date:20061212

They made $9.34 billion and they are giving away $16.5 billion in salaries,
bonuses etc? Supposedly only the bonuses will com from this, as salaries and
benefits would already have been taken into account  otherwise they
won't be around much longer

Rui

 
By JOHN HOLUSHA

The Goldman Sachs Group reported today that it earned $9.34 billion this
year, the most in Wall Street history, and that it would set aside $16.5
billion for salaries, bonuses and benefits for employees.

[PEN-L] Sing! Sing! Sing! With John Ashcroft


Really, on Youtube.

Worse still, the footage includes guitar player Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of
Ultimate Spinach/Steely Dan/Doobie Brothers fame accompanying James
Woolsley.

Not for the faint of heart.
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016191.php

[PEN-L] Army, Marine Corps To Ask for More Troops



Army, Marine Corps To Ask for More Troops

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 13, 2006; A01

The Army and Marine Corps are planning to ask incoming Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates and Congress to approve permanent increases
in personnel, as senior officials in both services assert that the
nation's global military strategy has outstripped their resources.

In addition, the Army will press hard for "full access" to the
346,000-strong Army National Guard and the 196,000-strong Army
Reserves by asking Gates to take the politically sensitive step of
easing the Pentagon restrictions on the frequency and duration of
involuntary call-ups for reservists, according to two senior Army
officials.

The push for more ground troops comes as the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have sharply decreased the readiness of Army and Marine
Corps units rotating back to the United States, compromising the
ability of U.S. ground forces to respond to other potential conflicts
around the world.

"The Army has configured itself to sustain the effort in Iraq and, to
a lesser degree, in Afghanistan. Beyond that, you've got some
problems," said one of the senior Army officials. "Right now, the
strategy exceeds the capability of the Army and Marines." This
official and others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition
of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about
the matter.

The Army, which has 507,000 active-duty soldiers, wants Congress to
permanently fund an "end strength," or manpower, of at least 512,000
soldiers, the Army officials said. The Army wants the additional
soldiers to be paid for not through wartime supplemental spending
bills but in the defense budget, which now covers only 482,000
soldiers.

The Marine Corps, with 180,000 active-duty Marines, seeks to grow by
several thousand, including the likely addition of three new infantry
battalions. "We need to be bigger. The question is how big do we need
to be and how do we get there," a senior Marine Corps official said.

At least two-thirds of Army units in the United States today are rated
as not ready to deploy, as well as lacking in manpower, training and
-- most critically -- equipment, according to senior U.S. officials
and the Iraq Study Group report. The two ground services estimate that
they will need $18 billion a year to repair, replace and upgrade
destroyed and worn-out equipment.

If another crisis were to erupt requiring a large number of U.S.
ground troops, the Army's plan would be to freeze its forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and divert to the new conflict the U.S.-based combat
brigade that is first in line to deploy.

Beyond that, however, the Army would have to cobble together
war-depleted units to form complete ones to dispatch to the new
conflict -- at the risk of lost time, unit cohesion and preparedness,
senior Army officials said. Moreover, the number of Army and Marine
combat units available for an emergency would be limited to about half
that of four years ago, experts said, unless the difficult decision to
pull forces out of Iraq were made.

"We are concerned about gross readiness . . . and ending equipment and
personnel shortfalls," said a senior Marine Corps official. The
official added that Marine readiness has dropped and that the Corps is
unable to fulfill many planned missions for the fight against
terrorism.

Senior Pentagon officials stress that the U.S. military has ample air
and naval power that could respond immediately to possible
contingencies in North Korea, Iran or the Taiwan Strait.

"If you had to go fight another war someplace that somebody sprung
upon us, you would keep the people who are currently employed doing
what they're doing, and you would use the vast part of the U.S. armed
forces that is at home station, to include the enormous strength of
our Air Force and our Navy, against the new threat," Marine Gen. Peter
Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing last
month.

But if the conflict were to require a significant number of ground
troops -- as in some scenarios such as the disintegration of Pakistan
-- Army and Marine Corps officials made clear that they would have to
scramble to provide them. "Is it the way we'd want to do it? No. Would
it be ugly as hell? Yes," said one of the senior Army officials.
"But," he added, "we could get it done."

According to Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander for the
Middle East, the Army and Marine Corps today cannot sustain even a
modest increase of 20,000 troops in Iraq. U.S. commanders for
Afghanistan have asked for more troops but have not received them,
noted the Iraq Study Group report, which called it "critical" for the
United States to provide more military support for Afghanistan.

"We are facing more operational risk than we have for many, many
years," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the A

[PEN-L] Scandal in the treasury repo market?

2006-12-12 Thread raghu


I saw this article in Fortune about a possible SEC inquiry into fraud in the
Treasury repo markets:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/12/11/8395437/index.htm

This article gived few details and there is surprisingly little coverage in
the business media.

(If I am not mistaken there was an earlier "cornering" scandal in 1992
involving the "Liars Poker" crew at Salomon brothers - this one appears to
be roughly similar.)
-raghu.


snip
Treasury yields are the benchmarks for corporate debt, mortgages and car
loans, so any disruption in the market could have a wide-ranging economic
effect.

Just such a disruption occurred on Nov. 3, when several newspapers reported
that Philip Smith and Robert Fischetti were in negotiations with UBS
(Charts) to leave the bank's trading desk amid rumors that the Securities
and Exchange Commission was scrutinizing the bank for manipulating the
Treasury repurchase, or "repo," market.
Beware: More Fed hikes may be coming

The SEC declined to comment. UBS would not verify whether the pair were
still at the bank, but it did say it is cooperating with a government
investigation.

UBS is one of the 22 investment banks that buy bonds directly from the
Federal Reserve and resell them to customers, including mutual funds,
pension funds, foreign investors and others. The members of this club, which
include Lehman Brothers (Charts), Cantor Fitzgerald and Mizuho Securities
(Charts), also use the bonds as collateral for loans.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

2006-12-12 Thread Carrol Cox

Jim Devine wrote:
>
> I didn't really answer Charles' question. Yes, capitalism started in
> both the English countryside and in the colonies. But the full-blown
> capitalist engine (that now is taking over the whole world in a
> different way than was involved in slavery and colonialism) started in
> the English countryside. That "engine" is the metaphor used to
> describe the process of expanded reproduction described in CAPITAL.

>From the beginning of this debate some years ago there has been an
unending confusion of "beginning" with "development." It is as though
one party was arguing that sperm fertilized the egg and the other party
was arguing no the umbilical cord fed the fetus.

Carrol

Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Irans New Power Balance]

2006-12-12 Thread Carrol Cox

Jim Devine wrote:
>
>> okay, let's forget the stress points metaphor for now. The point is,
> for what issues is there a potential that we can get people to agree
> with us (more importantly, with me ;-)) when they don't currently
> agree with us.

Here's the thing. Throughout its history capitalism has generated an
unending stream of outrages, often affecting considerable majorities of
the capitalist nations. Yet times and places where mass movements of
resistance have materialized have been extraordinarily few. Moreover,
there seems that those few occasions have no lessons to teach us -- or
no lessons that we couldn't teach ourselves in weeks were we to find
outselves in the midst of another such occasion. The French uprisings
all eventually failed. The second Russian uprising succeeded thanks to a
world war. The Vietnamese and Chinese Revolutions had as their condition
a foreign invasion. The Cuban Revolution is clearly sui generis.

I spent a lot of time from roughly 1975 to 1989 trying to dream up,
reason out, discover, such issues, and explored a few of them, with some
nice local results on a couple. But we really aren't going to discover
them; they (if they exist or appear) are goind to discover us. So the
main thing we have to do in any given year is _stay us_, by which I mean
don't join the DP, don't go in for using low-phosphate detergents,
etcetera.

We can continue to organize around whatever local or natinal issues
temporarily trigger active public response. Some will flourish for
awhile and die. Others will be flat from the beginning. Under the right
conditions (Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" is the right metaphor)
those ongoing activities will flow into something bigger. And if they
don't. They don't. I had a great uncle who organized sheepherders for
the IWW in Montana early in the century. Nothing much came of it. When I
visited with him for a couple days back in 1947 he wasn't weeping about
it. Neither should we.

Carrol

[PEN-L] Less Hungry for Dollars


Less Hungry for Dollars:



December 10, 2006
Economic View
As the Dollar Falls, Some Dominoes Don't
By DANIEL ALTMAN

EXCHANGE rates are changing — and fast. While American consumers may
not react right away — say, by buying fewer imports and thus narrowing
the trade deficit — investors may be a different story.

When the dollar drops, several things happen. Returns on
dollar-denominated assets become less valuable to foreigners. The
dollars they receive in interest, dividends and other distributions
don't buy as many euros or yen. And dollar-denominated assets become
cheaper to buy. If foreign investors think that the dollar will
recover someday, or if they are seeking a combination of risk and
return that still looks good with a lower dollar, they may go on a
shopping spree.

Other effects occur with a bit more time. For example, if investors
are predominantly selling their American assets to buy foreign ones
instead, the demand for dollars will drop. That pushes the dollar's
value down further, and the effect can start to snowball, perhaps
uncontrollably.

So, are any of these things happening now? The dollar has certainly
taken a big tumble since its highs of February 2002 — a whopping 18
percent in a broad measure calculated by the Federal Reserve, both in
raw exchange rates and after adjusting for differences in the prices
of goods at home and abroad. The dollar has moved substantially more
against some currencies. Say you are a German who bought an American
bond paying 8 percent four years ago, when the euro was about one to
one with the dollar. Now that bond is paying only 6 percent, as far as
you're concerned.

Different types of investors may react to this effect in different
ways, said Richard Portes, a professor of economics at London Business
School. "You've got two categories of investor," he explained. "One is
the central banks, which have been putting their reserves in the
dollar securities, typically Treasury securities. The other is the
private sector. The private sector has not, in the past couple of
years, net been putting its money into American securities. In fact,
there's been a net outflow in equities."

Central banks will eventually take the same cue, he added, if they
continue to see the value of their dollar-denominated reserves
plummet. "People say central banks don't care if they lose money,"
Professor Portes said. "That's just not true. I've talked to central
bankers who have said, 'I'm not going to be the last one out of this
room if a fire breaks out.' "

Indeed, central banks have already started to diversify holdings away
from the dollar, which is a factor behind its drop. But this process
hasn't created a crisis yet, nor has it substantially cut the funds
available for businesses and consumers in the United States.

"Asian central banks have already diversified and will continue to do
so," said Kathleen Stephansen, director of global economics at Credit
Suisse. "But that's not putting into question the fact that the dollar
remains the predominant currency in the basket, and I'm thinking
particularly with regard to China."

Ms. Stephansen pointed out that new sources of funds for the American
market are popping up all the time.

"There are a lot of emerging markets that are extremely good at
creating gross domestic product, and they don't really have the
financial wherewithal at the moment to invest the proceeds," she said.
"The U.S. still remains the most liquid market. And that's why I think
we'll continue to see capital flows coming here."

Even with more money rolling in from developing countries — and, more
recently, oil exporters as well — you might expect savvy American
investors to start putting their money overseas. After all, if you had
bet on the euro five years ago, you would have earned a 50 percent
return by now.

Though investors have been shifting money overseas, they haven't moved
as much as you might expect. Ms. Stephansen said that American
investors still had a significant homeward bias, and that, given
market realities, their portfolios were still "very much skewed
towards the U.S."

And what of the opportunity for foreigners to do some bargain-basement
shopping for American assets and companies? Ms. Stephansen said the
dollar would probably have to fall further before a wave of
rate-driven foreign direct investment occurred. It might not be too
far away, though; she suggested that a climb by the euro to $1.40,
compared with $1.32 on Friday, could be enough.

In the meantime, the dollar's plunge may have actually had a salutary
effect on investors' view of the United States. Professor Portes
remarked that as the dollar falls, so does the value of the nation's
debt in international markets. In fact, he estimates that the value of
the nation's debt, restated in terms of other currencies, has fallen
enough this year to

[PEN-L] Breathtaking ignorance of ruling class politicians


http://www.ktre.com/global/story.asp?s=5805636&ClientType=Printable
True or False: U.S. Intel Leaders Fail Quiz on the Basics of Islam
by Z. Byron Wolf, ABC News

Pop quiz.

Quick. Without thinking or Googling, who are the 
senators from Wyoming? The Chinese president? 
What are the two main sects of Islam? Al Qaeda members follow which sect?


Pretty hard, huh?

A reporter recently directed the questions about 
Islam to Texas Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes.


Reyes failed, which would perhaps not be a big 
deal if Reyes were an ordinary congressman.


But he's not.

Come January, Reyes will chair the House 
Intelligence Committee, which oversees all U.S. 
intelligence activity, a good portion of which is 
directed toward the war on terror.


Reyes could not tell Congressional Quarterly's 
national security editor Jeff Stein whether al 
Qaeda was made up of Sunnis or Shiites.


From Stein's scathing column on the exchange:

"Al Qaeda, they have both," Reyes said. "You're talking about predominately?"
"Sure," I said, not knowing what else to say.
"Predominantly -- probably Shiite," he ventured."

-- Congressional Quarterly

Reyes was wrong despite having a 50-50 chance of success.

"Issues like al Qaeda and the Middle East deserve 
serious discussion and consideration," Reyes said 
in a statement after the column was posted on CQ's Web site.


"The CQ interview covered a wide range of topics 
other than the selected points published in the 
story. As a Member of the Intelligence Committee 
since before 9/11, I'm acutely aware of al 
Qaeda's desire to harm Americans. The 
Intelligence Committee will keep its eye on the 
ball, and focus on the pressing security and intelligence issues facing us."


For his part, Stein realizes maybe even he could 
not pass a detailed quiz on Islam.


"I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff, 
either," Stein said to ABC. "That's the irony of 
this thing. But I cover intelligence, so I have 
to have a functional knowledge of Islam."


Stein said he kept the quiz easy for Reyes. "I 
didn't even go to the tough questions. Like what is Wahabism?"


Reyes is not the only congressman on the 
intelligence committee who has trouble with these basic questions about Islam.


Republicans Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry 
Everett, R-Ala., also failed this test, and Stein 
wrote about them in a previous column.


Stein has made a cottage industry of asking these 
questions of lawmakers from both parties and FBI counterterrorism officials.


He has received the same blank stares that Jay 
Leno gets when he stops people on the street and 
asks them to name the first American president.


