RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
I think these things go in cycles. Back when the US faced superpower competition from the USSR, both sides had to try to look good internationally, causing a temporary upward harmonization. JD I've been waiting for years to hear Jim Devine agree with me that the Soviet Union was a Good Thing. At last! At last! The next step in his intellectual evolution would be to acknowledge the indispensable role of Stalin in defending the existence of the USSR againt imperialist attacks in the 1940s-1950s. Mark
RE: Re: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
At 04:44 PM 11/05/2002 +, you wrote: I've been waiting for years to hear Jim Devine agree with me that the Soviet Union was a Good Thing. At last! At last! The next step in his intellectual evolution would be to acknowledge the indispensable role of Stalin in defending the existence of the USSR againt imperialist attacks in the 1940s-1950s. I'd give the credit to the Soviet people. then you'd have to explain what happened to 'the Soviet people' (now extinct) after Stalin died. Why did they stop defending the country? And actually I don't agree with Lou Proyect about one key thing: the USSR was much more strongly placed, in a material sense, in 1989 than it was in 1939, to resist imperialist attack. So it was not a foregone conclusion that the US would win the Cold War. That's what cold war ideologues themselves now say when they crow about the 'American victory', but they were talking about the 'inevitability of Bolshevik collapse' within days of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The external difficulties the Bolsheviks faced were enormous, and in 1917 too, there was no 'Soviet people' around to defend the gains of October. Eleven capitalist powers sent troops into Russia to support the Whites against the Bolsheviks, including Germany, the US, Britain, France, Canada, Japan and the Czechs. But even Intervention does not tell the whole story of the difficulties the Bolshevik leadership and Party had to surmount. The dearth of statecraft among the Bolsheviks must also be acknowledged. Months before seizing power they were a still scattered, despised sect. Until the very eve of the revolution Lenin had to remain in hiding, monitoring events only with difficulty. The Bolshevik leader had no military experience and was not a statesman (much of his working life had been spent inside libraries). There was nothing to suggest that this conspiratorial leader and his small party would be capable of holding power and of resolving the problems which had destroyed Tsarism and three successive Provisional Governments. Yet the Bolsheviks were to do all this and more - they were to create a new state, built on historically-innovative principles, with its own unique ideology and civil culture. More than this, they created a new nation, built of the shards left by Tsardom- with its more than 100 restive subject nationalities. This state survived for 70 years and was lost only because of the failure of the Party and of the political leadership after 1956. The discomfiture Bolshevik successes aroused in the chancelleries of Western capitals was made worse by the prevailing ignorance of their origins and goals. Almost nothing was known of Lenin outside Russia. Before the revolution, the London Times mentioned the presence in Petrograd of a `pacifist-agitator' named Ulyanov/Lenin. In the first reports in The Times after the October Rising, the Times' Petrogard correspondent confidently expected the Bolshevik regime to fall 'within days'. They had no money, no arms and no food. The first Bolshevik-led government was (like its bourgeois predecessors) announced as `provisional'; few even among its supporters expected it to last much longer than they had. The question of revolutionary leadership both at the time of siezing state power and subsequently in periods of international reaction and counter-attack, and of internal consolidation, is surely key to understanding what happened and why. If you want to invoke what are amorphous, historically ethereal, actually just empty categories like 'the Soviet people' then you also have to abandon any form of structured political discourse, organisation, parties, agitational strategies, leadership etc. Mark
RE: harmonization
Title: harmonization er, how did India gain since 1991? They weaponised their nukes? Built the Narmada Dam? What? Mark -Original Message-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Devine, JamesSent: 05 November 2002 18:05To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'Subject: [PEN-L:31873] harmonization (was: RE: [PEN-L:31872] Re: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process) I wrote: I think these things go in cycles. Back when the US faced superpower competition from the USSR, both sides had to try to look good internationally, causing a temporary upward harmonization. Ian Was Viet Nam an upward harmonization? no. But I'm glad you asked. I should have been clearer. The US/USSR competition obviously encouraged such horrible events as the US war against Viet Nam and the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia. But, as we discovered very clearly once the competition ended, it also created an environment in which social democracy could prosper in W. Europe, countries such as India could gain, etc. My friend Phil Klinkner, a political scientist, has a book (with Rogers M. Smith) called the "Unsteady March: the rise and decline of racial equality in America" (U of Chicago Press) that argues that US wars -- including the Cold War -- have been generally good for the civil rights movement. For example, the USSR rightly propagandized against racism in the US, which added needed support to the civil rights movement (though of course, that movement's struggle was more important to its success). Now, it's hard to decide on the balance between costs and benefits here, but luckily the costs never involved a nuclear war. Jim
RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: 05 November 2002 21:40 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:31882] Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process Some Israelis say that they actually take more care about avoiding civilian casualties than the U.S. military does; they actually send soldiers into hostile territory rather than dropping bombs from several miles high. They may be right. Doug What is this, an apology for Ariel Sharon? Mark
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman Sent: 05 November 2002 22:06 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:31885] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process Mark, I agree with Doug here. I understand that Japanese assassins use knives instead of sniper guns. The Israelis put some of their soldiers at risk -- despite the viciousness of their policy. The US fights where its personnel are at no direct risk. This is in no way an apology for Sharon. The soldiers they seem to be 'putting at risk' seem to be recent Russian-origin immigrants. But in fact this is just nonsense; they do not put their soldiers at risk. Their soldiers commit warcrimes and massacre civilians. It is innocent Palestinians, men and women and children, who die, not Israeli 'soldiers'. This is slow-motion ethnic cleansing. It is wrong to excuse it. Mark
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: 05 November 2002 22:44 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:31890] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process Of course not, you prick. Though I'm not the least bit surprised you said this. I should just put you on autotrash. In fact I think I will. Bye! You are such a prat, you put me on autotrash so many times already that you obviously live there yourself.
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
Joanna wrote: The short answer is that during WWII the soviet people fought against a fascism whose explicit aim was their enslavement; in 1989, they were sold out by Stalinist bureaucrats and black marketeers. The shorter answer is that if Stalin had not sabotaged the revolutionary opposition during the Spanish civil war, there might not have been a WWII. You know that old riddle: Q: What happened to the great poets of the WWII? A. They died in Spain. Here is what one Soviet poet and patriot wrote in 1942: COURAGE Now we know well how each can bear the shock, What each must do: nothing can break us, The Hour of Courage peals from every clock, Courage will not forsake us. It is not terrible for us to give Our blood beneath the murderous hail, If we know you, O Russian speech, shall live, And the great Russian Word not fail. Shining and free it shall be said we gave You to our children, and thus from bondage saved The centuries to come. The poet's name is Anna Akhmatova. There were many other celebrated Soviet war poets. This was how the great war-novelist and journalist Konstantin Simonov described Moscow in 1943: 'It is really beautiful but we have grown so accustomed to its beauty that most often we do not even notice it. And yet one only has to leave it for half a year, a month, a week, and it is there before you, morning, noon and night - beautiful, unique, almost fabulous. The cool rosy autumn dawn rises behind the Kremlin, over its embattled walls and its tall spires. The dark November waters swirl silently under the high bridges - the Moskvoretsky, Kamenny, Krymsky and Borodinsky. Standing on the Borodinsky bridge, with its granite emblems of military glory towering over the heavy spans, with the Borodino field behind it and the Kremlin in front, one can take in the whole of Moscow at a glance: its embankments deserted in the morning; the tenuous, silvery chains of the Krymsky Bridge rising beyond the bend in the river, and on the other side, the tiny subway cars, looking like toys from here, whistling lightly past over the river. Stretching up from the bridge is the Arbat, with its lanes and byways, the Starokonyushenny (Old Mews), Skatertny (Table Cloth Lane), Khlebny (Bread Lane), the narrow streets whose very names tell of the profession of the Russian craftsmen who lived there and who built this city for themselves and their descendants, built it with their capable hands, with a merry song and a strong word, putting all their generous, great-hearted Russian soul into it. Try to imagine for a moment, just for a moment, that you are no longer a Muscovite, that you are homeless, that this fair city is no longer yours, that the Germans have seized its houses, streets and boulevards, that they have taken all that goes to make Moscow, this city so dear to the heart of every Russian. Take a stroll through Moscow with this thought in mind; go up to the Vorobyevy or the Poklonnaya Hills, where Napoleon stood in his time, and look down, look around you, see how great and majestic is the city; how beautiful are its houses, its limitless streets, how alive it is, how warm, how much your own. And you feel that you cannot bear this thought another moment, that you cannot really conceive even for a moment that all this is not yours, your very own. The German soldiers read the Volkischer Beobachter. 'Moscow is in flames,' it said, 'Moscow is in flames and burning on all sides.' ... in twenty languages, in German and French, Dutch and Polish, Italian and Finnish, in Rumanian and Hungarian, the brazenly exultant radio bawled and gloated over crushed and prostrate Europe. In twenty languages Moscow burned down, Moscow was in ruins, Moscow passed into German hands. And yet, over a year later, we stride up to the Vorobyevy Hills, over a parkway straight a narrow, bestrewn with yellow autumn leaves, and see Moscow extending before us. It has remained just as fair, just as majestic. And the same rosy dawn rises over its ancient walls; the cupolas flash with the same glint of old bronze in the rays of the rising sun; the Moscow River flows just as silently between its granite embankments, and the clock on the Spacey Tower sends forth its usual deep, sonorous chimes. ... Fuel will be short this winter [1943]. The city will economise, but it does not ant to freeze and it will not do so. Eighty thousand Muscovites, men and women, mostly women, have been working without let-up for months on end in the forests around Moscow, Kalinin and Ryazan. They have been felling, chopping and sawing trees Moscow needed it, and so they became woodcutters...Great stacks of birch and fir trunks can be seen on the Moscow pavements at dawn... This winter smoke will go curling from the chimneys of warm Moscow houses... The monument to Timiryazev, which had toppled over a the result of an explosion, again stands in its place... You can walk for hours without seeing a trace of the recent bombardments and siege. ...In
RE: Re: RE: X 5 dismantling due process
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of joanna bujes Sent: 06 November 2002 00:49 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I grew up reading Russian authors writing about this same experience; however, it was possible for me to distinguish between the orthodoxy that dictated the format of these pieces, and the reality of people's deep longing for peace and justice, which also informed films like Ballad of a Soldier and The Cranes are Flying. My own favourite Soviet war film is Stanislav Rostotskii's ... A zori zdyes' tikhiye' which describes the fate of an all-women anti-aircraft unit stationed in Latvia, but the only dep longing I saw there was for victory over the Nazis and their Romanian allies. While I can appreciate the courage it would take for an American to become any kind of red, I'm not an American but you're not the first to assume I was and then to deplore me for being ready to look at all sides of the truth about Stalin (from whom people 'cowered in abject terror' etc etc) while in the same breath congratulating an American for being brave enough to do so, which suggests to me that most of the cowering in abject terror is being done these days by Americans. Now, we don't agree. I din't live in Romania my wife was born there and I did live in the Soviet Union for many years so I guess I'm also entitled to anecdotalise a little. Mark
RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman Sent: 06 November 2002 03:29 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:31913] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process My God. Every post I have seen on this thread is toxic. Lou, you know better and so does Doug. I should throw Bill Lear into the mix. Doug made a perfectly reasonable statement, as I said before. Please cut the flaming. On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 07:32:06PM -0500, Louis Proyect wrote: Doug Henwood wrote: No Michael I didn't not overreact. This is the same fellow that called me a killer of Afghan babies. This is typical of how Doug and his toxic sidekick conducts his pissing-contests -- I don't recall him saying or me ever retpeating that he kills Afghan babes, so this is a lie. But I do recall Henwood supporting the bombing of Afghanistan, as no doubt do many others. Mark
RE: Re: dismantling due process
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Sabri Oncu Sent: 06 November 2002 06:34 To: PEN-L Subject: [PEN-L:31920] Re: dismantling due process I object to this kind of rationality and hence my objection to Doug's calling Lou toxic, Mark's calling Doug prat or a killer of Afghan babies, I didn't call Doug a killer of Afghan babies, this is just his red-baiting. I did point out that he supported the war against Afghanistan, and I wonder why that so upsets him, since it is true? Of course, thousands of innocent Afghanis have been killed my American aerial bombardment during that war. Mark
RE: Re: Roach on Asia
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Charles Jannuzi Sent: 04 November 2002 14:01 In Japan it is caused, it seems to me, by a chronically overvalued yen--against the US dollar ( a de facto world currency for every importing and exporting nation I know of) and by a wild overvaluation against Canadian and Australian dollars (two countries from whence huge amounts of commodities consumed in Japan come from). Cheap imports from China, often branded or even made to spec with Japanese makers' names, contributes a lot too. with respect, this is like saying tides are caused by the cycles of the lunar orbit. It is a description of a phenomenon not an explanation. How comes the yen to be over-valued and the yuan to be under-valued? Like the man said, at bottom there is only one money in the world. If chronic and persistent, crisis-inducing over and under-valuations happen, it's because of the politics in political economy. What the US has managed to export to Asia is *its own* accumulation crisis; deflationary policies, which have been and are being applied by both Japan and China, in both cases have the same objective, namely to out-compete US capitalism by using the accumulation crisis as a mechanism for the enforced restructuring of their respective national capitals. Japan like Germany has not responded to competitive dollar devaluations beginning with Nixon, by devaluing themselves but instead have chosen the deflationary path of striving to increase domestic productivity and thus in the long run to out-compete and destroy US capitalism, and to a degree they succeeded. China, which is historiclaly behind the curve, took the path of embracing competitive devaluations while policing its working class by direct political means rather than by the scourge of unemployment. Now China is getting to a position where it may be bale to compete more on equal terms, in which case it will revalue, the Chinese working class will experience wage increases, and net value will begin to flow massively into China, which will use the money to invest abroad and then to militarise in order to defend its investments. These longrun historical competitions between rival national capitals/imperialisms, are forms of class struggle. Mark
RE: Re: RE: Re: dismantling due process
It's part of the new race to the bottom, the downward harmonization of moral standards. Jim Don't forget that it was Churchill who first proposed gassing and bombing Iraq in 1919. The idea that there was ever an upward harmonisation is surely illusion. Mark
Re: Re: Roach on Asia
At 03-11-02 12:27, you wrote: Seriously, do you think an investment bankers's analyst is ever going to be trustworthy? They survey the world only as takeover opportunities for their clients and for themselves. I'll look at the article again and go through it piece by piece (I've done this for quite a few standard western takes on Asia and Japan by the way). CJ I take it as read that investment bankers as a class ought to be thrown in nets into the Potomac but I think I'd make them tell what they knew first. They ought to know something. Roach is surely right about chronic deflationary processes in Asia, about the risks of collapse in the US-centric world market, and above all about the hugely important onrush of China. We've been discussing this a lot on the A-List with Henry Liu and others and I don't want to go thru it again here, but there is a lot of evidence out there in support of Roach's impressions about Asia, no? Mark
RE: Re: Roach on Asia
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Charles Jannuzi Sent: 03 November 2002 13:55 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:31794] Re: Roach on Asia You have to see it first as the tendentious propaganda that it is. no doubt it is, but what in this instance is the propaganda in aid of? He is absically saying Asia minus China is shot, and Chinese growth + US weakness is the reason. Why is that propaganda? Mark
Re: Re: Roach on Asia
At 03-11-02 15:22, you wrote: Because Asia is not shot. There is a major and chronic deflationary crisis in Japan. Asia may not be shot, but this crisis is very real, is it not? Mark
Re: Re: RE: Re: Roach on Asia
At 03-11-02 19:45, you wrote: There seems to be a consensus among US bears of a nationalist bent to say, in effect, yeah our country's a mess but the rest of the planet is in even worse shape so keep that money comin' to our shores. Ian Is this also an argument in favour of ignoring the words of investment bankers? In general, I don't see how anyone can credibly deny the existence of savage deflationary forces at work in the Asian subset of the capitalist world system, particularly in Japan. Mark
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Roach on Asia
At 03/11/2002 20:11, you wrote: Right, 'but' the other shoe that keeps the deflation from becoming a big black hole is US imports from the region and the $1billion + a day comin' in as well. If the rate of return for Asian investors is higher in the US than in their own region, why increase the level of investment at home for home markets? The Japanese, for one, would need far bigger homes to put all the stuff that would need to be purchased to increase AD. Ian I don't get this. Are you saying that deflation in Asia is a result of lack of effective demand in Asia? Is it not more the result of the lack of effective demand in the world as a whole, the reason being that the hegemonic capitalist state is no longer capable of capitalising the world economy or of sustained growth itself? As with the pax Britannica after 1873. Deflation in Asia is an index of the weakness of the hegemon and means that this is a transitional epoch characterised by the decline of one hegemon and either the rise of another, or a prolonged bout of sustained chaos, turbulence and deflationary crisis. US forward strategy is to compensate for its economic weakness by militarising its economy and society and by seizing control of the Middle East and Central Asia. But this cannot solve its underlying problem and can only lead to renewed arms races and to a politicising of crisis and a radicalising of working classes, including but not only in Asia. Mark
RE: Re: Re: Roach on Asia
Roach writes for Morgan Stanley he's a famous bear. So what did he get wrong about Asia? Mark
RE: Re: Now for the real fight over Iraqi oil
Charles Jannuzi wrote: And I forgot to say: Kuwaiti interests own 10% of BP. Who owns Kuwait? Mark
RE: Re: Now for the real fight over Iraqi oil
Chris Burford wrote: Russian troops advancing into Northern Iraq in a preventative peace making initiative. Iraq might get divided up into zones of occupation like Germany did, but hopefully US and Russian troops would not fire at each other in ill will.) Russian troops in Iraq? Ooh-la-la, if I was a 'worse-the-better' believer I'd say amen to that. Can't imagine anything more likely to accelerate the final capitalist apocalypse. Btw some people think that 'BP' stands not for 'Beyond Petroleum' but 'Beyond Parody', since despites its best efforts BP has been unable to increase its production of non-hydrocarbon energy-- so-called 'renewables' (photovoltaics etc)-- to more than 1% of its turnover. As part of the Beyond Parody corporate makeover, some BP gas stations in the UK now feature snazzy solar arrays. They generate just enough electricity to power a display which tells you what the temperature is and... how much electricity they generate. A more telling illustration of the utter futility of so-called 'renewables' would be hard to imagine. Mark
RE: Now for the real fight over Iraqi oil
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-pen-l;galaxy.csuchico.edu]On Behalf Of Chris Burford Sent: 30 October 2002 08:24 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:31680] Now for the real fight over Iraqi oil From today's Guardian, no lightweight article:- BP chief fears US will carve up Iraqi oil riches Terry Macalister Wednesday October 30, 2002 The Guardian Lord Browne, chief executive of BP and one of New Labour's favourite industrialists, has warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of any future war. I think I'm right in saying that BP-Amoco is actually the second largest *American* oil company so what actually is Browne on about? Mark
RE: German banks in crisis
Chris Burford their false consciousness obstructs their ability to see that this should be routine, because they dare not recognise the marxian law of value] Well of course they rcognise the Marxian law of value, Chris. Otherwise they wouldn't stay in business. They just don't draw the same conclusions as you and I from it. Hard to see how deflatonary banking collapses and the eggar-my-neighbour policy implicit in state bailouts of 'our own' banks can lead to world gummint however. Traditionally, it leads to world war. Mark
RE: N Korea offers non-aggression treaty
Chris Burford wrote: Through contradictions we are equilibrating towards a framework of world-governance Chris, you might as well say that thru contradictions we are equilibrating towards world war 3, with just as much assurance about the outcome. And that's the problem: when there are such huge an dangerous uncertainties in the world, that in itself predisposes states and leaders to sauve-qui-peut attitudes, to renewed militarism, authoritarianism, arms races and beggar-my-neighbour trade and foreign policies, none of which is exactly conducive to world gummint. Mark
RE: Re: Equilibrating to global governance - Iraq, France, USA
Michael quoth: global governance - Iraq, France, USA actually this is the ideal triumvirate to rule the world: Islamic culture and oil, French culture and olive oil, and guns. Yeah. Mark
RE: Whither ecological economics?
