bottom of industry on-time
rankings, caused it to rack up huge losses and sent its stock, which is mostly
held by the same frustrated employees, tumbling.

What happened?

In retrospect, it seems obvious: while everybody agreed to call workers
"owners," they did not act like owners, and management did not treat them like
owners.

If the two sides had worked hard to create a true ownership culture throughout
the company, the experiment might have succeeded, industry analysts say.
Instead, labor and management displayed a lack of commitment from the start.

Such irresolution is hardly a formula for success in any endeavor. For the most
ambitious employee-ownership project ever, it spelled trouble.

Employee ownership has not been a complete failure. United executives and labor
leaders said it had accomplished its most important goal by saving the airline
from a major restructuring in the mid- 1990's, a move that would have cost
thousands of jobs. But they also acknowledge that the opportunity to create a
new breed of worker-owner who would propel the company into an era of corporate
collaboration, a vision that seemed within reach seven years ago, has been
squandered.

"One of the greatest opportunities we did not take advantage of was sitting down
and agreeing on a joint vision of where we wanted to go," said James E. Goodwin,
UAL's chief executive.

Rick Dubinsky, the head of the pilots union at United, described employee
ownership as a big red box tied with a bright bow that is sitting in the middle
of an arena filled with United workers and managers.

"I think the present is still inside but nobody knows how to open up the box,"
Mr. Dubinsky said. "Neither side really attempted to work out what it was going
to take to make it work. Everybody kind of took it for granted."

Which was a big mistake for such a monumental venture. Most of the 11,000
employee-owned companies in the United States have fewer than 500 workers, and
only 5 percent are unionized. United had 75,500 employees in 1994 and was, and
remains, highly unionized. As a measure of the difficulty of the task, the few
other high-profile experiments in employee ownership, like the Weirton Steel
Corporation, have quietly moved away from the concept.

Researchers say employee ownership can give companies a competitive edge, but
only if workers believe they are helping to call the shots.

"People bring all sorts of expectations and imaginations to this idea that we
are owners of the company," said Christopher Mackin, president of Ownership
Associates Inc., a consultant in Cambridge, Mass., who has worked for United.
"You have to go through this interpretive process of what you mean by
ownership."

But United's unions did not set out to change capitalism or make history. They
set out to save jobs in perhaps the worst crisis the airline industry has
endured since it was deregulated in 1978.

United lost nearly $1 billion in 1992, and Stephen M. Wolf, then its chief
executive, threatened to sell assets and lay off workers unless they made wage
and productivity concessions.

Some union leaders had dreamed of controlling United. They had tried and failed
once, in 1989, to buy the airline. Now, they seized on the financial problems
and tried again. And Mr. Wolf, who stood to make millions on his stock options,
went along.

Here is how the agreement worked: The two biggest unions  the Air Line Pilots
Association and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers  and a group of nonunion salaried employees agreed to wage cuts and
work rule changes in exchange for a $4.9 billion loan to buy 55 percent of UAL's
stock. The stock would be distributed to the employees in their retirement
accounts over seven years. The two unions a

The Greening of Marxism update

2001-03-12 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


The latest [March 2001] issue of Ecological Economics has an essay "The Poverty
of Money: Marxian insights for ecological economists" by Anitra Nelson of RMIT
University at Melbourne, Australia

email is: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

The rest of the essay titles in the issue don't suck either, so I'm putting the
kettle on

Ian

From monopoly pricing to price wars :-)

2001-03-12 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Embarrassed firms slash Aids drug prices


Special report: Aids

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Monday March 12, 2001
The Guardian

Aids patients in Ivory Coast will be the first to benefit from a price-cutting
war that appears to have broken out among drug manufacturers, embarrassed by the
outcry in recent weeks over the preventable deaths of millions and afraid of
losing the potentially huge African market to copycat generics manufacturers.
Merck, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, has dramatically
dropped the price of two antiretroviral drugs in the last few days. Crixivan
(indinavir sulfate), which costs around $6,000 (about £4,100) a year in the US,
is on offer to sub-Saharan Africa at $600 a year, and Stocrin (efavirenz) at
$500. Merck says it will make no profit on the sale. Ivory Coast's minister for
Aids, Assana Sangare, said yesterday her country would buy discounted drugs from
Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline, bringing the cost of the sort
of three-drug combination used to combat HIV/Aids in the west down to around
$1,200 a year.

The three drug companies, and two others, have in the past offered discounts of
85% but have not named figures. There has been only a limited response. Most of
Africa said the prices were still unaffordable. Merck's more generous offer is
being seen as a response to the low prices being offered by generics companies,
which copy patented drugs. Cipla, the Indian generics company, has said it is
willing to supply developing world governments with a cocktail of three Aids
drugs for $600 and to drop the price to $350 for the volunteer doctors of
Médecins sans Frontières. The same combination would cost over $10,000 a year in
the west.

The prices are still too high to allow more than a small number of people to be
treated in desperately poor countries. But the real significance of the Merck
move is that it signals a downward spiral in drug prices, which looks set to
open up the possibility of treatment for millions for whom HIV is now a death
sentence.

Merck's offer comes within days of the opening and adjournment of a court case
brought by 39 international pharmaceutical companies - Merck among them -
against the South African government contesting legislation that would allow the
import of drugs that are cheaper elsewhere.

International outrage over the spectacle of hugely wealthy drug companies trying
to stop South Africa's access to cheap medicines has made the case acutely
embarrassing for the companies. While they say they must fight on because the
legislation in effect sweeps away all their patent rights in South Africa, they
are under pressure to improve their public image. GlaxoSmithKline, for instance,
has recently announced two malaria initiatives for Africa.

Whether or not Merck is trying to draw the sting of the court case, it is
certainly motivated by the threat of Cipla walking into the African mar ket.
Cipla has asked the South African government to grant it eight compulsory
licences for Aids drugs - permission to make a cheap version in South Africa of
a patented drug, which is allowable under international trade agreements in
cases of dire human need.

Merck and the others are signalling that they will do all they can to fight the
generics companies off, if not through law then by undercutting their prices.

"I certainly feel that compulsory licences are unneces sary in this case," said
Jeffrey Sturchio, Merck's executive director for public affairs in Africa. "We
are making these drugs available. We're willing to work with the government in
South Africa."

Those campaigning to get Aids drugs to millions across sub-Saharan Africa are
delighted at the price war. "We think prices can fall further, down to as low as
$200 a year for a triple combination," said Nathan Ford of MSF. "For many
countries drugs are still, and will be still, too expensive."

RE: S&L bailout cost

2001-03-12 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


150-175 billion$$

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman
> Sent: Monday, March 12, 2001 7:23 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:8926] S&L bailout cost
> 
> 
> What is the best estimate of the cost of
> the S&L bailout?
> 
> --
> 
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>

RE: RE: Re: racism discussion/practice

2001-03-11 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> 
>
> CB: If I follow you, what occurs to me is , 1) no individual worker
> or generation of white workers gets the whole long run accumulation
> of advantages;  2) Reich or or someone else cited studied and
> compared North and South and found overall lower wages associated
> with greater racism and reaction in the South, so this suggests the
> 100 years of comparative incremental advantages for whites must be
> discounted because their wages were lower than they would have been
> without racism ( Yoshie's original criticism of Boushey's study and
> conception, I believe ) 3) For Marxists and others who have
> definitely concluded that ending capitalism is in some sense much
> more in the white workers' interest than the wage premiums in
> capitalism, the trade off of wage premiums for no socialism is a net
> big loss for white workers.
>
> I didn't quite follow your reference to biology and genetics.
*

Well, the counterfactual [absence of racism] is too problematic for us to say
with any level of confidence that the wages for northern whites would have been
higher. [1]Because industrial migration to the sunbelt was led by the
capitalists [the deluge of right to work laws] and [2] other, non-racist
influence factors also contributed to wage increases.

My point on biology and genetics was simply in reference to the fact that,
irrespective of whether racism creates a wage premium, racism is irrational as
there is no evidence in biology or genetics of separate races.

> CB: I'm not sure you can say they are willing to pay for the
> externalities , lower quality of life which is epidemic crime. They
> more likely feel stuck with it.
**

Agree.
>

> (((
>
> CB: What is Przeworski's logic ? Again, economists should argue that
> there are bigger benefits to uniting to end capitalism
***

See "Capitalism and Social Democracy". I'm not  sure economists should shoulder
the burden of carrying that argument forward, although they clearly can
contribute. The call should be as Jim D. says, democratic control of the
economy; this means getting political scientists to see that the so called
concordance between capitalism and democracy is an illusion.

Ian

Greider on the brave new world of DC trade politics

2001-03-09 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


[Full piece at: http://thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010326&s=greider ]

FEATURE STORY | March 26, 2001

Trading With the Enemy
by WILLIAM GREIDER


A new season of trade politics is under way among Washington insiders, with an
astonishing twist: America's major multinational corporations are love-bombing
labor and environmentalists. Leading business interests, it turns out, are not
opposed to incorporating labor and environmental rights into new trade
agreements after all. "These are important issues that cannot be ignored," the
Business Roundtable announced, in a report speaking for about 200 of the best
and biggest corporate logos, from General Motors to General Electric. The
Emergency Committee for American Trade and the National Association of
Manufacturers have been shopping a list of various labor-enviro measures they
might support in upcoming trade negotiations. The Economic Strategy Institute, a
think tank financed by steel, aviation, semiconductors, autos and other
manufacturers, went much further. ESI published a scholarly study that argues
labor-rights enforcement will actually generate greater economic efficiency in
the global system and healthier development for poor countries.

This abrupt friendliness toward reform from its most stalwart industrial
opponents represents meaningful progress for the popular forces that made their
anticorporate coalition visible in Seattle. Alas, it is not the millennial
consensus the corporates wish to depict. "The only whiff of sincerity," said
Daniel Seligman of the Sierra Club, "is they sincerely want fast track
legislation with minimum cost to their bottom lines." Lori Wallach, director of
Global Trade Watch, described the business offensive as "a splash of green and
blue paint" intended to get out of the political stalemate threatening further
trade liberalization. "They've hit the political reality," she said. "It's
slaying them."

The business motives clearly involve tactical politics, not some sort of
ideological conversion, but we may at least pause to savor the new music. A year
ago, all right-thinking experts discounted and ridiculed the new social movement
as self-indulgent and destructive. "Luddite whackos," in the Wall Street
Journal's memorable phrase. Economists and free-trade cheerleaders in the media
condescendingly lectured the activists on how impossible it would be to
incorporate "social" values into international agreements without wrecking the
global economy. Besides, they scolded, don't you know such measures do the
gravest harm to the struggling poor of the world? Now that global corporations
are shifting to a more sympathetic line, one awaits a similar revisionism among
their media camp followers. Or will the pundit class turn its fire on Boeing,
Microsoft and others for caving to the Seattle rabble? More likely, the
opinion-makers will blame the bleeding-heart agitators for again mucking up
progress.

The important point is that, tactical insincerity aside, many US multinationals
are implicitly retreating from an untenable intellectual position, as some
business reps privately confirm. A central question raised by labor and others
is, How can the trading system invoke penalties like tariffs to protect
intellectual property rights or capital investors but insist this device would
be illegitimate for labor rights and other human concerns? "There's no answer to
that on intellectual grounds," one business-friendly thinker confided.
"Businesspeople realize the debate has shifted, but they're trying to figure out
how they can still preserve their position."



The intellectual concession is expressed most directly in the ESI's report Labor
Standards in the Global Trading System, by Peter Morici, a neoclassical
economist from the University of Maryland and former economics director at the
US International Trade Commission. Arguing that poor labor conditions hamper
long-term growth even though they may appear to have short-term advantages,
Morici wrote that exploited labor in developing economies, including child labor
and discrimination against women, "may be expected to reduce wages for less
skilled workers in [their] domestic markets, increase exports and place downward
pressure on the wages for competing workers in foreign economies." When freedom
of association, the right to organize and other labor rights aren't protected,
the annual savings in labor costs average more than $6,000 per worker, Morici
estimated. These practices may attract low-end investments to a country's export
zones but won't have much positive effect on economywide development, he wrote.
"Lax enforcement of workers' rights encourages prolonged reliance on
less-skilled, labor-intensive activities and does little to encourage
economy-wide capital formation, the development of more advanced industries and
long-term growth," Morici reported.

