[PEN-L] new frontiers in socializing risk and money laundering

[Eubulides]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1374599,00.html
Second guarantee for BAE revealed

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Thursday December 16, 2004
The Guardian

The government has given a second secret financial guarantee to BAE
Systems for a Middle East arms deal.

BAE is selling Hawk warplanes to the Gulf state of Bahrain for £158m, with
the risk falling on the taxpayer if the regime fails to pay up.

This follows the disclosure that the Department of Trade and Industry has
secretly granted insurance of £1bn to BAE over another big arms contract
with Saudi Arabia. British taxpayers will also be liable if the Saudi
regime collapses.

The DTI's export credit agency says in its annual report of the Bahrain
deal - which it does not identify - "for reason of commercial
confidentiality, one exporter has requested non-disclosure of guarantees
issued".

All its other 47 civil deals around the world are openly listed, and the
companies involved are named.

The Export Credits Guarantee Department appears to have granted BAE a
unique privilege of anonymity. The ECGD refuses to comment on the deal.

BAE said: "Details of specific arrangements are treated by BAE Systems as
commercial in confidence."

This secrecy is despite the Bahrain Hawk deal being publicly announced
last year, both by the Bahrain regime and by the British government.

Lord Bach, the arms sales minister, said the deal was on a
government-to-government basis, and would include cooperation on training
between Bahrain's air force and the RAF. "I am pleased that BAE will
benefit from this decision," he said.

The trade secretary, Patricia Hewitt, is facing judicial review in the
high court because ECGD has agreed to water down its anti-corruption
regulations after pressure from arms firms.

BAE is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office over corruption
allegations in Saudi Arabia.


* * * * ** *

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1376450,00.html
Secret Pinochet payments linked to BAE

David Leigh, David Pallister and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday December 18, 2004
The Guardian

The British arms firm BAE yesterday refused to comment on documents
showing mysterious payments linked to UK weapons purchases by General
Augusto Pinochet.

Sums of up to $5m (£2.57m) are listed in Gen Pinochet's bank records
obtained by a Senate investigation in Washington.

Some appear to be linked to arms purchases he agreed to make from Royal
Ordnance, a BAE subsidiary.

At one point, Gen Pinochet obtained £1m, which was deposited for him in
London at a branch of Washington-based Riggs Bank.

The Senate subcommittee on investigations has been inquiring into
unexplained wealth of up to $12m acquired by Gen Pinochet. The money was
handled by Riggs, itself under investigation for possible
money-laundering.

When asked for an explanation for the payments to Gen Pinochet, the arms
firm said: "BAE Systems decline to comment on this occasion."

Last week, Gen Pinochet was placed under house arrest in Chile after being
charged with human rights violations, the third time he has been indicted
for such crimes. He is accused of kidnapping and murdering 10 people as
part of Operation Condor, a plan to abduct dissidents across South America
in the 1970s.

The key document, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian,
appears to have been proffered by Gen Pinochet to Riggs while it was
operating his secret accounts as partial explanation of the source of his
wealth. The bank was under pressure to conduct "know your client" checks.

At the time, Gen Pinochet had stepped down as president, but remained head
of the armed forces.

Throughout the 1990s, he visited Britain as a guest of BAE, who persuaded
him to buy and build under licence a Royal Ordnance-designed cluster-bomb
and rocket system called Rayo.

The document, on Chilean defence ministry paper, lists what it terms
"Comisiones de Servicio al extranjero realizada por el sr Augusto Pinochet
Ugarte". This is translated in the Senate committee report as "Certain
travel and commissions allegedly owed to Mr Pinochet".

The wording is ambiguous, but the Chilean government last week denied one
explanation, that it recorded genuine "travel expenses" paid by the
Chilean defence ministry.

"The document could end up being a forgery," the Chilean undersecretary of
war, Gabriel Gaspar, was quoted as saying by news agencies.