That's a comedy show, though. This is Congress.

Stein cedes that not all Congress members have failed the quiz.

"Some of the people I've asked these questions 
have known them," Stein said. "Zoe Lofgren, the 
ranking Democrat on the intelligence subcommittee 
of the House Homeland Security Committee, knew it 
very well. [Rep.] Jane Harman, too. She kind of 
rolled her eyes and said, 'Where do you want me 
to start? Fourteen-hundred years ago there was a 
split in Islam.' ... And I said, 'OK, you know."


It should be noted that incoming House Speaker 
Nancy Pelosi bumped Harman, D-Calif., out of her 
position as the ranking Democrat on the 
Intelligence Committee in favor of Reyes.


In case you, like Reyes, were not aware, Shiite 
and Sunni are the two main branches of Islam.


The differences between these two are at the 
heart of what people in the news business are 
calling "sectarian strife" and "civil war" in Iraq.


"Shiites, who account for some 10 percent to 20 
percent of the world's Muslims, split off from 
the mainstream of Islamic practice because of a 
disagreement about who was rightfully qualified 
to lead the Muslim community," says the 
nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations in a 
background paper on the subject posted on its Web site.


"Shiites believe Islam's leader should be a 
descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. Sunnis say 
leaders should be chosen through ijma, or 
consensus. Shiites revere Ali ibn Abi Talib, the 
Prophet Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, who was 
killed while serving as the top leader, or 
Caliph, of Islam in the 7th century. His tomb is 
in Najaf, Iraq's holiest Shiite city."


On-the-spot, off-the-cuff questions from 
reporters have long been a thorn in the side of politicians.


President Bush was famously quizzed by a TV 
reporter in Boston in November 1999 about the 
names of world leaders. He went one for four.


Since then he has gotten some on-the-job training.

One of the world leaders Bush was unable to name 
was General Pervez Musharraf, who at that time 
had recently taken control of Pakistan in a 
military coup. Today Musharraf is a major ally of Bush's in the war on terror.


Previous House Intelligence Committee chairmen 
have had a history, too, of putting their feet in their mouths.


Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chaired the House 
Intelligenc

Re: [PEN-L] did he say this?--one from Abe Lincoln

A quick google uncovered one of my all time favorite fake quotes
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Lincoln.html

What the web page says is

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F.
Elkins) Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

The quote doesn't even sound like Lincoln.  There isn't a shred of
documentary evidence that Lincoln made or wrote such a statement; it's in
none of the collections and everything extant by Lincoln has been collected
and printed.  And--oh, yes--and there was no Colonel William F.
Elkins...indeed, not even a Private William F. Elkins...not with that middle
initial.

The quote was actually traced to a newspaperman in Indiana named Ellis in
the early 1870s, who apparently got it from a third party organizer in
Illinois named Jesse Harper.  Indeed, 19th century American newspapermen
were always muddled when it came to direct quotations (also punctuation and
spelling).

All that said, I've always believed that there was something behind it.

The predictive features aside, it is not that different than views Lincoln
expressed regularly in other connections.  The wartime profiteering during
the Civil War infuriated many of the original Republican leaders, including
Lincoln, who regularly grumbled about contractors and businesses taking
advantage of the situation.  His law partner and biographer, William Herndon
broke with the Republicans in 1874-75 to encourage a third party movement of
farmers in Illinois (Jesse Harper's organization).

It is quite easy to see Lincoln saying something like this statement in
earshot of Herndon, Harper, Ellis or someone who passed on a shorthand
version of it to someone else.

Solidarity!
Mark L.

Re: [PEN-L] general comments about what's going on [was Iran's New Power Balance]


On 12/12/06, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Yes.  Excellent example.  We still use the same word ("marriage"), but it's
just not the same institution, is it?  Or "the family"?  The defined role of
the father, the mother, and the kiddies are all different than they once
were.


Religion, marriage, family, etc. have always been diverse, and they
have changed greatly, on the whole for the better in the USA, thanks
in part to past and present activism of people.  But that doesn't
appear to have helped build an organized Left, just as past and
present activism in trade unions, the civil rights movement, anti-war
movements, etc. have not.  In short, "mass work" has not led to a
formation of a mass left (or even a small but solidly organized left),
though leftists individually and collectively have left their marks on
American culture and society.
--
Yoshie

[PEN-L] banning Mandela


http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley12112006.html

CounterPunchDecember 11, 2006

Homeland Security Stalks the New South Africa
Banning Mandela

By Virginia Tilley

Johannesburg, South Africa.

On Friday evening, October 20, a traveling academic confronted a
regular ugly occurrence at JFK airport. He was stopped at immigration
by Homeland Security, shuttled off without explanation into a stark
waiting room, left there for six hours with no food or water with
other similarly trapped travellers (including a little child who cried
inconsolably), was asked a few template questions - "have you ever
been a member of a terrorist organization?" - and finally was marched
away by two armed officers and put on a plane back to South Africa,
his
10-year visa summarily revoked. No explanation. By the time he
realized what was afoot and called the South African embassy, at about
3 a.m., it was too late for them to do anything. He arrived back in
South Africa tired, tousled, and very pissed off.

But, unusually, this visitor was in a position to make a serious stink
about it. Within hours, the South African government's Department of
Foreign Affairs was mobilized and the American Embassy was offering
embarrassed apologies. Within days, the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) was also mobilized. The American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) called to ask if they could make his experience
a test case.

Denying US visas to visiting academics is, of course, not uncommon
these days. All over the United States, in the Homeland Security era,
university departments and organizers of scientific and academic
conferences have been regularly startled, angered, frustrated and
baffled as some new colleague or visiting scholar is denied entry to
the country. Some of these unwanted souls have been luminaries, like
Dr. Tariq Ramadan, an international scholar of Islam and its
interaction with western cultures, who was named by Time one of the
100 most important innovators of the 21st century. Targeted as
objectionable by pro-Israeli networks, Dr. Ramadan was abruptly denied
a visa just two weeks before he was scheduled to assume a senior
appointment at the University of Notre Dame. (Amidst the ensuing
hullabaloo, he was promptly snapped up by Oxford). Other rejectees are
talented rising scholars, like Dr. Waskar Ari from Bolivia, whose visa
was denied just a month before he was to take up his new position at
the University of Nebraska. Apparently, all work visas from Bolivia
were cancelled some time after the leftist President Morales was
elected.

But Dr. Adam Habib is not some mild-mannered professor-type, to whom
Homeland Security (with its routine disdain for intellectuals and
their lily-livered liberal universities) might casually flip the bird.
Nor is he simply well-known - although he is one of the best-known
political scientists and public intellectuals in South Africa, whose
expulsion from the US has sent shock waves through South Africa and
triggered a blitz of international media coverage. Nor is he a Muslim
cleric, Pakistani student, Venezuelan researcher, Palestinian
brother-in-law, or other traveller who might fear for the welfare of
some vulnerable family member or lack access to government contacts,
and therefore be sufficiently intimidated by Big Brother to confine
his frustrations to sympathetic friends in his living room.

Rather, Dr. Habib is Executive Director of the Democracy and
Governance Programme at the para-statal Human Sciences Research
Council (HSRC), the largest research institution in South Africa.
(Disclosure: I work in that programme.) He was going to the US as part
of an official delegation from the HSRC, led by its CEO Olive Shisana,
to consult with the World Bank and other terrorist sympathizers. His
chums are ministers and director generals of various government
agencies and their international equivalents.

In other words, he's a leading international figure in the study and
promotion of democracy in South Africa, in the African continent, and
globally. Very shady stuff, apparently, to Homeland Security.

Why was Dr. Habib caught in Homeland Security's net? (They even let
his wife in.) Officials gave no explanation and they aren't required
to give one. Even the airport officers, who dealt apologetically with
Dr. Habib as they threw him out of the country, may not have known
what it was. Having visiting the US numerous times over the past
decade on his ten-year visa, Dr. Habib himself was entirely baffled.
Back home, speculations ran the gamut. His visit to Iran in 2004? But
that was part of an official HSRC exchange programme. A ban on Muslim
clerics? Dr. Habib is a practicing Muslim but not a cleric. Racial
profiling? Dr. Habib is not Arab, or Pak, or Persian, or Afghan, or
any other of Homeland Security's racial targets: he's of Indian
descent, as is some 2.5% of South Africa's population. His name? Even
the doughty Homeland Security can't automatically shut out every
traveler with la

[PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

*   From: Jim Devine
Your "capitalism without workers" is a contrast to the real world
capitalism in which there are a lot of proletarians. But Brenner, as I
understand him, is talking about what started the system going. We rightly
associate capitalism with proletarians, just as we associate measles with
red spots on the skin. But Brenner is talking about the etiology of the
disease. One can have the measles virus before the red spots come.

^
CB: On this analogy , the body of the virus would be not just in the English
countryside, but in the colonies as well. The etiology of the disease is
geographically spread out, not focussed in one place.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

2006-12-12 Thread Waistline2

that quote is from the _Poverty of Philosophy_. A good book in many
ways, it was also a bit hasty. Marx said memorable stuff like "The
hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill
society with the industrial capitalist." It's a great epigram, but
it's hardly an analysis of the sort that Marx produced later. Its
technological determinism doesn't fit with Marx's historical
materialism. The book is better at devastating Proudhon than
presenting an alternative.

Comment

Of course the handbill gives you a society with the feudal lord and the steam
mill a society with industrial capitalist. Hell . . . one hundred and fifty
years later it is easy to say this is not exhaustive. The statement is
obviously summation and not meant to be exhaustive.

Many things or there are many aspects to the rise of the bourgeois mode of
production as the industrial system. One of extreme consequence is the
transformation in the primary form of wealth from landed property to what 
Engels called
movable property or gold.

The modern computer is giving us an even new society, but this does not mean
the computer by itself. Rather, what is meant is the entire evolution of the
technological regime - including energy source, that gives society the hand
mill, the steam engine, the gasoline powered engine, the semiconductor and say
the Internet, which is still in its infancy.

Marx was writing to the audience of his time not us today.


Melvin P.

[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Iran’s New Power Balance]

On 12/12/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Yoshie Furuhashi  wrote:
> > > What do you think are stress points today?

me:
> > clearly one concerns the distribution of income and the distribution
> > of medical benefits. Class differences are getting worse.

Yoshie:
> Those are objectively stress points, so is the Iraq War, but
> subjectively none of them appears to be sending people up in arms at
> this moment, though certainly there are (overlapping) groups of people
> who are working on them as issues.

okay, let's forget the stress points metaphor for now. The point is,
for what issues is there a potential that we can get people to agree
with us (more importantly, with me ;-)) when they don't currently
agree with us.

On a lot of things, from the Iraq War to universal health care, short
of abortion on demand and expropriate the expropriators, there are
already a lot of people, a majority on a number of key issues, who
would agree with standard leftist views if they are polled.

The problem comes down to these:

total absence of the Left (leftists do not have a coherent world view
that unite them and many of them don't like other leftists all that
much :->);

people vote for politicians who don't share their views and don't vote
for politicians who share their views, mainly because those who don't
have more money and are seen to be credible and electable than those
who do;

people -- probably many leftists -- are pretty solidly stuck in
electoralism, having forgotten how to change things in the streets.

At this point, Carrol would say, yes, our enemy has been stronger than
the local enemies of other leftists in other countries.  That's
probably true, but that has always been true for over the last 100
years, and it will probably be true until the US loses its global
hegemony.  So, we need to figure out what can be done, even knowing
that our enemy is the baddest in the world, our social geography more
fragmented than in other countries due to suburbanization, our
politics more decentralized than in other countries due to federalism,
etc.
--
Yoshie

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


the now-ancient engine metaphor helps. In my interpretation of Marx
(and to a lesser extent of Brenner), slavery and colonialism provided
fuel for the capitalist engine. But the engine was created in the
English countryside. Once the engine started going (involving the
accumulation that Marx describes in much of CAPITAL), eventually it
didn't need fuel from slavery and colonialism. It could switch to
other fuel supplies, such as the surplus-value produced domestically.

of course, that metaphor isn't reality. No metaphor is.


With all due respect to Charles, I don't think it is profitable to
find support for arguments against Brenner in Marx's writings. (By
the same token, there is little support for Brenner's thesis as
well.) Marx simply never wrote much about the colonial world,
especially about Latin America. And what he wrote about Asia was
completely wrong. I keep expecting Jim to get into the details of
Latin American history, but judging from his last post, that was
another country and besides the wench is dead.

Re: [PEN-L] general comments about what's going on [was Iran's New Power Balance]

Yes.  Excellent example.  We still use the same word ("marriage"), but it's
just not the same institution, is it?  Or "the family"?  The defined role of
the father, the mother, and the kiddies are all different than they once
were.

Maybe we need to see more Walt Disney movies about Mommy and Daddy Squirrel,
to realize this, but the same word doesn't make it the same thing.

ML

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

I didn't really answer Charles' question. Yes, capitalism started in
both the English countryside and in the colonies. But the full-blown
capitalist engine (that now is taking over the whole world in a
different way than was involved in slavery and colonialism) started in
the English countryside. That "engine" is the metaphor used to
describe the process of expanded reproduction described in CAPITAL.

On 12/12/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On 12/12/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Jim, What do you make of the fact that Marx refers to slavery and
> colonialism as the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation of capitalism
> ? Doesn't that mean that Marx's thesis is that capitalism started both in
> the English countryside and in the colonies ? Both, not just in the English
> countryside.

the now-ancient engine metaphor helps. In my interpretation of Marx
(and to a lesser extent of Brenner), slavery and colonialism provided
fuel for the capitalist engine. But the engine was created in the
English countryside. Once the engine started going (involving the
accumulation that Marx describes in much of CAPITAL), eventually it
didn't need fuel from slavery and colonialism. It could switch to
other fuel supplies, such as the surplus-value produced domestically.

of course, that metaphor isn't reality. No metaphor is.
--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


On 12/12/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Jim, What do you make of the fact that Marx refers to slavery and
colonialism as the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation of capitalism
? Doesn't that mean that Marx's thesis is that capitalism started both in
the English countryside and in the colonies ? Both, not just in the English
countryside.


the now-ancient engine metaphor helps. In my interpretation of Marx
(and to a lesser extent of Brenner), slavery and colonialism provided
fuel for the capitalist engine. But the engine was created in the
English countryside. Once the engine started going (involving the
accumulation that Marx describes in much of CAPITAL), eventually it
didn't need fuel from slavery and colonialism. It could switch to
other fuel supplies, such as the surplus-value produced domestically.

of course, that metaphor isn't reality. No metaphor is.
--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


that quote is from the _Poverty of Philosophy_. A good book in many
ways, it was also a bit hasty. Marx said memorable stuff like "The
hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill
society with the industrial capitalist." It's a great epigram, but
it's hardly an analysis of the sort that Marx produced later. Its
technological determinism doesn't fit with Marx's historical
materialism. The book is better at devastating Proudhon than
presenting an alternative.