This analysis is a pretty good fit with what AFL-CIO president John Sweeney has
been saying when he promotes "fairness" and new ru

RE: Re: racism discussion/practice

2001-03-09 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> 
>
> CB: I think it goes back to what Yoshie emphasized on LBO-Talk at
> first; don't go around telling white workers racism is an economic
> advantage to them.  The unique contribution of left economists, as
> economists, is whenever they discuss the matter, they should
> emphasize (using economists' forms of knowledge) that the immediate
> advantage of racism perceived by white workers, apparent or real, is
> undercut by real losses to white workers. Racism for white workers is
> sort of like a rip tide/undercurrent in the ocean. On the surface the
> waves are going toward shore; underneath, less visible  is a more
> powerful force taking you out to sea.
*

But if what Mat is saying is true with regards the past 100 years of wages [a
long run made up of precisely short-term advantages -a kind of economic Zeno's
paradox]; and further, that econometric studies confirm this [or should we say
for the sake of argument the jury is still out], aren't we thrown back on
creating an ethical argument showing NC models of economic rationality is
contradicted by yet another result of biology, genetics etc.? What are the real
losses if there is a wage premium for whites, while putting up externalities of
"crime" and the like that they seem willing to pay for? How does "workers of all
countries unite" overcome paradoxes of collective action if racism confers
benefits to enough of them to continue to follow Przeworski's logic?

Ian

Taxes and Health; how to convert a conservative

2001-03-09 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Published on Friday, March 9, 2001 in the International Herald Tribune
A Conservative Convert To Socialized Medicine
by David Burgess

PARIS - What's the old joke? A conservative is a liberal who has just been
mugged? Well, I am a conservative who has just been "mugged" by the socialized
French health system, and, to my astonishment, I'm a believer.
I have lived in France for nearly 19 years. Until about two years ago I was very
cross about the amount I had to pay in taxes and in "social charges," which
finance the medical system, in which a pauper gets about the same medical care
as a millionaire.

Let me take you quickly through my experience of being gravely ill in France.

For 20 years or so I had been a gobbler of antacids in one form or another, and
in October 1998 I began to have trouble swallowing. I assumed it was an ulcer
and took the appropriate medicine, but it didn't go away.

At the end of the year I was referred to a doctor who performed an endoscopy, in
which, under anesthetic, a tube is inserted in the throat, allowing the doctor
to have a look around and do a biopsy. He found that I had a malignant tumor at
the base of my esophagus, where it meets the stomach, that had virtually closed
the passage.

The doctor lost no time. He called my local hospital, which fortunately was one
of the four in the Paris area that could do the operation that I needed, and
reserved me a bed for the next day.

At the hospital, within an hour or two of my arrival, my surgeon, who has the
title of professor, as he is head of the department of digestive surgery, paid
me a visit. He outlined the operation I would have, and, in answer to my
question, said the mortality rate for the kind of cancer that I had was about 85
percent within the first three years. But, he said, "Don't worry, we're going to
beat it."

Foolishly, I suppose, I believed him. Now, more than two years later, I still
do; he has lots of charisma.

After my operation, which lasted more than 10 hours, I was in the hospital
another three weeks, then home, where a nurse came by each day to give me the
shots I needed, check and dress my surgical wounds and make sure that I wasn't
losing weight. Then back to the hospital for three days of chemotherapy every
three weeks - four treatments in all.

I was operated on in mid-January 1999, went back to work part-time in mid-May,
and returned to work full-time in September. (For those of you who are less than
enthusiastic at the prospect of going to work in the morning, there is nothing
like a serious illness to adjust your outlook.)

Why does socialized medicine seem to work in some places and be a disaster
elsewhere? Anyone who reads the British press is assaulted daily with tales of
how cancer patients have to wait months for an appointment with an oncologist,
or a candidate for a hip or knee replacement has to wait years. In France, such
delays can be measured in days or, at most, weeks.

Why the difference? Take a deep breath. These are the numbers, provided by the
French and British health ministries and translated into dollars (bear in mind
that Britain and France have roughly the same populations). French total
expenditure on health in 1999 was $109.5 billion. In Britain it was about $78.02
billion. Per capita, it was $1,800 in France and $1,312 in Britain. As a
percentage of the gross domestic product, it was 8.5 percent in France and 5.9
percent in Britain.

I should mention that I am not yet out of the woods. My markers, blood tests
that indicate the presence of cancer, started to rise last summer, and since the
end of September I have again been in chemotherapy. The markers have dropped
consistently, showing that the therapy is working. The treatment is
debilitating. I expect to resume work part-time from April or May until the
summer vacation, and full-time thereafter.

Last summer, I asked a friend of mine, a dean at a medical school in New
England, what the cost of my care would have been in the United States. "About
$700,000," she said. I haven't seen a bill. Well, that is not quite true. I got
a bill for 43 francs (about $6.50). I'm not sure what it was for, but I paid it.

I no longer complain about my taxes.

Copyright © 2001 the International Herald Tribune

RE: Re: Is Racism in the Interest of White Workers?

2001-03-07 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> Maggie says that racism is irrational and ingrained.  Of course, she
> is correct.

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

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


As is sexism. That being said, was the repeal of the ergonomics standards racist
and sexist if it can be shown that the burden falls disproportionately on
non-white non-males?

What does "the long run" mean, besides the fact that we're all dead?

Ian

The unreliability- incompetence argument deployed to give racketeers more $$$

2001-03-07 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Published on Wednesday, March 7, 2001 in the Guardian of London
US Test Failings Make Weapons 'Unreliable'
Pentagon Report Lambasts Missile Shield Evaluation
by Martin Kettle in Washington

Reduced and inadequate testing has led to a serious decline in the reliability
of US weapons, a Pentagon report says.
Service chiefs are cutting too many corners and taking too many risks in their
efforts to bring expensive new weapons systems into operational use before they
have been properly tested, it concludes.

"Cost and schedule pressures are increasingly causing programme managers to
accept more risk and it is showing up as performance shortfalls in operational
testing," says the author of the annual departmental report, Philip Coyle, who
resigned as the Pentagon's director of testing and evaluation in January.

The report is scathing about the increasing failure to test weapons systems
properly, an issue at the centre of the argument about the government's plan to
erect a multibillion dollar missile defence shield to protect the US and its
allies from attacks by "rogue states".

Mr Coyle says that earlier tests of the missile shield were too simple to allow
a properly informed decision whether to move from the current research phase to
deployment, as the administration has made it clear it intends to do.

The missile defence test programme is "not aggressive enough to match the pace
of acquisition to support deployment and the test content does not yet address
important operational questions," the report says.

It makes it clear that the armed forces' desire to bring modern hi-tech weapons
on stream is consistently running ahead of the proof that they can actually do
the job for which they are intended.

The failure to submit new systems to adequate testing has caused repeated delays
in all the armed services, the report says. "The impact of reductions [of
testing] can be seen in the doubling of army systems that failed to meet
reliability requirements," Mr Coyle writes.

In recent years 66% of all US air force programmes have had to stop operational
testing because the system under test was not in fact ready for testing "due to
some major system or safety shortcoming", the report says. In the past five
years 80% of army weapons and equipment programmes have failed to achieve even
half of their "reliability requirements", it adds.

The report is especially critical of the way in which the increasingly ill-fated
and hugely expensive V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff aircraft programme has been
allowed to get so close to deployment with so many basic safety and reliability
issues unsolved.

The Osprey, which crashed twice last year killing 23 US marines, is a
revolutionary cross between a helicopter and a plane. It is intended to replace
the current generation of medium lift assault helicopters.

Tests were reduced "due to cost and schedule pressures", the report says.
Instead of carrying out the planned 103 tests of the controversial tilt-rotor
plane, the marines first cut the number to 49 and then conducted only 33.

Rather than test the Osprey's reliability under icing conditions or under air
combat simulations, the US navy issued waivers to cancel the tests.

The report's criticisms of the national missile defence (NMD) programme come at
a time when President Bush has ordered his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
to conduct a review of defence strategy and needs, including the role of NMD.

It is expected to recommend a central role for a more extensive NMD system than
the one that was tested under the Clinton administration.

The report is highly critical of the adequacy of the testing programme to which
missile defences were subjected as part of the Clinton administration's more
limited programme to examine the feasibility of a land-based system of about 100
anti-missile interceptors based in Alaska.

Unsuccessful NMD test intercepts in 1999 and 2000 were not only failures but
were dogged by "considerable limitations" in reliability, Mr Coyle says.

These included a failure to achieve "realistic engagement conditions" with
respect to radar tracking, range, intercept altitude and closing velocity, as
well as other features.

The tests were of limited use, because they simulated "only unsophisticated
counter-measures, such as simple balloons". In real combat, the report says,
hostile missiles would be equipped with much more elaborate and effective decoy
systems.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

RE: Re: Re: Re: farewell to academe

2001-03-05 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> I see to dimensions to Brad's question.  Is higher education late sorting
> mechanism or does it add to social productivity?  If free higher
> education would
> offer a wage premium to workers and if it added to social
> productivity, wouldn't
> it makes sense to promote education and then to tax the returns?
*

"I would like to present a different view. Higher education, in this model,
contributes in no way to superior economic performance; it increases neither
cognition nor socialization. Instead, higher education serves  as a screening
device in that it sorts out individuals of differing abilities, thereby
conveying information to the purchasers of labor."

[Kenneth Arrow, "Higher Education as a Filter" in "The Economics of Information"
volume 4 of Collected Papers, page 116]

Ian

RE: Re: Re: farewell to academe

2001-03-05 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


Barkley:


>I understand, however, that there is some kind of
> different atmosphere on campus.  Some of it is just a more
> blatant careerism, although that has always been there.
> Some of it is a more blatant kowtowing to external business
> donors, exemplified by the new trend to naming buildings
> after them (when was the last time you saw an academic
> building named after a great thinker or historical figure?).
> Some of it reflects the ongoing expansion of mindless
> administrative bureaucracies.
*

"One topic in the area of social responsibility that I feel duty bound to touch
on, because it affects my own personal interests, has been the claim that
business should contribute to the support of charitable activities and
especially to universities. Such giving by corporations is an inappropriate use
of corporate funds in a free-enterprise society." [M. Friedman, C&F, p. 135]

Ian

Stop the GATS call to action sign-on letter

2001-03-02 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


[From FoodFirst]

ATTENTION --- Civil Society Activists Around the World!

Although the Battle of Seattle was successful in preventing a new
comprehensive round of global trade talks from going ahead, this did not
mean there would not be trade negotiations at the WTO. On the contrary,
a whole new set of WTO talks on global trade in 'services' began in
February, 2000, with formal negotiations due to begin this spring after
a crucial stocktaking session is completed at the end of March. These so
called GATS negotiations [General Agreement on Trade in Services] could
have a dramatic and profound effect on a wide range of public services
and citizens' rights all over the world.

Below is a statement, Stop the GATS Attack Now!, which has been prepared
by an international network of civil society organizations working on
WTO issues. As with previous initiatives like No New Round! and Shrink
or Sink!, we hope this statement will help to launch and link together a
series of country-based campaigns on the GATS negotiations all over the
world.

We would greatly appreciate it if your organization would consider
signing-on to this statement as soon as possible. The procedures for
doing so are outlined below. It is our intention to collect sign-ons
from civil society organizations in as many countries as possible before
formally launching the statement in mid-March prior to the GATS
stocktaking meetings in Geneva later that month. So, please let us know
soon if your organization can sign-on!

Instructions on how your organization can sign the letter: (This is an
organizational sign-on letter only. We will not be adding individuals to
it)

1) Send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2) In the subject line
type in "GATS Attack signatory" 3) In the body of the e-mail list the
organization & country (contact information such as address, phone & fax
is also appreciated) that you are signing on. Those who wish should
mention how many people the organization represents.