The document lists a series of foreign trips by Gen Pinochet. Included is
an entry dated 21 September 1995 which records the sum of $3m with
reference to a trip to England to visit foreign companies, as well as
visits to Malaysia and Brazil. This was the point at which Chile signed
the Rayo deal.

A second entry is dated 25 September 1997. It records a visit to China and
a hitherto unknown visit to England by Gen Pinochet after Labour took
power, listed as "Invitacion industria Royal Ordnance". Appended to it is
the figure "$2.5 million".

US Senate investigators found that Riggs als

[PEN-L] The Aviator

[Louis Proyect]

Despite Screenwriter John Logan and Director Martin Scorsese's best 
intentions, "The Aviator" is very much like the "Spruce Goose" of the 
film's climax: a lumbering, ill-conceived mess. Since they apparently 
didn't understand the true story of the white elephant seaplane that is 
represented as a soaring engineering achievement, it should come as no 
surprise that they would get nearly everything else wrong about Howard 
Hughes. Not only do they truncate the biography of this paradigm of 
American capitalism, leaving out the tawdry details of his dealings with 
the CIA and his various corporate crimes throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s; 
they also airbrush and prettify his earlier life to the point where it 
amounts to a lie.

The idea for this biopic came from Leonard DiCaprio, who plays Howard 
Hughes. Despite having progressive politics, especially on ecology (see 
http://www.leonardodicaprio.org/), he was 
unwilling to see Hughes in his proper historical context. DiCaprio was only 
interested in the man's speed fixation, his desire for privacy and his 
psychological quirks. Furthermore, John Logan turns Hughes into a kind of a 
libertarian hero after the fashion of Ayn Rand.

Despite his willingness to expose all the personal tics and foibles of this 
very odd subspecies of the American bourgeoisie, it is obvious that Logan 
and everybody else associated with this project want the audience to cheer 
for Howard Hughes at the end of this film. We have come a very long way 
from the days of "Citizen Kane."

If anything, Scorsese seems intent on making the same kind of film that 
another cutting-edge Italian-American director made a while back. Francis 
Ford Coppola's 1998 "Tucker" is a biopic of Preston Tucker, an auto 
manufacturer whose visionary plans for a car with safety belts and other 
features unheard of in Detroit at the time were shot down by hidebound, 
reactionary enemies in the business class. At the time, critic Roger Ebert 
said that you get no sense of what made Tucker tick. He, like Scorsese's 
Howard Hughes, is seen from the outside. Ebert also said that it was hard 
to avoid the impression that Coppola saw himself in Preston Tucker, who was 
also a kind of genius thwarted by lesser mortals.

With Howard Hughes, the parallels are even more obvious since his career 
began as a film-maker. Referring to Hughes's "Hell's Angels," a film about 
WWI aviators, Scorsese told the Telegraph: "He was a cocky guy and he 
bucked the system in terms of independent film…" In other words, he was a 
predecessor.

"The Aviator" begins with the making of this film. It is a fairly accurate 
in terms of showing the young Howard Hughes's overweening ambitions to make 
the ultimate film about air war. He is seen as the ultimate risk-taker who 
proves his detractors wrong, especially Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly), who 
he had hired to run Hughes Tool. Dietrich warns him that mounting expenses 
might bankrupt the company his father founded and which was the source of 
his unlimited wealth. Scorsese depicts the film's premiere as a triumph of 
the plucky young producer/director. What the film covers up is the fact 
that the film actually lost $1.5 million, an immense sum in 1930.

Nor does the film dramatize the death of mechanic Phil Jones, who was 
strapped to a spinning plane and instructed to operate smoke pots to give 
the impression of a burning plane. Pilots working in the film warned that 
this was too dangerous. They were correct. Jones missed a cue to parachute 
from the spinning plane and fell to his death in a plowed field. Hughes was 
all to willing to take risks, but with other peoples' expense apparently.

(The account of Jones's death and other factual corrections in this review 
are drawn from Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele's "Howard Hughes: His 
Life and Madness." Bartlett and Steele might also be known to you as the 
authors of "America: What Went Wrong" and other critiques of American 
society. In other words, they are the perfect biographers for a subject 
like Howard Hughes.)