Brian M Czech wrote: Just out of curiosity, why is there so little discussion of the ecological economics movement on this list? My memory isnt the greatest, but I dont recall ever hearing any mention of Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, Richard Norgaard, the International Society for Ecological Economics, the journal Ecological Economics, the steady state economy, natural capital, etc (except in response to a few of my own posts). This puzzles me because the ecological economics movement has produced the most potent sustainability policy implications Ive seen. Is ecological economics that far off the radar screen that it doesnt even register with PEN? Or is PEN not really concerned with sustainability issues? There has been discussion of ecological economics on Pen-l and I posted on Daly, Costanza, Cleveland and others, but there have never been many takers. If you are interested in this you might want to check out the A-List archives which has a good search engine at: http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/index.htm where a search on Costanza and Cutler Cleveland and Daly will bring up the following for starters: A-list message, Re: [A-List] Europe/US rivalry: demography ... future. Several authors in the series actually estimate the maximum sustainable population of the United States (Werbos, Pimentels, Bouvier, and Costanza). The Optimum Population Series is expected to be published in book form sometime next year (1991). Meanwhile, copies of NPG FORUM are available from ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002w35/msg00016.htm 08/26/02, 41115 bytes A-list message, [CrashList] fwd from Murray Duffin ... to an ultimate limit. I've tried to argue this on the ecological-economics lists but these guys are totally hung up on their theory. I'm not saying Costanza, Cutler et al are not doing useful empriical stuff, they are, but I do say it is plain absurd when the 'natural- capital' thinkers try to put a ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg00085.htm 08/02/00, 11950 bytes A-list message, [CrashList] new paper by Cutler Cleveland et al ... | Next ] Index: [ Author | Date | Thread ] [CrashList] new paper by Cutler Cleveland et al * To: crl crashlist@xxx * Subject: [CrashList] new paper by Cutler Cleveland et al * From: ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg00116.htm 08/03/00, 5556 bytes A-list message, Re: [CrashList] Energy scenarios and Natural Capitalism ... * From: Julien Pierrehumbert julp@xxx * Date: Tue Feb 6 09:18:02 2001 Mark, If you look on the CrashList website, check out Cutler, Cleveland et al. They show that although energy efficiency may increase through time (i.e., energy per unit of GDP falls), overall energy consumption ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg02512.htm 02/06/01, 8480 bytes A-list message, [CrashList] FW: Amory B. Lovins responds to David Orton: A fun ... from Amory Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute). This is an area we've only touched on here. I'd like to do more. It would be interesting to get Cutler/Cleveland to review the Lovins et al book, if anyone can arrange that! Mark -Original Message- From: Amory B. Lovins ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg00534.htm 08/24/00, 10762 bytes A-list message, RE: [CrashList] Energy scenarios and Natural Capitalism ... for them, once you embed these narratives in the wider facts the picture ain't so pretty. If you look on the CrashList website, check out Cutler, Cleveland et al. They show that although energy efficiency may increase through time (i.e., energy per unit of GDP falls), overall energy consumption INCREASES ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg02488.htm 02/03/01, 9877 bytes A-list message, RE: Fw: [CrashList] FW: David Orton: A fundamental dilemma ... from Amory Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute). This is an area we've only touched on here. I'd like to do more. It would be interesting to get Cutler/Cleveland to review the Lovins et al book, if anyone can arrange that! Mark -Original Message- From: Amory B. Lovins ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg00533.htm 08/24/00, 11164 bytes A-list message, [A-List] some comments on Goff ... description of our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products. -- Daly and Townsend All matter and energy in the universe are subject to the laws of thermodynamics. The First Law (the conservation law) says there can be no creation ... http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2001/msg03206.htm 10/18/01, 42512 bytes A-list message, [A-List] Re: Substance and rationality -- A-List digest, Vol 1 ... 1 #311 * To: a-list@xxx * Subject: [A-List] Re: Substance and rationality -- A-List digest, Vol 1 #311 * From: James Daly james.irldaly@ * Date: Sat May 18 10:17:02 2002 It
RE: Re: employment
Michael Hoover wrote: i'll try to avoid making an analogy here for reasons that should be obvious... i can't help but recall fanon's assertion that violence is turned inward in colonial society; people kill each other rather than their subjugators... Yes, as Marx used to say, it's the violins in the cistern that make the plumbing rattle. Mark PS I admit that a 98kb posting of a badly-translated, seemingly-obscure debate among Russian commentators may be a bit daunting, but if anyone wants to understand why Russian president Putin is Just Saying No to Bush right now (over Iraq)--and what are the momentous implications thereof--this was required reading.
Countdown to Doomsday
Capitalism to Destroy Human Habitat? October 2002 By Carlos Petroni With Abel Mouton, Caty Powell, Gene Pepi and Jesse Powell Illustrations by Gaby Felten The final struggle over the survival of planet Earth, as the habitat for life, is fast approaching. The main obstacle to saving the planet is the existence of the worldwide capitalist/imperialist system, a juggernaut oblivious to the fate of billions of people. It is obvious that stress caused by the geometrical growth of the world population in the last two centuries has caused a number of the present-day problems of our environment. However the existence of capitalism as a system based on profits has compounded all of the problems. The control and withholding of technology in response to the laws of the market and the need to preserve imperialism has prolonged the use of outdated, polluting industrial facilities and methods that continue impacting the environment as they did in the 18th century, only worse. The use of coal and petroleum products to keep steam and internal combustion engines from being replaced, which would cut into profits, releases polluting gases into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming and depletion of the ozone layer. Currently deregulation fever is allowing capitalists to exploit raw materials without limit and extract minerals and fossils without measure, causing scarcity and over exploitation of the land. The absence of worldwide planning to balance production against both the needs of the population and need for environmental preservation is creating over-production in some regions, depletion of resources in others, and ruining productive capacity in still others. Instead of facing up to the problems, our capitalist leaders remain fully committed to the anarchistic nature of the system, to free markets, periodic trade and armed wars and fierce competition. Thus every reasonable solution to the worlds environmental problems is impossible. Capitalism has multiplied the effects of natural destructive forces, accelerated the impending catastrophe and added peculiar forms of environmental destruction that would not exist save for the existence of the present system. The factors: global warming, floods, droughts, spread of diseases, waste, war and... Global warming (heat waves, rising seas, melting of mountain glaciers), depletion of the ozone layer, brown clouds, planet-wide drought, the pressure of population and the catalytic effect of these causes (called fingerprints by scientists) contribute to the transforming of natural disasters into unnatural catastrophes. The result is exceptional flooding, drought, famine, spread of disease-bearing insects and other carriers, and the destruction of coral reefs (what scientists call harbingers). Poverty, and industrial and technological backwardness maintained in order to perpetuate profits that otherwise would be spent on conversion of industries only worsen the vicious cycle of earth decay. To all that you can add wars waged for domination and control (or simply out of frustration or ideology) and the existence of massive polluters, including the arms industry with its nuclear arsenal and nuclear plants, with all the problems of disposal of toxics and nuclear waste. Events such as the deadly stretch of hot days that killed 669 people in the Midwest during the summer of 1995 and 250 in the Eastern United States in July 1999 (considered until recently ìfreakî occurrences) now regularly cost thousands of lives worldwide. The recent round of floods in Europe, Asia and Latin America, now in full swing and expected to last a few weeks to several months, have already cost an estimated 10,000 lives and the displacement of more than 6 million people. An additional 30 million are threatened with the loss of their homes and other property damage. Typhoons and hurricanes are much more frequent lately and have more devastating effects, like those in South Korea and other countries that recently killed and wounded thousands. Increase in infectious disease is another threat posed by global warming. As temperatures rise, disease-carrying mosquitoes and rodents migrate into new areas, infecting people in their wake. Scientists at the Harvard Medical School have linked recent US outbreaks of dengue (breakbone) fever, malaria, hantavirus and other diseases to climate change. A much graver situation is now developing in the economically underdeveloped continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Mexico alone, almost 10,000 people were infected with dengue in the last two months. It is estimated that the infectious rate of malaria will increase 250% - causing hundreds of millions of new cases in the next few years (it presently affects around 300 million people). Even the United States is starting to be afflicted with this and other diseases at increasingly dangerous levels. Scientists estimate that 60% of the total population of the globe will be exposed
RE: Re: Re: employment
ravi wrote: i hope doug does not find me in the list of those he finds unreasonable. whether it be my general responses to his posts, or to the particular issue of marc cooper (and i agree that we should avoid discussing personalities), i have tried to be honest and friendly. if that impression is untrue, i apologize. Doug Henwood's emails are full of words about his extreme annoyance, anger, frustration, irritation etc; all of that is humiliating and insulting to his possible interlocutors. It also looks like a cry for help, it's not even repressed rage any more, but open and in-your-face anger and capriciousness. There is no need to apologise. Doug is or was a psychoanalyst, wasn't he? He ought to recognise some warning signs. Probably his Oedipal struggle with the patriarchal Gods of socialism will soon be over, he will slough off that skin and re-emerge as the rock-ribbed repug he really is. Will they still have him though? That's the problem. After all, he already was a repug, long ago before imagining that he was of the left after all. Maybe he upset a few people during his commute up and down the Damascus road and now they don't want him either. Mark
Oil has always been top of Bush's foreign-policy agenda
[some people think that even to mention energy crises is just 'fatalism' but that's not what the Bush regime thinks. They know the oil is running out, and this is key to everything they say and do. Mark] Oil has always been top of Bush's foreign-policy agenda October 7 2002 The White House decided that diplomacy was not an option in the Middle East, writes Ritt Goldstein. As the United States prepares for war with Iraq, a report commissioned early in George Bush's presidency has surfaced, showing that the US knew it was running out of oil and foreshadowing the possible need for military intervention to secure supplies. The report forecasts an end to cheap and plentiful fuel, with the energy industry facing the beginning of capacity limitations. Prepared by the influential Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, it urged the Bush Administration to admit these agonising truths to the American people. Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century, written early last year, was a policy document used to shape the new administration's energy policy. It applauded the creation of Vice-President Dick Cheney's energy task force to address the creation of specific energy plans, and suggested it consider including representation from the Department of Defence. Saying there is no alternative and there is no time to waste, the document projects periods of exploding US energy prices, economic recession and social unrest unless answers are found. It suggests that a minimum three to five years is needed to find a solution, and says a reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy is called for, with access to oil repeatedly cited as a security imperative. The involvement of the Council of Foreign Relations in the report's preparation adds weight to its findings. The council ranks as one of the most influential groups in US political circles, with members including Mr Cheney and the former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker. The report also explodes the myth that the US is insulated from Middle East oil supply problems because it receives the bulk of its oil from less volatile sources outside the Persian Gulf. It says Middle East pricing and supply trends will affect energy costs around the globe regardless. It details an alternative basis for the US war on terrorism, as well as the apparent basis for much of the Bush Administration's present foreign policy, its so-called oil agenda. The Administration has been actively pursuing oil issues with Venezuela, Colombia, West Africa, the Caspian and Indonesia. And amid the pressure of UN resolutions and Israeli-Palestinian tension, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, recently visited West Africa. Among the immediate steps it urged was an inquiry into whether US policy could be changed to speed the availability of oil from the Caspian Basin region, supporting longstanding accusations that energy issues shadowed the US agenda in Afghanistan. The French authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie have argued that US oil interests had persuaded the Bush Administration to block terrorism investigations and negotiate with the Taliban, a report by the Inter Press Service (IPS) last November said. It has been said repeatedly that the US objective is the construction of trans-Afghan pipelines allowing access to Caspian oil and gas. According to the authors and an article in Le Monde Diplomatique in January, US attempts to bribe and threaten the Taliban had preceded the September 11 attacks. Notably, the IPS article quoted the French authors as saying that, faced with the Taliban's refusal to co-operate, the rationale of energy security changed into a military one, reflecting what the report advocated as a valid option. Providing a footnote to the question of US military threats, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, has sued Mr Cheney to obtain details of his energy task force meetings. Environmental groups have speculated that the suit is being fought to hide the level of involvement the collapsed US energy giant Enron had in the task force. On the looming oil crisis, the report reluctantly blames deregulation of the energy markets, a lack of a comprehensive US energy policy and the avoidance of oil conservation measures. It also suggests diplomatic alternatives - but policy since the September 11 attacks appears in keeping only with the military intervention option. Ideas such as defusing the Arab-Israeli conflict, an easing of Iraqi sanctions and reducing the restrictions on oil investments inside Iraq are at odds with the policies the Administration is pursuing. While the US now presses for regime change in Iraq, more than 18 months ago the report repeatedly emphasised its importance as an oil producer and the need to expand Iraqi production as soon as possible to meet projected oil shortages - shortages it said
FW: [A-List] US imperialism: Iraq and oil
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael Keaney Sent: 07 October 2002 09:45 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [A-List] US imperialism: Iraq and oil Sunday Herald - 06 October 2002 Official: US oil at the heart of Iraq crisis By Neil Mackay President Bush's Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that 'Iraq remains a destabilising influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East' and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US 'military intervention' is necessary. Vice-president Dick Cheney, who chairs the White House Energy Policy Development Group, commissioned a report on 'energy security' from the Baker Institute for Public Policy, a think-tank set up by James Baker, the former US secretary of state under George Bush Snr. The report, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, concludes: 'The United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a de- stabilising influence to ... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/ diplomatic assessments. 'The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.' Baker who delivered the recommendations to Cheney, the former chief executive of Texas oil firm Halliburton, was advised by Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former chief executive of Enron, the US energy giant which went bankrupt after carrying out massive accountancy fraud. The other advisers to Baker were: Luis Giusti, a Shell non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of BP and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco. Another name linked to the document is Sheikh Saud Al Nasser Al Sabah, the former Kuwaiti oil minister and a fellow of the Baker Institute. President Bush also has strong connections to the US oil industry and once owned the oil company Spectrum 7. The Baker report highlights massive shortages in world oil supplies which now leave the US facing 'unprecedented energy price volatility' and has led to recurring electricity black-outs in areas such as California. The report refers to the impact of fuel shortages on voters. It recommends a 'new and viable US energy policy central to America's domestic economy and to [the] nation's security and foreign policy'. Iraq, the report says, 'turns its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so', adding that there is a 'possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time' in order to damage prices. The report also says that Cheney should integrate energy and security to stop 'manipulations of markets by any state', and suggests that Cheney's Energy Policy Group includes 'representation from the Department of Defence'. 'Unless the United States assumes a leadership role in the formation of new rules of the game,' the report says, 'US firms, US consumers and the US government [will be left] in a weaker position.' www.rice.edu/projects/baker/
FW: Russian strategists debate the future