Stop the GATS Attack Now!

As civil society groups fighting for democracy through fair trade and
investment rules, we reject the outright dismissal by the World Trade
Organization [WTO], some of its member governments and allied
corporations of the vital concerns raised by civil society before,
during and after Seattle. The smoke and pepper spray had barely lifted
from the streets of Seattle when the WTO launched new negotiations to
expand global rules on cross border trade in services in a manner that
would create vast new rights and access for multinational service
providers and newly constrain government action taken in the public
interest world wide. These talks would radically restructure the role of
government regarding public access to essential social services world
wide to the detriment of the public interest and democracy itself.

Initiated in February 2000, these far-reaching negotiations are aimed at
expanding the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services [GATS] regime
so as to subordinate democratic governance in countries throughout the
world to global trade rules established and enforced by the WTO as the
supreme body of global economic governance. What's more, these GATS 2000
negotiations are taking place behind closed doors based on collusion
with global corporations and their extensive lobbying machinery.

The existing GATS regime of the WTO, initially established in 1994, is
already comprehensive and far reaching. The current rules seek to phase
out gradually all governmental "barriers" to international trade and
commercial competition in the services sector. The GATS covers every
service imaginable - including public services -in sectors that affect
the environment, culture, natural resources, drinking water, health
care, education, social security, transportation services, postal
delivery and a variety of municipal services. Its constraints apply to
virtually all government measures affecting trade-in-services, from
labor laws to consumer protection, including regulations, guidelines,
subsidies and grants, licensing standards and qualifications, and
limitations on access to markets, economic needs tests and local content
provisions.

Currently, the GATS rules apply to all modes of supplying or delivering
a service including foreign investment, cross-border provisions of a
service, electronic commerce and international travel. Moreover, the
GATS features a hybrid of both a "top-down" agreement [where all sectors
and measures are covered unless they are explicitly excluded] and a
"bottom-up" agreement [where only sectors and measures which governments
explicitly commit to are covered]. What this means is that presently
certain provisions apply to all sectors while others apply only to those
specific sectors agreed to.

The new GATS negotiations taking place now in the World Trade
Organization are designed to further facilitate the corporate takeover
of public services by:

1) Imposing new and severe constraints on the ability of government

Douglas Dowd on Hugh Stretton's Econ. text

2001-03-01 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray





Refuting the Big Lie
by Doug Dowd

Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction (Pluto Press, 1999), 864 pages, $90
hardcover, $35 paper.

Capitalism was first firmly established in Britain in the eighteenth century and
it was then and there that economics was born, in Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations
(1776). Economists have served capitalism ever since, but only in the past
quarter-century has capitalism neededand gottenso much from them.

As the twentieth century began, given the intrinsic inequalities of capitalism,
the existence of political democracy in almost all capitalist nations
constituted an ongoing threat to capitals rule, a threat intensified by
capitalisms tendency toward intermittent economic crisis and socioeconomic
weakness.

For much of the nineteenth century, economics tended toward ideology; by its
end, it was pure ideology. But ideology alone was no match for the challenges of
the new century.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the crises were so pervasive and
became so deep that economists could propose nothing to avoid or alleviate them.
When something was proposed, as with Keynes during the depression of the 1930s,
neither capital nor most economists took heed before the Second World Warexcept
in Nazi Germany, which invented the military Keynesianism that undergirded
capitalism in the decades of the Cold War.

And what about economics? The years after the war were also the years in which
business had lost its unchallenged power and prestige, having laid a very large
and rotten egg before the war, as had mainstream (neoclassical) economics. A
substantial group of new economists had also come into being, educated by
the depression, the New Deal, and the war, aware and supportive of the need for
socioeconomic reforms. Their ideas and policies were effectively shaped by the
then-relatively powerful labor movement and a liberalized public, with
significant support from those in big business who had learned from the war just
how useful governmental (especially military) expenditures could be. Not for
nothing were the two decades or so after the war called Cold-War liberalism.

Global economic expansion took hold as the 1950s proceeded, and the following
decade was the most expansive ever, aided and abetted by the Cold War. But
superstate or no, capitalisms laws of motion had only been modified, not
repealed.

In the early 1970s a unique and deep crisiscalled stagflationbegan to surface;
by 1974, it had become global. Simultaneous, severe, and sustained increases in
both unemployment and prices occurred. Capital had realized in the fifties and
sixties that it could tolerate a bit of shared power and the costs and taxes of
the warfare-welfare state, only so long as their sales and profits kept them
ahead of the game. But the global excess capacities of the seventies ended that
particular honeymoon.

Thus began what Richard DuBoff has aptly termed the corporate counter-attack.
It was an attack whose main aims were to weaken unions and get rid of the social
wage in both the private and public spheres: to return to the raw capitalism of
yore.

Corporations could not and did not fight that battle alone. They assiduously and
successfully increased their efforts to influence public opinion through the
media, and it was then that their political contributions began their quantum
leap toward present levels, and achieved the key victory of placing Ronald
Reagan in the White House. Reaganomics was initially seen as laughable and its
policies as some combination of stupid and cruel. Now the policies are taken as
common sense, and the economics as the new gospel.

It is that virtually unchallenged economics that Hugh Stretton effectively
demolishes in his superb book. He is a great teacher; he writes clearly and
without the priestly air so common to economists. His scope is extraordinary in
its combination of breadth and depth; by comparison, other texts rightly seem
both absurd and pretentious.

Strettons economics answers the two big questions that serious people have been
led to believe economists do answer, but which they really do not: What do we
need to know about how the economy functions? and What can and must we do to
make it meet human, social, and environmental needs? Rather than answering such
questions, mainstream economics spreads capitalisms big lie: Whats good for
business is good for everyone, everything, everywhere: which is then delivered
daily by the media and politicians.

Stretton puts another economics in the place of the big lie: an economics that
we need and can understand and use. Stretton is an Australian who studied in his
own country, in England, and in the United States and who did a stint in
government. He knows what hes talking about; he also knows that experience
itself does not guarantee good sense. Here a few excerpts in which he comments
both on the importance and the wrongheadedness of

RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: query: Frank Ramsey]

2001-03-01 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


"Ramsey and Harrod, the founders  of modern theories of dynamic economics, were
scathing about  the ethical dimensions of discounting in a more general context,
commenting respectively that discounting 'is ethically indefensible and arises
merely from the weakness of the imagination' and that it is a 'polite expression
for rapacity and the conquest of reason by passion'." [p. 12]

"To illustrate, if one discounts present world GDP over two hundred years at 5%
per annum, it is worth only a few hundred thousand dollars, the price of a good
apartment. Discounted at 10%, it  is equivalent to a used car." [p. 13]

In: Heal, "Valuing the Future"

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of J. Barkley Rosser,
> Jr.
> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 2:15 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:8578] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: query: Frank Ramsey]
>
>
> Eugene,
>   I can see that it is worded in an unclear manner.
> In this I am partly going with the literature that all
> interprets it to mean that he considers (positive)
> discounting to be "ethically indefensible."  I have
> seen Ramsey's name used in connection with this
> argument on quite a few occasions.  He is probably
> the first "respectable" economist to make the argument
> within the context of a formal model.
>  One such secondary source is
> Kenneth Arrow, "Intergenerational Equity and the Rate
> of Discount in Long-Term Social Investment," in _Contemporary
> Economic Issues: Economic Behaviour and Design, Vol. 4,
> Papers and Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of
> the International Economic Association_, ed. by Murat R. Sertel,
> 1999, London: Macmillan, pp. 89-102.  He discusses Ramsey's
> view on p. 95.
> Barkley Rosser
> -Original Message-
> From: Eugene Coyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Thursday, March 01, 2001 4:31 PM
> Subject: [PEN-L:8571] Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: query: Frank Ramsey]
>
>
> >My confusion, I guess, is which practice Ramsey is saying is "ethically
> >indefensible."  Is "not discounting" ethically indefensible?  Or is it
> >discounting which is "ethically indefensible"?  I should have paid more
> >attention the year they were teaching diagramming sentences.  I didn't, so
> I'm
> >still confused.
> >
> >Gene Coyle
> >
> >"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> >
> >> Eugene,
> >>  To "not discount" means to treat the "future enjoyments"
> >> as equal in value to present ones.  That means using a
> >> zero discount rate.
> >>  There are a lot of people in environmental and ecological
> >> economics who argue for this, along with a lot of others,
> >> including some from the Marxian tradition.  There are a lot
> >> of issues floating around with this.
> >>  Ramsey influenced Pigou who in 1932 complained
> >> about the "defective telescopic faculty" that people use when
> >> contemplating the future (and discounting, that is, devaluing it).
> >> Barkley Rosser
> >> -Original Message-
> >> From: Eugene Coyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> Date: Thursday, March 01, 2001 2:48 PM
> >> Subject: [PEN-L:8568] Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: query: Frank Ramsey]
> >>
> >> >As I read the quoted sentence I take it to mean discount rates should be
> >> higher
> >> >than, not zero.
> >> >
> >> >Clarify?
> >> >
> >> >Gene Coyle
> >> >
> >> >"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> michael,
> >> >> "It is assumed that we do not discount later enjoyments
> >> >> in comparison with earlier ones, a practice which is ethically
> >> >> indefensible and arises merely from the weakness of the
> >> >> imagination."
> >> >> Frank P. Ramsey, "A Mathematical Theory of Saving," Economic
> >> >> Journal, 1928, vol. 38, no. 152, pp. 543-559, quote appearing
> >> >> on the first page.
> >> >>   Essay also reprinted in D.H. Mellor, ed., _Foundations: Essays
> >> >> in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics_, 1978,
> >> >> Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, pp. 261-281, where it
> >> >> appears on p. 261.
> >> >> Barkley Rosser
> >> >> -Original Message-
> >> >> From: michael perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> >> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> >> Date: Thursday, March 01, 2001 1:01 AM
> >> >> Subject: [Fwd: [PEN-L:8500] Re: query: Frank Ramsey]
> >> >>
> >> >> >>He is also famous for arguing on ethical grounds
> >> >> >> that discount rates should be zero.
> >> >> >
> >> >> >I don't recall that in the 1928 article.  Where did he say that?
> >> >> >
> >> >> >"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >>   Frank Ramsey was a mathematical growth
> >> >> >> theorist and philosopher at Cambridge who died
> >> >> >> in his 20s in the 1920s.  He was the first to posit
> >> >> >> a growth theory model with an infinite time horizon,
> >> >> >> I believe.  His "Mathematical Theory of Saving" is
> >> >> >> very influential in growth th

RE: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: query: Frank Ramsey]

2001-03-01 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



> Eugene,
>  To "not discount" means to treat the "future enjoyments"
> as equal in value to present ones.  That means using a
> zero discount rate.
>  There are a lot of people in environmental and ecological
> economics who argue for this, along with a lot of others,
> including some from the Marxian tradition.  There are a lot
> of issues floating around with this.
>  Ramsey influenced Pigou who in 1932 complained
> about the "defective telescopic faculty" that people use when
> contemplating the future (and discounting, that is, devaluing it).
> Barkley Rosser
> -Original Message-
> From: Eugene Coyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Thursday, March 01, 2001 2:48 PM
> Subject: [PEN-L:8568] Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: query: Frank Ramsey]
>
>
> >As I read the quoted sentence I take it to mean discount rates should be
> higher
> >than, not zero.
> >
> >Clarify?
> >
> >Gene Coyle
*



Also Geoffrey Heal's "Valuing the Future: Economic Theory and Sustainability"
has excellent treatment of the issue [math alert].

Ian

Strategic ambiguity today

2001-02-28 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


Rambling before Congress today, AG stated:

"The surge in spending had lifted the growth of the stocks of many types of
consumer durable goods and business capital equipment to rates that could not be
continued. The elevated level of light vehicle sales, for example, implied a
rate of increase in the number of vehicles on the road hardly sustainable for a
mature industry. And even though demand for a number of high-tech products was
doubling or tripling annually, in many cases new supply was coming on even
faster. Overall, capacity in high-tech manufacturing industries rose nearly 50
percent last year, well in excess of its rapid rate of increase over the
previous three years. Hence, a temporary glut in these industries and falling
prospective rates of return were inevitable at some point."