True to biopic traditions, "The Aviator" dwells on Hughes's romances with 
movie stars like Katherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. Hepburn is played by 
Cate Blanchett in one of the most ill-conceived performances in recent film 
history. Anybody who has seen Hepburn in film will be startled by 
Blanchett's braying and repellent version of the actress, which evokes 
Martin Short's impersonation of her on the old Saturday Night Live more 
than anything else.

It serves to establish a contrast between the crude but honest Hughes 
character and the liberal phonies in Hollywood he must have had to put up with.

In a pivotal scene, Hughes is invited out to the Connecticut estate of 
Hepburn's blueblood, liberal parents. At a dinner party there, they appear 
as repulsive as the Sean Penn marionette in this year's "Team America." 
Speaking down to Hughes, they spout slogan after slogan ab

[PEN-L] quotation du jour

[Devine, James]

"history is just old spin" -- John O'Farrell
 
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine 
 
Britain: a rough guide 

John O'Farrell
Friday December 17, 2004
The Guardian   

'Excuse me, have you got any of those handy new government booklets explaining 
British history, custom and character?" 

"You wot, mate? Oh them, nah, they were supposed to be delivered Thursday, but 
they never turned up ..." 

"Thanks, that's all I needed to know." 

It's a tough job for anyone, cramming everything that defines this country into 
one small publication. How do you possibly explain How Clean is Your House? How 
do you prevent them from finding out about Swindon? Do you talk about the wars 
that Britain has fought against its neighbours, or do you emphasise the culture 
and tradition of tolerance? I suppose whichever most annoys the French. 

The history of Britain is a rich and fascinating narrative except for that bit 
in the sixth form where they make you study the Whig oligarchy. But history is 
just old spin; there is no single incident in our island story on which 
everyone can agree, with the exception of: "Yeah, that was pretty funny when 
Kilroy-Silk was covered in pig slurry." 

Any official government history is going to depend on whichever party is in 
power. The Tory version of the olden days would have been all Nelson, Kipling 
and Maggie scoring a hat-trick in the 1966 World Cup final. If the booklet had 
been written by lefties it would say: "Describe how you think the chimney 
sweeps would have felt ..." Even the Liberal Democrats have their own emphasis: 
"In 1485 Henry Tudor defeated Richard III, but, amazingly, still didn't 
introduce proportional representation." 

But now we have a New Labour government guide to British history and customs. 
"Guy Fawkes broke the terms of his anti-social behaviour order and managed to 
plant the gunpowder because necessary anti-terrorism legislation had been 
opposed by the Hampstead chattering classes." And: "Shakespeare's plays played 
to packed houses at the Globe Theatre, and he managed perfectly well without an 
Arts Council subsidy." 

Asylum seekers skimming through this potted history of Great Britain may be 
angered about what has been left out. "Why no mention of John of Gaunt? What 
about the Battle of Malplaquet? And who is this Princess Diana?" 

There are, of course, certain quintessential British icons that still resonate 
around the globe: Shakespeare, Churchill, Mr Bean. So most people come to 
Britain with some advance knowledge, which is more than you can say for every 
nation. If you were asked about the Central African Republic, you could have a 
stab at its approximate location and its system of government, but after that 
you'd be struggling. But nothing can be presumed, so this Good Brit Guide has 
had to start with the basics: "Britain is a country off the north-west of 
Europe. It has a unique culture comprising Indian restaurants, mock-Irish pubs 
and American television. It is a constitutional monarchy, which means the Queen 
is head of state, though real power was handed over long ago to Rupert Murdoch. 
We used to have a band called the Beatles. We won the war. We invented 
football." 

Er, what else? Did we mention the Beatles? Well, anyway, you only have to look 
at the postcards on the London newsstands to see the symbols that define Great 
Britain: Big Ben, Princess Diana, and for some reason, a solitary bosom with a 
funny face painted on it. 