On 12/12/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

How about this one to show that Marx's thesis was more like Jim Blaut's than
Brenner's on the issue in dispute ?

^

Throughout Karl Marx's long career as philosopher, historian, social critic,
and revolutionary, he considered the enslavement of African people in
America to be a fundamental aspect of rising capitalism, not only in the New
World, but in Europe as well. As early as 1847, Marx made the following
forceful observation:

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as
machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton
you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their
value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world
trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an
economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the roost progressive of
countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North
America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy - the complete
decay of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery to disappear and
you will have wiped America off the map of nations.

Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed
among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to
disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without
disguise upon the New World.1





--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

[PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

Jim, What do you make of the fact that Marx refers to slavery and
colonialism as the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation of capitalism
? Doesn't that mean that Marx's thesis is that capitalism started both in
the English countryside and in the colonies ? Both, not just in the English
countryside.

Charles

[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Iran’s New Power Balance]


Yoshie Furuhashi  wrote:

> > What do you think are stress points today?


me:

> clearly one concerns the distribution of income and the distribution
> of medical benefits. Class differences are getting worse.


Yoshie:

Those are objectively stress points, so is the Iraq War, but
subjectively none of them appears to be sending people up in arms at
this moment, though certainly there are (overlapping) groups of people
who are working on them as issues.


okay, let's forget the stress points metaphor for now. The point is,
for what issues is there a potential that we can get people to agree
with us (more importantly, with me ;-)) when they don't currently
agree with us.
--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

[PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

How about this one to show that Marx's thesis was more like Jim Blaut's than
Brenner's on the issue in dispute ?

^

Throughout Karl Marx's long career as philosopher, historian, social critic,
and revolutionary, he considered the enslavement of African people in
America to be a fundamental aspect of rising capitalism, not only in the New
World, but in Europe as well. As early as 1847, Marx made the following
forceful observation:

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as
machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton
you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their
value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world
trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an
economic category of the greatest importance.

Without slavery North America, the roost progressive of
countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North
America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy - the complete
decay of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery to disappear and
you will have wiped America off the map of nations.

Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed
among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to
disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without
disguise upon the New World.1

[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Iran’s New Power Balance]

On 12/12/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

me:
> > yup, polls are relevant. But whatever happened to old-fashioned
> > analysis of the social structure to figure out where the stress points
> > are?

Yoshie:
> What do you think are stress points today?

clearly one concerns the distribution of income and the distribution
of medical benefits. Class differences are getting worse.

Those are objectively stress points, so is the Iraq War, but
subjectively none of them appears to be sending people up in arms at
this moment, though certainly there are (overlapping) groups of people
who are working on them as issues.

On 12/12/06, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted this new poll to LBO-talk:

11. Just your best guess, how much longer do you think the U.S. will
have a significant number of troops in Iraq – less than six months,
six months to a year, one to two years, or longer than two years?

Less than six months2
Six months to a year   16
One to two years38
Longer than two years42
No opinion1

12. How much longer do you think the U.S. should have a significant
number of troops in Iraq – less than six months, six months to a
year, one to two years, or longer than two years?

Less than six months   30
Six months to a year25
One to two years  25
Longer than two years 14
Withdraw all now (vol.)   2
No opinion  3

The gap like this would be a good point of departure if an organized
Left existed, but there is no organized Left in the USA today.

On 12/12/06, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Well, nothing is permanent, for sure, but Christianity has proven more
> staying power than state socialism, which didn't last a century.  :->
> So, they are likely to be around, for a foreseeable future.

"Christians" is, I think, the wrong category. The "Christian Right"
(politically active right-wing evangelicals and fundamentalists) have
been around only a few decades as a significant political force. And
those categories are, perhaps, too broadly defined. We can't know how
long these groups may flourish, but that flourishing could be quite
unstable, subject to great swings.

Certainly.  The evangelical end of it is still on the upswing, though,
whereas our kind of Christians are on the downswing, just as we are in
the USA.  :->

That said, there are signs of positive change even among evangelicals
on poverty, the environment, and homosexuality, though not yet on
abortion:

December 12, 2006
Gay and Evangelical, Seeking Paths of Acceptance
By NEELA BANERJEE

RALEIGH, N.C. — Justin Lee believes that the Virgin birth was real,
that there is a heaven and a hell, that salvation comes through Christ
alone and that he, the 29-year-old son of Southern Baptists, is an
evangelical Christian.

Just as he is certain about the tenets of his faith, Mr. Lee also
knows he is gay, that he did not choose it and cannot change it.

To many people, Mr. Lee is a walking contradiction, and most
evangelicals and gay people alike consider Christians like him
horribly deluded about their faith. "I've gotten hate mail from both
sides," said Mr. Lee, who runs gaychristian.net, a Web site with 4,700
registered users that mostly attracts gay evangelicals.

The difficulty some evangelicals have in coping with same-sex
attraction was thrown into relief on Sunday when the pastor of a
Denver megachurch, the Rev. Paul Barnes, resigned after confessing to
having sex with men. Mr. Barnes said he had often cried himself to
sleep, begging God to end his attraction to men.

His departure followed by only a few weeks that of the Rev. Ted
Haggard, then the president of the National Association of
Evangelicals and the pastor of a Colorado Springs megachurch, after a
male prostitute said Mr. Haggard had had a relationship with him for
three years.

Though he did not publicly admit to the relationship, in a letter to
his congregation, Mr. Haggard said that he was "guilty of sexual
immorality" and that he had struggled all his life with impulses he
called "repulsive and dark."

While debates over homosexuality have upset many Christian and Jewish
congregations, gay evangelicals come from a tradition whose leaders
have led the fight against greater acceptance of homosexuals.

Gay evangelicals seem to have few paths carved out for them: they can
leave religion behind; they can turn to theologically liberal
congregations that often differ from the tradition they grew up in; or
they can enter programs to try to change their behavior, even their
orientation, through prayer and support.

But as gay men and lesbians grapple with their sexuality and an
evangelical upbringing they cherish, some have come to accept both.
And like other Christians who are trying to broaden the definition of
eva

[PEN-L] Damage Control 101: How to get rid of pesky union organizers


The headlines look ugly:
.

Swift plants raided for illegal immigrants
http://khastv.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7760

KHAS-TV Production at a Grand Island meat packing was shut down 
Tuesday morning after immigration officials raided the facility. At 
7:30 Tuesday morning, dozens of unmarked law enforcement vehicles 
stormed into the parking lot at Swift and Company.


Authorities tell us Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided 
the plant to arrest illegal immigrants using stolen identities.


Officials say the illegal immigrants were improperly obtaining and 
using social security numbers to gain employment at Swift.

.

Tip #1: Complaining *looks* good to the public worried about 
police-stateism and worker rights:


"Swift believes that today’s actions by the government violate the 
agreements associated with the Company’s participation over the past ten 
years in the federal government’s Basic Pilot worker authorization 
program and raise serious questions as to the government’s possible 
violation of individual workers’ civil rights."

.
.
.

"All the facilities except Hyrum are unionized."



...Maybe they won't be after the immigrant workers have been harrassed 
often enough.


But don't say that in public


Contact:
Sean McHugh
Vice President
Investor Relations and Communications
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(970) 506-7490

U.S. IMMIGRATION OFFICIALS COMMENCE EMPLOYEE INTERVIEWS
AT SIX SWIFT & COMPANY FACILITIES

GREELEY, COLO., December 12, 2006 – Swift & Company today announced that 
this morning, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division and other law 
enforcement agencies commenced employee interviews at six Swift & 
Company production facilities, located in Cactus, Texas; Grand Island, 
Nebraska; Greeley, Colorado; Hyrum, Utah; Marshalltown, Iowa; and 
Worthington, Minnesota, in connection with an investigation of the 
immigration status of an unspecified number of Swift workers. All the 
facilities except Hyrum are unionized. No civil or criminal charges have 
been filed against Swift or any current employees.


Operations at the affected Swift facilities have been temporarily 
suspended pending the anticipated end-of-day completion of the interview 
process. Shortly thereafter, Swift expects to resume operations, but 
production levels will depend on the number of employees, if any, 
detained for further interviewing or otherwise unable to return to work.


At this time, Swift cannot assess how, if at all, the results of the 
employee interview process will affect its business or results of 
operations. Any loss of a significant number of employees at any 
facility could adversely affect the operations of that facility until 
Swift is able to replace any lost members of its workforce and return to 
normal production levels. The six facilities represent all of Swift’s 
domestic beef processing capacity and 77% of its pork processing 
capacity. The Company also operates a pork processing facility in 
Louisville, Kentucky.


Swift believes that today’s actions by the government violate the 
agreements associated with the Company’s participation over the past ten 
years in the federal government’s Basic Pilot worker authorization 
program and raise serious questions as to the government’s possible 
violation of individual workers’ civil rights.


Swift & Company President and CEO Sam Rovit said: “Swift has never 
condoned the employment of unauthorized workers, nor have we ever 
knowingly hired such individuals. Since the inception of the Basic Pilot 
program in 1997, every single one of Swift’s new domestic hires, 
including those being interviewed today by ICE officials, has duly 
completed I-9 forms and has received work authorization through the 
government’s Basic Pilot program. Swift has played by the rules and 
relied in good faith on a program explicitly held out by the President 
of the United States as an effective tool to help employers comply with 
applicable immigration laws1.”


1 Basic Pilot fact sheet 
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/07/20060705-6.html)


- 1 -
More: 
http://www.swiftbrands.com/media/releases/2006_12_12_Swift_ICE_Interviews.PDF

[PEN-L] Corporate Corruption: Does It Matter HOW The Rich Get Richer?


Not if you ask them, or their friends...

[JURIST] US Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty
<http://www.usdoj.gov/dag/dagmcnaultybio.htm> [official profile]
announced Tuesday that the Department of Justice <http://www.usdoj.gov/>
(DOJ) [official website] will no longer encourage corporations to turn
over confidential records to officials investigating corporate fraud
<http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/currentawareness/corporatefraud.php> [JURIST
news archive].

The new McNulty Memorandum
<http://www.usdoj.gov/dag/speech/2006/mcnulty_memo.pdf> [PDF text]
revises portions of the 2003 Thompson Memorandum
<http://www.usdoj.gov/dag/cftf/business_organizations.pdf> [PDF], which
included business record turnover as a factor prosecutors could use in
determining whether corporations were cooperating with investigations,
by now requiring prosecutors to receive McNulty's approval before
seeking investigative facts gathered by corporate counsel and protected
by attorney-client privilege.

In a speech <http://www.usdoj.gov/dag/speech/2006/dag_speech_061212.htm>
[text] at a Lawyers for Civil Justice
<http://www.lfcj.com/process.cfm?PageID=1> [advocacy website] event,
McNulty explained the revisions, saying:

   First, my policy now makes clear that attorney-client communications
   should only be sought in rare cases; that is, that legal advice,
   mental impressions and conclusions and legal determinations by
   counsel are protected. Before they are requested, the United States
   Attorney must seek approval directly from me. I must personally
   approve each waiver request for attorney-client communications. Both
   the request for approval and my authorization will be in writing.

   Second, to support the request, prosecutors must show a "legitimate
   need" for the information. If they cannot meet that test, I will not
   authorize their seeking privileged information. To meet this test,
   prosecutors must show:

 (1) the likelihood and degree to which the privileged
 information will benefit the government's investigation;

 (2) whether the information sought can be obtained in a timely
 and complete fashion by using alternative means that do not
 require waiver;

 (3) the completeness of the voluntary disclosure already
 provided; and

 (4) the collateral consequences to the corporation in
 requesting a waiver.

   This is a substantial test and it addresses the criticism that
   prosecutors are merely asking for blanket waivers in every
   circumstance. I do not agree that blanket waivers were routinely
   sought in the past, but establishing this test ensures that
   requesting waiver is a thoughtful, considered process and that
   prosecutors are not requesting waiver from corporations without
   examining their real need for the information.

The revisions also generally prohibit prosecutors from considering
whether corporations pay attorneys' fees for their employees and agents
undergoing investigation. Such evidence will be considered, however, in
totality of circumstances inquiries when the advancement of fees
purposely impedes an investigation.

A federal court ruled in June that prosecutors, acting under the
Thompson Memorandum guidance, violated the constitutional rights
<http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/06/federal-prosecutors-violated-kpmg.php>
[JURIST report] of 16 former KPMG employees by pressuring the
professional services firm to stop paying the employees' defense costs
in an ongoing tax fraud case.

In September, McNulty expressed support
<http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/09/doj-defends-policy-encouraging.php>
[JURIST report] for the Thompson Memorandum despite concerns over its
restraint on attorney-client communications from groups including the
American Bar Association and the US Chamber of Commerce.

AP has more <http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061212/D8LVDFDO2.html>.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


I'm not dogmatic. I'm catmatic.

On 12/12/06, Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Rejected for insufficient dogmantism.  Way below the pen-l minimum.

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 01:38:45PM -0800, Jim Devine wrote:
>
> (I've said it before, but I don't see the Brenner, Dobb (etc.) vs.
> dependista (Sweezy, AG Frank, etc.) controversy as embodying a
> dichotomy or duality. Brenner _et al_ are good at pointing to class
> relations within countries, while Frank _et al_ are good at
> emphasizing relations between countries. Neither perspective is
> without limits.)
> --
> Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
> animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
> individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com




--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Iran’s New Power Balance]


me:

> yup, polls are relevant. But whatever happened to old-fashioned
> analysis of the social structure to figure out where the stress points
> are?


Yoshie:

What do you think are stress points today?


clearly one concerns the distribution of income and the distribution
of medical benefits. Class differences are getting worse.

I guess I could go further. But again, the key is to avoid crude
empiricism (what the polls say) and to figure out the conflicts which
are coming down the line...