When did this move from contingent to inevitable? Wasn't all that supply chain
management software and demand forecasting technology that the Bill Gates' of
the world told us would get rid of the disconnect between supply and demand
dynamics in the critical sectors of the economy supposed to solve this problem?
How soon before they start blaming workers for the downturn, or at least start
laying on the deniability rhetoric for the Fed's own failures?

Will computer networks in supply chains of various commodities ever improve the
self-prediction of capital and consumer goods markets? We know they don't do it
for financial markets nor can they it seems. Is there something along the
outlines of yet another contradiction of capitalism coming into focus if, as
Albin and others suggest, the economy has Turing level complexity? The futile
striving to make the EMH true for financial markets is precisely what is to be
avoided in capital goods and consumer goods marketsrandomness that precludes
the formation of market power and predictive power.

Enough rambling


Ian

"Great wealth is useless, and may be worse." [L T Hobhouse]

Invitation to Public Debate

2001-02-28 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


Dear Friends and Colleagues

I would like to invite you to a public debate in Hatfield, Herts, UK on 30
April 2001.
Details are attached below - please feel free to circulate them.

There is no charge or registration for attendance but in order to get an
idea of numbers I would appreciate it if you informed me if you are likely
to come.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Best wishes
Geoff Hodgson
Research Professor.


"INSTITUTIONALISM VERSUS MARXISM: PERSPECTIVES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE"

A Public Debate

Professor Alex Callinicos (University of York)
Professor Geoff Hodgson (University of Hertfordshire)

6.00pm, Monday 30 April 2001
Fielder Centre, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Herts., UK
Everyone Welcome. No charge.

This debate between two leading thinkers will address some of the most
important and critical problems in social science today. Does Marxism offer
a viable theoretical alternative for the twenty-first century? Does
institutionalism offer a superior theoretical approach?

Alex Callinicos is the author of "Equality" (2000), "Social Theory: A
Historical Introduction" (1999), "Against Post-Modernism" (1988) and many
other works.

Geoff Hodgson is the author of, for example, "How Economics Forgot History"
(2001), "Economics and Utopia" (1999), and "Evolution and Institutions".

This public debate is organised by the Centre for Research in Institutional
Economics at the University of Hertfordshire.

The Fielder Centre is about one mile from Hatfield Railway Station. There
are fast trains taking about 30 minutes from the centre of London.



--
Geoff Hodgson
Research Professor
University of Hertfordshire
http://www.herts.ac.uk/business/esst/Staff/g-hodgson/hodgson.html
http://www.geoffrey-hodgson.ws

Adieu to globaloney





Goodbye to globalisation

America's new focus means greater realism and honesty for the rest of us

Special report: globalisation

John Gray
Tuesday February 27, 2001
The Guardian

George Bush and Tony Blair sent out a reassuring message from Camp David. Their
schmoozing and backslapping was designed to tell the world that nothing much has
changed since Mr Bush entered the White House. In fact there has been a
momentous shift in America's stance towards the world. As a political project
globalisation is dead. The high-flying rhetoric of the Clinton administration
has been replaced by a hard-headed focus on American national interest. The US
is now more concerned with protecting itself in a dangerous and intractably
disordered world than with spreading its values to the last corners of the
globe.
It is a development that carries large risks, not least for Britain, but it
should also be seen as a triumph of reality over illusion. The era of
globalisation was a time of cant, humbug and self-deception on an enormous
scale. A chorus of pundits, politicians and business people told us that we were
living through an unprecedented economic and technological revolution. At the
same time they suggested that everything would go on much as before. On both
counts they were wrong.

There is nothing unprecedented in the real changes the world economy is
undergoing. The internet is only the latest in a series of technologies that
began with the telegraph. There have been near-instantaneous link-ups between
world markets ever since transatlantic underwater cables were laid in the last
third of the 19th century. Looking further back, we can see that today's new
technologies are another phase in a worldwide industrial revolution that began
200 or 300 years ago, if not earlier.

What we also see if we look back over the past couple of centuries is that it
was a time of great social and political upheaval. Industrialisation did not go
unopposed. Trade unions and social democratic parties were part of a powerful
backlash that included less benign movements such as communism and fascism.
Worldwide industrialisation went together with wars, revolutions and - in many
countries - murderous dictatorships.

The missionaries of globalisation failed to notice its darker side. They
confused a genuinely inexorable historical process - the worldwide diffusion of
new technologies that abolish or curtail time and distance - with market
deregulation, a trend that is clearly on the wane. They were able to pass over
the turbulent history of globalisation because a historic boom in world markets
had created the illusion that economic history had come to an end.

It is hardly accidental that the fad for globalisation coincided with a bubble
on Wall Street. Equally, it is no coincidence that we are hearing a good deal
less of it now that the bubble is deflating. The popular idea of globalisation
expressed what might be called the Dow Jones interpretation of history - the
theory that booming stock prices somehow demonstrated that free markets were
spreading irresistibly across the world. With the pricking of the Wall Street
bubble, that theory is now itself history.

The Bush administration's stance on foreign policy must be seen in the context
of the end of America's long boom. It was easy for Americans to imagine that
history was on their side when the stock market seemed to be making them
effortlessly rich, but the world has begun to look a good deal more forbidding
now that their some of their gains are starting to vanish before their eyes.
When the pain spreads from the stock market to the real economy and rising
unemployment returns to the US, protectionist pressures in Congress will grow.
As the business cycle resumes, perhaps with exaggerated force, the US is likely
to revert to something resembling the attitude to the world that it adopted
towards the end of the 19th century. It will not drift into isolation, but it
will intervene overseas only when it believes its vital interests are at stake.

Many in Europe have been horrified by the shift in attitude in Washington.
Partly Europe's shock at Washington's new priorities reflects its failure to
take seriously long-standing American intentions. US plans for National Missile
Defence (NMD) are objectionable on several counts, notably their highly
destabilising impact on arms control. But they are not new. Some version of NMD
would very likely have gone ahead if Al Gore had become president. This is one
area of clear continuity in American policy. The most worrying aspect of the new
American administration may not be its defence plans but its attitude to the
global environmental crisis. President Bush has publicly cast doubt on the
reality of global warming - thereby breaking with a consensus not only of
scientists but also of a growing number of business leaders. This stance bodes
ill for relations with Europe, and for the wo

RE: Re: Walden Bello on dismantling corporations and their proxies


 >Marxists would be free to study and write about M-C-M'.
> >
> >Peter
>
> Seriously, Peter, you criticize Bello for being "much too reformist,"
> but your program -- "to socialize (which is not necessarily to put
> under public ownership) corporations national and transnational, and
> to craft a set of rules and governing procedures to make possible
> trade without the lash of global competitiveness that has poisoned
> every national political economy" -- looks to me to be _also_ much
> too reformist & utopian to boot. :)
>
> Not that you can't criticize Bello for being "much too reformist,"
> but if that's your criticism, your reader naturally expects more than
> what you offered.
>
> Yoshie
**

So what's your meta-reformist plan to get us beyond M-C-M' Yoshie? How would you
reconfigure the institutions of the technosphere so they're a little more
biosphere friendly while becoming humane work places free of racism, sexism and
all other forms of domination?

"The long term goal should be to reduce the financial and governance role of
the stock market with an eye towards an eventual elimination. Corporations
should be placed increasingly under a combination of worker, community,
customer, supplier, and public control. Of course, it's easy to say that in
a sentence or two, but the actual task, technically and politically, would
be difficult as hell." [DH]

Ian

Trade and Gender


- forwarded message. For more information contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] - 

Announcing the International Gender and Trade Network

The International Gender and Trade Network is made up of seven regional
networks (Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, North America, and
Pacific) of gender advocates involved in research, advocacy and economic
literacy around issues of trade and development.

Each region operates autonomously with its own regional coordinator, and
economic literacy and research focal points.  But we all share common goals
of identifying trade's impact on women and a women's agenda relative to
trade and investment that will foster greater economic justice and security
for women, families and communities globally. Our work on these issues is
facilitated through the coordinating role of overall research and economic
literacy coordinators who work with the Secretariat to ensure global and
intra-regional comparative dynamics.

Currently, the regions are following particular trade negotiations, such as
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) (ALCA for LA) and Cotonou (the new
agreement between the European Union and the ACP -African, Caribbean and
Pacific - countries) and ongoing WTO negotiations. Periodic updates on
regional actions as well as the status of ongoing negotiations are available
on our web site. Each region is also undertaking specific research projects,
focusing on critical questions concerning gender and trade in that region.

To learn more about the International Gender and Trade Network, including
how to get involved go to our homepage at: www.genderandtrade.net 
.  To receive weekly updates by email on the
work of the Network email [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
and request to be added to the "genderandtrade" list-serve.

Walden Bello on dismantling corporations and their proxies





Should corporate-led institutions be reformed or disempowered?
It's not off the wall to think of dismantling corporations
[Part II of The most crucial task facing the world's NGOs]

by Waldon Bello
The CCPA Monitor, February 2001, pp 14-16

The battle against the global corporate agenda will be largely decided by the
tactics adopted by the world's non-government organizations (NGOs). And these
tactics in turn depend not only on the balance of forces, but will turn even
more fundamentally on our answer to the key question: Should we seek to
transform or to disable the main institutions of corporate-led globalization?

Institutions should be saved and reformed they're functioning, while defective,
but nevertheless can be reoriented to promote the interests of society and the
environment. They should be abolished if they have become fundamentally
dysfunctional.

Can we really say that the International Monetary Fund can be reformed to bring
about global financial stability, the World Bank to reduce poverty, and the WTO
to bring about fair trade? Are they not, in fact, imprisoned within paradigms
and structures that create outcomes that contradict these objectives? Can we
truly say that these institutions can be re-engineered to handle the multiple
problems that have been thrown up by the process of corporate-led globalization?

The answer to all these questions, realistically, is NO. So, instead of trying
to reform these institutions, would it in fact be more realistic--and
"cost-effective," to use a horrid neoliberal term--to abolish or at least
disempower them, and create totally new institutions that do not have the
baggage of illegitimacy, institutional failure, and Jurassic mindsets that
attach to the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO?

Disabling the corporation

Indeed, I would contend that the focus of our efforts these days is not to try
to reform the multilateral agencies, but to deepen the crisis of legitimacy of
the whole system. Gramsci once described the bureaucracy as but an "outer trench
behind which lay a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks." We must no
longer think simply in terms of neutralizing the multilateral agencies that form
the outer trenches of the system, but of disabling the transnational
corporations that are the fortresses and earthworks that constitute the core of
the global economic system.

I am talking about disabling not just the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank, but
the transnational corporation itself. And I am not talking about a process of
"reregulating" the TNCs but of eventually dismantling them as fundamental
hazards to people, society, the environment, to everything we hold dear.

Is this off the wall? Only if we think that the shocking irresponsibility and
secrecy with which theMonsantos and Novartises have foisted biotechnology on
us is a departure from the corporate norm. Only if we also see as deviations
from the norm Shell's systematic devastation of Ogoniland in Nigeria, the Seven
Sisters' conspiracy to prevent the development of renewable energy sources in
order to keep us slaves to a petroleum civilization, Rio Tinto's and the mining
giants' practice of poisoning rivers and communities, and Mitsubishi's recently
exposed 20-year cover-up of a myriad of product-safety violations to prevent a
recall that would cut into profitability. Only if we think that it is acceptable
business practice to pull up stakes, lay off people, and destroy
long-established communities in order to pursue ever-cheaper labour around the
globe--a process that most TNCs now engage in.

NO, these are not departures from normal corporate behaviour. They are normal
corporate behaviour.   And corporate crime against people and the environment
has, like the Mafia, become a way of life because, as the British philosopher
John Gray tells us, "Global market competition and technological innovation have
interacted to give us an anarchic world economy."