TITLE: MAIN REMARKS AT A ROUND TABLE ON IRAQ, GEORGIA, BUSH DOCTRINE AND RUSSIAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS [UL. MOSFILMOVSKAYA, 40, 15:10, OCTOBER 2, 2002] SOURCE: FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE (http://www.fednews.ru/) [Alexei] Pushkov: Let us start our Round Table meeting. Let me begin by saying that as always, American imperialism has sprung a surprise on us. Dim Simes has not come. He has been infected. I don't know by whom. Voice: Iraqis. Pushkov: I don't know. The Iraqis or al Qaeda. He called me yesterday and said he was running a fever and he canceled his trip to Russia. So, he cannot physically take part in our Round Table. Which is a pity because he could have given us an authentic picture of what is happening in the United States around Iraq. But since this is the 11th Round Table organized by Postscriptum program and the previous ten round tables took place without Simes -- I am told that he did take part in one Round Table -- so, nine round tables took place without him. But I hope any way that it will be just as successful without him. Our discussion will focus not so much on the Russian-American perspective as on the Russian perspective. That is, in what situation do we find ourselves in connection with the recent developments. I will permit myself to make a brief introduction just to outline the main parameters of the discussion. First, it is obvious that Iraq is just a field where a very powerful world-wide trend is manifesting itself. And if it weren't Iraq, it would have been some other country. The trend is as follows. To prevent the United States becoming a latter-day Roman Empire, and to prevent the establishment of a Pax Americana is practically impossible. But there are empires and empires. Some empires have unlimited sway and some have limited sway. There are reasonable empires and unreasonable empires. The question is, what will the United States be like and accordingly, what will we be like. And the question is whether Vladimir Putin would like to become a governor of one of the provinces in this empire or to be a partner, if not an equal partner, who will take part in solution of issues that affect the new empire and the destinies of the world. This is the choice facing Putin, but it also faces the whole nation because with all due respect, even if he is reelected in 2004, his tenure is finite. Meanwhile, for Russia this will continue to be a dilemma. Iraq is only the beginning. That was my first point. Second point. The second point is that we have had signals indicating that international events will go in this direction. The first signal was the situation around Bosnia. It was very complicated, involving as it did ethnic conflicts and so on and not everybody could get the message. The second failed signal was Somalia when the Americans had to retreat when they met with stiff resistance from Somalian warlords. And the third and most convincing signal was Kosovo. Obviously, Kosovo was to be followed by something else. Let me remind you that the Pentagon is seriously discussing a report on what is to be done next, after Iraq. The issue of Iraq has practically been closed. What next? Several influential intellectuals in America led by Ronald Asmus, one of the three people who first promoted the idea of NATO expansion to the East in 1993. That is, they made that idea public triggering a debate in America. They were Asmus, Kruger and Talbott. Asmus leads a group which says that the next task of American policy and NATO is to bring about a change of regime in Iran. If you raise this issue in Washington today everybody will tell you, who is listening to Asmus. This is some strange piece of paper. I've been hearing from the Americans for ten years, don't pay attention to it. In 1993 I was told, don't pay any attention to it. You must be mad to talk about the Baltic countries joining NATO. This is impossible. Now the Baltics are in NATO. Then they started talking about Ukraine joining NATO. You must be crazy, I was told. But now we see that Kuchma is about to be replaced and three years later Ukraine will be a member of NATO. Obviously, this is an on-going trend and we will see a progressive change in the world order. Nobody will stop at Iraq. It won't be a one-off affair like after September 11 when America had to be backed, what with the national syndrome and so on. This is my second point. Point three. On September 20, America adopted a new national security doctrine, a very interesting doctrine developed by Condoleezza Rice. Condoleezza Rice is a very charming and intelligent woman, she obviously tries to emulate George Kennan who in his time thought up the doctrine of deterrence which for some 40 years formed the content of America's foreign policy. The new doctrine, called the Bush Doctrine, or Preemptive Action Doctrine boils down to two points. First, the United States should promote a balance of forces
RE: Re: Holy Roman Empire 2002
I can't remember who it was who said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Macaulay? Mark -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Chris Burford Sent: 04 October 2002 07:45 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:30885] Re: Holy Roman Empire 2002 At 03/10/02 09:39 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote: But unwittingly, and at the expense of Iraq, what is being forged through all this jostling is a world government. It may take several decades more, but the pace is accelerating, and it could be shorter than we think. Chris Burford Leaving aside the question of whether a world capitalist government is desirable, it is by no means assured that civilization will exist in several decades. The USA has made a decisive and dangerous turn in its geopolitical/military strategy by openly declaring that it will use tactical nuclear weapons on a first-strike basis. I agree with this. It is also the blundering and brutal approach to terrorism that will propel the world into a cycle of greater repression and greater divisions of working people. Even the British ruling class knows from the experience of Ireland, that that does not work. The problem, it seems to me, is that much of the left is sleepwalking. Consciousness tends to lag 10 years behind events on a consistent basis in any event. The meliorist illusions of left-liberal and social democratic strongholds such as the Nation, New Labour and the postmodernist academy, which in themselves were a product of the 1990s stock market boom and Clinton/Blairism, seem altogether inappropriate for the deep crisis we find ourselves in today. Yes and no. Now that Bush is succeeding in dictating the agenda, a lot of liberal publicity is coming through this side of the Atlantic emphasising how a bourgeois democratic liberal Iraq would be much more pleasant, and condoning its imposition by force of arms. But other liberal voices are alarmed at US hegemonism. As of yesterday evening the balance of the skirmishing was that France Germany and Russia had come out opposing the US led draft resolution, but Hans Blix had conceded that he could not go back to Iraq with his deal without further instructions from the security council. The battle in this new holy roman empire will be about the terms of those instructions. But even though opponents of US war in practical terms would have to support the efforts of France Russia and China to impede this step, the whole unconscious contradictory process is part of an inevitable leap forward in defining the parameters of world government - the degree of licence given to bodies of armed men capable of imposing their will on others, the degree to which they have to try to appeal to some *apparently* impartial justice, and the increasing limitations on state sovereignty. The French proposal is *also* inherently imperialist but in this context it would contribute to the process of formation of world government by weakening the authority of the overwhelming hegemon to impose its will at whim. In terms of how the left takes up a stand in this apparently hopeless position, as people know, I do think needs a perspective on whether world government is in principle desirable. And whether, however revolutionary one's spirit there are significant chances of a revolution within a sovereign country anymore. Then the left has to argue, and the arguments are potentially endless, are about how that world government comes about because the process will be very dirty and very contradictory. I think it is inescapable concretely that any political stance has to look at the choices on the table at the particular time. That is not the same thing as abandoning any long term goal of principle. There is a very difficult call about what is in the best interests of working people locally and globally at any one time, versus the long term. Some members of this list including myself have taken different positions on different conflicts. Others have opposed all interventions. Chris Burford London
RE: RE: oilism redux
Ian wrote: Not that I advocate a technocracy; just that there are still a lot of very smart people on our planet who reject fatalism in all its forms. Fatalism has nothing whatever to do with the Global Hubbert eak. Accusing people of fatalism who accept the geological evidence about the extremely limited original natural endowment of hydrocarbons is like calling someone a fatalist because they state that the sun will rise tomorrow. Mark
RE: RE: oilism redux
Ian wrote: Not that I advocate a technocracy; just that there are still a lot of very smart people on our planet who reject fatalism in all its forms. Fatalism has nothing whatever to do with the Global Hubbert Peak. Accusing people of fatalism who accept the geological evidence about the extremely limited original natural endowment of hydrocarbons is like calling someone a fatalist because they state that the sun will rise tomorrow. Mark
oilism redux
[In times past some people on this list somewhat sneeringly referred to the notion that energy politics might be an important cause of capitalist crisis and of war as 'oilism'. Those of us who argued that apocalyptic energy crises were just around the corner were derided as Malthusian misanthropes and hopeless Cassandras. Who was right and who was wrong? Here's how the US news media now tends to rpesent the case for US predation in the Middle East. We're seeing a lot of this kind of 'bonanza' stuff but what they don't talk about is what will happen if they _don't_ get their hands on Iraqi oil, for whatever reason. What amazes me about is the absolute cynicism, the in-your-face thievery and imperial thuggery of this kind of talk. I suppose it is born of secret desperation. Without Iraqi oil America is doomed. Mark Jones] Subject: S.F. Chronicle article: Oil firms wait as Iraq crisis unfolds Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002 10:21:06 -0700 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by helios.hampshire.edu id NAA09116 Oil firms wait as Iraq crisis unfolds Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, September 29, 2002 ©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/09/29/MN116803.DTL The world's biggest oil bonanza in recent memory may be just around the corner, giving U.S. oil companies huge profits and American consumers cheap gasoline for decades to come. And it all may come courtesy of a war with Iraq. While debate intensifies about the Bush administration's policy, oil analysts and Iraqi exile leaders believe a new, pro-Western government -- assuming it were to replace Saddam Hussein's regime -- would prompt U.S. and multinational petroleum giants to rush into Iraq, dramatically increasing the output of a nation whose oil reserves are second only to that of Saudi Arabia. There already is a stampede, with the Russians, French and Italians already lined up, said Lawrence Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a New York think tank funded by large oil companies. Until now, debate over the economic impact of a U.S.-led attack on Iraq has focused mostly on short-term dangers. Pundits have worried that just as during the Gulf War, a new Iraq war would disrupt oil exports from the Persian Gulf and cause a sharp spike in petroleum prices. If Hussein attacks oil facilities in neighboring gulf states, for example, or Arab oil producers institute a boycott, Americans could wind up paying more than $2 per gallon for gasoline, some experts predict. The long term, however, looks radically different, according to oil analysts. In their view, a new Iraq oil boom could begin within two years of the war's end -- roughly the time it took to repair damaged facilities in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War. Once production reaches its full capacity, they say, the enormous increase in supply could weaken OPEC, the oil producers' cartel led by Saudi Arabia, lower international oil prices for the foreseeable future and shift the balance of power among the world's major oil producers. OPEC is already significantly fractured, and this would already add to its internal frictions, said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who formerly was a U.S. diplomat and CIA agent in the Mideast. It would definitely diminish the Saudis' influence (over the United States) and would cause the Iranian regime a lot of trouble. Iraq has 113 billion barrels of proven reserves, second worldwide only to Saudi Arabia, which has 262 billion barrels. But because of its two decades of war, Iraq's oil potential remains relatively unexplored. The U.S. Energy Department estimates that Iraq has as much as 220 billion barrels in undiscovered reserves, bringing the Iraqi total to the equivalent of 98 years of current U.S. annual oil imports. American firms are barred by U.S. law from making contracts with Iraq and have had to watch as the rival firms of other nations sign contracts with the Iraqi dictator to pump oil after U.N. sanctions are lifted. Assuming Hussein is overthrown and U.S. and U.N. sanctions are lifted, Goldstein said, you'll see the U.S. companies will be very interested. Muhammad-Ali Zainy, a former Iraqi government oil official, estimates that after an overthrow of Hussein, oil production would rise from its current output of about 2.5 million barrels per day to as much as 7 million barrels per day by the end of the decade. Given Iraq's dire financial situation, any Iraqi government after Saddam Hussein will need massive amounts of money and will try to produce as much as it can, said Zainy, now a senior energy analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. Just how low prices could go as a result of increased Iraqi production is unclear. Some analysts have predicted that oil could plummet from its current level of about $30 per barrel -- a price that includes
RE: Re: oilism redux
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of joanna bujes Sent: 30 September 2002 20:48 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:30731] Re: oilism redux .As for doomed...not America, just the folks that currently run things. Not so, unfortunately. It is hundreds of millions of people living in the 'burbs and living out the American dream, who will suffer the most. Mark
RE: Re: EU Schlerorsis
Ian Murray wrote .Here's contact info for the Guardian. I'm pretty sure the contact info for the NYT and Wash Post are in the archives. How to contact Guardian Unlimited Actually the best way to contact them is to eat your lunch in the Progressive Working Class Chop House (sic) which is just opposite their premises in Farringdon Road in the East End. That's where some of them hang. Since the Chop House no longer seems to do chops but does do caviar, champagne etc, you'll feel quite at home. I do anyway. Mark
Re: Re: Re: Where is Herbert Spencer when we need him?
At 23/09/2002 05:55, Melvin wrote: Classless concepts will not help the new communist class. Nor will wholesale condemnation of the American peoples strengthened the antiwar bourgeois democratic current alive and well in America. You are right and my short way of putting it was wrong. There are many Americans from all classes who are opposed to US militarism; unfortunately, like the many German workers who opposed Hitler, they may still end up paying the collective price which America will one day pay for its national crimes. Mark
[A-List] Left Book Club: Zed titles
Dear Pen-lers, The Left Book Club by the A-list officially launches with the following titles courtesy of Zed Books. As was recently discussed, Zed operates a differential pricing policy enabling purchasers from the South to acquire books at more affordable rates. These are indicated below: HARRY SHUTT, New Democracy - US$17.50 - CLUB PRICE: $12 (South: $6.00) JAMES PETRAS AND HENRY VELTMEYER, Globalisation Unmasked - US$19.95 - CLUB PRICE: $14.00 (South: $7.00) WILLIAM BLUM, Rogue State - US$17.50 - CLUB PRICE: $12.00 (South: $6.00) ROBERT BIEL, The New Imperialism - US$27.50 -CLUB PRICE: $18.00 (South: $9.00) JOEL KOVEL, The Enemy of Nature - US$19.95 (not $15) - CLUB PRICE: $14.00 (South: $7.00) Zed will pay for postage and packaging. The offer on these titles closes on 31 December 2002. For further details on these and other Zed titles see http://www.zedbooks.demon.co.uk/home.htm Please note that you have to subscribe to the A-List. In order to take advantage of this offer, reply to me offlist at [EMAIL PROTECTED] I will forward your details to Zed, who will then provide you with payment details. Happy reading, Michael Keaney
Re: Re: [A-List] Left Book Club: Zed titles
At 23/09/2002 19:48, you wrote: How do you subscribe to the A list? Joanna The A-List archives are at http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/ also subscription info. Mark
Re: Where is Herbert Spencer when we need him?
At 22/09/2002 14:53, you wrote:
I expect we'll soon see all conscientious libertarians and consistent social
Darwinists rise up in revulsion against this Bush doctrine.
Why so? 100 hundred years after Spencer, angry Americans are more anxious
to bash people of different hue, colour, etc, than ever. Why, there are
people on this very list who came out in support of the Bush tactic of
bombing Afghanistan, and they are not at all apologetic, on the contrary,
they continue to argue for American exceptionalism ('perhaps Marc Cooper
has a point' etc); unfortunately, what is exceptional about Americans is
their mix of murderousness, infantile self pity and devastating lack of
self-insight.
Mark
[A-List] The Left Book Club by the A-List
Pen-l'ers When Mark Jones set up the A-list a year ago it was with the intention that a forum be provided where participants could analyse developments in the global political economy from an anti-imperialist perspective in a suitably conducive environment. Mark passed the reins to me earlier this year, and I've tried to follow suit by using the fine facilities provided by Hans Ehrbar at Utah University so that we have a developing archive of materials focused on various related themes. However both Mark and I would like to take the list further, and to that end, we can announce the launch of the Left Book Club by the A-list. Books by major independent and mainstream publishers will be offered to A-List Members at substantial discounts and on a quick turnaround. At the moment, we have reached an agreement with progressive publisher Zed, which has agreed to offer us some selected titles. We are in the process of negotiating with other publishers, and announcements will follow. The first offering will be made later this week. A new website will also carry the details. All enquiries should be made in the first instance to Michael Keaney [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are looking for ideas and suggestions. Anyone wishing to review books should get in touch. In some cases we may be able to provide or obtain review copies of books. Whatever happens, we hope that at least some of the titles offered by the Left Book Club will feature in list discussions, along the lines of the recent exchange concerning Robert Biel's The New Imperialism. The first offering will include Harry SHUTT's, new book The New Democracy, PETRAS AND VELTMEYER's Globalization Unmasked and William BLUM's Rogue State. As stated above, this list will expand according to the success of our negotiations with publishers. More details will be posted as soon as they emerge. This service will be available to subscribers of the A-list only. There are no formal membership restrictions, except that those indulging in sectarianism, flaming, baiting or apologising for imperialism will be ejected. So far this policy has led to a remarkably flame-free existence for the A-list, and long may it continue. We expect both heat and light in our discussions, but none of the above. Michael Keaney http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/a-list
hot air and meltdown
So much piffle and hot air is talked about 'renewables', the 'hydrogen economy'. windmills, geothermals, photovoltaics, compressed air machines and I know not what, in the context of declining oil and of avoiding C02 greenhouse gas emissions. Now we have a situation where BP has announced that Britain North Sea oil and gas is running out so fast that Britain will be a net import of natural gas within 2 years; and meanwhile, the price of oil is back at $30/barrel. You'd think that the second age of nuclear would be dawning, especially when Tony Blair himself has recently said we'd have to 'look again seriously at nuclear'. Now get this: Britain's nuclear power industry is bankrupt: Nuclear option Industry needs creeping nationalisation Leader Tuesday September 10, 2002 The Guardian Nationalising nuclear power was never part of a government energy policy. But it is slowly becoming part of one. Ministers have shown their hand by stepping in to prevent the immediate collapse of British Energy, the nation's biggest nuclear power provider, with a £410m support package. The message is clear: nuclear plants cannot go bankrupt. Alarmingly, the state aid may not be enough - it buys just three weeks' breathing space in which to negotiate a long-term rescue for the company. The prospects do not look good. British Energy cannot produce electricity at a price that exceeds the cost of extracting it from its nuclear reactors. The question for ministers and British Energy is can nuclear power ever be made to pay? If the answer is no, then the government needs to either progressively shut down the industry or subsidise it. For example British Energy pays about £300m a year to BNFL, a state-owned company, to reprocess the waste its operations leave behind. A deal which favours British Energy rather than BNFL would mean the taxpayer bearing more of a burden than shareholders. Strangely, environmental considerations might be British Energy's strongest card. Although nuclear waste is expensive - and difficult - to dispose of, nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gases. Yet British Energy is not exempt from the climate change levy; if it were, the Treasury would be losing £80m a year. Even building new nuclear power stations means more money from consumers in the form of higher energy prices. Britain's deregulated electricity market has seen prices drop, but as Downing Street's performance and innovation unit energy report last February admitted: Nowhere in the world have new nuclear power stations yet been financed with a liberalised electricity market. In the short term, ministers have no option but to stump up extra cash. If the meltdown were to continue, British Energy's contribution to the national grid would have to be replaced - else blackouts in Britain, seen in California two years ago, beckon. British Energy cannot easily cut costs - an accident would be blamed on Treasury penny-pinching. The prospect of another bail out - in the form of creeping nationalisation - looms. When it arrives shareholders, who pocketed six years of dividends, and executives, responsible for British Energy's plight, ought to lose out.