--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

2006-12-12 Thread Michael Perelman

Rejected for insufficient dogmantism.  Way below the pen-l minimum.

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 01:38:45PM -0800, Jim Devine wrote:
>
> (I've said it before, but I don't see the Brenner, Dobb (etc.) vs.
> dependista (Sweezy, AG Frank, etc.) controversy as embodying a
> dichotomy or duality. Brenner _et al_ are good at pointing to class
> relations within countries, while Frank _et al_ are good at
> emphasizing relations between countries. Neither perspective is
> without limits.)
> --
> Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
> animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
> individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

I wrote:

>"zero workers"? you mean proletarians (waged, non-slave, non-serf)? I
>think Brenner's point is that the process he describes _produced_ the
>proletarians as a class.

Louis:

Yes, but that is after the fact. It is the commercial leasing of land under
the whip of competition that he characterizes as the beginning of
capitalism. This is a capitalism that only includes big farmers who rent
land and small farmers who they exploit (not in the technical sense of the
word.) No workers here at all. A capitalism without workers? Unlikely, to
say the least.

Your "capitalism without workers" is a contrast to the real world
capitalism in which there are a lot of proletarians. But Brenner, as I
understand him, is talking about what started the system going. We
rightly associate capitalism with proletarians, just as we associate
measles with red spots on the skin. But Brenner is talking about the
etiology of the disease. One can have the measles virus before the red
spots come.

me:

>I think the point is that the existence of proletarians there (who
>were free of the bonds of serfdom and slavery) was totally dependent
>on the existence of an industry (mining) that depended entirely on the
>existence of non-proletarian labor.

Louis:

What is the source of your information about Bolivia? ...

It's been a long time since I read about this. But Galeano and many
other _dependistas_ write about this. In addition, there was more than
one article in LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES (which I gave away, alas).
It's clear that the mines as Potosí never attained the critical mass
to transform Bolivia into a capitalist system. This is partly for
dependista reasons: the benefits of the mines were exported to Spain.

(I've said it before, but I don't see the Brenner, Dobb (etc.) vs.
dependista (Sweezy, AG Frank, etc.) controversy as embodying a
dichotomy or duality. Brenner _et al_ are good at pointing to class
relations within countries, while Frank _et al_ are good at
emphasizing relations between countries. Neither perspective is
without limits.)
--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

Re: [PEN-L] did he say this?


On 12/12/06, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

It's possible Marx wrote something like this, but these words just don't
sound like him.  They're quoted on various blogs, etc. but without an
attributed source that I have seen.

Periodically, making quotes attributed to famous people has always been a
cottage industry.  Now they're urban legends and always outrun any attempt
to correct them.


There's even a book called "They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes,
Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions" by Paul Boller, ed.

For example, Lenin is said to have said, "The capitalists will sell us
the rope with which to hang them."

But: > There may be truth in the much-quoted remark that Lenin is
alleged to have made about the capitalists' eagerness to sell their
goods (the profit motive is, after all, unideological), but it is
almost certainly a fake. Lenin was supposed to have made his
observation to one of his close associates, Grigori Zinoviev, not long
after a meeting of the Politburo in the early 1920s, but there is no
evidence that he ever did. Experts on the Soviet Union reject the rope
quote as spurious. <

Boller, Paul F.(Editor). They Never Said It : A Book of Fake Quotes,
Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford
University Press, Incorporated, 1990. p 64.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/loyolamarymount/Doc?id=10087095&ppg=91

Copyright (c) 1990.  Oxford University Press, Incorporated.  All
rights reserved.
--
Jim Devine / "The human being is in the most literal sense a political
animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society." -- Karl Marx.

Re: [PEN-L] Austrian Rabbi cautions against strategic abuse of the Holocaust


Angelus Novus wrote:

Occam's razor.  I find it ponderous that people never
seem to view the murder of Jews as an expression of
the will to murder Jews.


.

I'm sorry, there is complexity in simplicity.
My razor simplifies the issue and says: "It's more complicated than that."

...and there are reasons, specifically definable reasons and goals, that
are being pursued by people who would insist otherwise, that the
emanation of evil seen in Nazi Germany was simply "...an expression of
the will to murder Jews", or that it *truly* matters whether it was
5,999,999 or 6,000,000.

That is simply a profitable and/or comfortable illusion for some, but
nowhere near the *whole* truth... and hopefully, the 'truth will out' if
this conference, sociologically fubar as it is, due to unending
suppression of alternate lines of thought by anyone anywhere near
mainstream, fulfills it's intended purpose of quickly coming to the
conclusion that *yes* the gas chambers existed, and *yes* millions of
Jews were murdered.

Then the real business begins, the business of showing that the
holocaust continues unabated. The trick will be to indict Europe and the
U.S., not the residents of Israel, who at this juncture in history are
quite simply caught (voluntarily or not) in the geopolitical crossfire
that IS current events in the middle east.

That's the part I'm waiting for. But I suspect that the only decent
information will be in the arab press in arabic. I'm not sure how many
blog-inches IRNA is going to give it, beyond the pomp and spectacle.


"Your free to speak your mind my friend
As long as you agree with me
Don't criticize the fatherland
Or those who shape your destiny.
Cause if you do
You'll lose your job
Your mind
And all the friends you knew
They'll send out all their boys in blue
We'll find a way to silence you

But there's nothing you and I can do
You and I are only two
What's right or wrong it's hard to say
Forget about it for today
We'll stick our heads in to the sand
Just pretend that all is grand
And hope everything turns out ok"

--The Ostrich, John Kay & Steppenwolf

[PEN-L] Last Night DIY in Santa Cruz - Not Like Any Ol' Police State

Part of creating a new world is resistance to the old one, to the 
relentless commodification and control of everything, including 
celebration and the way we relate to each other.

.

A   L A S T   N I G H T   M A N I F E S T O

Last Night is a decentralized, collective, spontaneous, open, public New
Year's Eve celebration in Santa Cruz, California. Last Night is a
completely organic event, organized and put on at a grassroots-level. No
city-sponsorship. No corporate donors. It’s a do-it-yourself (D.I.Y.)
parade and celebration.

We write this manifesto in the spirit of understanding, in an attempt to
communicate our intentions. The parade is not merely a celebration, but
a celebration of the power that we all have when we gather together to
make something happen. Not just a street party, but a party to reclaim
our streets.

Last Night started in 2005 as a response to the implosion of the
city-sponsored First Night celebration. Elsewhere that year, the
government abandoned millions of poor people in hurricane-ravaged New
Orleans. Last Night was also a commemoration of the do-it-yourself
spirit of those surviving communities.

That year, thousands of people came out to participate in the people’s
parade that marched raucously up Pacific Avenue. The parade included the
Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra, martial arts displays, firedancers, the
Santa Cruz Peace Coalition, Indonesian music, drum circles, floats, and
the Opera Lady. The parade was high-energy and peaceful. There were no
conflicts with police who’s light presence remained far on the
periphery. The parade and it’s organizers represented a broad
cross-section of the community.

In a typical overreaction of authority to the threat of people taking
responsibility in their own lives, the Santa Cruz Police Department
deployed undercover officers to infiltrate parade planning meetings for
three months. Records released after the spying scandal came to light,
revealed a pattern of abuses, including monitoring unrelated groups and
other first amendment activities and compiling police dossiers of
organizers.

[ Detailed news report from Free Speech radio, January 2006 (3.5
minutes):  ]

The city's own police auditor determined that police had violated the
civil rights of parade organizers. After six months of effort,
community, activist, and ACLU involvement, the city put in place a weak
policy to curb some of the abuses of police power.

The celebration is decentralized -- no one person or group is making it
happen. There is no central committee nor board of directors. No one is
in charge, but we are all leaders. Decisions about route and timing and
other tactical matters are made collectively by those willing to step up
and make it happen. Collective simply means we all do it together.

The celebration is spontaneous -- we are not asking for permits and
permission, nor are there any limits on participation. No one is in a
position to restrict who can participate or in what way. People simply
show up prepared to take part in a city-wide celebration. Our entire
community is invited to participate and celebrate together.

The focus is on self-reliance. One of the most important aspects of the
Last Night celebration is that people take responsibility for themselves
and for their community. As such, parade "un-organizers" take pains to
address issues such as security, traffic control, sanitation, clean-up,
and police liaison.

Beyond the impossible barrier of the city's arduous and prohibitively
expensive special event permit, the permit process itself is a racket.
It is the process through which the city seeks to charge us for the
privilege of exercising our rights to free speech and free assembly.
Accepting a permit puts one person or group in the position of having to
put controls on other people, lest someone damage their good standing
with the authorities. Additionally, that person or group takes
responsibility and liability for the actions of others. We don't want to
be in that position, nor do we want someone to have that responsibility
for us.

We want to live in a world full of play and celebration, where
self-expression is a matter of course. A world full of surprises, in
which relationships are authentic and open-ended. A world in which we
share a direct connection to the world around us. Where one does not
have to ask permission of authorities to realize one’s dreams of
adventure and possibility.

Part of creating a new world is resistance to the old one, to the
relentless commodification and control of everything, including
celebration and the way we relate to each other.

When we ask permission to live our lives, to celebrate, to come
together, to express dissent, we legitimate the power of institutions
over us. We give up our power to make our own choices and become subject
to the decisions of others who may or may not be acting in our interests.

Therefore, we are not seeking permits from the

[PEN-L] Goldman-Sachs bonuses


(I used to work for these bastards in the late 1980s, but left after word
got out that they were planning to get rid of all their more experienced
and well-paid employees. They probably would have gotten rid of me first
since I refused to work more than 35 hours per week and screwed up their
commodities database in 1989--no I didn't do it on purpose. In good years,
like this one, the bonus was about 20 percent of a year's employee for a
lower-level employee like me. For investment bankers, it was usually equal
to a year's salary and up. They used to call the bonus the "golden
handcuff" at places like Goldman and Salomon Brothers, where I had also
worked--even on a project for Michael Bloomberg. The golden handcuff meant
that no matter how much you hated these joints, you stuck around for the
money.)

NY Times, December 12, 2006
Goldman Reports Record Earnings for 2006
By JOHN HOLUSHA

The Goldman Sachs Group reported today that it earned $9.34 billion this
year, the most in Wall Street history, and that it would set aside $16.5
billion for salaries, bonuses and benefits for employees.

That figure works out to an average of $622,000 for each employee, although
the payouts will be far from uniform: the investment bankers at Goldman who
arrange mergers and acquisitions or sell corporate stock to investors will
receive much more, and support staff and other kinds of employees much less.

In the company's fourth fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 24, profits
increased 93 percent over the year before, to $3.16 billion, or $6.59 a
share, exceeding the forecasts of most analysts.

Most other major Wall Street investment banks will report their results
later this week or next week, and analysts expect robust figures across the
industry.

The bonuses at Goldman, the leading merger advisor in the industry, and
elsewhere on Wall Street are expected to give the New York area's economy a
substantial boost, particularly in sales of high-end residential real
estate, luxury cars and other pricey goods. "When these guys learn what
their bonuses are, we are among the first people they call," said Pamela
Liebman, the chief executive of the Corcoran Group, a residential
brokerage. "They call their mothers, and then their real estate brokers."

Ms. Liebman said that investment bankers "work hard and want to live well,"
and that they are usually interested in buying a luxury apartment in
Manhattan or a second or third residence elsewhere.

She said her agency is already getting calls in advance of the bonus
announcements this year, and that the interest is not limited to the top
executives of Wall Street firms. "Even the junior guys want to spend their
bonuses on residential real estate."

Two years ago, BMW of Manhattan opened a showroom at 67 Wall Street, so
that investment bankers would not have to take the time to travel uptown to
its main sales and service operation at 57th Street and 11th Avenue.

At the time, Jeffrey A. Falk, the president of the dealership, said the
intention was to get physically closer to potential customers.

"This is part of a strategy we have been developing over the past two years
to make it more convenient for our demographic."

Speaking today, he said there has been an increased level of what he called
"pre-shopping" at the Wall Street showroom, based on anticipated bonuses.

"They are shopping now, and talking to salesmen based on what they think
their bonus will be," Mr. Falk said. "Then in January and February, we'll
get the orders."

Spouses and the high-end retailers that cater to them feel the effect of
the bonus payment, said Faith H. Consolo, vice chair of Prudential Douglas
Elliman, a commercial brokerage.

"The luxury market is very dramatically affected by bonuses," Ms. Consolo
said. "We are talking furs, jewelry, apparel and beauty items like $250
jars of face cream. Anything that makes them look good or feel good."

Luxury spas are likely to see an influx of business as well, she side, as
executives use part of their bonuses to send their spouses on spa vacations.

2006 is the third consecutive year of record-breaking earnings for Goldman,
which is the world's largest securities company as measured by the total
market value of its stock. And the company appears positioned to continue
growing in its crucial investment banking business.

The company said its backlog of merger and underwriting deals was larger at
the end of November than it was at the end of August.

Rising stock prices generally, an active market in fee-generating business
deals and gains on investments, many of them in Asia, are expected to make
this year exceptionally profitable for many other Wall Street companies as
well.

--

www.marxmail.org

Re: [PEN-L] Austrian Rabbi cautions against strategic abuse of the Holocaust

2006-12-12 Thread Angelus Novus

--- Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> AFAICT, the people who are disparaging this
> conference also disparage
> complex thinking... unless it's their thoughts or
> someone who agrees
> with their line of thinking.

I admire your openness and lack of guile in defending
a conference of Holocaust negationists.  Too many
leftists just tiptoe around the issue (the junge Welt
wouldn't even print the names of some of the famous
attendees).  For once it's nice to see someone just
come right out in defense of it.

> After all, we all know that *exactly* 6 million of
> my tribal kin were
> murdered by the nazis simply because Hitler was
> nuts... needed a
> scapegoat, and a whole slew of other simplifications
> and distortions
> that don't include the involvement of the 'allies',
> their economic and
> social, immigration policies towards immigrants.

Occam's razor.  I find it ponderous that people never
seem to view the murder of Jews as an expression of
the will to murder Jews.

Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
http://new.mail.yahoo.com

[PEN-L] Just Foreign Policy News, December 12, 2006

2006-12-12 Thread Robert Naiman


Just Foreign Policy News
December 12, 2006
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/newsroom/blog/

1321 days have passed since President Bush declared "Mission
Accomplished in Iraq." Nearly 2800 U.S. troops have been killed in
Iraq since.