 To such a world of anarchy, scarcity, and conflict created by global
laissez-faire, Gray continues, "Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Malthus are better
guides than Adam Smith or Friedrich von Hayek, with their Utopian vision of a
humanity united by "the benevolent harmonies of competition." Smith's world of
peacefully competing enterprises has, in the age of the TNC, degenerated into
Hobbes' "war of all against all."

Gray goes on to say that, "As it is presently organized, global capitalism is
supremely ill-suited to cope  with the risks of geo-political conflict that are
endemic in a world of worsening scarcities. Yet a regulatory framework for
coexistence and cooperation among the  world's diverse economies figures in no
historical or political agenda."

Recent events underline his point. When the ice  cap on the North Pole is
melting at an unprecedented  rate and the ozone layer above the South Pole has
declined by 30%, owing precisely to the dynamics of this corporate
civilization's insatiable desi

Socializing the debt in Thailand

2001-02-25 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray






Bangkok to buy banks' bad debts
By Amy Kazmin in Cha-Am, Thailand
Published: February 25 2001 20:31GMT | Last Updated: February 26 2001 01:00GMT



Thailand's new government is to tackle the country's bad-debt problem and
promote industrial restructuring by creating a state agency to buy up most
non-performing loans from private commercial banks.

The agency will buy and manage about Bt300bn ($7bn) in non-performing loans from
private banks and Bt900bn in bad loans from state banks. For private banks the
scheme will apply to bad debts that have more than three creditors.

The move follows intensive discussions at the seaside resort of Hua Hin over the
weekend between top bankers and the government's economic team led by Thaksin
Shinawatra, Thailand's newly installed prime minister (pictured).

Somkid Jatusripitak, finance minister, said that the government intended to use
its leverage as major creditor to promote a fundamental corporate restructuring.

This would include consolidating fragmented sectors such as Thailand's steel
industry into stronger units that could compete globally. Deal-making has been
impossible because so many creditors are involved.

Crucial questions about pricing and loss-sharing formulas have yet to be
decided. However, Mr Thaksin said the government agency would pay net book value
for the bad loans, minus an as yet unspecified discount, issuing long-term bonds
to finance the buyout.

He added that the assets would be managed by outside professionals, not by
government bureaucrats.

Critics have expressed concern that the bad-debt buyout would mean taxpayers
shouldering the burden for the mess made by banks and powerful corporate
interests during the boom years before the 1997 economic crash.

However, Mr Thaksin, who promised in his election campaign to return struggling
banks to financial health, said the government would not relax pressure on
defaulting borrowers to pay back their debts.

"They will not get off the hook easily," Mr Thaksin said. "This is not a
bail-out."

Mr Thaksin said the idea was to resuscitate potentially viable businesses to
help get the economy moving. "We can help to revive businesses which can be the
instrument for creating jobs."

Supavud Saicheua, head of research at Merrill Lynch Phatra Securities and an
informal adviser to the new government, said: "If you are the creditor to a big
portion of the industry, you can push to rationalise. Bank bail-out is the last
thing on their minds."

Mr Thaksin said the transfer of bad loans would not get banks lending again
right away. "This is just to prepare them to jump into the economy if it were to
recover," he said. "But we have to revive the real economy also."

However, bankers said there was an understanding that banks would reduce their
large spreads between lending and deposit rates once the bad-debt burden had
eased.

Mr Thaksin has expressed concern about low deposit rates, which he said has
squeezed people living on a fixed income and undermined consumer confidence.
Banks say large interest margins are necessary because of the high level of
non-performing loans.

Bankers also said Mr Thaksin surprised them by expressing support for
strengthening bankruptcy and foreclosure laws to make it easier to seize
recalcitrant borrowers' assets. "It is another step towards tightening the
bolts," the prime minister said after the meeting.

Quote of the day

2001-02-23 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


Who said this:

"The political constituency for the ecological economics viewpoint is not so
much the American working class as the populations in the South who suffer from
their inability to prevent exports that imply social and ecological
dumping...poorest countries may become the real losers by suffering the
environmental load of "affluent consumption."

Canadian Parliament haggles over FTAA and "transparency"


[from Ellen Gould]

http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/chambus/house/debates/016_2001-02-19/HAN016-E
.htm

Mr. Bill Blaikie (WinnipegTranscona, NDP): Mr. Speaker, my question is
also for the
Minister for International Trade.

The minister seems to not appreciate the seriousness of the fact that
documents may be available
to American members of congress that are not available to Canadian
members of parliament.

I would like the Minister for International Trade answer a question.
Never mind
Americanization. The most Americanizing thing that one could think of
would be the FTAA. It is
not a question of Americanization. It is a question of democracy and
access for members of
parliament to important documents. Will he make a commitment that
whatever is available to
members of congress will also be available to Canadian members of
parliament?

Hon. Pierre Pettigrew (Minister for International Trade, Lib.): Mr.
Speaker, I find it
interesting that we see the NDP joining the Bloc in wanting the
Americanization of our way of
proceeding. I will look into exactly how they are proceeding in the
United States and I will look
into what is available. If it is available to congress, it will not be
long before it becomes public.
Let me look into exactly how the Americans are proceeding.

The one thing I can tell the House is that nobody will give Canada
lessons in transparency in
these negotiations. We have been transparent and have taken the lead in
dialoguing with society
on these issues.



  1430

Mr. Bill Blaikie (WinnipegTranscona, NDP): Mr. Speaker, that was one of
the dumbest
answers I have heard and, believe me, that is going some.

Workplace safety litigation?


From: http://.ft.com



Aiding America's victims
Litigation awards a lot to a few but no-fault insurance may be fairer - and
cheaper
Published: February 21 2001 19:34GMT | Last Updated: February 21 2001 19:42GMT



Suppose three refinery workers in Texas are maimed by burns that cover 70 per
cent of their bodies, because their employer fails to inspect a pressure vessel.
Surely they can exercise their fundamental human right to litigate?

Not in the land of the lawsuit. Though litigiousness ranks with the Protestant
work ethic as a core American value, US law does not allow these men to sue the
employer that burned them. They cannot force the refinery to pay millions of
dollars for pain and suffering. They cannot impose punitive damages, possibly in
the billions, to deter others from such negligence. They cannot even fully
recover lost earnings.

Workers injured by sexual jokes, racial slurs or age bias can earn awards worth
millions. But those maimed by workplace injuries cannot have their day in court,
because the law makes most employers immune from such lawsuits. Instead, work
injuries are dealt with by a no-fault insurance scheme.

In the vast American sea of liability, there are islands of immunity not just in
workplace safety but also in other areas of employment, securities and consumer
law. Their very existence calls into question the moral geography of the system
as a whole.

Extravagant litigation is its most obvious feature. George W.Bush the candidate
promised to redraw the map of civil justice in America. He vowed to cap
excessive legal fees, punish frivolous litigation, deter bad-faith lawsuits and
force losers to pay under certain circumstances. He even vowed to protect
teachers against liability for discipline in the classroom.

But George W. Bush the president seems to have lost interest in cartography.
Grand reforms of the system have dropped off his agenda. Perhaps he is doing no
more than recognise the lie of the land. In a divided Congress heavily lobbied
by trial lawyers, only the most limited reforms will prosper.

Any kind of swingeing tax on huge legal fees, for example - though still being
toyed with by Bush reformers - seems unlikely to survive the greed-fed
opposition of trial lawyers.

And even the poor teachers may not get their island of immunity. Mr Bush's
promised Teacher Protection Act is not expected to be part of the education
legislation he sends to Capitol Hill.

Indeed, the only important reforms with a chance of passing into law came from
the old Congress. One measure could limit the number of class-action lawsuits by
forcing them out of state courts and into the federal system, which has tougher
standards. But another could turn the tide in the opposite direction: it would
extend litigation to an area of previous immunity, by allowing patients to sue
their health maintenance organisations about the extent of their insurance
cover.

But even if Mr Bush had been able to pursue the wilder visions of tort reform
that danced in his head when he was a candidate, he still would not have asked
the larger questions:

 How can it be right that six people riding in a General Motors car can be
awarded $4.9bn when their petrol tank explodes, whereas six GM employees
test-driving the same car at work would probably get nothing but a portion of
their medical costs and salary?

 How can it be right that it is easier to sue a company and force a settlement
of even baseless suits if the subject is sex discrimination than if it is
securities fraud? Tighter rules brought in during the past decade discourage
frivolous securities lawsuits and have increased the rate of dismissals. Could
something similar not be done to tame employment litigation?

 How can it be right that, increasingly, consumers are forced to sign away the
right to litigate when they sign credit card, leasing, insurance, computer and
e-commerce contracts? This is a legal sanctuary that over the past few years has
grown by stealth to encompass a large number of consumer transactions and
employment contracts. Banks, computer makers, insurance firms, car dealers and
others have begun writing contracts that force consumers to submit disputes to
arbitration. Most of the time, this stops consumers with small disputes from
uniting to bring class actions. In effect, it limits both the damages they can
claim and their ability to find a lawyer willing to represent them.

How can such anomalies persist in a country that considers the right to sue
fundamental to democracy, essential to level the playing field between employee
or consumer and corporation and crucial to the perfection of capitalism?

Proponents of the American civil justice system say it harnesses the
entrepreneurial spirit of plaintiffs' lawyers (most of whom work for a share of
the profits) to compensate victims (in the absence of a social safety net) and
regulate corporate conduct (in the absence of big government). Surely it would
make sense to extend t

RE: RE: Re: Mises University



> but they don't believe in rational expectations. not at all. Lachmann was very
> close to Shackle in many resepcts. Lachmann is considered by some Austrians to
> be a "nihilist" because he takes the Austrian notion of radical uncertainty so
> seriously he almost doesn't get market coordination or spontaneous order.
>
> this is what I respect about the Austrian research program. It is very easy to
> get market coordination or spontaneous order when you assume away all the
> problems, like the neoclassicals. Perfect information, perfect foresight,
> perfect competition, big deal you get a result that markets are efficient. But
> recognize radical uncertainty, no equilibrium, etc., and still argue that
> spontaneous order is achieved, that is a much bolder claim. That is
> how I became
> interested in how the Austrians actually explain this achievement.


Not to mention leaving spontaneous and efficient pretty undefined.

Ian

RE: Automatic Professor Machine


Cool, android pedagogy :-)

Whatever are we gonna do when the boundary between computers and drugs gets
morphed?

Ian

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman
> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 10:07 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:8364] Automatic Professor Machine
>
>
> http://chronicle.com/free/2001/02/2001022201u.htm
>
> Chronicle of Education
>Thursday, February 22, 2001
>
>
>
>
> 'Automatic Professor Machine' Is
> Unveiled -- by a Longtime
> Technology Critic
>
> By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
>
> A longtime technology critic has fashioned
> a prototype of a device that he says could
> do away with traditional colleges and
> teachers, replacing them with
> knowledge-dispensing terminals that look
> like A.T.M.'s. The fictional device, called
> the Automatic Professor Machine, spoofs
> the ever-rising wave of
> education-technology products on college
> campuses.
>
>
>   Langdon Winner with the A.P.M. prototype.
>
>
>
> Its inventor, Langdon Winner, has staged
> satirical news conferences unveiling the
> machine on campuses and at educational
> meetings around the country. Mr. Winner,
> a professor of political science at
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who has
> long criticized e-learning, says he hopes the
> Automatic Professor Machine will make
> people stop and think about the current
> craze for online education.
>
> In the spirit of distance education, the
> professor has placed a video recording of
> his mock news conference on his World
> Wide Web site.
>
> In the 25-minute video, Mr. Winner plays
> the role of a slick entrepreneur named L.C.
> Winner, C.E.O. of EDU-SHAM,
> Educational Smart Hardware Alma Mater
> Inc. He delivers a PowerPoint presentation
> about the future of education and the many
> products his virtual company is developing,
> including a "wearable university" that
> delivers courseware via a university T-shirt.
>
> Here's how L.C. Winner says the A.P.M.
> would work: Students would walk up to
> one of the computer terminals -- installed at
> convenient locations like fast-food
> restaurants, prisons, and colleges -- and
> select a course or degree from a menu.
> Then students would insert a few hundred
> dollars and a floppy disk to retrieve lessons
> from a central database. The students
> would place their completed lessons back in
> an A.P.M. terminal to get their grades and
> an instant diploma.
>
> Mr. Winner says his presentation is a
> reaction to what he sees as a lack of critical
> attention to education technology.
>
> "I thought the debate about education and
> technology had gone too far in one
> direction. It was sort of all enthusiasts and
> all people going, 'This is the wave of the
> future.'"
>
> The professor has long had an interest in
> satire. In 1969, while he was a music critic
> and editor for Rolling Stone, Mr. Winner
> helped create the Masked Marauders, a
> band that spoofed rock "supergroups" that
> brought together stars from various popular
> bands.
>
> The rock band included musicians who
> imitated Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul
> McCartney, and George Harrison.
>
> Stay tuned. Mr. Winner says he's planning
> a musical sendup of distance education -- a
> song called "March of the Distant
> Educators." He says the song will combine
> the grandeur of "Pomp and Circumstance"
> with the catchiness of an advertising jingle.
>
>
> --
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Chico, CA 95929
> 530-898-5321
> fax 530-898-5901
>

WTO 2day




21 February 2001

Dear WTO Website users,

Please find below the latest news from the WTO appearing on
the WTO website at http://www.wto.org.  To access the information you can
either click on the links or copy and paste them into your browser address
window.   If the new information doesn't appear, try refreshing the screen.