The real goal is the seizure of Saudi oil
The real goal is the seizure of Saudi oil Iraq is no threat. Bush wants war to keep US control of the region Mo Mowlam Thursday September 5, 2002 The Guardian I keep listening to the words coming from the Bush administration about Iraq and I become increasingly alarmed. There seems to be such confusion, but through it all a grim determination that they are, at some point, going to launch a military attack. The response of the British government seems equally confused, but I just hope that the determination to ultimately attack Iraq does not form the bedrock of their policy. It is hard now to see how George Bush can withdraw his bellicose words and also save face, but I hope that that is possible. Otherwise I fear greatly for the Middle East, but also for the rest of the world. What is most chilling is that the hawks in the Bush administration must know the risks involved. They must be aware of the anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East. They must be aware of the fear in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that a war against Iraq could unleash revolutions, disposing of pro-western governments, and replacing them with populist anti-American Islamist fundamentalist regimes. We should all remember the Islamist revolution in Iran. The Shah was backed by the Americans, but he couldn't stand against the will of the people. And it is because I am sure that they fully understand the consequences of their actions, that I am most afraid. I am drawn to the conclusion that they must want to create such mayhem. The many words that are uttered about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, which are never substantiated with any hard evidence, seem to mean very little. Even if Saddam had such weapons, why would he wish to use them? He knows that if he moves to seize the oilfields in neighbouring countries the full might of the western world will be ranged against him. He knows that if he attacks Israel the same fate awaits him. Comparisons with Hitler are silly - Hitler thought he could win; Saddam knows he cannot. Even if he has nuclear weapons he cannot win a war against America. The United States can easily contain him. They do not need to try and force him to irrationality. But that is what Bush seems to want to do. Why is he so determined to take the risk? The key country in the Middle East, as far as the Americans are concerned, is Saudi Arabia: the country with the largest oil reserves in the world, the country that has been prepared to calm the oil markets, producing more when prices are too high and less when there is a glut. The Saudi royal family has been rewarded with best friend status by the west for its cooperation. There has been little concern that the government is undemocratic and breaches human rights, nor that it is in the grip of an extreme form of Islam. With American support it has been believed that the regime can be protected and will do what is necessary to secure a supply of oil to the west at reasonably stable prices. Since September 11, however, it has become increasingly apparent to the US administration that the Saudi regime is vulnerable. Both on the streets and in the leading families, including the royal family, there are increasingly anti-western voices. Osama bin Laden is just one prominent example. The love affair with America is ending. Reports of the removal of billions of dollars of Saudi investment from the United States may be difficult to quantify, but they are true. The possibility of the world's largest oil reserves falling into the hands of an anti-American, militant Islamist government is becoming ever more likely - and this is unacceptable. The Americans know they cannot stop such a revolution. They must therefore hope that they can control the Saudi oil fields, if not the government. And what better way to do that than to have a large military force in the field at the time of such disruption. In the name of saving the west, these vital assets could be seized and controlled. No longer would the US have to depend on a corrupt and unpopular royal family to keep it supplied with cheap oil. If there is chaos in the region, the US armed forces could be seen as a global saviour. Under cover of the war on terrorism, the war to secure oil supplies could be waged. This whole affair has nothing to do with a threat from Iraq - there isn't one. It has nothing to do with the war against terrorism or with morality. Saddam Hussein is obviously an evil man, but when we were selling arms to him to keep the Iranians in check he was the same evil man he is today. He was a pawn then and is a pawn now. In the same way he served western interests then, he is now the distraction for the sleight of hand to protect the west's supply of oil. And where does this leave the British government? Are they in on the plan or just part of the smokescreen? The government speaks of morality and the threat posed by weapons of mass
Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk
At 05/09/2002 19:29, Louis Proyect wrote: Robert Biel's The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000) is everything that Hardt-Negri's Empire is not. This is a wonderful book by Biel and, prompted by my mentor Lou Proyect, I just spent a day at the British Library going thru it. Great, especially, on the importance to capitalist accumulation and to the wealth enjoyed by the big swinging dicks of Wall St and their fashionable-parlor-socialist acolytes and alleged critics, is the unsung and unpaid domestic drudgery of Third World Women. As Biel points out, the same people who argue in favour of the maquiladoras and the entrenchment of wage-slavery in the peripheries, as somehow enlightening alternatives to such domestic drudgery, are in their own persons and in their engrossment of the labour of others, beneficiaries of that domestic drudgery, for without the immiseration and cruel exploitation of unseen masses of women, part-peasant, part-proletarian, hag-ridden by patriarchy and ultimately at the service of Wall St and its mouthpieces, imperialism could not continue to exploit the South at all. These silent, invisible women, hundreds of millions of them, are a condition of existence of late capitalism, of US imperialism in its exterminist phase of final decay. Those who want to silence such authentic voices of the oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its servants. Biel provides a rebuttal to their craven politics in terms which even economists can understand. However despite its strong points, so well summarised by Lou that you don't need to buy the it, there are one or two, no, make that four, thing wrong with Biel's book. First, his approach to the USSR (his Maoist inflection doesn't permit him to comprehend either the scale of the human catastrophe ongoing in eastern Europe, or the implications, positive and negative, of the disappearance of the USSR for global relations of production and for US hegemony). 2nd his approach to the nature of contemporary imperialism (he's a semi-kautskyite who believes in ultra-imperialism. Now. while it is true that there exists a baleful solidarity of the thieving North against the abused South, the idea that the USA is merely one imperial power among others, a primum inter pares, is absurd. The US is the heart of the global cancer of capitalism, the primary tumour). 3rd Biel's approach to the ongoing and apocalyptic eco-crisis, which combines man-made climate change, mass extinction and poisoning of the ecosphere is far too weak (He kind of mentions it, but it is hardly central to his thinking; but, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in eco-catastrophe, but eco-catastrophe is sure interested in you). 4th Biel's political conclusions are tepid, insipid and utopian; and here I diosagree with Lou's more upbeat judgment. I'm glad of Lou's review and despite my overall negativity, this is a good book. Especially good factually (but an archive search of marxmail or the A-List will bring up a lot better and more recent stuff, for free. Where do Zed get off charging $25 for a slim paperback?) Mark Jones
Fwd: Re: [A-List] British empire loyalists no. 94
[forwarded from the A-List, by Stan Goff. Mark Jones] Pat Bond's article, to which this responds, is pasted in below. I feel compelled to weigh in here, and invite criticism, given that I haven't had time to sit down and work the following reflections out in a very rigorous way. These are very tentative musings. Pat Bond has opened up a critically important area of discussion here, one that scientific socialists in particular need to grapple with at the level of epistemology, if we are to repair our theoretical roof. It was Luxemburg who raised this question with regard to imperialism theory, I think, of the center-periphery dynamic and the question of material unsustainability. In fact, in this polemical contest between her and Lenin (who said socialism will be constructed on electrification), she has been vindicated, I think. It was a glimpse she had, but we now have the scientific understanding necessary to flesh out this question and to expand and improve our understanding of the *materialism* in historical materialism. Marx glimpsed the sustainability issue as well with his questions about soil degradation and capitalist agriculture, when he was studying Liebeg. In fact, it is Marx still who forces us back to a dialectical consciousness, to a critique of the Cartesian separation of subject and object ( a real issue for ecologists and feminists as well), to the questions of reification and mystification (that is, epistemology and ideology). In three plus years of (sometimes painful and tedious, but generally very fruitful) discussions on two international listservs between marxists, social democrats, deep ecologists, and feminists, some in which Pat Bond participated, the primacy of epistemology became achingly clear. It was at the level of how we know that we continually encountered our worst impasses. And one place where misdirection (in the sense of magic tricks) seemed to often plague both ecologists and (variously orthodox) socialists was this self-same Cartesianism - human/subject, nature/object - which quietly led us to uncritically accept a notion of technology as somehow separated from nature, and as existing independently as it were from social relations; a fundamental rejection of the most valuable insights of marxism. It was a real testament to the power of capitalist ideological hegemony, and leads me to believe that we are way behind the power curve, so to speak, in the development of theory related to ideology (include here every scientific insight and every new field of study that occurs along a continuum reaching from sociology through neurobiology, with semiotics and linguistics occupying very important spaces). Alf Hornborg, a Swedish ecologist who has done very important work here states: It is not enough to say that the specific *forms* of technology are socially constructed; ultimately, the whole idea of a technological 'realm', so to speak, rests on social relationships of exchange [I quibble with him here, as he conflates exchange with production/reproduction, but...]. This implies that what is technologically feasible cannot be distinguished from what is socially, i.e. economically, feasible. [Hints of dependency theory here] If, since Newton, the machine has served as a root metaphor for the universe, an advocate of a less mechanistic world view might begin by demonstrating that even the machine is an organic phenomenon. It is this understanding that helps clarify the interpenetrating relation between an independent material universe, our interpretations of reality generally, our technical knowledge, our social relations, and the whole notion of development. Let's begin by admitting that development and sustainability are problematic concepts, theoretical minefields of the first order, in fact. There is a value judgement implicit in the notion of development, if it can mean anything at all. To simply reduce it to evolution of *whatever* is tautological. Development is evolution, and evolution is development. We are chasing our tails. There is a subtext in the connotation of the term that implies improvement, and this introduces the question of for whom?. (Even if we provisionally accept the bourgeois nonsense that the for whom is everyone, or humanity generally, we are faced with the very real dilemma that this historical process is consuming the foundation of its own existence, because development is made synonymous with growth.) But marxists have done a creditable job of partially resolving this issue by demonstrating that capitalist development, at least, is based significantly on the material exploitation of people's labor power, therefore, all development is socially constructed and historically contingent. Marxists have also identified the predominant role of specific technology (instruments of production) in development. (Marxists haven't done such a great job of escaping dogmatic interpretations of Marx that ignore the role of unremunerated (women's) labor, and non
Re: Russia turns to yuan
At 25/08/2002 12:11, you wrote: Is this very interesting article, on the A-List (founded by Mark Jones), a sign of a change towards a more multipolar world, or is it just a reaction to the dubious nature of the dollar as a store of international value, at present. Despite all the reservations about Russia and China, I would like to believe the former. Chris Burford London GOODBYE DOLLAR! GOODBYE EURO! Russian state banks rushed to China for yuans I think that Pravda may be anticipating the collapse of capitalism a little here (an old fault). According to Johnson's Russia List there are more dollars than rubles in circulation in Russia right now, so I think the day of yuan/ruble hegemony has yet to dawn. As long as the US controls the sealanes, and has (if you can believe Michael Ruppert, there are now 400,000 combat-ready US troops parked in and around the Middle East), can US control of world oil--the basis of dollar hegemony-- be under threat? Surely if the Americans have learnt anything in the past twenty years, it's that you can balkanise the whole world, starting with the USSR, and moving on now to Iraq and perhaps Saudi Arabia, and no-one stops you. When they start to redraw the political map of the Middle East/Central Asia, carving up territories in a new imperialist scramble to redivide the spoils and plunder anew, presumably US hegemony will be more not less secure. Here is what Stan Goff has just been saying on this: The Infinite War and its Roots by Stan Goff Most of the polemical resistance to the so-called War on Terrorism has thus far been based on ethics and morality. And the moral dimension of the war is important. But we must take a more critical look at this war, at what is motivating the war, and what are the likely outcomes. While we can mount moral resistance to the war, if we fail to critically engage the real causes of it, we cannot mount an effective political resistance, which has to be an effective response to the motive forces behind the war. Here we will emphasize the dynamic between an American ruling class and its governing junta -- which has seized power and is in many ways out of control -- in an adverse historical circumstance that is not likely correctable, and cannot, therefore, guarantee the survival of U.S. imperialism. We have to study this dynamic concretely to understand it. It is important at the outset not to think of big business (sometimes referred to as capital) as broken into discrete sectors, each sector with its own static base and ideology. The concept of capital as broken into static sectors, while it may be useful for a short time to conduct a transient analysis, is fundamentally mechanical. Capital is a dynamic and cyclical process of accumulation via valorization and systemic reproduction. It has to stabilize and reproduce itself as a system, yet it also has to grow. This simultaneous need for equilibrium and disequilibrium is one of the central paradoxes of imperialism. Total capital at any moment is a set sum of money, for the sake of argument, but it is in flux, changing forms throughout the production/reproduction process, first productive capital, then goods and services, then redistributed through interests and rents, then finance capital, etc. Capital has a temporal nature. In this process, the system bosses, CEOs, etc., are like an acting troupe, the members of which keep changing roles. The notion that they are divided into sectors, then, is illusory, because no fraction of capital exists independently in any sector. A crisis of accumulation is not a discrete crisis limited to one sector of capital. It is general. And the higher the degree of international integration and rationalization of the capitalist class, especially in a technically complex interdependency, the more generalized are the accumulation crises. Anything affecting one sector necessarily affects all sectors. We cannot know every aspect of this dialectic, but we can focus on some key aspects of it, bearing in mind the limitations of this focus, that I think will shed some light on our situation. So I will focus on oil, on currency, and on the evolving role and dilemma of the U.S. military. While we can certainly acknowledge that currency and the military are constants in the abstract and not a sector of capital, oil at first blush appears to be a definite sector. But this, too, is illusory. Oil is not a separate sector, first for the reasons cited above, but also because oil is no mere commodity. Oil is the form of a deeper cycle of material reality than that on which radical theorists concentrated in the abstract with relation to the commodity and the vast social architecture they unfold from that enigma. It is the embodiment of inescapable physical laws related to energy and matter, and those are the laws, in conjunction with the laws of social motion, that we are bumping up against, not just as a society but as a species. Oil is a form of super
Re: Re: Re: Russia turns to yuan
At 25/08/2002 16:13, Melvin P. wrote: There is a glut of oil in the world. Er, well. Even BP don't quite agree. They, like Shell, think we are at the end of the oil age. Only the satanic hordes at Exxon think otherwise for some reason. BP are now supporters of the 'hydrogen economy' on the grounds that Hydrogen [is] the most abundant element in the universe, as they put it on their website: http://www.bp.com/company_overview/technology/frontiers/fr04aug02/fr04hydrogen.asp Unfortunately most hydrogen on this planet takes the form of not-notably combustible H2O. Attempts to pipe H2 to your local forecourt result in a price of $500 per Kwh of power delivered, which makes it cheaper to power your house with hamsters. It also means storing Hiroshima-bomb sized H2 containers at your local gas station. For more on why there can never be a hydrogen economy (or a wind, geothermal, fuel-cell or pv economy), see Don Lancaster's article on energy fundamentals at http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf where he also defines the DOLLAR as A voucher currently exchangeable for the personal use and control of ten kilowatt hours of electrical energy or thirty kilowatt hours of gasoline. Mark
Re: At Long Last Lagavullin
I'd like to thank Max for his forbearance and good manners. Thank you, Max. Mark At 13/08/2002 16:16, Max wrote: I am delighted to announce that Mark Jones, after some delay due to circumstances beyond his control, is redeeming his debt to me for a case of lagavullin. It may be recalled that some years ago he wagered against me that the Dow would fall below some impossible level -- I forget what exactly, within a year's time. He proved to be wrong, not in terms of the fall, but the timing. In any case, I would like to attest that he is a man of honor, a gentleman, and a scholar, even though he has said some horrible things about people on this list. Nobody's perfect. Some of you can start polishing up your shot glasses. mbs -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Kelley Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 3:18 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: 8 a day, no way? At 03:25 PM 8/9/02 -0700, R wrote: with all that drinking, kelley, your urethra must be very germ free.;-) every tried cranberry juice? I tend not to because it usually comes with a bunch of other stuff to make it palatable. As for the water and tp, it was a joke so paula would have something else to invest in. Water is necessary for msucles. The more muscles, the more glycogen (stored carbs). Each gram of glycogen stores an additional 2.5 to 3 grams of water. When muscle tissue increases, then more water is stored in the bloodstream too. So, you're drinking a lot, but not really expelling it any more than when you had less muscle. I workout 1.5 hours a day and live in a very warm, humid climate. I've decided I want to train to do a bike/canoe tour that I've wanted to do since I moved here. Then, with any luck, after my beau relocates here, and I whip him into shape *rubbing hands together*, I'd like to do a canoe trip from St. Pete to Key West. Even at a gallon, I can't get enough. When I take a day off from training, I feel miserable and I'm more thirsty than ever and actually drink close to a gallon and half. As for cranberry juice, yes, I have. Still, i'm puzzled why you ask! Chuck and others, thanks for the interesting info. I just thought it looked like a wicked, bass ass workout because it's targeting more than just your legs. I never folks just on legs for any aerobic activity. The fact that you can't backpedal is interesting too! I just heard that you were supposed to do it in a group because it's also about the imagination. Or something like that. Beats me. That's why I asked. The group action seemed so gimmicky and faddish that I was put off.