No War with Iran: Petition
More than 26,600 people have signed the Peace Action/Just Foreign
Policy petition. Please sign/circulate if you have yet to do so:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/involved/iranpetition.html

MoveOn.org calls for talks with Iran and Syria, letters to the editor:
Following the release of the Iraq Study Group report, which calls for
the US to talk with Iran and Syria, MoveOn.org sent an action alert
asking for letters to newspapers in support of the ISG's call for
talks.
http://pol.moveon.org/lte/index.html?lte_campaign_id=69

Just Foreign Policy News daily podcast:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/podcasts/podcast_howto.html

Summary:
U.S./Top News
Citing dissatisfaction with Democratic strategy on Iraq, Rep. Dennis
Kucinich announced that he would run for the Democratic presidential
nomination. Mainstream media coverage of the announcement has been
predictably snarky (although NPR this morning reported it straight.)
Kucinich is the only candidate who clearly opposes the Iraq war and
wants to bring the troops home, a fact no doubt correlated with MSM
annoyance at his candidacy.

Reps. Kucinich and Paul hosted a Congressional briefing on Iraqi war
casualties, focused on the Lancet (Johns Hopkins) study. Stephen Soldz
reports that Juan Cole presented various evidence from the media that
supported the Lancet authors' position that the vast majority of
deaths are not presented in the press, and that study co-author Les
Roberts again called for another research group to investigate the
Iraqi mortality rate and confirm or invalidate the Lancet study. [The
Public Radio show "This American Life" recently updated their classic
program on the Lancet Study:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/pages/descriptions/06/320.html]

The Bush Administration has tried to "isolate" Venezuela, writes Just
Foreign Policy President Mark Weisbrot on Huffington Post. This
strategy took another hit at the South American summit in Bolivia,
where President García of Peru, who had previously traded insults with
President Chávez, said, "any kind of argument, any previously made
statements, remain a closed chapter."

President Bush heard a dismal assessment of his handling of Iraq from
a group of military experts, but the advisers shared the White House's
skeptical view of the recommendations made by the Iraq Study Group,
the Washington Post reports. Juan Cole writes: "Giving this small
random group a high-profile hearing contradicts the basic principle
that when someone gets you into a mess, you stop following their
advice."

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, seven in 10 Americans disapprove
of the way the president is handling the situation in Iraq - the
highest percentage since the March 2003 invasion, the Post reports.
Six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting.

Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the Iraq war and want
most U.S. troops withdrawn within a year, USA Today reports.

In a recent interview, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, incoming chair of the
House intelligence committee, could not describe Hezbollah and said
that al-Qaeda is predominantly Shiite, Reuters reports.

Israel's prime minister appeared to acknowledge during a TV interview
that Israel has nuclear weapons, the New York Times reports. Last week
Robert Gates acknowledged an Israeli nuclear arsenal at his
confirmation hearing to become secretary of defense. Both U.S. and
Israeli officials have refused to confirm this in the past, in part
because such an acknowledgment could in theory trigger sanctions under
U.S. law, and because attention to Israel's nuclear arsenal could
undermine the US case for isolating Iran.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Eugene Gholz, Daryl Press &
Benjamin Valentino argue that the same logic that supports withdrawing
U.S. forces from Iraq supports withdrawing them from the entire
region, rather than re-deploying them to neighboring countries, where
their presence is sure to inflame public opinion against the U.S. and
host governments.

Iran
Russian officials said that European negotiators have overcome many of
their objections to a draft U.N. Security Council resolution barring
Iran's trade in sensitive nuclear materials and ballistic missiles,
the Washington Post reports. Russia has insisted that sanctions be
narrowly focused on activities suspected to violate international
agreements, rather than the broad sanctions on Iran's legal nuclear
program sought by the US.

Israel's air force plans to enhance its air-refueling capabilities,
increasing the range of its warplanes, USA Today reports. The article
suggests that this is related to Israeli threats to attack Iran. The
article points out that unlike the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq's
Osirak nuclear reactor, an Israeli attack on Ir

Re: [PEN-L] did he say this?

It's possible Marx wrote something like this, but these words just don't
sound like him.  They're quoted on various blogs, etc. but without an
attributed source that I have seen.

Periodically, making quotes attributed to famous people has always been a
cottage industry.  Now they're urban legends and always outrun any attempt
to correct them.

ML

Re: [PEN-L] general comments about what's going on [was Iran's New Power Balance]

Mark:

Why are people so obsessed with confusing words with substance?

"Christianity" just ain't the same beast it was even a century ago, much
less longer.  Probably more than other religions, what we have now is
entirely turned inside out, upside down, cut into fishbait, partly in the
belly of sharks, etc.

To say it has staying power rather misses the point

The same kind of thinking used to discuss "state socialism" (whatever that
is) as Incan or Spartan or something.

Me: yep! Like marriages today - all that remains is the ritual and the
make-believe, the essence is no longer there. And religion has gone the same
way.

Re: [PEN-L] did he say this?


Doug Henwood wrote:

On Dec 12, 2006, at 12:46 PM, Jim Devine wrote:


while looking for a quote to replace Brecht (see below), I found the
following attributed to Marx: "Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day,
teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."



.

Groucho Marx?
.

Hmm. Seen on a bumpersticker in the failing fishing town of
Gloucester, Mass.: "Give a man a fish and he eats. Teach a man to
fish and he starves."

Doug


.

But if he lived in California and possesses a commercial fishing 
license, there'd be a 1-in-3.33 chance that the feds would pay $100,000 
to buy him out.


The federal government is covertly buying out 1/3 of California's 
fishing fleet because, quite simply, 90% of the "food fish" for humans 
have taken a vacation from the planet and they aren't coming back 
anytime soon. Must maintain markets into a dwindling supply and rising 
demand (population growth, not to mention sushi bars!).


It will be good practice for "oil crunch" times coming up.

Soy(lent) protein anyone?
Less vitamin E in the diet?

Don't worry, we'll adapt nutritionally over the next millenium or so.
(to the smoke from peat-fired centralized energy sources too!).

Leigh

December 10, 2006
Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/science/10cnd-evolve.html

By NICHOLAS WADE

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected 
among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in 
adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 
3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.


The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising 
of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to 
be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be 
documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or 
more populations acquiring the same trait independently.


Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the 
principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because 
there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar 
apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and 
people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, 
natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept 
the lactase gene switched on.


Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising 
people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 
years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active 
lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose 
tolerant.


Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, 
but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live 
at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.


Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, 
first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. 
But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral 
peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.


A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has 
now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and 
genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her 
colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other 
and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently 
switched on.


The principal mutation, found among Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic groups 
of Kenya and Tanzania, arose 2,700 to 6,800 years ago, according to 
genetic estimates, Dr. Tishkoff’s group is to report in the journal 
Nature Genetics on Monday. This fits well with archaeological evidence 
suggesting that pastoral peoples from the north reached northern Kenya 
about 4,500 years ago and southern Kenya and Tanzania 3,300 years ago.


Two other mutations were found, among the Beja people of northeastern 
Sudan and tribes of the same language family, Afro-Asiatic, in northern 
Kenya.


Genetic evidence shows that the mutations conferred an enormous 
selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 
times as many descendants as people without them. The mutations have 
created “one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection 
yet reported in humans,” the researchers write.


The survival advantage was so powerful perhaps because those with the 
mutations not only gained extra energy from lactose but also, in drought 
conditions, would have benefited from the water in milk. People who were 
lactose-intolerant could have risked losing water from diarrhea, Dr. 
Tishkoff said.


Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, an archaeologist at the University of 
California, Santa Cruz, said the new findings were “very exciting” 
because they “showed the speed with which a genetic mutation can be 
favored under conditions

Re: [PEN-L] general comments about what's going on [was Iran's New Power Balance]

Why are people so obsessed with confusing words with substance?

"Christianity" just ain't the same beast it was even a century ago, much
less longer.  Probably more than other religions, what we have now is
entirely turned inside out, upside down, cut into fishbait, partly in the
belly of sharks, etc.

To say it has staying power rather misses the point

The same kind of thinking used to discuss "state socialism" (whatever that
is) as Incan or Spartan or something.

Substance, please...don't be distracted so easily by labels.

Best,
Mark L.

Re: [PEN-L] did he say this?

2006-12-12 Thread Doug Henwood


On Dec 12, 2006, at 12:46 PM, Jim Devine wrote:


while looking for a quote to replace Brecht (see below), I found the
following attributed to Marx: "Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day,
teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."


Hmm. Seen on a bumpersticker in the failing fishing town of
Gloucester, Mass.: "Give a man a fish and he eats. Teach a man to
fish and he starves."

Doug

Re: [PEN-L] Austrian Rabbi cautions against strategic abuse of the Holocaust


AFAICT, the people who are disparaging this conference also disparage
complex thinking... unless it's their thoughts or someone who agrees
with their line of thinking.

After all, we all know that *exactly* 6 million of my tribal kin were
murdered by the nazis simply because Hitler was nuts... needed a
scapegoat, and a whole slew of other simplifications and distortions
that don't include the involvement of the 'allies', their economic and
social, immigration policies towards immigrants.

England, in the meetings on Palestine wouldn't allow Israel to be
located anywhere else.
That would be a good place to start in any examination of a 'continuing
holocaust', but I need no more proof thanks to the imagery I see on TV
and in the newspapers everyday.

Ramadi, Belsen... what's the difference? One had barbed wire and ovens.

The other is open air, and if you don't follow that thin white line
(that's always moving) , you are dead friend. Ditto Palestine. Gunned
down for being outside your home, gunned down for being in the wrong
(non-jewish) neighborhood.

Gunned down Maimed Raped Burned Tortured.

I could be describing abu Ghraib, no?

I've heard the Mea culpas, mea culpa, mea MAXIMA culpas, and it's the
nazi's fault now with no outside help or complicity on the part of the
allies.

We 'KNOW' the truth... the victors made it.

I'll use one point... snidely:
The German Africa campaign WAS NOT about oil. It was simply to 'be there'.

After all, one of the reasons that Germany lost WWI was NOT because the
U.S. had changed it's navy's fuel supply to oil... more efficient in
thermal units, and more compact, making for longer military reach
without re-fueling. Britain quickly followed suit at the end of the war
(Ever since then, there's been a U.S. or British Naval group in the
Persian Gulf.).

But NO, the war was *about* how many of my kin got killed.

The war in the Pacific? It SURE wasn't about cutting off Japan's supply
routes for oil!
It was because they were enslaving Koreans and Chinese.

Raping them! Rape, I tell you!

(end snideness)

This is the information age, and with a little luck, the victors will
NEVER AGAIN get to dictate history to the rest of the world.

Charles Brown wrote:

From: Angelus Novus

--- Leigh Meyers
wrote:



The Jewish figure noted, "We should focus on the
reality that the behind-the-curtain individuals and financial
providers as well as perpetrators of some of the World War II crimes had


been Zionists themselves."

And the use of this classical anti-semitic trope is
not anti-semitic of course, because the speaker is a
rabbi, right?


CB: And to add to the complexity, the rabbi is saying that some of the
Zionists were anti-semitic ,or allied with anti-semites in order to drive
Jews out of Germany and Europe to Israel.

[PEN-L] Danny Hoch


At first blush, Danny Hoch--a New York Jew--seems to be the American Ali G.
In the 1999 feature film "Whiteboyz", which he co-wrote with Marc Levin, he
plays a rural Iowan who dreams of being a gangsta rapper. A year later,
"Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop" appeared. Based on past Hoch performances on
stage and television, he once again portrays a Black rapper wannabe as well
as a number of other characters drawn from the streets of New York and
rural poverty-stricken areas like the one depicted in "Whiteboyz".

However, Hoch is no clown. His main interest is not in making people laugh
(although he can be very funny), but in making them think about race and
class, the fault-lines of American society exposed by Hurricane Katrina. He
is in the performance art tradition of Eric Bogosian and John Leguizamo,
two other New Yorkers who have portrayed down-and-out characters on stage.
And like these two, he is constantly being tempted by Hollywood to go
mainstream. And unlike them, he has had the inner resources to resist them.

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/danny-hoch/

--

www.marxmail.org

Re: [PEN-L] general comments about what's going on [was Irans New Power Balance]

2006-12-12 Thread Carrol Cox

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Well, nothing is permanent, for sure, but Christianity has proven more
> staying power than state socialism, which didn't last a century.  :->
> So, they are likely to be around, for a foreseeable future.

"Christians" is, I think, the wrong category. The "Christian Right"
(politically active right-wing evangelicals and fundamentalists) have
been around only a few decades as a significant political force. And
those categories are, perhaps, too broadly defined. We can't know how
long these groups may flourish, but that flourishing could be quite
unstable, subject to great swings.

Carrol

Re: [PEN-L] big media's big secret agenda on public stupidity

To Leigh: Sorry about the "Loon war" - that's a bit too much faith in the
spellchecker! 


 
 
Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
2 Cutten St,
Horison, Roodepoort,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tel/ Fax (+27-11) 766-4336
Cell (+27) (0) 83-368-1214

"Quando a verdade é substituída pelo silêncio, o silêncio é uma mentira" -
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny
Yevtushenko



-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Leigh Meyers
Sent: 12 December 2006 19:55
To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] big media's big secret agenda on public stupidity

Off Topic... Just blogged this:
PINOCHET: A Declassified Documentary - The National Security Archive
http://leighm.net/blog/?p=775

Jim Devine quotes Rui Correia:
>> Scandals and fanatic sensationalism there is aplenty, but where is 
>> the deep
>> thought analysis?
>
> it's likely done in media outlets aimed at the actual decision-makers,
> like the power elite.
.

After the scandals and fanatic sensationalism, wouldn't you like a 
nice... 'Ovaltine' and a 'Beanie Baby to snuggle?

How about a day at the spa, a good stiff drink(which is why alcohol 
advertising is limited in most mass media, it works *too* well), getting 
laid by a girl who looks like a size 0 starlet, getting laid at all?

Or, as Fee Waybill of The Tubes put it, "...how about a Winnebago? A 
WHOLE herd of Winnebagos! We're givin' 'em away!"

A while back, in Emigre' magazine, which was sort of a precursor 
non-glossy Adbusters, it was noted that the upper middle class and rich 
are more suceptible to advertising on T.V., especially advertising at 
the extreme edges of content like 'Ovaltine fuzzy slippers comfort, or 
at the other end, a wild snowboarding weekend in the Alps with a size 0 ho.