WTO AGRICULTURE NEGOTIATIONS: THE ISSUES, AND WHERE WE ARE
NOW

The first phase of the WTO agriculture negotiations is
drawing to a close. You can find out what has been happening in our
background note on the latest situation, which has just has been updated.
It's on the WTO website at:

http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/agric_e/negs_bkgrnd00_contents_e.htm
where you can browse it or download it as a 20-page document
in Word or pdf format and print it out.

The note incorporates all the proposals received so far and
some of the discussion in the negotiating meetings, the latest having taken
place on 5-7 February 2001. There are now 36 proposals from 87 countries
(62% of the WTO's membership of 140). The latest is from Nigeria, and as
usual you can find it on our main agriculture negotiations "gateway" page:
http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/agric_e/negoti_e.htm
We are also continuing to add statements made at the 5-7
February meeting to the website as they are released.

The next meeting starts on 22-23 March, when WTO member
governments will continue to discuss the proposals received so far. Then, on
26-28 March they will take stock of the first 12 months of the negotiations
and embark on the second phase.

SEE THE MAIN NEWS ITEMS FOR THE PAST WEEK
Moldova concludes membership negotiations
The Republic of Moldova, on 19 February 2001, concluded its
negotiations for accession to the WTO with the Working Party's adoption of
the country's package of membership documents. Director-General Mike Moore
congratulated Moldova for the rapid pace of the negotiations and its
"impressive hard work" to secure WTO membership. 
Also:
> Dispute body adopts Argentina hides ruling, sets up panel
in Brazil-Canada aircraft case
> WTO and World Bank release book on internationalization of
financial services.
> WTO Ministerial to be held 9-13 November 2001
> WTO Secretariat organizes "Symposium on Tourism Services"
> Moore cites success of WTO trade policy courses
> New proposal for LDC assistance adopted
> WTO elects officers for 2001
> WTO organizes "Trade, Technology and Development" seminar
Go to our news page for the full stories at
http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news_e.htm.  For items more than three
days old, you may have to consult the News Archives for 2001
http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news01_e/news01_e.htm.

Regards,



Webmaster
WTO website http://www.wto.org
World Trade Organization
154 Rue de Lausanne
1211 Geneva 21
Switzerland

Intl. Statement on GATS


[From Public Citizen; contact info below]


- please forward widely -

ATTENTION --- Civil Society Activists Around the World!

Although the Battle of Seattle was successful in preventing a new comprehensive
round of global trade talks from going ahead, this did not mean there would not
be trade negotiations at the WTO. On the contrary, a whole new set of WTO talks
on global trade in 'services' began in February, 2000, with formal negotiations
due to begin this spring after a crucial stocktaking session is completed at the
end of March. These so called GATS negotiations [General Agreement on Trade in
Services] could have a dramatic and profound effect on a wide range of public
services and citizens' rights all over the world.

Pasted below is a statement, Stop the GATS Attack Now!, which has been prepared
by an international network of civil society organizations working on WTO
issues. As with previous initiatives like No New Round! and Shrink or Sink!, we
hope this statement will help to launch and link together a series of
country-based campaigns on the GATS negotiations all over the world.

We would greatly appreciate it if your organization would consider signing-on to
this statement as soon as possible. The procedures for doing so are outlined
below. It is our intention to collect sign-ons from civil society organizations
in as many countries as possible before formally launching the statement in
mid-March prior to the GATS stocktaking meetings in Geneva later that month. So,
please let us know soon if your organization can sign-on!

Instructions on how your organization can sign the letter:  (This is an
organizational sign-on letter only. We will not be adding individuals to it)

1) Send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
2) In the subject line type in "GATS Attack signatory"
3) In the body of the e-mail list the organization and country (contact
information such as address, phone & fax is also appreciated) that you are
signing on. Those who wish should also mention how many people the organization
represents.







 Stop the GATS Attack Now!

As civil society groups fighting for democracy through fair trade and
investment rules, we reject the outright dismissal by the World Trade
Organization [WTO], some of its member governments and allied corporations of
the vital concerns raised by civil society before, during and after Seattle. The
smoke and pepper spray had barely lifted from the streets of Seattle when the
WTO launched new negotiations to expand global rules on cross border trade in
services in a manner that would create vast new rights and access for
multinational service providers and newly constrain government action taken in
the public interest world wide. These talks would radically restructure the role
of government regarding public access to essential social services world wide to
the detriment of the public interest and democracy itself.

Initiated in February 2000, these far-reaching negotiations are aimed at
expanding the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services [GATS] regime so as
to subordinate democratic governance in countries throughout the world to global
trade rules established and enforced by the WTO as the supreme body of global
economic governance. What's more, these GATS 2000 negotiations are taking place
behind closed doors based on collusion with global corporations and their
extensive lobbying machinery.

The existing GATS regime of the WTO, initially established in 1994, is
already comprehensive and far reaching. The current rules seek to phase out
gradually all governmental "barriers" to international trade and commercial
competition in the services sector. The GATS covers every service imaginable -
including public services - in sectors that affect the environment, culture,
natural resources, drinking water, health care, education, social security,
transportation services, postal delivery and a variety of municipal services.
Its constraints apply to virtually all government measures affecting
trade-in-services, from labor laws to consumer protection, including
regulations, guidelines, subsidies and grants, licencing standards and
qualifications, and limitations on access to markets, economic needs tests and
local content provisions.

Currently, the GATS rules apply to all modes of supplying or delivering
a service including foreign investment, cross-border provisions of a service,
electronic commerce and international travel. Moreover, the GATS features a
hybrid of both a "top-down" agreement [where all sectors and measures are
covered unless they are explicitly excluded] and a "bottom-up" agreement [where
only sectors and measures which governments explicitly commit to are covered].
What this means is that presently certain provisions apply to all sectors while
others apply only to those specific sectors agreed to.

The new GATS negotiati

Marx and Huxley out to haunt Dubya


[How long before fetuses are full fledged commodities?]





Nobel Laureates Back Stem Cell Research
Group of 80 Recipients Sends Letter Asking Bush Not to Block U.S. Funding for
Studies

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 22, 2001; Page A02



Hoping that sheer brainpower may help tip the balance in a heated political and
ethical debate, 80 U.S. Nobel laureates have signed a letter to President Bush
urging him to not block the first flow of federal dollars for research on human
embryo cells.

The letter, which organizers believe is the biggest collection of Nobel
signatures ever sent to a president, marks the latest effort to influence the
Bush administration as it decides whether to fund experiments on embryonic stem
cells. The cells, obtained from spare human embryos slated for destruction at
fertility clinics, are widely believed to hold the potential to cure many
ailments, including juvenile diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

The decision about whether to fund the work is forcing the new administration to
weigh its political allegiances in an escalating battle pitting antiabortion
activists against patient advocates and biomedical researchers.

Opponents of the work say the cells are ethically tainted because human embryos
must be destroyed to retrieve them.

But in their letter to Bush, the Nobel laureates say that given the cells' great
therapeutic promise, it would be immoral not to study them.

"While we recognize the legitimate ethical issues raised by this research, it is
important to understand that the cells being used in this research were destined
to be discarded in any case," the letter said. "Under these circumstances, it
would be tragic to waste this opportunity to pursue the work that could
potentially alleviate human suffering."

The letter is to be faxed to the White House this morning -- three weeks before
a National Institutes of Health deadline by which scientists must apply for the
agency's planned first round of stem cell research grants.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson has said he is "reviewing"
the Clinton administration's decision to fund such research, and Thompson "is
cognizant of" the March 15 deadline, said HHS spokesman Campbell Gardett.

But with Thompson's review still in its early stages, and the NIH grantmaking
process set to proceed, many researchers fear that Bush will not wait and
instead sign an executive order blocking the funding before it begins.

The letter to Bush was signed by such notables as James Watson, who won a Nobel
in 1962 for co-discovering, with Francis Crick, the structure of DNA; molecular
biologist Hamilton O. Smith, who was a key player in the recent landmark genome
mapping effort by Celera Genomics of Rockville; Edward Lewis, the California
Institute of Technology biologist who conducted seminal work on embryo
development; and Nobelists in other disciplines, including physicists Murray
Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg and economists Robert Samuelson and Milton
Friedman.

The letter was composed and circulated by Michael West and Robert Lanza, two
scientists at Advanced Cell Technology Inc., a biotechnology company in
Worcester, Mass. Lanza said the company, which conducts stem cell research, had
nothing to gain from the campaign since a Bush ban on federal funding for stem
cell research would force scientists to do business with private companies such
as his. Rather, he said, he was motivated by a personal wish to help patients.

"As a medical doctor and a human being, I feel obligated to do everything I can
to ensure that this research reaches the clinic as soon as possible."

The letter drew sharp criticism from opponents of the research, including
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.

"Just as war is too important to be left only to generals, the killing of human
beings in medical research is an issue too important to be left only to
scientists, even Nobel laureates," Johnson said. Like other opponents, he favors
research on similar cells obtained from adults -- an approach that many
scientists say is promising but not promising enough to justify dropping the
embryo studies.

The stem cell debate that Bush inherited started when the Clinton administration
determined that research on embryo cells was not prohibited by a longstanding
congressional ban on embryo-destroying research. Federal researchers could not
themselves destroy embryos to get stem cells, the HHS general counsel declared.
But they could conduct research on cells taken from embryos that privately
funded researchers had destroyed.

Opponents claim that ruling was wrong and hope that Thompson's new general
counsel, yet to be named, will reverse the opinion. That would stop the grant
approval process on a legal technicality without Bush having to make an
executive decision.

The NIH delayed giving grant money for embryo cell r

Supremes to rule on plant patents

2001-02-20 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2001


Court To Hear Seed Patent Dispute
WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to use a dispute over corn
seeds to clarify whether some types of plants are eligible for patent
protection.

The court said it will hear an Iowa farm supply business' argument that patents
cannot be awarded to those who develop new varieties of plants reproduced from
seeds.

The supply company, Farm Advantage Inc. of Belmond, Iowa, was sued by Pioneer
Hi-Bred International, the world's largest producer of seed corn.

Pioneer alleged that Farm Advantage infringed on its patents for 17 corn seed
products by reselling them to farmers. Pioneer sells the products under a
limited license that does not allow them to be resold.

Farm Advantage sought to throw out the lawsuit, arguing that the patents were
invalid. The company said federal law does not allow patent protection for seeds
and plants reproduced from seeds, but that varieties of such plants can be
protected under a 1970 law called the Plant Variety Protection Act.

A federal judge in Sioux City, Iowa, ruled against Farm Advantage in 1998, and
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed in January 2000.
``Neither Congress nor the courts excluded new plant varieties from the patent
statute,'' the appeals court said.