The idea of an official guide to the UK for uninitiated newcomers is a laudable 
one. The trouble is that the wrong version has been published and distributed. 
You know how these things happen: you dash out a joke version, you're off work 
for a day, and suddenly the cod guide to Britain that was being emailed round 
the office is now being religiously followed by every nervous foreigner 
desperate to make the right impression. 

'Free accommodation is widely available from any of the landladies whose cards 
may be found in telephone boxes. Pints of beer in pubs do not belong to anyone 
in particular and are placed on the tables for you to help yourself. There is 
an amusing pub game where people try and pretend that you are stealing their 
drink, and it would be rude if you did not join in the fun by shouting: 'Oi, 
gaylord, in the pub car park. Now!' After this you may encounter a traditional 
British policeman." 

Fortunately, this mistake has been discovered and the proper booklets are now 
available. But imagine if no one had noticed; we might have had asylum seekers 
being verbally abused, discriminated against or unjustly imprisoned. We might 
have had drunken brawling and ugly arrests after closing time. Thank goodness 
the real Britain's nothing like that. It can't be or I'm sure the booklet would 
have mentioned it. 

[EMAIL PROTECTED]   

[PEN-L] Call for papers: UNU-WIDER Jubilee Conference

[Eubulides]

--- Forwarded Message Follows ---
From:   "dissemination" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Jubilee Conference" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:Call for papers: UNU-WIDER Jubilee Conference
Date sent:  Fri, 17 Dec 2004 14:53:50 +0200
Organization:   UNU-WIDER

CALL FOR PAPERS

UNU-WIDER Jubilee Conference

WIDER Thinking Ahead: The Future of Development Economics
Helsinki, 17-18 June 2005

The twenty years since the World Institute for Development Economics
Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) was established in
1985 have seen major changes in the world economy with profound implications
for the developing world and for development economics. In June 2005,
leading researchers and policymakers will meet in Helsinki to mark
UNU-WIDER's jubilee anniversary, and to reflect upon where we now stand in
development economics and what the next two decades might hold. The
conference will highlight new and emerging issues in development, how
research can best address these questions, and the promising methodologies
that can push the frontiers of research and practice forward.

The two-day conference will span a broad range of topics, including growth,
trade and finance for development; poverty and inequality; strategies for
poverty reduction; conflict; and economic policy-making for development.
Presentations will deal not only with current research issues but will also
identify the challenges and dilemmas which are likely to occupy researchers
and policymakers.

The conference is open to younger researchers as well as established
scholars, and UNU-WIDER actively encourages the participation of nationals
from developing countries. Papers from the conference will be disseminated
through the UNU-WIDER website, and a selection will be published in
UNU-WIDER books and special issues of journals.

Applications with papers or one-page abstracts should be sent along with a
short CV to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] no later than Monday 14 February 2005.
Details also available at: http://www.wider.unu.edu


World Institute for Development Economics Research
of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER)
Katajanokanlaituri 6 B
00160 Helsinki, Finland
Tel.  +358-9-6159911
Fax  +358-9-61599333
Email  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.wider.unu.edu