more on the Great bet
I bet Max Sawicky that the DJIA would fall to 3,000. It did not. This bet was akin to the famous bet made between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich about whether the Club of Rome's central predictions about eco-doom were wrong or right. Simon (the eco-optimist) won his bet. Ehrlich et al had to pay up $576. In the meantime, Ehrlich et al have been proven right, spectacularly so, on all the key indices of climate change, mass species extinction, and the wrecking of the biosphere. Simon was wrong after all. The trap Ehrlich fell into was believing that commodity markets (this was how Simon framed the wager) actually tell you something about the real world. Naive person that I am, I also half believed that the Dow and other market indices actually tell you something. Perhaps they do, but only in the same ways that Stonehenge (which is a neolithic astronomical observatory where the scientific proceedings were spiced up with a little human sacrifice) tells you something about celestial mechanics. Good sport that I am, I intend to pay Max the value of his whisky. I'm more comfortable doing it now that it is clearer who the real winner was: me. Not only was the Dow rigged; so evidently have been many other figures about the great American [non] boom. The only thing we know for sure is that the US economy is grossly inefficient and wasteful, consuming as it does twice as much energy and resources per capita as the EU or Japan, for precious little obvious benefit in HDI terms. Mark Fresh jolt to American economy Latest productivity figures will undermine US 'miracle' and fuel fears of 'double-dip' recession Faisal Islam, economics correspondent Sunday August 4, 2002 The Observer US figures for productivity will slide this week, suggesting a relapse of the world's biggest economy into a 'double dip' recession, and the possibility of further rate cuts from the US Federal Reserve. Historical revisions to data are also set to belie the idea that the US economy outperformed structurally in the past half-decade. 'This week will probably rub away the productivity miracle, and we will find a large part of it was a statistical mirage,' says Professor Avinash Persaud, global head of research at State Street Bank. The figures, due on Friday, will show that quarter-on-quarter growth in US non-farm productivity slumped to about 1 per cent in the second quarter of this year, compared with 8.4 per cent in the previous quarter. Those first-quarter figures underpinned the belief that the structural flexibility of US businesses would see its economy power into very strong recovery during this year. But economists expect that figure and a slew of previous figures to be revised downwards, after last week's surprisingly poor GDP data. 'The weaker quarterly figures mean US GDP grew only 0.3 per cent last year, rather than the 1.2 per cent that was previously estimated. This and other revisions raise all sorts of questions with respect to estimates of trend US growth and trend US productivity growth,' says David Hillier of Barclays Capital. Last week's poor growth, sluggish job creation and souring consumer confidence figures sent US investors running scared. But productivity numbers are of longer-term importance. The seemingly stellar productivity boom anchored much of the capital investment and share market confidence that propelled the US economy in the late 1990s. Even after the revisions, average annual productivity growth from 1996-2002 will be around 2.6 per cent, says Lehman Brothers, double the trend rate of the previous two decades but no greater than European productivity. 'For the past few years the US authorities have been lording over us about the superiority of the US economic model. I think we'll find Europe has performed just as well,' says Persaud. Much of the superior US productivity performance has been down to demographics and immigration. A recent Office for National Statistics report showed that, if the UK used the US method of 'hedonic quality adjustments', British productivity would be 0.5 percentage points higher. 'Look at the per worker per hour measure and you find that, despite so-called eurosclerosis, European productivity has been as high as the US's,' says Persaud.
Re: the great bet
At 26/07/2002 17:42, Michael wrote: Some time ago, Mark Jones, who has not returned made a bet with Max Actually I have returned, but I have not yet written to Max detailing my terms, which however I plan to. Wall St is now worth about $11 trn instead of the $20 trn it was worth two years back. It has lost almost half its value. In my opinion, it will lose more. However the extent of the losses is not reflected in the DJIA, which is an arbitrary artefact. Therefore, I lost my bet with Max. But it cannot be gainsaid that I was right in principle. It is the Dow which is out of line with reality. Mark that the stock market was about to crash. I forget the exact date and exact level, but Mark's estimate was too soon and too low. He asked me to announce to that Max is about to be paid in full. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Doug tells the truth..........................
The truthabout Doug 'I'm no pacifist' Henwood is that he, too, is in favour of US policy, that is, Henwood favours the policy of bombing Afghan towns and cities, he favours the random and/or mass slaughter of Afghanis, he favours the destruction of whatever remains of the social infrastructure in Afghanistan, in short he favours the kind of war of exterminism which for example the Russian state has carried out in Chechya in recent years. The collapse of Afghan society as a result of the combined efforts of US bombing and the insertion of Russian ground forces, troops, tanks etc, under the Northern Alliance flag, is creating not just a humanitarian catastrophe but prime-time genocide in Afghanistan. Henwood does support this ongoing genocide. He is a 'voter for war credits', a person who has surely lost any shred of credibility as a spokesman of the left. You cannot be of the left while supporting US genocide in Afghanistan. Now, weasel words about supporting this or that bit of a policy can not help him slide out his moral complicity in the US genocidal assault on Afghanistan, and no self-serving caveats about being against bombing but in favour of oher kinds of administering death should blind us to the truth of his politics: it is a cowardice and an instinct for personal survival, nothing more, that motivates it. When assessing 'the truth' of Henwood's politics, let us begin with this obvious fact -- the man is simply a craven apologist for exterminism, for US imperialism in its newest and most lethal guise. Mark Jones At 23/11/2001 07:18, you wrote: http://www.thenation.com FEATURE STORY | Special Report Terrorism and Globalization by DOUG HENWOOD
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Stand-off between Opec and Russia?
of its own downfall. Stabilising the world economy may not make more capital flow into the Russian oil patch. Capital follows profit, not sentiment. If Putin's grand plan succeeds, then the majority of future investment will still flow into the Middle East, above all to Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and not into Russia's decayed and declining oil sector. Central Asia and the Caspian are also too uneconomic and too small in reserves to ever replace Gulf crude. Therefore, the underlying logic of decline and crisis remains in place. Putin's plan is not destined to save capitalism. All it can do is to buy time: in other words, it is an attempt to *manage decline* during the next decade, while hoping that something else turns up meantime. It is not a basis for relaunching world capitalism into a new great upwave of accumulation. Inevitably, therefore, the most pronounced aspects of any new Russo-American realignment will not be any inherent capacity for renewed growth and progress, but on the contrary will be intensified repression, obscurantism and black reaction. It is a recipe for the further militarisation of imperialism, for the shrinking of civil society, for creating societies of total surveillance and lockdown, for intensified racism and social intolerance. This is the era of Exterminism, the highest stage of imperialism. It is also the age of Panopticon. Here too, Afghanistan is a foretaste of the future. Mark Jones
Re: Re: Re: Re: Not good
At 25/09/2001 05:52, Christian wrote: Last week, you said that the market price was not indicative of the coming crisis of oil production, because it's not functioning like a normal price should. Now, you're saying that if it moves in the direction you think it should, then the market price _will_ be indicative of the coming crisis--sooner or later. Although I don't yet know much about the specific data that you refer to, as an argument, you have to admit this sounds pretty fishy. What I'm arguing is that oil is not a normal commodity. No other commodity has four US navy battlegroups (now a fifth) patrolling the sealanes to secure it. No other commodity has the known economic impacts; price hikes have quick recessionary result. The postwar boom was built on the exploitation of 1930s automobile and chemical and engineering technologies using the flood of cheap high-grade oil and has energy which began to run out in the 1970s. A future high price for crude and gas, sustained even in a slump, will tell us that Opec is in control and that world oil has peaked: NOT that true market prices have at last emerged. I didn't argue *that*. Incidentally, prices are cratering right now. NO-ONE really knows what will happen, IMO, not the CIA, the USGS, the DoE EIA. not Opec itself, not the economists like Mike Lynch and Morris Adelman nor the petrogeologists either. But the test of whether production has peaked or not will be that Opec gains renewed and this time permanent market domination. That will be a real watershed, and altho no-one yet knows for certain, the signs are there. As for current 'short term fluctuations', perhaps they tell us that supply and demand is too finely balanced and that there is no large reserve of available production capacity. I agree with you about less elasticity in a so-called New Economy, so why hasn't it happened, and more interesting to studentsof the herd-behaviour of economists, why indeed is no-one talking about it, if they aren't? Mark But okay, if we accept your argument, how long do we have to wait? Today, ostensibly on news of the coming recession, November forward contracts on crude fell 15+% from yesterday, to $22 /barrel. The price of a million btus of natural gas was above $10 last November during the energy crisis. It is now around $2. Are we close enough to a slowdown for this to count? By the way, if someone really believed we had entered a new era of immaterial productivity, that would seem to imply _less_ oil supply (and price) elasticity w/respect to the business cycle, not a usual kind. I haven't seen anyone make that argument, though.
Re: Re: Re: Saudi Royal Family in Flight
At 25/09/2001 00:10, Chris wrote: The article says The Saudi royal family has long been concerned about the rise of Islamic radicalism within its own kingdom. This isn't the first time King Fahd has been sent to Geneva for health reasons, is it? Didn't he also have a diplomatic illness during the Gulf War, or am I misremembering? Mark
Re: Re: Re: Re: Not good
At 24/09/2001 01:09, you wrote: Mark Jones wrote: As for bad economy, is there such a thing as a good capitalist economy? No. I forgot my catechism. Sorry, Rev. Jones. Doug You still didn't let us know what *you* think we should do about falling markets. Maybe the answer will be in your forthcoming book about the New Economy. Mark
Re: Where are we going????
At 24/09/2001 01:56, Michael Perelman wrote: Has any good come from the fall of the USSR? -- You don't have to buy into the worse the better thesis to see that the fall of the USSR was inevitable (unbearably unpleasant as it may have been for those of us with personal connections there and/or who lived thru it), given the collapse of the Soviet economy and the complete political bankruptcy of Soviet socialism. Perhaps it is better to acknowledge the inevitable rather than live in a dreamworld. I have always thought that the consequences would be cataclysmic, for reasons I have tried to set out here and elsewhere many times before. The social and ecological cataclysm of which the fall of the USSR was both symptom and catalysing cause has already embraced hundreds of millions of people; all that has happened now is that it has begun to hit hard in the core capitalist states, too. It seems almost banally obvious that late capitalism is radically unstable, and therefore the avalanche of change has only begun to sweep down on the West. Huge transformations and powerful, open struggles are simply inevitable. No-one can avoid being affected by this process of sweeping change, which is certain to invade every aspect of our lives. As Trotsky famously said, You may not be interested in the war, but the war is interested in you. There will be no hiding place, and no fence-sitting. People will have to take sides--events will force them to--and we shall have to be a little more partisan than we perhaps have been. People will have to learn to make sacrifices to aid the causes they believe in. Sacrifices will be imposed by hostile circumstances anyway, so it is a sign of political courage and of a hunger for freedom and real social emancipation that we should try to elect what sacrifices we bear rather than simply be the unwilling but passive victims of adversity. Mark
Re: Re: Re: Re: Not good
At 24/09/2001 20:55, Doug wrote: And now I'll really go quiet. Are you here or not here? It's very unclear. Mark
Re: Re: Not good
At 21/09/2001 17:45, Doug Henwood wrote: Tom Walker wrote: The patriotic rally following Bush's speech doesn't appear to be materializing. European markets slid 7%. NASDAQ gapped down nearly 6% at the opening. SP down 4%. Investors seem to be shouting (with their money), Hell no, we won't go! Ok, we're on the PEN-L bear watch again. What do you think we should do if the market keeps falling? Just what does it mean that it does? If it means a very bad economy ahead, what does that mean? Right now you're sounding like the color guy in the ICU, and not much else. Doug What is the point of these questions? Why should leftwing economists do anything about falling markets, and indeed what could they possibly do? Or when you say *we* as in What do you think *we* should do if the market keeps falling? do you mean, We patriotic Americans? As for bad economy, is there such a thing as a good capitalist economy? Mark
terrorism doesn't pay (2)
FT: An uneasy truce Pressure from Washington and Europe has forced Yassir Arafat and Ariel Sharon into a ceasefire. Whether the calm lasts may depend on factors outside their control, writes Ralph Atkins Published: September 19 2001 20:21 | Last Updated: September 19 2001 20:32 In the hours immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, appeared more convinced than ever that Israel could control by military force the year-long Palestinian intifada. Tanks had tightened their siege of the West Bank town of Jenin as part of the escalating military involvement in Palestinian-controlled areas. Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was another Osama bin Laden, Mr Sharon told Colin Powell, the US secretary of state. In the week that followed, at least 25 Palestinians and five Israelis died as Israel's military operations spread from Jenin to Jericho and Ramallah and to the Gaza strip. By yesterday, however - the last day of the Jewish New Year holiday - the world-changing effects of the attack on the US had forced a reappraisal. Under pressure from the US and Europe, both anxious to include Arab nations in the international coalition against terrorism, Mr Sharon had responded to a ceasefire pledge by Mr Arafat by ordering an end to offensive military operations. Israeli troops were pulled out of those areas of the West Bank granted autonomy under the Oslo peace accords in the 1990s. The guns in the West Bank and Gaza have been largely silenced. The prospects for calm in the region appear brighter than they have been for months. Nobody should get carried away, says Joel Peters, international relations expert at Ben Gurion university, but given enough time and attention, you could get some kind of stability pact locked in and a period of stability could lead back to the negotiating table. The change in Mr Sharon's approach was partly the result of overplaying his hand. Unilaterally targeting Mr Arafat in the international fight against terrorism played badly in Washington, not to mention European capitals. Washington, although keeping its distance from the Palestinian leader, regards Mr Arafat as a partner in any peace process. Since the attacks on New York and Washington, the US has been looking beyond the disputed Holy Land as it prepares its response to last week's attack. It was anxious that there should not be problems in the Middle East, says one western diplomat. But Shlomo Brom, senior research associate at the Jaffee centre for strategic studies, says Mr Sharon would not have been deflected simply by international criticism. The decision to withdraw from positions seized in the West Bank reflected more a determination not to be outmanoeuvred by Mr Arafat. The government didn't want to create a situation in which Mr Arafat can put the blame [for violence] on it, Mr Brom says. The crisis in the US has placed a different set of pressures on the Palestinian leader. Mr Arafat realised he had to avoid the strategic mistake of the 1991 Gulf war, when he sided with Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader. Even though most Palestinians distrust the US for its perceived pro-Israeli bias, within hours of last week's attacks in Washington and New York Mr Arafat was condemning the perpetrators unequivocally and publicly donating blood for victims. By early this week, after discussions with European and United Nations' envoys, he was persuaded that America's tragedy offered a chance to make political advances in the Middle East. He perceived, with help from some friends, that this was an opportunity, says one European who took part in the meetings. The ceasefire call, broadcast yesterday in Arabic on Palestinian television and radio, provided Mr Sharon with an opportunity to change tack. His national unity coalition government has been divided on the best response to the US tragedy. While the prime minister was initially persuaded by the rightwingers in his cabinet that this was the time to isolate Mr Arafat, there had been opposing voices from the start, in particular from the foreign office. Shimon Peres, the veteran foreign minister who was the architect of the Oslo peace process, argued that the US attacks should be used as a chance to bring Mr Arafat into an international alliance against terrorism. Israel's embassy in Washington, conscious of the sensitivities, specifically warned against labeling Mr Arafat a bin Laden. The prime minister's own advisers cautioned him against including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the war of civilisations allegedly unleashed by the Saudi dissident. Israel's conflict with Mr Arafat was to a large extent territorial, one said, but we're seeing forces trying to drag us into the dark corners of religion. The danger was of further polarising the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and strengthening the hands of vehemently anti-US Islamist groups, such as Hamas and
Re: re: military keynesianism
At 18/09/2001 05:14, Tom wrote: Having just read Mark's post, I am forwarding a response I sent just a few minutes earlier to someone on another list who was worried about conspiracy. Macdonald Stainsby forwarded Mark Jones: I have reached the conclusion that even Saudi oil production is at or near the peak. This is quite unexpected and it means that the capitalist world-system does not even have the leeway of another two or three decades which some of us thought it might. We are staring disaster in the face right now. This is not quite as unexpected (even by Mark) as Mark suggests. Projections ranged from 0 to 30 years and they've been around for years. Even the 30 year projection doesn't give any leeway, if you understand the scale of social-economic change required to adapt. Tom, actually this Saudi story came as a bit of a shock to me anyway. I still find it hard to credit. Without going into details, Saudi reserves have always been assumed to be at least 260bn bbls and the half way point (peak) wasn't expected for another 40 to 50 years. The US gov't Energy Information Administration's June 2001 report on Saudia Arabia says: With one-fourth of the world's proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia is likely to remain the world's largest oil producer for the foreseeable future. During 2000, Saudi Arabia supplied the United States with 1.5 million barrels per day of crude oil, or 17%, of U.S. crude oil imports during that period. It goes on: Saudi Arabia (not including the Saudi-Kuwaiti Neutral Zone) contains 259 billion barrels of proven oil reserves (more than one-fourth of the world total) and up to 1 trillion barrels of ultimately recoverable oil. Saudi Arabia is the world's leading oil producer and exporter, and its location in the politically volatile Gulf region adds an element of concern for its major customers, including the United States. In the first quarter of 2001, Saudi Arabia produced around 9.2 MMBD of oil (including half of the Saudi-Kuwaiti Neutral Zone's 600,000 bbl/d), compared to production capacity of around 10.5 MMBD. In 2000, Saudi oil production totaled about 9.1 MMBD, of which about 8.4 MMBD was crude oil and 0.7 MMBD was natural gas liquids. Although Saudi Arabia has about 77 oil and gas fields (and 1,430 wells), over half of its oil reserves are contained in only eight fields, including Ghawar (the world's largest onshore oil field, with estimated remaining reserves of 70 billion barrels) and Safaniya (the world's largest offshore oilfield, with estimated reserves of 19 billion barrels). Ghawar's main producing structures are, from north to south: Ain Dar, Shedgum, Uthmaniyah, Farzan, Ghawar, Al Udayliyah, Hawiyah, and Haradh. Overall, Ghawar alone accounts for about half of Saudi Arabia's total oil production capacity. Saudi Arabia reportedly has plans to increase its oil production capacity, especially of relatively light crudes, to 12.5 MMBD in coming years. One possible project, at the Qatif field, could boost Arab Light and Arab Medium production capacity by 500,000 bbl/d at a cost of $1.2-$1.5 billion. Qatif contains medium quality, 33-34o API gravity oil. Another potential project, at the Khurais field, could increase Saudi production capacity by 800,000 bbl/d by 2005 at a cost of $3 billion. This would involve installation of four gas/oil separation plants (GOSPs), with a capacity of 200,000 bbl/d each, at Khurais, which first came online in the 1960s but was mothballed by Aramco (along with several other fields -- Abu Hadriya, Abu Jifan, Harmaliyah, and Khursaniyah) in the 1990s. For 2001, Saudi Aramco's budget calls for drilling 246 wells (208 onshore, 38 offshore) at a cost of $1 billion, a 25% increase from 2000 and nearly double the 1999 drilling budget of $580 million. For 2002, Aramco plans to drill 292 wells at a cost of $1.2 billion. Many of these wells will be drilled in Ghawar. http://www.eia.doe.gov/ This doesn't read like doom and gloom, but there have been persistent reports that massive waterflooding is going on in the al-Ghawar field, the biggest and indeed both Saudi Arabia's and the world's most priceless petroleum asset. That is a poor sign of depletion advancing at a fast rate, and it is also an indicator that the Saudi's may have been forcing the pace of production in order to keep world oil prices low, because the plain fact is that the balance between global supply and demand has been very tight. This sort of thing: waterflooding, poor reservoir managment and over-producing, was exactly what destroyed the Soviet oil industry, sending production down by half from 601 m tonnes of crude in 1987 to just over 300 m tonnes p.a. by 1991. Since western management techniques and technology is supposedly so much better, or so we were always told, it is hard to believe the same dumb stupidity is going on in Saudi Arabia now. But really, who knows? Not me, in truth. But if this really is the kind