In the appeal granted Supreme Court review on Tuesday, Farm Advantage's lawyers
said the patent law's protection of '``anything under the sun that is made by
man' was not intended to include plants.''

A 1930 law specifies that patent protection can be given to plants produced from
grafting or cutting rather than from seeds. But Farm Advantage's lawyers said
seed-grown plant varieties ``were not and had never been intended by Congress to
be included within the class of things patentable'' under the federal law.

Pioneer's lawyers said the patent law is intended to sweep broadly and that a
1980 Supreme Court decision said that ``living things'' can be patented.

Justice Department lawyers supported Pioneer's argument. Patent law provides
broader protection than the Plant Variety Protection Act, and denying patent
protection to seed-grown plants would reduce incentives for research and
development, government lawyers said.

The case is J.E.M. AG Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, 99-1996.

Contradictions of US labor law

2001-02-18 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Employer, Employee Roles Blurred
Subcontracting Case Demonstrates the Potential for Shortchanging Workers

By Sarah Schafer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 19, 2001; Page E01


It was just the kind of job that Zenon Soto was looking for when he came to
Washington from Bolivia six years ago. It provided health insurance, required
little English and paid up to $16.50 an hour.

For two years, Soto believed he worked for C.R. Calderon Construction Inc. of
College Park, hanging drywall in office buildings that would house some of the
Washington area's hottest companies.

But in 1999, Soto said, he realized he wasn't being paid fairly for overtime.
Later, he said, the company stopped providing health insurance without telling
him why. Some time after that, the pay stopped altogether.

When he complained, Soto was told he didn't work for Calderon at all. The
company said he and many of his co-workers had been employed by subcontractors
hired by Calderon.

Soto, his wife, Tania, and 15 other workers sued Calderon for about $120,000 in
overtime, back pay and damages. On Friday, they reached a settlement in which
Calderon admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay the workers a total of
$30,000.

Lawyers and social workers said the case offers a glimpse of how construction
firms have been able to exploit legal and illegal immigrants by relying on weak
labor-law enforcement and the reluctance of many immigrants to complain.

In interviews and court filings, the workers said Calderon cheated them out of
tens of thousands of dollars of overtime and deducted money from their paychecks
for health insurance or child-care payments that never were made.

The company argued that many of the workers were employed by subcontractors, not
Calderon, according to Philip B. Zipin, a lawyer for the company's owners,
Carlos and Ana Pilar Calderon of Olney. Therefore, the subcontractors -- not
Calderon -- were responsible for payment and benefits, he said.

One of the key questions in the case -- who is an employer and who is an
employee? -- is popping up increasingly in the modern economy, with its loose
networks of freelancers, temporary employees, independent contractors and other
worker arrangements, experts said.

The distinction matters because U.S. labor laws impose specific financial
obligations on employers, such as paying minimum wage, time-and-a-half for
overtime, and Social Security and unemployment taxes. An employer can sharply
reduce certain payroll expenses and gain more workforce flexibility by using
independent contractors or temporary workers rather than full-fledged
employees -- but is breaking the law if those workers do not meet certain
federal criteria.

In one recent case closely followed by the high-tech industry, a federal judge
ruled that Microsoft Corp. inappropriately classified thousands of employees as
temporary workers when they should have been treated as full employees.
Microsoft settled the employees' lawsuit by paying $96.9 million.

The misuse of independent contractors "is fast becoming a classic scam to avoid
minimum wage, overtime and other labor laws," former labor secretary Robert
Reich said without commenting on the Calderon case specifically.

Fuzzy employment relationships can be particularly difficult for immigrants, who
already are more likely to be denied overtime or other benefits required by law
because they often don't understand English or are unsure of their rights, Reich
said.

In addition, many immigrant workers are here illegally and fear deportation
should they speak out against employers. Often, they come from countries where
government corruption is common, and therefore they mistrust the public agencies
here that are supposed to ensure that they are treated fairly. And those who
accept cash to avoid paying taxes are also less likely to complain because they
fear attention from the Internal Revenue Service.

"To a lot of people in the Latin American community, you know, 10 bucks a day is
a lot of money. . . . Most fear losing their jobs and getting kicked out of the
country. For what? A few dollars more?" said Elizabeth Potts, deputy director of
the Coalition for Fair Contracting, an organization funded by labor and
management groups to monitor construction projects that receive government
funding. "They have families to feed, not only here but back in their country."

The U.S. Supreme Court and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have
declared that undocumented workers have the same employment rights as legal
workers under federal labor law. But many immigrant advocates say it's more
likely for a construction site to get a visit from the Immigration and
Naturalization Service than from the Department of Labor.

Only about half of the immigrant workers who sued Calderon are working in the
United States legally, according to Jim Rosenberg, an attorney for the workers.

For decades, the Washi

CA utilities cont.

2001-02-18 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



DAVIS ANNOUNCES PLAN TO RESCUE TROUBLED UTILITIES

By Jennifer Coleman
Associated Press
February 18, 2001
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Proposing to plunge California deeper into the energy
business, Gov. Gray Davis announced a multibillion-dollar plan to rescue two
utilities from the brink of bankruptcy in part by buying miles of electric
transmission lines.

The plan also would require the parents of Southern California Edison and
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to help pay off the utilities' debts, which they
say are approaching $13 billion.

Under the plan announced Friday, the state would spend billions for power lines
owned by PG&E, SoCal Edison and the state's other investor-owned utility, San
Diego Gas & Electric.

Buying the lines could cost the state $7 billion, Democratic Assemblyman Fred
Keely said. Enough of the Legislature's majority Democrats appear to support the
proposal to pass it. Davis said it would be financed with no rate increases.

The state has pledged to spend at least $10 billion in revenue bonds to buy
power for customers of SoCal Edison and PG&E, both of which have been denied
credit by electricity suppliers.

The state has committed close to $2 billion since early January to buy
electricity to keep the lights on for customers of the two cash-strapped
utilities.

A law signed by Davis last month allows the state to enter into lower-cost,
power-buying agreements lasting several months to a decade. Until then, the
state is spending about $45 million a day.

Critics said customers will end up paying for the latest plan.

Republican Assemblyman John Campbell said the governor's overall plan has grown
to more than $20 billion, spread out over state-issued revenue bonds that will
be paid back by customers.

RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: new growth theory

2001-02-16 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




> Barkley wrote:
> >  Basically they do a very careful review of past
> >approaches to growth theory and show that many
> >of the classical writers, starting with Adam Smith,
> >had essentially fully developed models of growth
> >that incorporate the essential ideas of "new
> >endogenous growth theory."
> >  The new guys just fool around with coefficients
> >on production functions, kind of like the way you did
> >in that technical appendix on "salience" (aka "social
> >capital effect"), :-).
>
> Barkley, people on pen-l don't know what you're talking about, so why are
> you posting this? It's okay to rib me, but why do it to an audience that
> doesn't comprehend?
***

This is extremely patronizing. Just because people aren't responding doesn't
mean they don't know...


> If anyone cares, "salience" does not refer to anything to do with "social
> capital." Rather, it refers to the relative importance of external effects.
> I assume that one person's production has an external effect on other
> people's production. I have one coefficient which determines whether it's a
> beneficial externality or a detrimental one (it can't be both, by
> assumption) and another coefficient -- the salience -- which determines the
> degree of the external effect, whether positive or negative. Different
> resources differ in these two ways. It's purely a technical relationship,
> not a social one, though it has societal effects.
>
> When I do talk about "social capital," it's when I talk about Smithian
> theories of "fellow feeling" (or Rousseauean public spiritedness) as
> shoring up an individualistic society's stability, avoiding rampant
> free-riding. I don't actually use the phrase "social capital," which seems
> unduly obfuscatory. I also talk about forces -- such as social inequality
> arising from Lockean unlimited accumulation of (private) capital -- that
> undermine fellow feeling and public spiritedness. One of my conclusions is
> that the latter-day "communitarians" who wish to wed Lockean capitalism
> with Rousseauean or Smithian community feelings are fooling themselves.
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Social inequality is force? Mmm

Ian

Re: new growth theory

2001-02-16 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


One of the things I'm curious about is what prompted the development of NGT.
>From what people have said, it sounds like a minor contribution (if any
meaningful contribution at all) to growth theory. I'm wondering: what was the
impasse (perceived or real) that prompted development NGT, a theory that seems
directed at no particular question at all?

Christian

***

Competitive credentialism and the quest for tenure.

Ian

Dollar strength and causality vertigo

2001-02-16 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




Friday, Feb. 16, 2001

O'Neill Remark Confuses Financial Markets

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was quoted on Friday as
saying the United States was not actively following a strong dollar policy,
throwing financial markets into confusion.

The policy, which has held that a strong dollar is in U.S. interests,
underpinned the rally in U.S. financial assets during the second half of the
1990s.

``We are not pursuing, as it is often said, a policy of a strong dollar. In my
opinion a strong dollar is the result of a strong economy,'' O'Neill said in an
interview with Germany's Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a day before a
Group of Seven industrial nations meeting in Palermo, Italy.

The dollar took an immediate hit on the comments, losing half a cent to the euro
and nearly half a yen, but rebounded after the U.S. Treasury said that there had
been no change in the strong dollar policy.

``There has been no change in a strong dollar policy at all,'' a U.S. Treasury
spokesman said, adding Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill had not said anything
different from before in an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung.

He added that the strong dollar was a reflection of the strong U.S. economy.

FX POLICY IN FOCUS

Currency markets went on high alert when U.S. President George W. Bush picked
O'Neill for the top job at the Treasury, with speculation rife that the former
chairman of aluminum giant Alcoa would be more sympathetic than his predecessors
to the pain inflicted on U.S. exporters by a strong dollar.

But against a backdrop of slowing U.S. growth, traders became concerned that
O'Neill would distance himself from a policy, which had been crafted and
maintained by Robert Rubin, a former investment banker, and Lawrence Summers, an
academic.

O'Neill sought to put such worries to rest after he said a month ago at his
confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee that there would be no
sudden shift in the United States exchange-rate policy:

``I thought, in the interest of not wasting a lot of television footage, I
should say at the very outset, I am in favor of a strong dollar. I can't imagine
why anyone would think to the contrary.''

INTEVENTION THE EXCEPTION

O'Neill said in the FAZ interview that intervention in currency markets was not
right in principle but there could be exceptions.

``To intervention I only want to say this much: In principle there should not be
intervention in markets. But there can be exceptions,'' he was quoted as saying.

O'Neill said the U.S. Federal Reserve's one percentage point interest rate cut
in January had been very useful but said he was not sure whether it would have
an effect soon.

``I'm not sure whether we will soon see the first signs of a recovery in the
economy or whether we will have a zero growth rate for some time,'' he said.

When asked whether the economy in the euro zone was weak, O'Neill answered by
referring to the single currency:

``I don't understand all this talk about a weak euro. Who wants to say with
certainty where the ``right'' rate for the euro against the dollar is?''

He said he had told Congress it was important to bring in President Bush's plans
for a $1.6 trillion reduction in taxes as soon as possible.

O'Neill said the tax reform could be financed without eating into that portion
of the U.S. budget surplus earmarked for social security and pensions.

But he signaled that this act of fiscal loosening was not the beginning of a
trend.

``We must maintain discipline and not allow ourselves to fall into huge new
spending programs,'' O'Neill said.

He said the financial markets would do well to price the future into their
current calculations. ``At the moment the data shows that the market is assuming
another rate cut. That is good for the economy,'' he said.

O'Neill reiterated his dislike for intervening to help other countries out of
financial crises.

``In the future it will be important to show countries who threaten to fall into
difficulties that the rest of the world will not be ready to help them.''

Asked whether the U.S. government would buy up private investments if there were
further budget surpluses and no more debts to pay off, O'Neill said:

``That is a terrible idea. In a capitalist system like ours it is not the
business of the government to own companies.''

IRS picks on the poor

2001-02-15 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray





February 16, 2001  Single-Page Format
Rate of All I.R.S. Audits Falls; Poor Face Intense Scrutiny
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON


Audits of tax returns by the Internal Revenue Service, already at a record low
in 1999, fell almost 50 percent last year.