However, imho, the power elite aren't part of that group, they are too 
busy watching how they *appear* ON T.V. to better 'frame' their image, 
and to keep up with current events as they appear to the rest of the 
society.

My rough guess is TV watching time for someone like Henry Kissenger or 
Bill Gates is extermely limited and they are quite specific in the 
information they are looking for when they DO watch.


BTW Rui, the subject line in that 9/9/2006 message was:

Winning a small battle in the *Looong* war, the information war

Not Loon war... although it *could* make kids loony (a factor in autism 
for a start)

Funny, I write the subject lines that way on purpose, especially with 
news stories where a one line 'zinger' comment is enough, and also to 
give an inking of content.

Unlike:
[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: 
[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: 
[PEN-L] Re: Irans New Power Balance


Here's the loony war post:

 >
 > 3. ABC/Disney also planned to distribute the historically false
 > "Path to 9/11" to more than 25,000 American classrooms, via
 > lesson plans created by Scholastic -- the world's largest
 > publisher of children's books -- with whom Disney has lucrative
 > content sharing deals. The study guide suggested that former
 > Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had a role in the Sept. 11, 2001,
 > terrorist attacks. Yesterday, Scholastic cancelled distribution
 > after thousands wrote the company to complain.
.
Greetings,

ABC's plan to air an inaccurate 9-11 "docudrama" has ignited
public outrage with hundreds of thousands of people sending
letters to Disney headquarters and local ABC stations to protest
their willful distortion of history.

These media protests have had an impact, but the root problem
will remain unless we act now to stop media giants from becoming
even more powerful.

Rampant media consolidation over the last two decades has put
control over the media in the hands of a few large corporations.
We see it in action now.

Local stations have been instructed by ABC -- and its corporate
owners at Disney -- to air "The Path to 9/11" a five-hour
"docudrama" that is riddled with falsehoods about events that
lead to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Disney is set to wield reckless control over local television
for ratings and political gain. Media ownership matters. It is
time to rollback rampant media consolidation and defend localism
and public service.

Tell the FCC to Stop Big Media's Abuse of the Airwaves:

http://action.freepress.net/ct/QpwFY8d19uJb/

"The Path to 9/11" reportedly features a series of fictionalized
scenes, written by a right-wing activist, that are in direct
conflict with the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission's report. Now,
Disney is forcing local broadcasters to air these falsehoods in
our communities.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to give
companies like Disney even more power over our airwaves. FCC
Chairman Kevin Martin has asked the public to comment on his
plans to let conglomerates like

Re: [PEN-L] big media's big secret agenda on public stupidity


Off Topic... Just blogged this:
PINOCHET: A Declassified Documentary - The National Security Archive
http://leighm.net/blog/?p=775

Jim Devine quotes Rui Correia:
Scandals and fanatic sensationalism there is aplenty, but where is 
the deep

thought analysis?


it's likely done in media outlets aimed at the actual decision-makers,
like the power elite.

.

After the scandals and fanatic sensationalism, wouldn't you like a 
nice... 'Ovaltine' and a 'Beanie Baby to snuggle?


How about a day at the spa, a good stiff drink(which is why alcohol 
advertising is limited in most mass media, it works *too* well), getting 
laid by a girl who looks like a size 0 starlet, getting laid at all?


Or, as Fee Waybill of The Tubes put it, "...how about a Winnebago? A 
WHOLE herd of Winnebagos! We're givin' 'em away!"


A while back, in Emigre' magazine, which was sort of a precursor 
non-glossy Adbusters, it was noted that the upper middle class and rich 
are more suceptible to advertising on T.V., especially advertising at 
the extreme edges of content like 'Ovaltine fuzzy slippers comfort, or 
at the other end, a wild snowboarding weekend in the Alps with a size 0 ho.


However, imho, the power elite aren't part of that group, they are too 
busy watching how they *appear* ON T.V. to better 'frame' their image, 
and to keep up with current events as they appear to the rest of the 
society.


My rough guess is TV watching time for someone like Henry Kissenger or 
Bill Gates is extermely limited and they are quite specific in the 
information they are looking for when they DO watch.



BTW Rui, the subject line in that 9/9/2006 message was:

Winning a small battle in the *Looong* war, the information war

Not Loon war... although it *could* make kids loony (a factor in autism 
for a start)


Funny, I write the subject lines that way on purpose, especially with 
news stories where a one line 'zinger' comment is enough, and also to 
give an inking of content.


Unlike:
[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: 
[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: 
[PEN-L] Re: Iran’s New Power Balance



Here's the loony war post:

>
> 3. ABC/Disney also planned to distribute the historically false
> "Path to 9/11" to more than 25,000 American classrooms, via
> lesson plans created by Scholastic -- the world's largest
> publisher of children's books -- with whom Disney has lucrative
> content sharing deals. The study guide suggested that former
> Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had a role in the Sept. 11, 2001,
> terrorist attacks. Yesterday, Scholastic cancelled distribution
> after thousands wrote the company to complain.
.
Greetings,

ABC's plan to air an inaccurate 9-11 "docudrama" has ignited
public outrage with hundreds of thousands of people sending
letters to Disney headquarters and local ABC stations to protest
their willful distortion of history.

These media protests have had an impact, but the root problem
will remain unless we act now to stop media giants from becoming
even more powerful.

Rampant media consolidation over the last two decades has put
control over the media in the hands of a few large corporations.
We see it in action now.

Local stations have been instructed by ABC -- and its corporate
owners at Disney -- to air "The Path to 9/11" a five-hour
"docudrama" that is riddled with falsehoods about events that
lead to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Disney is set to wield reckless control over local television
for ratings and political gain. Media ownership matters. It is
time to rollback rampant media consolidation and defend localism
and public service.

Tell the FCC to Stop Big Media's Abuse of the Airwaves:

http://action.freepress.net/ct/QpwFY8d19uJb/

"The Path to 9/11" reportedly features a series of fictionalized
scenes, written by a right-wing activist, that are in direct
conflict with the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission's report. Now,
Disney is forcing local broadcasters to air these falsehoods in
our communities.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to give
companies like Disney even more power over our airwaves. FCC
Chairman Kevin Martin has asked the public to comment on his
plans to let conglomerates like Disney buy up even more of our
local stations. Tell Disney and the Chairman Martin that enough
is enough:

Petition Link: http://action.freepress.net/ct/QpwFY8d19uJb/

No matter your politics, we should all embrace the public's
right to have a strong voice in how the broadcasters use our
airwaves. Sadly, the local station owners that are most
responsive to our interests are being pushed around by
conglomerates like Disney.

It's time that the FCC responded to the public and limited Big
Media's damaging influence on our democracy.

Onward,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
http://action.freepress.net/ct/R1wFY8d19uJ6/

P.S. -- To learn more, visit
http://action.freepress.net/ct/Q1wFY8d19uJ5/, a broad-based
coalition of c

[PEN-L] did he say this?


while looking for a quote to replace Brecht (see below), I found the
following attributed to Marx: "Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day,
teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."
Did he actually say that? where?

--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


"zero workers"? you mean proletarians (waged, non-slave, non-serf)? I
think Brenner's point is that the process he describes _produced_ the
proletarians as a class.


Yes, but that is after the fact. It is the commercial leasing of land under
the whip of competition that he characterizes as the beginning of
capitalism. This is a capitalism that only includes big farmers who rent
land and small farmers who they exploit (not in the technical sense of the
word.) No workers here at all. A capitalism without workers? Unlikely, to
say the least.


I think the point is that the existence of proletarians there (who
were free of the bonds of serfdom and slavery) was totally dependent
on the existence of an industry (mining) that depended entirely on the
existence of non-proletarian labor.


What is the source of your information about Bolivia? Who would you
recommend as the primary authority on class relations in 17th century Latin
American mining?





--

www.marxmail.org

[PEN-L] Austrian Rabbi cautions against strategic abuse of the Holocaust

From: Angelus Novus

--- Leigh Meyers
wrote:

> The Jewish figure noted, "We should focus on the
> reality that the behind-the-curtain individuals and financial
> providers as well as perpetrators of some of the World War II crimes had
been Zionists themselves."

And the use of this classical anti-semitic trope is
not anti-semitic of course, because the speaker is a
rabbi, right?

CB: And to add to the complexity, the rabbi is saying that some of the
Zionists were anti-semitic ,or allied with anti-semites in order to drive
Jews out of Germany and Europe to Israel.

[PEN-L] meritocracy at work


From SLATE, 12/12/06: >The [Washington POST] carries a wire story that

reports the incoming Democratic chairman of the House intelligence
committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, pretty much failed a pop quiz he got
from a Congressional Quarterly reporter. Worst part is, the questions
weren't even that difficult. When asked whether al-Qaeda is Sunni or
Shiite, Reyes answered, "Predominantly – probably Shiite." When he was
asked to describe Hezbollah, he didn't even give an answer and merely
said, "Hezbolllah. Uh, Hezbollah … why do you ask me these questions
at 5 o'clock?" Reyes' office issued a statement yesterday: "As a
member of the intelligence committee since before 9/11, I'm acutely
aware of al-Qaeda's desire to harm Americans." Well, guess that covers
it then.<

--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

Re: [PEN-L] big media's big secret agenda on public stupidity


On 12/12/06, Rui Correia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

[]apologies if some of you have already received this - I don't see it
coming out on my side, despite sending it out from a different address. Rui]

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but am beginning to believe that there are
secret agendas behind some of the major media players on the planet. Not my
best piece of writing, but it will do as a rant.

Besides the profit motif, the second leg of their enterprises seems to rely
on the "keep them stupid" thinking (not to mention that it is easier to feed
media rubbish to unthinking couch potatoes) that do cause waves and are
easier to sell to controllers (advertisers, politicians etc).


it also can be expensive to hire people who think rather than simply emoting.


Scandals and fanatic sensationalism there is aplenty, but where is the deep
thought analysis?


it's likely done in media outlets aimed at the actual decision-makers,
like the power elite.
--
Jim Devine / This space for rent.

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


On 12/11/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Brenner dates the origins of capitalism to the late 14th century. It
was a function of changes in the countryside driven by historically
contingent factors (plague, etc.) that resulted in the creation of
profit-driven farming based on leases. In this agrarian universe,
there were zero workers--zero.


the plague isn't actually contingent in his schema if I remember
correctly. Rather, it's the normal result of the "Malthusian" cycle
which ended with the rise of capitalism: the plague arose because of
the pressure of population on the land rather than being an exogenous
event.

"zero workers"? you mean proletarians (waged, non-slave, non-serf)? I
think Brenner's point is that the process he describes _produced_ the
proletarians as a class. The whole business about (the so-called)
"primitive accumulation" is about structural change more than
immediate empirical results.


Meanwhile a little more than a century
later the largest concentration of laborers anywhere in the world was
in Potosi, Bolivia.


I think the point is that the existence of proletarians there (who
were free of the bonds of serfdom and slavery) was totally dependent
on the existence of an industry (mining) that depended entirely on the
existence of non-proletarian labor.


Wood does not believe that there was capitalist
production there, however.


are Brenner and Wood joined at the hip? Maybe I'm wrong, but I've
found major theoretical differences between them.


Brenner never writes about Latin American
so I don't know exactly what he thinks.


If he hasn't studied it, perhaps he has no thoughts at all aobut it.

--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


On 12/12/06, John Gulick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Sometimes I weary of Devine pedantically impressing his modes of production
stamp upon messy empirical details.


it's best to express feelings rather than holding them in.

--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis


me:

>The plague upset traditional social relationships in the countryside,
>setting the stage for full-blown capitalism. It raised the bargaining
>power of the laborers who remained in many cases. But the landowners
>struck back. In England, they struck back with the primitive
>accumulation that Marx writes about, creating a proletariat by
>expropriating the rural laborers, separating them from any claim to
>land and other ways to independently support themselves. This created
>the proletarian class (in itself, not for itself).


John G.

Huh? This does not accord with my education on the topic. The theoretical,
and hence overly schematized, history of the "transition" with which I'm
familiar is a good deal more tortuous and less cartoonish than what Jim
serves up here. It (still a cardboard version) goes a little something like
this...


you want something less cartoonish? but then I'll have to go on and on
and on and on. Abstraction has its costs.


The black death decimates the Western European population of peasants and
serfs. The resulting demographic imbalance results in their increased
bargaining power vis-a-vis their overlords, emboldening them to demand the
commutation of labor services and rents-in-kind and the introduction of
money-rents. Thus you get a schism between rent-collecting absentee
landlords and rent-paying tenant farmers. Agricultural land can now be put
to its maximum rent-yielding use and this encourages and rewards enclosures
and a complex system of stratification emerges in the countryside with
vagrants and hired hands and household-based handicraft producers alongside
the tenant farmers (a.k.a. the "yeoman" farmers). Simple commodity
manufacture is going full throttle and the labor force eventually shoehorned
into the Lancashire mills isn't anywhere close to existing yet!


I don't see any substantive difference (except apparent ones due to
the brevity of my resentation). I would put more emphasis on the
transformation of the old "feudal" landowners into new capitalist ones
(as the main beneficiaries of the redefinition of property rights)
along with the role of the British Civil War and the like. I would
also emphasize the way that things turned out different in France than
in England...
--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Iran’s New Power Balance]


On 12/12/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

yup, polls are relevant. But whatever happened to old-fashioned
analysis of the social structure to figure out where the stress points
are?


What do you think are stress points today?

There is a good deal of agreement on the Iraq War, but that has not
proven a stress point yet as far as American workers are concerned,
for a majority of them are not directly impacted by it.


a lot of this represents a recent shift due to the growing power of
the Christian Wrong, rather than being a permanent feature of the US
political terrain.


Well, nothing is permanent, for sure, but Christianity has proven more
staying power than state socialism, which didn't last a century.  :->
So, they are likely to be around, for a foreseeable future.  Moreover,
some of the increase in ambivalence about abortion, which can be
voiced by the irreligious as well, originates in sources other than
conservative Christians:

increased contraceptive availability and usage, which raises the idea
of "women's responsibility" not to get pregnant involuntarily higher
in the minds of many than before;

technological advancement that has made younger fetuses viable;

technological advancement that has led to more frequent visualizations
of fetuses.