Re: Another take on oil
At 18/09/2001 13:38, you wrote: It's all about oil ... again If global conflict and ecological disaster are to be avoided, the west must end its reliance on oil, writes Mark Lynas I'm glad Michael sent this example of wishful thinking, it is an illustration of the unreality assailing us on all sides. Lynas says we must end our reliance on oil: The choices are stark. On one side lies war, insecurity and eventual ecological collapse. On the other lies a brighter future involving a reduction of poverty and global inequalities, ending western military dominance and achieving ecological sustainability. This is piffle. We cannot end our reliance on oil let alone look forward to a brighter future. People like Lynas who think oil isn't important or that there are real alternatives are deluded, or worse. We need to stop kidding ourselves and look the truth in the face. I may post more on this, but there is plenty of stuff out there, check out for instance Cutler Cleveland's stuff on energy + productivity (he argues that most productivity improvements happened because we used more efficient instead of less efficient energy-carriers, but are now moving the opposite way because of resource constraints). Check out his oil website too: www.oilanalytics.org Of course, humans may one day transform onto some new etherealised plane of being and create galactic civilisations. Then we shall drift among the stars like gods and talk philosophy forever like they do in Star Trek. However right now we are heading back to the horse and buggy era. (no pr for pv's either, please. My neighbour installed a pv-driven pond pump this summer. It worked for half an hour one very hot and sunny August morning, when a patter of drops fell briefly from the fountain head. This is about what you get. BP now install pv arrays on their forecourts, to show that they are really 'Beyond Petroleum'. When I inspected one closely what I saw was that this large array generated enough power to intermittently illuminate the screen beneath, which was advertising BP's commitment to alternatives. Don't bet the farm on windpower either. There is plenty of wind in the Hindu Kush, but that's not why the marines are heading there). Mark [DEFAULT] BASEURL=http://www.oilanalytics.org/ [InternetShortcut] URL=http://www.oilanalytics.org/# Modified=408C5EFF9333C101B1 [DEFAULT] BASEURL=http://www.oilanalytics.org/ [InternetShortcut] URL=http://www.oilanalytics.org/# Modified=408C5EFF9333C101B1
Re: re: military keynesianism
At 18/09/2001 19:12, Jim Devine wrote: Again, though there are clear environmental limits (including those of water supply) to capitalism, we should remember that energy prices are actually pretty low these days by historical standards. My remarks on military keynesianism arose from a thread on Lou's list--it's not a concept I use except as a shorthand way of describing a longrun process. Much of what Jim says (and others say) is correct and I go along with them. However there is a danger of fetishing the so-called laws of economics by avoiding contact with the underlying physical realities. We should remember that oil or any other commodity is a physical existent which only acquires an economic _form_ (oil becomes an 'energy resource', which is an economic, not a natural category, only thru first becoming a commodity)-- via the process of commodity-exchange, ie by the process of valorisation. There is *no* shortage of oil in nature; but there is a supply and demand relationship between different energy-carriers (oil, gas, electricity, coal, pv etc) when these become commodities and enter the market place. Ultimately it is the disequilibria which result from the normal cyclical process of accumulation which produce the mismatching of supply and demand. It is this that results in a cyclical variation between glut and famine (both things are very familiar in the history of oil). So a shortage (or glut) of oil (or any commodity) is and can only be a social, not a natural phenomenon. Specifically, and sorry if I am again semaphoric, resource depletion is masked because capitalism has found ways to produce diminishing resources at diminishing prices, a contradiction but a real one. The ability to hold down the price of what is a highly finite, essential and shortlived resource is by itself an important factor in warping our or the market's understanding of the real position, and is by itself a primary cause of shocks and violent crises occurring, rather than smooth transitions. In a common metaphor, the world's oil reserve is like the gas tank in an automobile; the amount of energy consumed and the rate at which it is consumed is determined by the characteristics of the engine and how hard the pedal is kept to the metal; the carburettor does not know how much fuel is left in the tank until the tank suddenly runs dry. The market does not know how much oil is left until it runs out. Depletion should be a smooth curve but can be like falling off a cliff, precisely because market signals do not work, there is no warning of impending supply-failure, and therefore no smooth or planned transition. In a free market, energy supply systems tend to collapse rather than fail gradually, once demand exceeds supply. In the history of capitalism, shocks to a specific accumulation regime are generally also shocks to the geopolitical architecture of the system. The collapse of the oil industry (which is happening-- see Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage by Kenneth S. Deffeyes) seems likely to have an endgame determined not by the play of market forces but by warfare in the middle east and perhaps globally. Whether the price of oil is high or low is a marginal issue since prices are either symptomatic of other (primarily geopolitical) processes or simply do not embody accurate signals. If energy prices are low (they are not that low, when you add in the taxpayer subsidies to the oil patch, the military costs of securing the sealanes and holding the Persian Gulf states, and other things) it is not because the supply problems revealed in the 1970s have been solved, but because of a ruthless and politically-inspired adjustment of effective demand. Instead of high prices and inflation, we have had a savage deflationary process which since 1974 has destroyed the developmental strategy in most of the peripheral states. Since energy production is always limited by environmental, political or availability factors, supply has never been able to match potential demand, if that potential is measured by a *developmental* standard. Potentially, South Asians need to consume at least 20x more oil than they do, in order to have a chance at western levels of affluence. That is impossible to achieve because the capitalist mode of production has far too narrow an energy-supply basis: ie, there just isn't enough oil (or coal, or whatever). Therefore demand has been rendered ineffective, and energy prices kept artificially low, by the simple strategy of destroying development thru deflation, debt, war etc. But the final result of this process has been the collapse of much of South Asia and the creation of an arc of instability reaching from the Balkans thru the Caucasus to Afghanistan and beyond. In other words, we got the oil on the cheap by mortgaging our kids' futures. The true price of cheap energy may turn out to be an uncontrollable slide into war of that
Re: RE: military keynesianism
At 18/09/2001 04:41, Max wrote: As a close observer of the U.S. fiscal policy debates, I'd like to chime in that military spending is certainly in the cards, but no support for deficit spending is anywhere in sight. Don't forget that Bush's $40B comes out of a residual surplus of $150B, though obviously the latter number will be lower before the year is over. The shortcomings of Keynesian policy after 1973 may be overstated. Mark's argument here is a close echo of the conservative critique, against which there is counter-evidence. His claims for effective Keynesian 'fine-tuning' prior to 1973 are also debatable. I'm sure you're right and Michael is right, that defence spending has few wider economic effects these days, altho that might conceivably change, if conscription is brought back for example. I also think you are right about pre-1973: things were never so black and white. Nevertheless, there was a sea-change in 1973-74. Is Bush really against deficit spending? Mark
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: U.S. popular culture
Doug Henwood wrote: And in late July, I heard an Australian aborigine singing this song at an aboriginal arts center in Adelaide. Speaking of the reach of American pop culture Did the aborigine know you were there? Mark
Re: Re: Re: Democratic Party Fiscal Conservatism
At 26/08/01 23:13, Michael wrote: Rakesh Bhandari wrote: ah what's a reasonable position for a left keynesian on trade? let's say the tax cut suffers leakage and bush and greenspan and the fucking bond traders (as clinton described them) are not willing to allow deficits the size of reagan's. consumers are also maxed out, and interest rate reductions are now ineffective. now the keynesian is left with the mercantilists whom keynes so admired. I agree with you here, I also agree and I am glad Rakesh is back, he is a clever economist. Mark
Re: Mission to exonerate
At 20/08/2001 11:58, Michael Keaney wrote: One arm of government, the SIS, knew all about the Hindujas' dodgy dealings including the Bofors scandal, but none of this leaked out to the Home Office in time to affect the Hindujas' application for citizenship, which was turned down for quite different reasons. It now emerges that at the time he was writing his report, Sir Anthony Hammond was starting his job as legal adviser to a company whose boardroom was full of former intelligence spooks and Foreign Office civil servants, at least one of whom had worked alongside Peter Mandelson. The Eye asked the Cabinet Office, which publishes the biennial report of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, whether in the circumstances the appointment of Sir Anthony Hammond to conduct the Hinduja inquiry had been appropriate. The reply was predictable: We don't have any comment. This Bofors business is as fishy as hell, and the real truth remains to be uncovered IMO. Where is the Eye getting its leads from, BTW? Interesting. Mark Jones
Re: Britain/US split?
At 20/08/2001 12:24, Michael Keaney wrote: Penners Way back on 25 May, Mark Jones wrote: Norman Tebbit seems to think, along with Margaret Thatcher, that political salvation for the Tories lies in strengthening the 'Special Relationship', and prioritising Britain's US connection over Brtiain's relationship with Europe. But since it is the US itself which is pushing Britain further into Europe, it's hard to see why Tebbit etc should be so stupid; no-one in Washington, even among the Bush camp, is supporting the Thatcher anti-EU line, are they? This is what I said and you rightly but politely disagreed: the loony toons in the lower depths of the Bush regime are indeed pushing for things like Britain in Nafta and less involvement in the Eurozone. But this is surely just one symptomatic part of the ongoing psychodrama of US national retrenchment and isolationism. It was always (in less neurotic times) the American consensus that Britain should be well inside the Euro gates, like any proper Trojan horse ought. Pulling the British satrapy out of Europe seems an awesome change of strategic direction, one with momentous implications. I see that Foreign Sec Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon or 'Buff' Hoon as the Defence Sec is known in the corridors of power, are starting to talk-up Star Wars 2. I'd like to see you unravel the twisted entrails of *that* sub-plot. I'm sure you/the Eye is also right about the deliberate unhorsing of Michael Portillo. The Guardian was active in this, which may or may not confirm the thesis that the editors reside on the South Bank and not in Clerkenwell. Mark Jones
Re: more sparks
At 15/08/2001 23:45, Doug wrote: Michael asked the other day what might counteract tendencies toward slump. I mentioned U.S. tax rebates and almost 100 central bank easings worldwide since December, with more almost certainly on the way. I could also have mentioned the decline in energy prices. Wellhead prices for natural gas in the U.S. are down 63% from their January peaks. Gasoline prices are off over 20% since spring. This is good news for (nonenergy) demand, if not for Mother Earth. I wouldn't rush to draw much comfort from the temporary fall in natgas prices. It's actually a serious that what is wrong with the underlying energy equation is not being put right. Look at supply, where apart from (astronomically expensive) Gulf of Mexico deepwater oil (not gas) there is accelerated depletion everywhere, and ask yourself whether this kind of price volatility will ever get investment into building a pipeline from Alaskan stranded gas fields. Without this investment, and almost certainly even with this, any serious uptick will have the US economy banging its head on the energy ceiling again. Mark Jones
Re: Re: more sparks
At 16/08/2001 02:11, Michael wrote: You are correct about energy prices. Doug Henwood wrote: Michael asked the other day what might counteract tendencies toward slump. A further thought on this. First, as I already argued, temporarily lower gas prices are the obvious result of recession, and are not counteracting tendencies. Spot price volatility reveals the underlying tightness of supply. Oil prices, incidentally, have not slumped despite growing recession. This is because non-Opec oil has declined so much that Opec has regained the armlock on the market which it lost in the early 1980s. This is a hugely important geopolitical fact and much under-discussed. Unless huge new non-Opec supplies come on the market, Opec will keep its grip and will not lose it again, as it did in the Reagan years. Thus crude will not slide to historically low prices ($10bbl) again. And Opec states and their social and political realities will come back into public awareness (already are). This fact that recession has not brought down oil spot prices may be an indicator that the world oil production peak has already arrived, in economic if not physical terms (altho it may have arrived in physical terms too). Second, crucially, price volatility does lend support to the Bush/Cheney emphasis on more production as opposed to more conservation. This looks to the Greens like the work of Satanic powers whose desire for profit from their fossil fuel investments outweighs all other considerations, even global warming. But it is more than conspiracy theory which makes the Bush administration behave like this. Because the *underlying problem* with the world's energy infrastructure is massive, chronic and persisting under-investment and this problem is getting worse all the time, not better. For all the subsidies and market-breaks fossil gets over renewables, there is still way too little investment in the energy supply system, which is 95% fossil and only 5% renewables even today. Without sharp increases in both upstream and downstream investment, the ongoing decline in the oil and gas sector will only accelerate, possibly beyond a point of no return. A sign that this is happening is the oil corps embarrassment about huge profits which only sit in their bank accounts. The WSJ has just been commenting on this: but the problem BP etc face is that there is now a dire shortage of new oilfields, new prospects, to invest in. The Caspian looks a busted flush. There are no huge new offshore plays like N Sea in the 1970s to put the money in. This too is a sign of an industry which has gone beyond maturity and is on the threshold of terminal decline. During the California outages electricity consumption decline by 12%, thru little more than people showing a little self-control and switching off lights and appliances. US energy consumption could fall by half and you'd still have a west European standard of life. But this is not good news for the US economy, jobs and the like. The problem you have with a vertically integrated highly centralised energy supply system is that you can't cut production by half and expect to still have much of the industry left in 5 or 10 years time. There will be no new oil or gas discovery, no new massive investments in electricity grids, refinery capacity, pipelines etc. People haven't begun to think thru the implications of this as much as have the Houston boardrooms -- and as have Bush and Cheney. Altho the US economy is 40% more energy efficient than in 1971, it also uses 25% more energy. What is beginning to happen now is an *absolute* as well as relative decline in energy consumption. That is completely unprecedented in the history of US capitalism. How will accumulation continue? Where will the growth come from, the New Economy? Don't think so. Mark Jones
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test ignore
NATION'S SUPPLY OF NATURAL GAS DRYING UP FAST
POWER PLANTS LIKE THOSE IN UPSTATE (SOUTH CAROLINA) WILL BURN INCREASINGLY SCARCE FUEL BY BRAD FOSS THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DEW, Texas -- In the dusty praire midway between Dallas and Houston, roughnecks hired by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. work day and night to drill 12,000 foot-deep holes no wider than a saucer. They pursue natural gas relentlessly. Nationally, 50 percent more gas wells are expected to be drilled this year compared to last. Strong prices and stronger demand underpin much of this activity, but there is another reason: Gas wells are being depleted ever faster, pitting industry against nature in a Sisyphean struggle to maintain a steady flow. We'll need tons and tons of these (wells) to help dig our country out of the mess we're in, Anadarko chief excutive Bob Allison said. The mess refers to the 23 percent annual decline in U.S. base production. We're on a treadmill that's making us go faster and faster just to stay even, said Skip Horvath, president of Natural Gas Supply Association. New drilling technologies allow the industry to tap gas reserves at greater depths and from a variety of angles, contributing to the rapid depletion. And today's relatively high prices encourage companies to use these aggressive techniques to maximize short-term profits. With natural gas the fuel of choice for more than 90 percent of power plants being proposed -- including two Upstate plants announced last week -- demand is expected to grow faster than the domestic supply, with imports from Canada, Mexico and elsewhere making up the difference. Imports have doubled since 1991 to about 10 billion cubic feet per day, while domestic production has nudged up only 4 percent. Regions where gas was once plentiful are yielding less each year, prompting petroleum producers to push for greater access to potentially larger fields in the Rocky Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. The industry has still managed to pocket huge profits in recent years thanks to the recent runup in price, which reached $10 per 1,000 cubic feet last winter. Even the current $3 is roughly 30 percent higher than in the 1990's. Because companies are getting more for the gas they find, they can get smaller targets and still meet economic goals, (Notice, that's ECONOMIC goals) said Mark Papa, chief executive of EOG Resource Inc., a Houston-based independent producer. But you've got to drill three wells...to get the equivalent of one well found three or four years ago. POWER CORRIDOR Six gas-fired power plants are in planning, construction or operation along the Upstate section of the Transco interstate natural gas pipeline. This past week, Cogentrix Energy Inc. announced plans for a plant in Greenville County and Duke Power said it will build one in Cherokee County.