The chance of an individual tax return's being audited last year was less than
one in 200, down from one in 112 in 1999 and one in 60 in 1996, new data and
revised figures for last year show.

Even those figures significantly overstate the risk of an audit for most
taxpayers. That is because, under orders from Congress, the I.R.S. is giving
particular attention to returns filed by the working poor who apply for a
special tax credit. Such returns accounted for 44 percent of all
audits[snip]

...The recent economic boom has generated so much tax money that it masks the
effect of cheating that has been encouraged by a lower risk of detection in
audits, said David Burnham, a Syracuse University researcher whose team will
soon post on its Web site detailed I.R.S. data, including figures on auditing of
the poor that were not available yesterday from the I.R.S.

[snip]

UFE on the wealth tax

2001-02-15 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray




UNITED FOR A FAIR ECONOMY ACTION ALERT

** Please excuse cross postings** PLEASE FORWARD**

February 15, 2001
Oppose the Bush Tax Giveaways to the Rich

Dear Member of United for a Fair Economy:

*UFE was on the front page of the NY Times for organizing a statement of wealthy
individuals against the repeal of the estate tax. Check out the story on our
website: http://www.ufenet.org and keep your eyes open for UFE in the news in
the days to come. The response from the NY Times has been amazing.

1. Please take five minutes to let your U.S. Senators know you OPPOSE
enormous tax giveaways to the rich in the Bush tax plan, specifically a full
repeal of the estate tax. (The Senate switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
They can connect you to your Senator's office)

*** If you live in California, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan,
Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, or Washington please note: your Senators are
swing legislators in this fight. PLEASE TAKE ACTION! ***

2. Please contact us and let us know you made the phone call.

3. If you can do more, see the list of five additional ACTIONS below that
you can take to fight the Bush tax and preserve the estate tax, our
country's most progressive tax.
___
Background information: Included in President Bush's tax cut plan are :

* Repeal of the Federal Estate and Gift Taxes
* Reduction of the top tax rate from 39% to 33%

Combined, these two tax cuts will give the richest 1% of households $666
billion in tax cuts over the next decade. That's 42.6% of the value of the
entire $1.6 trillion
tax cut.

The estate tax is our most progressive tax and the only federal tax on
accumulated wealth.
We have two major challenges in attempting to preserve the estate tax.
**One, there is a incredible campaign of misinformation distorting who will pay
an estate tax and its impact on our society.
**Two, there is virtually no debate on the negative consequences of repeal.

Only the richest 2% of households pay the estate tax. Half of the tax is
paid by 4,000 super-wealthy households with wealth of $5 million or more. The
repeal of
the estate tax will worsen America's already enormous wealth gap and
increase the dangerous concentration of wealth and power.

**Effect on Charities**
Repeal will have a devastating effect on charities and the non profit
organizations that rely on them. The U.S. Treasury
Department estimates that gifts to charity will fall $5-6 billion a year after
repeal.

**Fix the Estate Tax, Don't Repeal It.**
An alternative to complete repeal would raise the exemption threshold and
further protect small farms and family businesses. Urge your Senators to
support the Democratic alternative bill that is being developed by Senator Max
Baucus (D-MT.)
and others to fix the estate tax, not nix it.

DO you want to know how your elected official voted last summer on estate
tax repeal?
For more information, including fact sheets, commonly-asked questions and
links
to other web sites, visit www.ufenet.org.

Please call us at 1-877-564-6833 x45 if you have questions or can help in
other ways.
THANKS!

Tomas Aguilar, Chuck Collins & Dara Silverman
United for a Fair Economy

*** Five More Action Steps

Fired up? Do you want to do more? Here are FIVE things you can do to help
preserve the estate tax. Check our web site for even more ideas.

1. Get five other people together to make calls to your U.S. Representatives and
Senators
and discuss taking other actions together.

2. Write a Letter to the Editor of your local newspaper. See our web site
(http://www.ufenet.org)
for sample letters.

3. Are you connected to a local nonprofit organization (social services,
land trusts, arts, hospitals, civic associations)?
Give them information about the impact that estate tax repeal will have on
charities. Get them to speak out. On our web site, there are links to fact
sheets about the impact of repeal on nonprofit organizations.

4. Organize a delegation to meet with your Senators. Many elected officials
are back in their districts around President's Day weekend (February 16-20).
See our web site for ten tips for organizing a successful meeting with a
member of your delegation.

5. Participate in a creative theatrical action. Organize a "Support Rally"
sponsored by "Billionaires for Unlimited Inheritance" at the office of your
Congressional leader, especially if they said they would vote to repeal the
estate tax. See the web site:
http://www.billionairesforunlimitedinheritance.com. (Coming this Friday, 2/16)

Some information in this alert was provided by Citizens for Tax Justice
(http://www.ctj.org),  the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
(http://www.cbpp.org), and OMB Watch (http://www.ombwatch,org)



*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
Dara Silverman,
National Org

Commodifying communism

2001-02-15 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray





Welcome to StalinWorld

You won't believe how bad it is (or even that it exists. But it does, comrades,
it really does)

By Robert Chalmers

15 February 2001

Tasteless?" Mr Malinauskas stared out towards the electric fence, the moat and
the guard towers that enclose StalinWorld, the theme park in which he is
faithfully recreating life in a Siberian labour camp. "I wouldn't say so."
Viliumas Malinauskas, the former heavyweight wrestling champion of Lithuania,
charges tourists the equivalent of 80p to enter the park, with its narrow wooden
roadways and clumps of birch trees. There are plans to have visitors herded into
a reception centre by guides dressed as Red Army soldiers.

As a family day out, critics say, it represents an unpalatable cross between
Disneyland and the Gulag. Yet, undeterred, thousands of sightseers have already
visited the 500-acre estate in the south of Lithuania, 80 miles from the capital
Vilnius. Malinauskas hopes the park will eventually attract two million visitors
a year.

Certain refinements, such as the concealed loudspeakers that play tape-recorded
screams of women and children, are not yet in operation.

Coach parties, including school groups, arrive every day. Visitors wander round
the site, gazing up at the 53 huge metal statues of Soviet heroes dotted around.
The sculptures, in bronze, copper or iron, are up to 30ft tall and most weigh
more than 20 tons. They were proudly displayed at prominent sites around
Lithuania before the country declared independence in 1990.

"I have 12 Lenins, one Stalin and an Engels," says Malinauskas. On the basis
that you have to provide something for everyone, he has also constructed a
small, fenced-off area which contains a pig, two wild boars and "a quite
remarkable selection of fowl".

"The Mushroom King", as Viliumas Malinauskas is known locally, made his fortune
by exporting bottled chanterelles, ceps and other varieties prized by wealthy
gourmets. But, while his preserved fungi have excited universal delight among
mushroom fans from Riga to Los Angeles, his latest venture has been less widely
applauded. Several critics  one a priest  have publicly recommended dynamite.

"But who are these guys?" Malinauskas asks. "They are nobodies. They are morons
in a trance."

We walk out of the estate, through a wire fence, into his private grounds. The
area is protected by armed guards, two Dobermans and another dog, which, the
entrepreneur assures me, "only looks like a wolf".

The decor in Mr Malinauskas's own house  a bizarre three-storey residence that
might have come straight from the set of that other much-cherished celebration
of totalitarian chic, The Prisoner  is in marked contrast to the modest
facilities in the park's Siberian-style outhouses. You enter a marble entrance
hall, then climb a flight of steps that leads up past an aviary  containing a
white cockatoo, which greets you in Lithuanian. At the top of the stairs, an
opulent lobby is lined with cabinets displaying the hundreds of silver trophies
Malinauskas has won for his mushrooms and wrestling.

We sit down in his large office. Propped in a corner by his desk is a shotgun. A
plaque on a nearby wall commemorates his election this year as southern
Lithuania's "Liberal Man of the Year".

He is a whisky enthusiast and a heavy smoker. In a nation where manhood is more
openly prized than in some Western European countries, Malinauskas, whose main
enthusiasms include televised kick-boxing and his pet elk, is significantly less
in touch with his feminine side than the average Lithuanian male.

Pronounced clinically dead after a pulmonary thrombosis in 1998, the mushroom
producer, now 59, had recovered sufficiently to take part in the regional
arm-wrestling championship earlier this year, carrying off first prize as usual.

He reminded me strongly of a character from a Hollywood film, not one individual
actor, but a type: the stock figure who, advancing during a bar-room fight, has
a bourbon bottle broken over his head and, after briefly assuming a vaguely
quizzical expression, keeps on coming. "When I start something," Malinauskas
says, "I finish it."

It would be wrong, though, to presume that he is entirely without diplomatic
ability. Mindful of recent criticism, he has erected no signposts to the new
attraction, situated outside the small spa town of Druskininkai. Though the
estate is known as StalinWorld to most beyond its gates, Malinauskas prefers the
official, if less catchy, name of Grutos Park. He bought the land, in one of the
poorest parts of Lithuania, with £17,000 he earned as a farm manager during
perestroika and has since spent £500,000 developing the park. The idea of a
Soviet theme came to him three years ago. "I was visiting a factory," he says,
"and spotted Lenin's detached head, lying on the ground. That was the moment."

The statues were handed over to him by the Lithuanian government

Senate report on money laundering

2001-02-14 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray



 

This report has put the Argentine political-economy in a pickle.

Why can't the Germans?

2001-02-14 Thread Lisa & Ian Murray


[heaven forbid that immature leftist idealists spark this kind of debate in the
Americas]




February 14, 2001  Single-Page Format
Germany Weighs Overhaul of 'Consensus' Capitalism
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS


FRANKFURT, Feb. 13 - The debate may sound tedious and even trivial. But behind a
fog of discourse over arcane rules, Chancellor Gerhard SchrÃoder is about to
decide an issue at the heart of efforts to overhaul and modernize Germany's
``consensus'' approach to capitalism.

The issue is what Germans call mitbestimmung, or co-determination, and it
embodies the legally enshrined practice of letting workers have a direct say in
the management of their companies. When Germany's economy soared in the decades
after World War II, co-determination and cooperation between unions and
management became a symbol of enlightened business. But when the economy
floundered through much of the last decade, it suddenly seemed to represent
inflexibility and the inability to compete.

After months of background political maneuvering, Mr. SchrÃoder is expected to
announce on Wednesday whether he will support or water down an expansion of
current laws.

His labor minister, Walter Riester, has drawn up the proposed expansion of
workers' rights on the conviction that the law needs to catch up with changes in
German industry.

[snip]

RE: Re: Re: Social Capital



> - Original Message -
> From: ALI KADRI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 3:46 PM
> Subject: [PEN-L:8058] Re: Social Capital
> 
> Everything is social to begin with? What is that supposed to mean.?
> In the beginning God made the social and saw that it was good and
> the represenation of TOTALITY. Why not Thales' view that in the beginning
> was water the totality that became air, and earth etc
> At least Thales view is not some intellectual gobbledygook and is
> materialist ( or may be) to boot.
> 
> Also if everything is social how can there be a social being which reflects
> man's material relation with nature. There must at least be nature and man
> above and beyond the social or u have a circular conception since man and
> nature must also be social.. And what of the lakes, streams, rocks, blah
> blah...are they social too...
>   CHeers, Ken Hanly
*

Kinda like Whitehead's society of occasions in nested hierarchies? :-)

Ian

Bush-ism of the week


"God bless NATO,"

RE: Re: Re: Social Capital



>   Well, of course in a very crude sense, what
> yuppies call "networking" may well be simply a
> matter of accumulating social capital.  Certainly
> to the extent that such networking leads not only
> to "contacts," but to mutual backscratching and
> quid pro quos.  The latter certainly look like social
> capital in the Bourdieu reciprocity sense.
> Barkley Rosser


Networking is crony capitalism, period. There's a saying amongst young college
graduates who find themselves working shit jobs in big cities despite flawless
resumes; "it's not what you know, it's who you know". I've heard this from the
mouth of Harvard grads. who were fed up with "waiting their turn" because of the
talent glut of those who weren't socially hyper savvy in school.

Ian

RE: RE: Social Capital