Moreover, while conservatives have and will continue to fail to
overturn Roe v. Wade, they have been very successful at limiting
access.  Pro-choice liberals and leftists have not come up with any
practical approach to reversing the limits on access (in contrast to
countering wholesale attacks on the legal right to abortion).
--
Yoshie

Re: [PEN-L] it's about time!


me:

>Not Dead Enough. posted by lenin
>http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/12/not-dead-enough.html
>Pinochet is dead, but not dead enough. To see him as simply another
>vile bastard dictator who has snuffed it is to miss the point. He was
>crucial, inasmuch as he provided the opportunity for advanced
>capitalist states to test in the periphery a doctrine that lurked in
>the margins of political discourse back home.


John G:

Big fat yawn... I've read this before.


editorials plagiarize all the time. and there's nothing new under the
sun. well, how about a slogan instead: "Pinochet is dead, but
Pinochetism Marches On" or "Don't Mourn, Privatize!" (or Terrorize!)
--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

Re: [PEN-L] Tone on Pen-l (was: "Winston" or "it's about time!")

2006-12-12 Thread Michael Perelman

ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.  We have not had too much nastiness lately, but it just 
detracts
from the list.

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 08:21:24AM -0500, Paul wrote:
> Can we try to focus on the issues (and avoid ad hominus personal
> attacks)?  I find nastiness winds up with discussions that waste lots of
> energy/bandwith, turns a lot of people away, and discourages others from
> participating.  Thanks.
>
> Paul
>
>
> John G. writes:
> >Sometimes I weary of Devine pedantically impressing his modes of production
> >stamp upon messy empirical details.
>
> or
>
> >Big fat yawn... I've read this before. That's b/c these are crib notes of
> >David Harvey's _A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism_. How pretentious... using
> >Pinochet's death as an excuse to pontificate about the archeology of
> >neo-liberalism, with nary an original thought. It's not like he/she HAD to
> >do this, like some of us phone in the work effort when the mandates of paid
> >academic labor call. This is a VOLUNTEER job. At the very least he/she could
> >plagiarize an innovative analysis of an understudied phenomenon. But which
> >self-identified neo-Marxist doesn't have his/her diagnosis of the 1970's
> >crisis (most of which are numbingly familiar)? .

--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com

[PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: [PEN-L] Re: general comments about what's going on [was Iran’s New Power Balance]


yup, polls are relevant. But whatever happened to old-fashioned
analysis of the social structure to figure out where the stress points
are?

On 12/11/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

According to the latest poll, 60% said they favor "a six-month
timeline for withdrawal" (Nancy Benac, "AP Poll: Few Expect Victory in
Iraq," 8 December 2006,
).

60% is a solid majority.

Compare that with polls on abortion:
.  It looks like a
plurarity of Americans are to the left of Christian fundamentalists
but to the right of pro-choice leftists, favoring stricter limits on
abortion without going so far as to wish to ban all abortions.


a lot of this represents a recent shift due to the growing power of
the Christian Wrong, rather than being a permanent feature of the US
political terrain.
--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

[PEN-L] Three Pillars of the US Empire


The household debt service ratio and the financial obligations ratio
in the USA have risen, but far more slowly and modestly than the ratio
of household debt to disposable personal income would suggest:
"Household Debt Service and Financial Obligations Ratios,"
.  What has kept
the interest rates so low here (and consequently elsewhere, too), even
as the US current account deficit has become larger than ever?

The doubling of the global labor force since the fall of state
socialism and neoliberal capitalism, over all, but the three pillars
of the American empire's finance are China,* Japan, and the Middle
East.**

What makes them invest in the USA?  It seems to me that it comes down
to faith in the US Empire, past and present (past faith is important,
too, because of high costs of transition for countries like Japan and
China that have accumulated lots of dollar reserves), and absence of
an alternative.

What sustains faith in the US empire?  Is there anything other than US
hegemony in the final instance backed by US military power?  That is
why Washington can't easily let go of Iraq, for defeat can erode the
faith in the empire, though staying there longer can also erode it,
too.  What a double bind!

*


From T-shirts to T-bonds

Jul 28th 2005

From The Economist print edition


Beijing, not Washington, increasingly takes the decisions that affect
workers, companies, financial markets and economies everywhere

GLOBAL tremors in the currency, bond and commodity markets greeted
China's announcement that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the
dollar. No longer is it just Washington that has the power to cause
shockwaves. For many people, the tremors reflected the view that China
is the root cause of America's trade deficit, and that the revaluation
is a partial cure.

In fact, that view is wrong on several counts. China is not the main
cause of the American trade deficit. On the other hand, China is
behind almost everything else going on in the world economy. For China
is beginning to drive, in a new and pervasive way, economic trends
that many countries assume to be domestically determined.

Americans like to slap the "made in China" label on their huge trade
deficit. Yet not only is China's forecast current-account surplus of
around $100 billion this year only a fraction of America's likely
deficit of $800 billion, but, as chart 1 shows, most of the increase
in America's trade deficit has come from outside China. The main cause
of America's trade deficit is a lack of domestic saving, not unfair
Chinese competition. The deficit is thus made in America, not made in
China.

As for last week's revaluation, the announcement marked a significant
break with the past. China has long been under pressure to revalue its
currency from countries that claim the undervalued yuan gives Chinese
exporters an unfair advantage. After pegging the yuan to the dollar
for a decade, China has shifted to a managed float against a basket of
currencies, with an initial revaluation against the dollar of 2.1%.
Nobody is yet sure how this will work. It may be just a token move
aimed at warding off American protectionism. Or it could be the first
of several revaluations, marking the end of the so-called "revived
Bretton Woods system", under which China and other Asian countries
have bought billions of dollars in foreign-exchange reserves to hold
their currencies steady against the greenback.

Either way, the tiny revaluation by itself will have little impact on
America's huge trade deficit. Indeed, even if the yuan is allowed to
rise by another 5-10% over the next 12 months, as many economists
expect, that would hardly make a dent in the deficit. Nevertheless, it
is still an important change in China's exchange-rate regime,
representing a step towards a market-based system. And, as such, it
could have implications for the dollar, bond yields, and American
consumer spending.

To view China's global impact mainly in terms of its exports and its
trade surplus is to misunderstand, and to underestimate, the profound
forces behind China's growing influence. Everyone knows that most TVs
and T-shirts are made in China. But so, in some ways, are developed
countries' inflation rates, interest rates, wages, profits, oil prices
and even house prices—or at least they are strongly influenced by what
happens in China.

Of course, China is not the only fast-growing emerging economy that is
making waves around the world. But China really does loom much larger:
its contribution to global GDP growth since 2000 has been almost twice
as large as that of the next three biggest emerging economies, India,
Brazil and Russia, combined. Moreover, there is another crucial reason
why China's integration into the world economy is today having a
bigger global impact than other emerging economies, or than Japan did
during

[PEN-L] big media's big secret agenda on public stupidity

[]apologies if some of you have already received this - I don't see it
coming out on my side, despite sending it out from a different address. Rui]

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but am beginning to believe that there are
secret agendas behind some of the major media players on the planet. Not my
best piece of writing, but it will do as a rant. 

Besides the profit motif, the second leg of their enterprises seems to rely
on the "keep them stupid" thinking (not to mention that it is easier to feed
media rubbish to unthinking couch potatoes) that do cause waves and are
easier to sell to controllers (advertisers, politicians etc).

Scandals and fanatic sensationalism there is aplenty, but where is the deep
thought analysis? 

My fear is that now the big media corporations have now managed to reach
even further, actually gaining control of how journalists and other media
professionals are trained. Just this morning, Globo Television (better known
for churning out novelas), had two presenters going on about Brazil slipping
on the UNICEF rankings. The sheer stupidity of debating world rakings was
bad enough (someone has to be first and someone last - even among geniuses,
one has to be the least genius), but the worst was that they demonstrated
ignorance of how rankings work. Brazilian children ARE BETTER OFF today, but
because children in quite a few other countries are also better off (thanks
for a few positive developments), naturally, Brazil is placed lower down in
the rankings. In this case, perhaps instead of blaming poor journalists'
understanding of logistics, we should question the UN's use of rankings and
urge the introduction of -year-on-year variance scale. But that is here
besides the point.

So, while I am on Globo, I'll stay with it. Globo has aired that
brain-whittling Big Brother six or seven times. In all this times, it has to
my knowledge not bothered informing its sheep where the name Big Brother
comes from. Participants are know as "Big Bothers" - "John was a Big Brother
in 2004"; "Grazzi was the sexiest Big Brother" etc. 

I've been writing to Globo for years, never getting the joy of a response,
whereas I get such responses from BBC, CNN, UN bodies etc.  

I've complained of a variety of issues, including their continuing media
subservience to US sources or US agencies, without analysing it for the
usual US bias. The Israeli attack on Lebanon this year was a case in point:
Hizbollah aggressors/ Israeli victims, detailing the Israeli victims etc
until - as the casualties grew - it emerged that there is a significant
Brazilian-Lebanese community in Brazilian and in Lebanon (which Globo
finally after decades of their own citizens referring to them as "Turks",
finally decided to publicly explaining where the confusion had arisen) and
suddenly the reporting became pro-Lebanon, anti-Israeli.

Globo finds it convenient to not complicate information as education is not
their job - anything that happens on the African continent is referred to as
"Africa" - Lula will visit Portugal, France, Italy and "Africa". Patrons are
now beginning to develop a palate for coffees from Colombia, Jamaica,
Indonesia and "Africa".  

Earlier I was looking through this list at some of the postings I didn't
open at the time they were posted and came across a post from Leigh Meyers,
which I felt it unfortunate it did not get more reaction on this list. The
subject line read "[PEN-L] Winning a small battle in the Loon war, the
information war", posted on 09/09/2006. I've been curious enough to
undertake a study of the relationship between subject line and degree of
involvement, but havent so far, but I do believe Leigh's subject lines are
counterproductive as they often allude to something instead of saying
straight out, which is what I believe busy PEN-L members react to. 

Anyway, big media or big brother, it is all about big money and we should
all be concerned. The fact that big ideas are now being discussed in the
fringes as blogs and lists is the equivalent of fighting in the trenches
while others dominate the battlefield.

Rui


 
 
Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
2 Cutten St,
Horison, Roodepoort,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tel/ Fax (+27-11) 766-4336
Cell (+27) (0) 83-368-1214

"Quando a verdade é substituída pelo silêncio, o silêncio é uma mentira" -
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny
Yevtushenko

[PEN-L] inequality and consumption


December 12, 2006
Editorial / New York TIMES
Consumption Gap

Conservative economists often argue that wage stagnation and income
inequality are not as big a threat to Americans' standard of living as
they've been made out to be. In their view, how much one buys — rather
than how much one makes — is a better measure of economic well-being.

In a recent article in The National Review, researchers at the
American Enterprise Institute asserted just that, saying that when you
look at how much the middle class is consuming, they're "even doing
better than the upper crust."

Why make a fuss over other grim economic statistics if everyone
manages to keep buying things?

Here's why. The assertion — that the middle class has out-consumed the
"upper crust" during the Bush years — is false, the result of rosy
assumptions that turned out to be wrong.

Researchers at two other think tanks, the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, reworked the figures,
including newly available spending data for 2005. There is no dispute
among the various researchers over the new findings. Over all,
consumption is growing. But the growth is unbalanced, consistent with
the wide disparity in wages and income that has characterized the Bush
years.

Consumer spending by low-income households is way down since 2001.
Over the same period, spending by high-income Americans has been
robust, supported, in part, by generous tax cuts. In 2005, the top 20
percent of households made 39 percent of all consumer expenditures,
the highest share since the government started keeping track in 1984.

The information on middle-income households is mixed, with some data
showing a decline in their spending during the Bush era and some
showing an increase. But there is no question that spending by the
middle class has been weaker in the current economic expansion than in
previous recoveries.

It would be nice if by some magic Americans could spend their way out
of today's economic woes. But the gathering evidence shows that
growing income inequality has fostered consumption inequality as well.
It's time for policy makers to acknowledge that such inequality is an
economic and social ill — and to start finding cures.

--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht

[PEN-L] big media's secret agenda

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but am beginning to believe that there are
secret agendas behind some of the major media players on the planet. Not my
best piece of writing, but it will do as a rant. 

Besides the profit motif, the second leg of their enterprises seems to rely
on the "keep them stupid" thinking (not to mention that it is easier to feed
media rubbish to unthinking couch potatoes) that do cause waves and are
easier to sell to controllers (advertisers, politicians etc).

Scandals and fanatic sensationalism there is aplenty, but where is the deep
thought analysis? 

My fear is that now the big media corporations have now managed to reach
even further, actually gaining control of how journalists and other media
professionals are trained. Just this morning, Globo Television (better known
for churning out novelas), had two presenters going on about Brazil slipping
on the UNICEF rankings. The sheer stupidity of debating world rakings was
bad enough (someone has to be first and someone last - even among geniuses,
one has to be the least genius), but the worst was that they demonstrated
ignorance of how rankings work. Brazilian children ARE BETTER OFF today, but
because children in quite a few other countries are also better off (thanks
for a few positive developments), naturally, Brazil is placed lower down in
the rankings. In this case, perhaps instead of blaming poor journalists'
understanding of logistics, we should question the UN's use of rankings and
urge the introduction of -year-on-year variance scale. But that is here
besides the point.

So, while I am on Globo, I'll stay with it. Globo has aired that
brain-whittling Big Brother six or seven times. In all this times, it has to
my knowledge not bothered informing its sheep where the name Big Brother
comes from. Participants are know as "Big Bothers" - "John was a Big Brother
in 2004"; "Grazzi was the sexiest Big Brother" etc. 

I've been writing to Globo for years, never getting the joy of a response,
whereas I get such responses from BBC, CNN, UN bodies etc.  

I've complained of a variety of issues, including their continuing media
subservience to US sources or US agencies, without analysing it for the
usual US bias. The Israeli attack on Lebanon this year was a case in point:
Hizbollah aggressors/ Israeli victims, detailing the Israeli victims etc
until - as the casualties grew - it emerged that there is a significant
Brazilian-Lebanese community in Brazilian and in Lebanon (which Globo
finally after decades of their own citizens referring to them as "Turks",
finally decided to publicly explaining where the confusion had arisen) and
suddenly the reporting became pro-Lebanon, anti-Israeli.