Re: Re: Gas and oil short-termery reprise
Helium is a really serious issue which lightminded respondents don't get. A few years back I was at the Druzhba pipeline-head in Orenburg, southern Urals, where an amazing quantity of helium was vented into the air as an unusable byproduct of natgas, much to the embarrassment of the Russian engineers there who understood that this was like throwing gold away. Russian oilmen are really up to speed on this kind of thing. Mark At 8/12/2001 09:50 PM, you wrote: One side effect of the rapid depletion of natural gas is that the helium deposits that are commingled with the gas are also being depleted. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: critique of UNDP's Human Development Report 2001
At 8/12/2001 05:16 PM, Stephen E Philion wrote: Mark wrote: [We should waste less time in pointless attacks on Vandana Shiva and more on analysing ag-biz. Mark] Mark, are there people on this list who are engaging in pointless attacks on Shiva Or is this just a general assertion w/ no apparent reference? Let those who feel the pain speak the words. Mark
RE: Re: Imperialism and Environment
Yoshie Furuhashi: Moreover, since environmental regulations are local, national, at most regional (e.g., EU) affairs, capital can always displace condense environmental harms onto the politico-economically weakest links, so long as a multitude of political entities are competing with one another for investment. Unless the world becomes one nation under the law with all its parts developed evenly to the same level, such competition won't disappear. There is a huge array of international law and treaty agreement covering all manner of environmental issues from whaling to controls of use of ozone-eating CFC's to controls on dioxins, DDT, PCBs, to controls on infectious disease vectors, to greenhouse gas emissions (Kyoto is only the latest) and much else besides. This is not regional but international treaty and covenantal law. Mark Jones
Perelman on qualitiative versus quantitative value theory narratives
[Michael's message may be subliminal but it is important. Mark] Marx, Devalorization, and the Theory of Value Michael Perelman Marx, Devalorization, and the Theory of Value Introduction I am offering yet another reinterpretation of Marx's value theory. Although this value theory does not easily lend itself to algebraic or statistical modeling, the approach that I propose has the advantage of providing a closer link between Marx's crises theory and his theory of value. The core of this article concerns the treatment of constant capital in Marx's value theory. All quantitative treatments of Marxian value theory must find a way to measure the transfer of value from constant capital to the final products. Although the expanding literature on the solutions to Marx's so-called transformation problem has worked on this problem, none to my knowledge has satisfactorily come to grips with the impossibility of correctly measuring this transfer of value. An Alternative Approach Let us begin at the beginning. In the first volume of Capital, Marx analyzed commodities at their most abstract level. We might refer to the quantitative value theory that Marx presented there as a presentation of simple value, to indicate an affinity with simple reproduction or the most simplistic version of Marx's model of expanded reproduction. Keep in mind that both simple reproduction and expanded reproduction were merely analytical devices, neither a full description of reality nor a formal model. Nonetheless, neither simple nor expanded reproduction is entirely without interest. Both simple reproduction and simple value theory represented a significant theoretical advance over classical economics. For example, Marx's reproduction schemes laid the foundation for a more concrete investigation of a dynamic economy in the sense that they illustrate the difficulty of establishing the right proportions among sectors of the economy. In effect, Marx proposed an anti-equilibrium theory, which demonstrates that, unless certain unlikely conditions are met, the economy can experience a disproportionality crisis, similar, in some respects to the Harrod-Domar model. Had he gone no further, Marx might be remembered today as an interesting economist, but perhaps not much more. Both simple value theory and simple reproduction presume either a static or at least, a proportionately expanding economy, implying that all relationships retain all aspects of their initial structure, including relative prices. Nobody would argue that Marx's schemes of simple reproduction were a realistic model of the economy, but only a conceptual device that demonstrated the weak foundations of the sort theory that Say's Law represented. Neither simple value theory nor simple reproduction was a mere mental exercise. Marx used both to analyze the contradictory nature of capitalism. Despite their indisputable importance in this regard, both simple reproduction and simple value theory are inadequate for a more concrete level of analysis. The limits of simple reproduction theory are easier to recognize than those of simple value theory. To acknowledge the limits of simple value theory does not minimize the analytical importance of this concept, any more than the unrealistic assumptions underlying simple reproduction theory invalidate the insights that the reproduction schemes provided. Although Marx developed enormous insights from simple value theory in the first volume of Capital, simple values are inadequate for analyzing the dynamic economy that Marx analyzed in the later volumes. Certainly, Marx was interested in the dynamic nature of the economy. He saw himself as breaking new ground by realizing, Capital ... can be understood only as a motion, not as a thing at rest (Marx 1967; 2, p. 105). Before he could begin his dynamical analysis, Marx had to move beyond simple value analysis. Of course, Marx had already moved away from simple value theory, even before he began his dynamic analysis. For example, he allowed for deviations due to different organic compositions of capital, although he considered that modification to be minor. To sum up the argument to this point, most of the literature on Marx accepts the assertion that Marx's general method was to begin with a very abstract analytical approach, which he would progressively modify as he applied his theory to more concrete levels of analysis. Value theory is a case in point. Marx continually developed his value theory as he moved to more concrete levels of analysis. This value theory was not a formal model to be used to derive a mathematical rule for establishing prices, but rather a way of understanding the laws of motion of capital. Capital Valuation and Technical Change Depreciation Rules and Simple Value Theory Let us look at how Marx developed his more concrete concept of value. We all know that unsophisticated critics have charged that Marx suddenly discarded value theory in mid-course once he realized
RE: Globalising defence contractors
Keaney Michael: As well as computer hardware and software and financial accounting, now we are on the verge of a new era of common standards in weapons production. In the newspaper version of this article the following ties are listed: BAE Systems bought Lockheed Martin's aerospace electronics business and controls business in 2000, and owns defence electronics company Tracor Noam Chomsky has been saying that BAe has been taken over by the Americans and that there is now a split between Euro defence industry and Anglo-American defence industry, to mirror the big strategic divide. I haven't been able to find much for or against Chomsky; BAe did take over French firm Thompson, I think, and also is involved with the EU's fighter plane project. Chomsky wants to say that Britain s now a wholly-owned US subsidiary. I disagree, for reasons already stated: the British establishment wants to get in bed with the EU, and anyway the British have always clung to fig leaves like their own bomb, so it has never been a case of comoplete British subjection, even when Churchill gave away the Intelligence crown jewels plus British radar, jet engine and nascent nuke technology in 1940. The truth is that we don't really know anything, about GCHQ, Echelon or anything else. We are victims of massive disinformation and secrecy on all sides. What we do have is the speculations of people like Mary Kaldor. Mark Jones
RE: Re: over- or under-accumulation? typo alert
Yoshie Furuhashi: [Is capitalism suffering from over-production, as some argue, or is there a capital shortage bordering on famine, at the heart of the world crisis and an indicator that capitalism has entered a historical impasse, as Louis Proyect and I argue? Larry Elliott in today's Guardian says yes, there is a New Economy. He argues there may be a long wave of growth beginning and that we are at the start of a Kondratiev upwave. In future postings I will show why such optimism is misplaced, and why the present world crisis is qualitatively different and much more serious than earlier capitalist crises. Mark Jones] Several questions. Do K-waves actually exist? If they do as observable phenomena, can they be really thought of as underlying mechanisms that cause changes within capitalism therefore useful for an attempt at explanation? Why do you think that we have to be at the start of a Kondratiev upwave if the ensemble of capitalist social relations is to reproduce itself? And what do you exactly mean by capital shortage, if not what is meant by business propaganda of the 70s, Rakesh Bhandari's theory, etc.? Yoshie, I clearly intimate above that I don't agree with Elliot. I do not agree with Anwar Shaikh either: we are not at the start of a new upwave. As for K-waves in general, Trotsky's criticism of Kondratiev was right (altho clearly there are some periodicities involved with infrastructure investment for example, as I mentioned earlier in connection with Kuznets). Trotsky said: One can reject in advance the attempts by Professor Kondratiev to assign to the epochs that he calls long cycles the same strict rhythm that is observed in short [business] cycles. This attempt is a clearly mistaken generalization based on a formal analogy. The periodicity of short cycles is conditioned by the internal dynamic of capitalist forces, which manifests itself whenever and wherever there is a market. As for these long (fifty-year) intervals that Professor Kondratiev hastily proposes also to call cycles, their character and duration is determined not by the internal play of capitalist forces, but by the external conditions in which capitalist development occurs. The absorption by capitalism of new countries and continents, the discovery of new natural resources, and, in addition, significant factors of a superstructural order, such as wars and revolutions, determine the character and alteration of expansive, stagnating, or declining epochs in capitalist development. [Leon Trotsky, O Krivoi Kapitalisticheskovo Razvitiya (The Curve of capitalist Development), Vestnik Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii No. 4. (April-July 1923) ] I don't know what is meant by Rakesh Bhandari's theory. As for what I mean by capital shortage, I'm referring to the absolute shortage of capital which is the defining characteristic of this period. This is so despite the appearance of symptoms of over-production. I already mentioned that, even before considering this capital shortage from the point of view of value-theory, it is possible to recognise it empirically and even anecdotally. There is a huge underinvestment in infrastructure renewal, for example, in many OECD countries, and even when, as notoriously in the UK right now, the money is available and the political will to spend it, combined with insistent popular pressure for spending on public sector and transport projects: despite all this, government find it extremely difficult to actually spend the money. In the US soem of it is simply being handed back to taxpayers. This political frailty (in Blair's case) and/or fiscal impropriety in Bush's, has underlying causes and is not just the result of inertia or middle class greed. The same urgent need for renewal is apparent for example in the world energy system, which I mentioned before: Matt Simmons, admittedly a partial observer because he is an oil patch invetsment banker, speaks of the need for a new Marshall Plan for energy, and of the 'perfect energy storm' which will lay waste to capitalist economies if trillions of dollars are not invested urgently. Now the oil companies even have some at least of the money; but they seem unable to spend it, or not enough of it. In Russia, too, a huge balance of payments surplus of up to $50bn has been accumulated and hundreds of billions of dollars are being exported, and meanwhile the Russian industrial, social and energy infrastructure is beginning to implode. Russian oil and gas production continues to stagnate. The reasons in the Russian case are usually said to be corruption, bureaucracy, the lack of a proper regulatory regime, laws on property, protection of investments etc. But they are more fundamental. There is considerable surplus capital in the world system, but not enough to mobilise to overcome the profits crisis. This a classic realisation crisis, but it is more than that. This relative capital surplus can only be mobilised thru a crisis
RE: Re: RE: Re: carrying capacity in California
Doyle Saylor: Greetings Economists, Yes I agree with if resources need to be redistributed to sustain California. It would be a tremendous disaster to the people involved to not support them. I don't think this (redistribution to Californians) is quite what Nathan has in mind, is it? Mark
RE: Re: Schweickart and zero real interest rates
Chris Burford wrote: I shall take silence as consent. Oh, come on Chris. There are *laws* against that kind of reasoning. Mark
RE: Re: RE: Re: carrying capacity in California
Stephen E Philion: Actually, my reading of Nathan's remarks are that he is countering your arguments, not Doug's. Of course he is, Stephen: that's my point. Mark
carrying capacity in California
This is an MS excel attachment, it seems to work, apologies if attachments are against the rules on this list. If it doesn't come thru I can supply it privately. It details California carrying capacity and population overshoot by county. I don't endorse it since I don't know enough about the underlying methodology to judge. As they say, I'm sceptical, but... Mark Jones carrying capacity.xls
RE: Re: re 180,000 MW new capacity: Update
Eugene Coyle: Thanks Mark, But I'm still wondering. Your correspondent's last paragraph is not credible, just on the surface. Hundreds of units have come on line just in the last fortnight? Ridiculous. Here are some numbers from US DOE's Energy Information Agency. And this projection may be what Cheney relied on when he said we had to build a new power plant a week for the next 20 years. Even if that were to occur it wouldn't be hundreds in a fortnight. EIA says that we need 1,300 plants by the year 2020. (Not, N.B., 2003.) This based on an average plant size of 300 mW. Of that total 92% would be gas fired.Thus in 20 years, by 2020, the EIA projects about twice what your informant says will happen by June 2003. Regardless of how the EIA's forecast turns out to comport with the unfolded future, I think you can see from this that wherever the figures you are relying on come from, they don't seem plausible. I've seen that EIA quote and I also saw a comment in, I think either Bloomberg or the FT, to the effect that the EIA is writing back to the future, because the rate of actual construction far exceeds their own estimate. It's hard to know the truth, but there obviously is a lot of new construction going on right now and the 2-year/90,000 mW is based onj something. But even taking the EIA at face value, the question again becomes, where is the gas coming from? Something weird is happening to US ng from what I can see: depletion rates are becoming like the porverbial fall off a cliff. All this means that the frenzy of investment won't solve the underlying problem. So the only way sortages can be relieved is by a recession, conservation, and massive no nuclear investment, or all 3. Mark Jones
RE: Re: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)
William S. Lear: Especially when it is so far from the mark as to become crude and ugly pastiche. Bill, don't get into this, unless you are really looking for trouble. I cannot begin to tell you just how unimpressive you are. Don't make me start. Because I have a strong urge to tell you what kind of crude and ugly things you are up to, but I don't want to abuse the hospitality of this list. I *strongly* urge Michael Perelman to stop Lear's baiting, pronto. Mark Jones
RE: Re: Cuban Genetic Engineering (was Jesse Lemisch)
Yoshie Furuhashi says: It's best if ecosocialists focus on this aspect of the problem: toxic chemicals endangering workers' health. Is this discussion taking account of the fundamentals? If just the present world population of 5.8 billion people were to live at current North American ecological standards (say 4.5 ha/person), a reasonable first approximation of the total productive land requirement would be 26 billion ha (assuming present technology). However, there are only just over 13 billion ha of land on Earth, of which only 8.8 billion are ecologically productive cropland, pasture, or forest (1.5 ha/person). In short, we would need an additional two planet Earths to accommodate the increased ecological load of people alive today. If the population were to stabilize at between 10 and 11 billion sometime in the next century, five additional Earths would be needed, all else being equal -- and this just to maintain the present rate of ecological decline (Rees Wackernagel, 1994). http://dieoff.com/page110.htm Mark Jones
Discovery heralds way for plants to survive drought
Tim Radford, science editor Thursday June 28, 2001 The Guardian Scientists have found out how plants open and close their stomata - the tiny pores through which they breathe. The discovery could open the way for genetically engineered crops which could survive drought. The biological Morse code used by plants to control the stomata is described in Nature today by Gethyn Allen and Julian Schroeder from the University of California, San Diego and colleagues from Munich and Tubingen in Germany. Plants soak up huge quantities of water through their roots and respire through their stomata to cool themselves as they grow, mature and ripen. It takes around 900 litres of water to grow 1kg of wheat. But huge areas of farmland are becoming increasingly arid, and areas once made fertile by irrigation are being abandoned because the soils become increasingly salty. What has become a challenge in the developed world is already a disaster for many poorer nations in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, as crops wither before they ripen. The hunt is on for ways to develop plants that will survive at least a period of drought, and quicken again with the return of the rains. Much of the land used for agriculture is not irrigated because water is either unavailable or too expensive, said Professor Schroeder. So if crops can be engineered to respond to droughts by more rapidly and effectively closing their stomatal pores, where 95% of the water loss in plants occurs, they could better survive drought periods by conserving water until the next rain hits. Calcium plays a powerful role in the machinery of the cell, and is part of the signalling mechanism of stress. The researchers found that specialised guard cells in the leaves which surround each pore, or stoma, tune in to the frequency of calcium oscillations in the cell. When these oscillations are at a particular frequency, the guard cells react, and close the stomata for extended periods. A study last year warned that one third of the world's population would face severe water scarcity by 2025. We don't know how to genetically engineer a plant to hit the right frequency to close its stomata in response to a drought, said Prof Schroeder. That lies in the future. But understanding the calcium code means we can now learn more about the mechanisms that control a plant's resistance to drought conditions.
Oil Price Takes Big Hit As Stocks Swell
[but if the massive new investment which the energy system needs is aborted by a recession, then any future upturn will be even more constrained, because the global energy infrastructure is old and worn out, and that's been the problem since the 1970s; so what is happening is the progressive decline of fossil energy systems despite the fact the supply is a crimp on the economy and despite the continuing dependence of capitalist economy on fossil. That's the truth behind 'short term flucutations'. Mark] By Richard Mably LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices slumped on Wednesday after a hefty build in U.S. gasoline inventories stoked concerns that American motorists are cutting down on their mileage this summer amid a slowdown in the U.S. economy. Cut ``The problem for the oil market is that U.S. economic growth is declining toward zero and in the rest of the world the decline in growth is accelerating,'' said Gary Ross of New York consultancy PIRA Energy. ``Combine that with the inventory build and that's a recipe for price weakness.'' Weekly U.S. stock figures from the American Petroleum Institute reported a 3.3 million barrel increase in U.S. gasoline tanks to 222.9 million barrels in the week to June 22, the tenth week in a row that stocks have risen. U.S. gasoline futures prices that hit a record $1.17 in April fell over six cents on Wednesday to 71.2 cents a gallon, their lowest in 17 months. U.S. SLOWDOWN Consumption has been crimped by record high pump prices during the spring and fears that a slowdown in the U.S. economy, the world's biggest petroleum importer, may turn into recession. The U.S. Department of Energy (news - web sites) said on Wednesday that U.S. petroleum products demand over the past four weeks had averaged 18.888 million barrels daily, 4.2 percent less than in the same period last year. ``The lingering concern over stock positions has been completely blown away,'' said John Russel, managing director of consultants PEL Pacific in Bangkok. The API showed crude stocks rising 565,000 barrels to 313.5 million barrels or 20 million barrels, seven percent, higher than a year ago.