[PEN-L] Seymour Melman

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, December 18, 2004
Seymour Melman, 86, Dies; Spurred Antiwar Movement
By JENNIFER BAYOT
Seymour Melman, a Columbia University scholar who helped galvanize the
antiwar movement from the 1950's on with analyses of the social costs of
military spending, died on Dec. 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause appeared to be an aneurysm, said Benjamin Abrams, his research
assistant.
Dr. Melman, an economist who taught industrial engineering at Columbia, was
a leading advocate of disarmament for nearly half a century. He opposed
nuclear weapons almost from their inception and he opposed the current war
in Iraq.
A longtime co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, he
emphasized arguments that military spending diverted resources from health
care, public housing and education.
In speeches, editorials, scholarly articles and close to a dozen books, he
criticized the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and maintained that the
United States and the Soviet Union were draining their economies for little
more than the ability to destroy each other hundreds of times over. He
popularized the use of the word "overkill" to describe the buildup. "Isn't
1,250 times overkill enough?" he wrote in a 1964 letter to The New York
Times. "Since the Soviets by similar calculation can overkill the United
States only 145 times, are we to believe that any advantage exists here for
either side?"
He rebutted a post-World War II argument that war drove the economy,
maintaining that the opposite was true and that other factors helped pull
the country out of the Depression.
In his 1974 book, "The Permanent War Economy," he composed a long list of
military trade-offs. The money spent on one Huey helicopter, he said, could
buy 66 low-priced homes, while a recent $69 million reduction in
child-nutrition programs represented the cost of two DE-1052 destroyer
escorts. He added, "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A
aircraft program."
"His work changed the debate in the peace movement to much broader issues,"
said Marcus Raskin, a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, a
liberal research institute, and an adviser to the National Security Council
in the Kennedy administration.
Professor Melman's arguments appealed to a wide spectrum, attracting unions
like the United Automobile Workers and the Machinists Union as well as
public advocates like Ralph Nader, who yesterday described Prof. Melman's
studies as "prescient for decades."
Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and
antiwar activist, said Dr. Melman helped mobilize what once was weak and
scattered resistance to war and other military operations.
"The country is a lot different than it was 30 to 40 years ago, and he had
a big role in that," Mr. Chomsky said. "There's much more widespread
opposition to the diversion of resources to military production, to the use
of force in international affairs, to nuclear development."
Dr. Melman became an authority on a process called "economic conversion,"
the retooling of arms factories and military bases for civilian purposes.
He outlined such plans in "The Demilitarized Society" (1988) and
"Rebuilding America" (1992). He advised the United Nations on the
possibilities of economic conversion from 1979 to 1980, and from 1988 on,
he was chairman of The National Commission for Economic Conversion and
Disarmament.
Seymour Melman was born in the Bronx on Dec. 30, 1917. He received a
bachelor's degree in economics from College of the City of New York in 1939.
After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he received a
doctorate in economics from Columbia, where he was later chairman of the
industrial engineering department.
His books on military spending include "Our Depleted Society" (1965),
"Pentagon Capitalism" (1970) and "Profits Without Production" (1983).
His more recent books, including "After Capitalism: From Managerialism to
Workplace Economy" (2001), describe the potential of employee
self-management, an idea that interested him for decades. As a young man,
he briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel, and later in his career
participated in studies and meetings on the productivity of such collective
settlements.
Dr. Melman is survived by a brother, Myron, of Rehovot, Israel. His
marriage to JoAnne Medalie ended in divorce.
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org

[PEN-L] Trotsky quote query

[Chris Doss]

Hi,

Does anybody know where the following quotes come from
in Lev Davidovich's corpus? They are from my (Russian)
copy of Trotsky: Mify i Lichnost', which, like most
Russian books unfortunately, hos no footnotes. The
translations are by me, so they won't correspond
literally with the standard English translations,
except through some miracle. The context is possible
anti-Nazi alliances between the USSR and Western
powers. Thanks!

"They (the military agreements between the USSR and
the Allies) will preserve their worth in the first
period of military operations, but there is no doubt
that the united forces, in the decisive phase of war,
will be defined incomparably more in terms of more
meaningful factors than the oaths of diplomats, as
they are liars by profession... The imperialist
contradictions, of course, will be overcome with the
help of a compromise in order to prevent a military
victory of the Soviet Union..."

In the case of war "the fate of the Soviet Union will
be decided in the final account not on the maps of
generals, but on the map of class struggle. Only the
European proletariat... can defend the Soviet Union
from destruction or from a stab in the back by its
allies... War will help revolution."

"It is hard to doubt that a military defeat will turn
out to be fatal, not only for the Soviet ruling class,
but for the social bases of the Soviet Union... Under
the influence of the pressing needs of the state in
matters of first importance, the individualistic
tendencies of the peasant economy will receive actual
support, and the centrifugal forces inside the
collective farms will grow with every month... In
other words, in the case of a long war, if the world
proletariat remains passive, the internal social
contradictions of the Soviet Union not only may, but
must, lead to a bourgeois bonopartist
counterrevolution."