Globo finds it convenient to not complicate information as education is not
their job - anything that happens on the African continent is referred to as
"Africa" - Lula will visit Portugal, France, Italy and "Africa". Patrons are
now beginning to develop a palate for coffees from Colombia, Jamaica,
Indonesia and "Africa".  

Earlier I was looking through this list at some of the postings I didn't
open at the time they were posted and came across a post from Leigh Meyers,
which I felt it unfortunate it did not get more reaction on this list. The
subject line read "[PEN-L] Winning a small battle in the Loon war, the
information war", posted on 09/09/2006. I've been curious enough to
undertake a study of the relationship between subject line and degree of
involvement, but havent so far, but I do believe Leigh's subject lines are
counterproductive as they often allude to something instead of saying
straight out, which is what I believe busy PEN-L members react to. 

Anyway, big media or big brother, it is all about big money and we should
all be concerned. The fact that big ideas are now being discussed in the
fringes as blogs and lists is the equivalent of fighting in the trenches
while others dominate the battlefield.

Rui


 
 
Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
2 Cutten St,
Horison, Roodepoort,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tel/ Fax (+27-11) 766-4336
Cell (+27) (0) 83-368-1214

"Quando a verdade é substituída pelo silêncio, o silêncio é uma mentira" -
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny
Yevtushenko

[PEN-L] Tone on Pen-l (was: "Winston" or "it's about time!")

2006-12-12 Thread Paul


Can we try to focus on the issues (and avoid ad hominus personal
attacks)?  I find nastiness winds up with discussions that waste lots of
energy/bandwith, turns a lot of people away, and discourages others from
participating.  Thanks.

Paul


John G. writes:

Sometimes I weary of Devine pedantically impressing his modes of production
stamp upon messy empirical details.


or


Big fat yawn... I've read this before. That's b/c these are crib notes of
David Harvey's _A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism_. How pretentious... using
Pinochet's death as an excuse to pontificate about the archeology of
neo-liberalism, with nary an original thought. It's not like he/she HAD to
do this, like some of us phone in the work effort when the mandates of paid
academic labor call. This is a VOLUNTEER job. At the very least he/she could
plagiarize an innovative analysis of an understudied phenomenon. But which
self-identified neo-Marxist doesn't have his/her diagnosis of the 1970's
crisis (most of which are numbingly familiar)? .

Re: [PEN-L] question on imperialism from Loren Goldner From Zimbabwe

2006-12-12 Thread soula avramidis

students require patience and patience is a virute. maybe cannabis can do the 
trick

- Original Message 
From: Rui Correia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 11:18:49 AM
Subject: Re: question on imperialism from Loren Goldner From Zimbabwe

[a bit confused about the “from” Loren Goldner in the subject, but here is a 
response to what is said by the ‘student’]

Tobacco is one of Zimbabwe’s major crops, but this is certainly not what this 
person has been smoking

How can she go on about exchange rates, loans etc, and not a word about Mugabe, 
his destructive policies, how these drove away capital how he destroyed the 
agricultural sector, how corruption and cronyism saw to it that confiscated 
assets were parcelled off among the elite …. 

Then again, with prices and inflation what they are in Zimbabwe and cannabis 
growing wild and easily in any back yard throughout any country in Southern 
Africa, I could also write stuff like that about the Zimbabwean economy.

Rui Correia
Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant
2 Cutten St,
Horison, Roodepoort,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Tel/ Fax (+27-11) 766-4336
Cell (+27) (0) 83-368-1214

"Quando a verdade é substituída pelo silêncio, o silêncio é uma mentira" - 
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

-Original Message-
From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of soula avramidis
Sent: 12 December 2006 08:53
To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
Subject: [PEN-L] question on imperialism from Loren Goldner From Zimbabawe

a student from Harare who says the internet will not go far:

Certainly an interesting expose. What Loren Goldner asserts happened to Japan, 
as its reserves got reduced by 32%, and contends, China is likely to go through 
and see its owed loans and reserves reduced as it devalues to the expected 
RMB4:US$, is but a prototype or mirror image of what was done to Zimbabwe. 
Zimbabwe was seduced with supposedly "generous" loans when its exchange rate 
was Z$1:US$2 at independence in 1980. With external debt pegged at 3.4% of GDP 
in 1980, this rose to 40% by 1990, 62% by 1995 and 80% by 2000, and to 
anybodyʼs guess to the now declining GDP. Exchange rate changes at the 
appropriate time of transfer form a critical basis for the primitive 
accumulation. Most of Zimbabweʼs external debt was maturing around 1991, 
1996-2000 periods. The Z$ plummets from Z$0.50:US$ in 1980 to Z$2.27 in 1989; 
$5 in 1991; $9 in 1995;$18 in 1997; $37 in 1998 ; $55 in 2000; and now $300 000 
and many times over on the parallel market. As all this happens with no
 relevance to purchasing power parity, Zimbabwe has to sacrifice more export 
goods to meet the initial loan injections with value transfer in some kind of 
"Gypsy" great trick as it were. Like happened during the colonial imperialism, 
this exploitation will require local collaborators, and these are strategically 
positioned among the ruling elite in both ruling and opposition parties. Thus 
Zimbabweans demonise each other, are demonised, and when all is said and done 
exploited. Because manufacturing, which was around 25% of GDP has now fallen to 
below 10%, the exploitation has now gone to primary commodities including 
labour force, with over 20% of its "skilled workforce" now abroad. Increased 
mineral extraction for export, which is not rewarded by conspicuous forex 
earnings. Minerals such as platinum, which are known to be mined with lot of 
other raw high value minerals like gold; silver, copper, etc. are exported as 
raw platinum, extracted across the border/s and value
 accorded to raw platinum only.
Talk of primitive accumulation, it is probably gone worse than the slave trade 
error, save for the human face and bits of human rights funding to divert 
people from the core problem. Your stomach is the slave driver. At the heart of 
the imperialist modus operandi is the existence a local collaborative cluster, 
with some semblance of legitimacy, and a local and international agenda to 
divert the genuinely concerned and more empathetic from reading the signs.
 Harare, 7/12/06

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Re: [PEN-L] Winston Churchill refutes the Brenner thesis

2006-12-12 Thread John Gulick

Jim Devine wrote:

The plague upset traditional social relationships in the countryside,
setting the stage for full-blown capitalism. It raised the bargaining
power of the laborers who remained in many cases. But the landowners
struck back. In England, they struck back with the primitive
accumulation that Marx writes about, creating a proletariat by
expropriating the rural laborers, separating them from any claim to
land and other ways to independently support themselves. This created
the proletarian class (in itself, not for itself).

Huh? This does not accord with my education on the topic. The theoretical,
and hence overly schematized, history of the "transition" with which I'm
familiar is a good deal more tortuous and less cartoonish than what Jim
serves up here. It (still a cardboard version) goes a little something like
this...

The black death decimates the Western European population of peasants and
serfs. The resulting demographic imbalance results in their increased
bargaining power vis-a-vis their overlords, emboldening them to demand the
commutation of labor services and rents-in-kind and the introduction of
money-rents. Thus you get a schism between rent-collecting absentee
landlords and rent-paying tenant farmers. Agricultural land can now be put
to its maximum rent-yielding use and this encourages and rewards enclosures
and a complex system of stratification emerges in the countryside with
vagrants and hired hands and household-based handicraft producers alongside
the tenant farmers (a.k.a. the "yeoman" farmers). Simple commodity
manufacture is going full throttle and the labor force eventually shoehorned
into the Lancashire mills isn't anywhere close to existing yet!

Sometimes I weary of Devine pedantically impressing his modes of production
stamp upon messy empirical details.

_
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Re: [PEN-L] it's about time!

On 12/12/06, John Gulick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Jim Devine posted:

>Sunday, December 10, 2006
>Not Dead Enough. posted by lenin
>http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/12/not-dead-enough.html
>Pinochet is dead, but not dead enough. To see him as simply another
>vile bastard dictator who has snuffed it is to miss the point. He was
>crucial, inasmuch as he provided the opportunity for advanced
>capitalist states to test in the periphery a doctrine that lurked in
>the margins of political discourse back home.

Big fat yawn... I've read this before. That's b/c these are crib notes of
David Harvey's _A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism_. How pretentious... using
Pinochet's death as an excuse to pontificate about the archeology of
neo-liberalism, with nary an original thought. It's not like he/she HAD to
do this, like some of us phone in the work effort when the mandates of paid
academic labor call. This is a VOLUNTEER job. At the very least he/she could
plagiarize an innovative analysis of an understudied phenomenon. But which
self-identified neo-Marxist doesn't have his/her diagnosis of the 1970's
crisis
(most of which are numbingly familiar)? At least Harvey livened up his tale
of the Labor Party's unsuccessful reign with anecdotes of the gravediggers'
strike... unburied corpses piling up in the morgues and all that. This
Leninology posturing is paint-by-numbers.

JG

Things were beginning to go downhill in the then-existing socialist
bloc just about the same time, but I have yet to read a really
interesting narrative of economic history that takes a truly global
view of the seventies.
--
Yoshie

Re: [PEN-L] it's about time!

2006-12-12 Thread John Gulick

Jim Devine posted:

Sunday, December 10, 2006
Not Dead Enough. posted by lenin
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/12/not-dead-enough.html
Pinochet is dead, but not dead enough. To see him as simply another
vile bastard dictator who has snuffed it is to miss the point. He was
crucial, inasmuch as he provided the opportunity for advanced
capitalist states to test in the periphery a doctrine that lurked in
the margins of political discourse back home.

Big fat yawn... I've read this before. That's b/c these are crib notes of
David Harvey's _A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism_. How pretentious... using
Pinochet's death as an excuse to pontificate about the archeology of
neo-liberalism, with nary an original thought. It's not like he/she HAD to
do this, like some of us phone in the work effort when the mandates of paid
academic labor call. This is a VOLUNTEER job. At the very least he/she could
plagiarize an innovative analysis of an understudied phenomenon. But which
self-identified neo-Marxist doesn't have his/her diagnosis of the 1970's
crisis
(most of which are numbingly familiar)? At least Harvey livened up his tale
of the Labor Party's unsuccessful reign with anecdotes of the gravediggers'
strike... unburied corpses piling up in the morgues and all that. This
Leninology posturing is paint-by-numbers.

_
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[PEN-L] Oil Groups Dream of Day They Can Enter Iraq


Ain't happening any time soon, as no one can pacify Iraq for quite
some time to come. -- Yoshie


Oil groups dream of day they can enter Iraq

By Carola Hoyos and Roula Khalaf

Published: December 7 2006 19:07 | Last updated: December 7 2006 19:07

American troops stood by as government offices in Baghdad were torched
and looted after the city's fall in April 2003, a chaotic beginning to
the flawed US-led campaign in Iraq. But one imposing concrete building
was accorded special treatment.

Ringed with barbed wire, with dozens of US tanks guarding the entrance
and American soldiers perched on roofs, the oil ministry emerged
unscathed from the post-invasion mayhem. US officials insisted at the
time that their objective was to safeguard the centre of Iraq's vital
resources. The US military's actions, however, fed the conspiracy
theory that the toppling of Saddam Hussein was itself designed to gain
control of Iraqi oil.

Whatever the motives, the turmoil now sweeping the country has caught
up with Iraq's oil industry. The sector has been devastated by
violence, a lack of investment and rampant corruption. Production has
not regained pre-invasion levels.

While the stability of Iraq under the former regime had been
buttressed by oil revenues, today the struggle for control over these
resources – the third largest petroleum reserves in the world, after
Saudi Arabia and Iran – is threatening to tear the country apart. An
uneven distribution of reserves has exacerbated discord among Iraq's
three main communities – the majority Shia and minority Sunni Arabs
and Kurds – over the political destiny of Iraq.

As it strains to contain the sectarian bloodshed and ease the
departure of its own troops from Iraq, the US has been exerting
pressure on Iraqi leaders to pass a hydrocarbons law that would more
fairly regulate the distribution of oil revenues and close some of the
sectarian rifts. Political squabbles have overshadowed what could be
the historic aspect of the legislation: although the previous regime
had moved towards opening up the sector, in order to encourage oil
companies to break United Nations sanctions, the law is expected
finally to reverse the 1972 nationalisation of the industry.

According to drafts now circulating, it would allow various forms of
foreign partnership, possibly including production-sharing agreements.
Such contracts are preferred by oil companies, allowing them to hedge
the risk of cost overruns and giving them greater scope for gain if
oil prices rise.

While the passing of the legislation by the Iraqi parliament would
provide a welcome legal framework for big international oil companies,
executives acknowledge that investment is still far off. "The whole
industry is interested in Iraq, including us," says a BP official.
But, echoing concerns expressed by other companies, he adds: "The
security situation would have to improve dramatically if oil companies
like us were to commit themselves to long-term exploration and
production."

While international oil companies are used to working in troubled
environments, from rebel attacks in Nigeria to general strikes in
Venezuela, the conflict in Iraq not only dwarfs anything they have had
to deal with in recent history but has also been on a steady
escalation, putting into question the very existence of the Iraqi
state.

Oil production

Unlike Algeria's civil war in the 1990s – where the survival of the
state apparatus, backed by a powerful army, helped attract oil and gas
investment – Iraq is run by a weak central government whose authority
is challenged by local militias and political groups.

"To look into future [Iraqi oil] policy is to look into the unknown,"
argued Walid Khadduri, an expert on the country's resource sector,
told a recent London conference. "You can't discuss future oil policy
before knowing what will happen in the south of the country [home to
most of Iraq's oil wealth], who will control the south, whether it's
one national party or even local Shia parties."

According to the Iraq Study Group, the US bipartisan commission that
this week recommended a radical change of course for America in Iraq,
the country is producing only 2.2m barrels a day and exporting about
1.5m b/d. This is below the Iraqi government's target of 2.5m b/d and
falls far short of the sector's vast potential.

Another recent report, by the oil ministry's general inspectorate,
found that Iraq had lost more than $24.7bn (£12.6bn, €18.6bn) of
potential oil revenues over the past three years because of political
instability and violence, including the sabotage of pipelines.


From a global perspective, Iraq's oil is becoming increasingly

important to overall supply as demand accelerates, from China in
particular, and output from fields in the US, Europe and parts of Asia
slows with their advancing age. According to the International Energy
Agency, the developed countries' watchdog on the i

Re: [PEN-L] question on imperialism from Loren Goldner From Zimbabwe