RE: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)
Yoshie Furuhashi: It's impossible to modernize industry agriculture globally _under capitalism_, but _under socialism_ it is possible. How? Slogans don't cut it. The USA is inefficient. That's not what Doug Henwood thinks, is it? Or is the productivity miracle a myth just like the New Economy turned out to be? Mark Jones
re 180,000 MW new capacity: Update
[Eugene Coyle wondered whether plans for new power plant capacity will come to fruition. Mark] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 28 June 2001 21:35 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [energyresources] That incredible 180,000 MW new capacity: Update Karl, Murray, and others who were wondering: My incredulousness got the better of me and I delved into the breakdown of this new US electrical capacity projected to be online by this time (June) 2003. Here is what I learned: (1) Of the total 180,000 MW, 135,000 MW will use natural gas as its primary fuel. (Backup fuel is #2 fuel oil.) (2) Of the 135,000 MW fueled by NG, 55,000 MW represents peaking units. (3) The remaining 80,000 MW attributes to gas-fired base load units. (4) These new combustion turbines have a heat rate of 6500 BTU/WKH. (I calculated this number back to an implied efficiency of 50%.) Assuming that a recession obviates fueling the peaking units, I calculate the projected increase in required NG production to be: 80,000 MW x 1000 KW/MW x 6500 BTU/KWH x 24 H/D x 365 D/Y / 1000 BTU/cu-ft = 4.56 trillion cu-ft per year Compare this to current usage of 20 TCF/Y. Some of this new capacity will be used to retire old units, especially in California, that have been activated by the current crisis despite having heat rates as poor as 12000 BTU/KWH. The 135,000 MW represents over 1100 units. They are in various stages of planning, design, and construction. Hundreds have come online in the past fortnight. Why do I begin to see them as 21st century Moai? Regards, Dick in Florida ~~~ EnergyResources Moderator Comment Whats a Moai? ~ EnergyResources Moderator Tom Robertson ~~ Your message didn't show up on the list? Complaints or compliments? Drop me (Tom Robertson) a note at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
RE: Re: Re: RE: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)
Stephen E Philion Perhaps it would be better if Mark told us where he gets the idea that Doug embraces such ideology? Or is it imagined that Doug does so? Steve On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Doug Henwood wrote: Mark Jones wrote: The USA is inefficient. That's not what Doug Henwood thinks, is it? Or is the productivity miracle a myth just like the New Economy turned out to be? I suppose my ego should take some cheer from the fact that you've achieved a certain otherwise gratifying fame when people make shit up about you, but it's still irritating. I don't believe that at all, and I have no idea where you got this from. I think it's probably best that I ignore you from here on out, along with your partner in ur-nostalgia. Doug Probably things like this make me suspect that Doug is a closet fan of capitalism: You can hardly open a newspaper or turn on the TV (well, at least tuned to certain channels) without hearing about a wondrous New Economy. (Though it's sobering to learn that, according to a Scudder Kemper Investments poll, over 80% of Americans have neither heard nor read of a New Economy.) The canonical version is relentlessly, almost deliriously optimistic. It goes something like this. Finally, after a long wait, the computer revolution is paying off economically. It used to be, as the economist Robert Solow famously put it, that that revolution was visible everywhere but in the statistics. Now, with U.S. productivity stats surging forward, Solow's quip has to be retired. It took some time for people and organizations to learn how to use computers (broadly defined, of course, to include all kinds of high-tech electronic gadgetry), but now they've finally learned. All that hardware, now linked from local area networks to the global Internet, along with a political regime of smaller government and lighter regulation, has unleashed forces of innovation and wealth creation like the world has never known before. Flatter hierarchies and more interesting work are the social payoffs; rising incomes and an end to slumps the economic payoffs. Quality replaces quantity, knowledge replaces physical capital, and networks replace hierarchies. The portion of the New Economy discourse that's relevant to Marxism, and specifically to this panel, is that it's appropriated a lot of rhetoric about revolution, about the overturning of hierarchies, and about the democratization of ownership and the workplace that used to be staples of radical politics. At the same time, though, New Economy rhetoric also rejects a lot of the old Marxian catechism: we're now post-material; scarcity is waning as a social force; in an age of endlessly and almost costlessly reproducible goods like software and movies, ownership too is waning as a social force; physical capital doesn't matter anymore, because knowledge, as everyone from George Gilder to Manuel Castells could tell you, is what matters, not things; and place doesn't matter much anymore, as long as you have a cell phone and a net connection. [lbo-talk Sep 25 2000 - 11:31:51 EDT ] True, Doug's qualifies his to American efficiency with what is his habitual reservation: Obviously I am extremely skeptical about almost all these claims, or I wouldn't have a book to write. But scepticism like his is a stock-in-trade which allows you to have your cake and eat it. Doug is always sceptical, but it is only a cadenza to the main theme: the great civilisational benefits of American capitalism. For every expression of Doug's doubts about these benefits you can find many more rants like the above, where the exuberance of what Keynes called the 'animal spirits' of the business class, simply leaps off the page at you. At heart, Doug is a great celebrator of the American Dream. One of his intellectual mentors is Anwar Shaikh, who is a also great believer in the future of capitalism: If you argue, as Shaikh does, that the solution to the crisis of the last 24 years has been a relentless attack on the living standards of the working class, then all the noxious symptoms you list are part of the side-effects of the cure. If there is an upswing, these pressures will ease, and real gains for the working class - and a reduction of these hideous tensions - may be possible. [--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 15.11.97] You get the picture? Capitalism is bad but, hey, things are getting better! Even in the colonies: My point was this: life on the capitalist periphery is not some simple narrative of relentless decline. There has been real progress in a lot of places and in a lot of ways. [pen-l 02 May 2001 18:18 UTC ] Doug even thinks that altho neoliberalism is 'a crime against humanity', it too can be a good thing: I cite this stuff not to say that neoliberalism is wonderful or that Argentina is paradise. Neoliberalism is a crime against humanity, and Argentina could do a lot better under a more humane regime. But it's just wrong to say
RE: Re: RE: gold god
Doug Henwood wrote: In the second half of the 19th century, the U.S. was in recession or depression or panic about half the time. Violent booms alternated with violent busts. The proletariat was surly and rebellious and even the bourgeoisie wasn't happy with the situation. Is that what we should go back to? But it's only a few days since you told us that's what we *are* going back to: Because it's more of a 19th century slowdown than a post-WW II one, with a financial hangover from the burst Nasdaq/tech bubble, and a real sector one from overinvestment in gadgets. It's probably going to take some time to work through it. [pen-l13799] Mark Jones
RE: gas
Doug Henwood What happened? Has Armageddon been rescheduled? Nah, it's just a short-term fluctuation. So Krugman counts as an energy expert for you? Mark Jones
RE: Re: Yellow River: Facts on File
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: You've already answered your question yourself. What's missing is capitalists compelled to M-C-M'. This explains nothing in history. It's simply metaphysics. Mark Jones
RE: gold god
Jim Devine: Seriously, how does the gold standard allow for the elasticity of credit that capitalism needs? Very easily, if you are an ascendant hegemon, like for example Britain at the time the Bank of England first went on the gold standard, and hardly at all if you are a hegemon struggling against relative decline, like the USA in Nixon's era. The gold standard is a mechanism for pumping value out of colonies or subordinated states. It's a mechanism for seignorage and it permits the hegmon to provide credit for its national capital. Mark Jones
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: gas
Doug Henwood wrote: Doug Henwood wrote: You have to figure in the constant monetary inflation/deflation experienced since Nixon severed the dollar's link to gold. I'll bet that if you compared the price of oil over the past thirty to other commodities, I didn't write that. David Shemano did. Yes. The point Michael made was that while for most of the last century oil tracked wheat, in recent decades it has diverged, very much to the disadvantage of the US. Why trap ourselves like this? First of all, the posted WTI price doesn't tell us much about the real price of oil. No. But it's a more or less consistent series over time. Agreed, but so what? Why interpret oil prices according to a Keynesian wage-unit measure? You could have picked any number of equally arbitrary measures, from ppp per capita GNP's to Michael's comparison with wheat. Why the US average wage? For that you'd have to take other things into account, including various cross-subsidies such as the geopolitical costs funded by the taxpayer of control of the sealanes, which some estimate now double the spot price. Did that change much between 1980 and 2001? 1998 and 2001? Yes, there were obviously very large changes both in the spot price of oil and in the hidden cross subsidies; the US defence budget changed very markedly in this period, when the Cold War ended and the whole geopolitics of oil was transformed. Equally, the relationship of the US average wage to that in Japan, EU states, not to speak of places like China, changed, so why choose the US wage? If these larger changes don't show up very decisively on whatever measure you are using, then there is something wrong with your measure, no? Incidentally, no-one ever writes about oil without at some point invoking conspiracy theory. It is an incantation, an appeal to magic in the absence of all the facts, rather like appeals to 'human ingenuity' are in economics. Nevertheless, it is an obvious speculation that the price of oil went up to $30/bbl not because the oil suddenly ran out but because Clinton told Opec it was OK to do that, because altho $10/bbl was great for the New Economy, it was disastrous for the US oil patch and catastrophic for Russia, whose economy collapsed in August 1998 as you know, much to the chahgrin of Clinton/Gore. Thus, in Bush Sr's day, the Saudis were told to lower oil prices (even tho it hurt Cheney et al) because the Great Game then was about bankrupting the USSR. But now it's important to preserve social peace in Russia at the lowest net cost, which happens to be $28/bbl. Otherwise Russia is not safe for democracy, and the Caspian oil reserve is not safe for Europe and the US. These details are not captured by Keynesian time-series. Second, the argument from wages (whose wages, btw?) The average private sector wage in the U.S., like I said. Did you say that? Uh, Mark, are you a wind-up toy? I think this is what Michael would call an unnecessary sentence. The point I was trying to make was that all the gyrations in the market price of oil over the last 30 years have been largely meaningless, completely unconnected to underlying fundamentals, and a nice refutation of Hayekian price theory. That may not be the point you want to make, but I'm not you, and I have no desire to be. The price gyrations aren't meaningless at all, once you connect them to some kind of wider analysis than Keynesian price theory. But if you really think that the price of energy is meaningless, where does that everything else you write about, from your analysis of interest rates (down by 25 basis points, you have just informed LBO-talk), to stock market changes, consumer prices inflation, pensions, social security, and the rest? Mark Jones
RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Yellow River: Facts on File
Michael Perelman: I don't understand how it would lead to salinization, but the E. Asian ag. system was remarkably sustainable. Silting seems to be more related to removing the forest cover. What Happens when you Irrigate? Irrigation inevitably leads to the salinization of soils and waters. In the United States yield reductions due to salinity occur on an estimated 30% of all irrigated land. World wide, crop production is limited by the effects of salinity on about 50% of the irrigated land area. In many countries irrigated agriculture has caused environmental disturbances such as waterlogging, salinization, and depletion and pollution of water supplies. Concern is mounting about the sustainability of irrigated agriculture. from: http://www.ussl.ars.usda.gov/salinity.htm Mark Jones
RE: Re: where is the gas coming from?
Michael Perelman: The last sentense is unnecessary. On the contrary, I'd be interested to know whether the industry people Doug consulted before can explain where the extra naturral gas is coming from; no-one else seems to know, including the US DoE. I assume silence means that they don't know either. Mark Jones
RE: RE: Kuznets cycles and energy-system renewal
Mathew Forstater wrote: I have a very short encyclopedia entry on the Kuznets U hypothesis, but it is part of slightly a longer essay, if anyone is interested. I'd very much like to see it. I argue that Kuznets himself warned against applying what were some hunches about the early development of presently industrialized countries to currently 'developing' economies. Neverthless, in the 70s people like Paukert and Ahluwalia did just that, and even used cross-sectional data to test what was a theory about secular development. So they pieced together countries at different levels of GNP across a U shaped curve, implying that they were going to move along it. The problem here is that the conclusion that may be drawn is that countries with lousy income distribution should not worry, just keep on pursuing growth and they will become more equal. More recent evidence tells us this is not a very likely prospect, plus there is the problem with the environmental impact, since they are just talking about good old GNP/GDP grwoth, with all the problems with that. Cutler Cleveland has been doing interesting work for a long time on biophysical limits. At one time he supported the energy theory of value, which has some problems I think, although people like Herman Daly rejected it on the grounds that it was too similar to a labor theory of value, but I don't buy their non-critique of that. You mean Odum's eMergy stuff? It doesn't really work, but it's useful in lots of ways anyway, don't you think? Be that as it may, the Daly-Costanza ecological economics stuff has its good points, but it also has some weaknesses that can be improved by blending it with political economy, social ecology, feminist economics, etc. Absolutely true. I have some papers where I derive what I call some biophysical conditions for a sustainable economy--similar to some of what you can find in the ecological economics and sustainability lit under the names of things like 'rules for sustainability' etc. Is it on the Net, or can you send stuff to me offlist, Mat? I'd really be obliged. If we take this stuff seriously, it would entail a very major transformation of the way we live, the technological structure of production (transformation from an exhaustible resource-based to a renewable resource-based technological structure of production, etc.), whole sectors, industries, firms, occupations, skills, etc, would become obsolete, news ones required. There would have to a major sort of transition period, rethinking the whole layout in terms of the way we live and so on. There would definitely have to be either a guaranteed income and or guaranteed jobs for all (and there will be plenty to do) to make sure that the disruptions would not result in more massive unemployment, poverty, etc. I don't think it is impossible, but it would require a fantastic change in consciousness etc. Adolph Lowe, who taught at the New School for many years and who was thinking about these issues from the sixties on, thought that it was possible that it would take a mini-catastrophe or even a few mini-catastrophes to get the message through to people on a mass scale that we absolutely must change in fundamental ways. He hoped that it would take a major catastrophe, and he hoped that maybe it wouldn't take any catastrophes at all, but the way things have developed, with the inequalities and the technological developments, some people are able to insulate themselves from the effects of environmental and other problems, so we might be looking more to something like the old movie Metropolis than bioregionalist communism or communist bioregionalism. I can't see how will get there absent significant economic and social planning, with all the challenges that brings. We are not on the path to evolve in that direction presently, it doesn't seem, not automatically. Mat This is all very helpful and thank you so much. Mark Jones
RE: Re: Current implications for South Africa
Yoshie: Is it possible to provide all human beings with food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, energy, medicine, education, transportation, etc. that are necessary to meet historically developed minimum needs (setting aside other needs desires for the time being) under socialism? Or is it impossible since we are running out of fossil fuels clean water soon the population is exploding, as Mark says? Please stop attributing to me views I don't hold, it makes discussion pointless. Oil, gas and water will never run out. The issue is their economic availability to capitalism--and the price the rest of us pays. We discussed population before, and you said the same kinds of things then. I have one exchange dating from May 1998, when oil was about $10 a barrel and some people were busy discussing folies du jour like Tulip-o-mania, Zizek and Butler, and Greenspan's damascene conversion on the New Economy. Seems like a different era, hey? - Subject: Marx on surplus population Sender: Mark Jones Date: 17.05.98 Recipient: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: The limits and scarcities that marxists should be primarily concerned about are artificial--not natural--ones. Why? This is not to say that nature places no constraint upon social activities, be they labor or anything else. It does, in that the social world is embedded in the natural world. However, marxism, both in theory and practice, primarily addresses itself to what is _social_, both in terms of constraints _and_ possibilities. If this was so, would Marx ever have talked about modes of production, machinery, agriculture, desertification etc? Marxists should pay attention to the natural world, but we are _not_ naturalists. Meaningless. Let's think about the politics of food, for instance. Is it because we do not produce enough food that there are millions of the working class people who suffer from hunger and malnutrition now? No, it's not, even though the ruling class and their media want us to believe that. As of now, we have enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world comfortably, don't we? So you think the problem is merely one of distribution? Redistributional social justice politics, has nothing to do with Marxism. Environmental justice politics also has nothing in common with Marxism. It is because of social relations of capitalism--the contradiction between labor and capital--that masses of people are hungry, and how to rid ourselves of those social relations that exploit and oppress people because of their class, gender, race, nationality, and so on is the main object and objective of marxist theory and practice. People are not exploited 'because of their race, class' etc. Just as you reduce Marxist politics to a politics of social justice, so you reduce Marxist economics to a branch of sociology + pursuit of bourgeois right. All 'civil rights' (from which discourses of social justice derive) depend on bourgeois right, ie, the primacy and sanctity of property relations: but property relations, for Marxism, are merely a mystification. They are forms of production relations, not the presuppositions of production (and therefore the material basis of exploitation is not jurisprudential, but rooted in production). Marxist analysis of the capitalist mode of production is not a theory of exploitation. Marx specifically criticised such notions. It is a theory and narrative of value production, and the forms value assumes in the circuits of capital. This is not an optional extra to a notion of exploitation; it is the core of the theory. That is why it is not struggles around distribution but struggles around production which matter, because production is the centre of gravity of capitalism.Specifically, Marxism asserts that the production of capital is constrained by its material basis (extent and limits). The reason there is hunger in the world is because the rate of accumulation is historically too low to prevent the formation of surplus population, and the reason for that is because the rate of increase of social productivity is too low to generate enough capital to give the whole population First World living standards. When Marx wrote of the production of surplus population, he called it 'the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation'. (Cap I p798, Penguin ed). It is impossible to develop Marxism while abandoning core concepts like this. Who is defining the political and theoretical terrain? Racists who fear immigration, or their liberal opponents who manage to neuter theory in the name of an apologetic 'political correctness'? This 'absolute general law' is today central to understanding the conjuncture, more even than in Marx's day, and far from avoiding the issue, we need to relentlessly pursue it: ' The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of workers, therefore proceeds more rapidly than the technical transformation