"If the war is just a war, the defeat of the Soviet
Union will be inevitable. In the technological,
economic and military senses, imperialism is
incomparably stronger. If imperialism is not paralyzed
by a revolution in the West, it will sweep away the
Russian that was brought into being by the October Revolution."



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Re: [PEN-L] economics and class struggle behind legal victory.

[g kohler]

From: Chris Burford  Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004
. . . snip>
As for working people - working class and self-employed workers on the land
- a
more radical agenda of  human rights is to their advantage, but there is a
downside in that it ultimately tends to emphasise atomised individualised
rights, . . .
Reply:
Wouldn’t it make sense to campaign for *economic* human rights in order to
gain ground in the legal sphere? Many of the economic human rights have
already been catalogued in the 1948 UN Declaration, including the right to a
decent standard of living, full employment, no child labour, no
discrimination against women, and the right to a social order that
facilitates those other rights. One could add the right of not being
exploited. Since economic human rights can only be realized in a collective
manner, the argument of “atomized, individualized” does not apply to
economic human rights. Workers and poor people of the world unite for what?
Could be: unite for your economic human rights. That sits also well with the
theme of a common humanity, as raised by Lebowitz in a recent posting.
GK

[PEN-L] Oil company rot in Equatorial Guinea

[Louis Proyect]

(An article by Ken Silverstein, who founded Counterpunch a few years ago, 
before taking a job with the Los Angeles Times.)

LA Times, December 18, 2004
Oil Firms' Rich Concessions to Tainted African Ruler Probed
By Ken Silverstein, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Six years ago, the president of Equatorial Guinea was invited 
to invest in a promising venture with one of the U.S. oil giants tapping 
his tiny nation's reserves.

Mobil Oil Corp. offered the West African leader a stake in an oil trading 
business for $2,300, according to documents the company filed with a Senate 
subcommittee that were released last month.

Now, the company says, that stake is valued at about $645,000.
Mobil, now part of Exxon Mobil Corp., was not alone in sharing the wealth 
with President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, whose regime has been accused 
of massive corruption and human rights abuses.

Business ties between Obiang and seven U.S. oil companies, including real 
estate leases and investment in energy production facilities, are the 
subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to 
the companies and lawyers familiar with the investigation. Attorneys 
familiar with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act say the investigation 
involves the broadest examination of the oil industry's overseas practices 
since the law was passed in 1977.

Exploration by U.S. companies in Equatorial Guinea, previously an obscure 
cocoa producer, began to pay off in the late 1990s as the U.S. sought new 
sources outside the turbulent Middle East to meet its rapidly growing 
demand for foreign oil. The effort intensified after the Sept. 11, 2001, 
attacks and again after the invasion of Iraq last year.

The hunt for energy has pushed Washington and the oil industry into 
relations with regimes in the former Soviet Union and West Africa whose 
records on human rights and corruption are similar to those of traditional 
U.S. suppliers in the Middle East.

Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, American companies can do business 
with government officials but are not allowed to provide anything of value 
to anyone who can misuse a position of power to help them obtain or retain 
business.

U.S. government scrutiny of business relations with Equatorial Guinea grew 
out of a money-laundering inquiry begun in 2003 by the Senate Permanent 
Subcommittee on Investigations on accounts held by the country at Riggs 
Bank in Washington. The biggest account contained hundreds of millions of 
dollars in oil revenue deposited by American companies, according to the 
Senate report.

That report, along with documents from lobbyists and an industry-funded 
trade group and interviews with former U.S. officials, show that the 
companies made multimillion-dollar deals with Obiang and his relatives and 
helped them win political support in Washington.

Oil companies feted Obiang at Washington affairs attended by federal 
officials and helped broker meetings between members of the Bush 
administration and regime officials. The companies lobbied to reopen the 
U.S. Embassy in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea's capital, which had been closed 
since 1995. That was in part because of the country's dismal human rights 
record.

full: 


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org