James Devine wrote:
a symposium on the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO with the
lead essay by Eric Hobsbawm
A good day for Verso in LA, evidently. This no doubt is a spinoff from the
150th Anniversary edition of the CM that Verso's publishing in the spring,
with an intro by Hobsbawm. I haven't seen the
Louis Proyect wrote:
The first step is making the legal case. The next step is direct action to
enforce the legal decision. This is what happened in the US after Brown
versus Board of Education ruled against segregation. If people hadn't
sat-in, marched and boycotted, Jim Crow would still be in
Sid Shniad wrote:
What the fuck's this line of discussion about?
Because Canadians are so nice, Sid. Not loud nasty like Americans (or
Australians for that matter).
Doug
Bill Burgess wrote:
I guess I'm a 'doubting Thomas' on the issue of MAI.
Politically, I think it's important to defeat things like NAFTA MAI, but
I think Bill is right to doubt. All these struggle flare up around
documents proposed by bourgeois states, but the processes that lead the
law, like
Tom Walker wrote:
Is the market a commodity?
Can be, yeah. If The Market is worshipped as all-knowing, self-adjusting,
and the model for all aspects of life?
Sixty points for the correct answer.
Do I win?
Tom, do you have in mind something like what the Italian autonomist
theorists called
What's good to read on European Monetary Union?
Doug
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
DH had a note a couple of weeks ago to the effect
that despite the apparent defeat to the Boskin
commission's recommendation to reduce the CPI
by a full percentage point, the BLS had apparently
found reasons to adjust it to that extent in any event.
This troubled me and I
I got a flyer in yesterday's mail announcing a series of seminars on "How
To Stay Union-Free into the 21st Century" (printed with "UNION FREE" in red
in what looks like 96- or 100-point type, in contrast with the rest of the
phrase, which was merely in 30-point black type). It's sponsored by
Michael Perelman wrote:
I was thinking that we could invite him long but excuse him from some of
the more acrimonious aspects of our culture.
Why? Because he's Canadian?
Doug
Louis Proyect wrote:
What about giving land back to
the Indians as they are doing in Canada?
Is this really going to happen? I find it nearly impossible to believe that
a capitalist government would ever sign over significant amounts of land to
aboriginals, no matter how solid their claim. Am
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
Doug,
You are interested in analyzing capitalism aren't you?
It's a system isn't it?
Also, you are one of the most intrepid and capable
data wonks in cyberspace. Why the sudden horror of data?
Look, I have nothing against analyzing society
to be reversed byt he next recession? An artifact of some CPI
technical revisions?
* Expanded links http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_links.html.
Doug
--
Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED
Gil Skillman wrote:
Well, the paragraph of English prose can't really "make this point just
fine", in the sense of really knowing what the point means, what it
necessitates, and what it rules out. Prose is best suited for indicating
possibilities and connections, perhaps allusively. It's much
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
Focusing purely on
economics and a notch or two up mathematically, but
probably still more accessible than anything else is my
1991 book, _From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of
Economic Discontinuities_, Boston: Kluwer, not available in
paperback. I am
James Devine wrote:
o impose state control on
our bedrooms and bodies; no libertarians they.) Abortion is almost the only
issue where Clinton shows any kind of backbone -- and that may be an
opportunist effort to maintain his core constitutency.
I thought it was very interesting that when he
back at 4, when I went out again at 5:30, and when I came back at
10. God, I love the working press.
Doug
--
Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
web: http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html
William S. Lear wrote:
I don't have
time to get into the details, but this sort of thinking is designed to
cut off any notion of social action in an economy. It's all
individuals and the beautiful patterns they create, so just stand back
and be amazed at the wonders of the market
Not to
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
Asia, mostly. I think the Asian crisis goes well beyond the bailout issue.
If the presss gave it enough attention, as it normally would, that could
undermine the popular faith in the neoliberal ideology.
A simple challenge for the propaganda apparatus to deal with:
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
That is why I think that the whole brouhaha is invented - a sort of "Wag
the Dog" in reverse. in the movie, the political crisis was invented to
cover up a sex scandal, in the Lewinsky affair, the sex scandal is invented
to cover up a political-economic crisis.
What
Hey Marty Hart-Landsberg, you out there? Forget all this Asia crisis stuff
and answer the really important question: did you know Monica Lewinsky when
she was at Lewis Clark?
Doug
Tom Walker wrote:
But
with the increasing organic composition of capital, output becomes less and
less a function of direct labour.
Why then is the U.S. capital/output ratio in a downtrend (I know, I know,
this is by bourgeois measures) and the employment/population ratio in an
uptrend?
Doug
anyone know more about this? Is it just ideology, or is there
something else at work?
Doug
--
Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
web: http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
Thus, I was sticking my neck out in saying the East
Asian currencies are undervalued. But they certainly are
on PPP grounds (determined by productivity and price
levels). And old models by Dornbusch and others show that
with fixed prices and wages a shock in the
Tom Walker wrote:
I assume that Doug meant to say "market prices" instead of "market values".
Yeah.
It's not clear whether Doug is endorsing or simply reporting this definition
deadpan.
I think it's more or less true.
But it is a good example of how to explain an indefinite term by
Tom Walker wrote:
The lesson of the Asian crisis is that the limit of fictional accounting has
been reached. Humpty-dumpty has fallen off the wall.
How do you know? Why can't the big boys restructure Asia into a nicely
subordinate region just like they did Latin America after its import
Fleck_S wrote:
What's different between prostitution and many marriage contracts?
1.prostitution is sex for direct payment of money,
marriage is sex for indirect payment of money/financial security.
I should say that Susie Bright made exactly this point in her radio
interview with me.
Doug
James Michael Craven wrote:
On what basis do you assert that these women are "socialists"?
Because they call themselves that, for one. I've never talked to Hartley,
but I did a long interview on my radio show the other week with Bright, and
we talked, among other things (like left puritanism)
Thanks to everyone who's supplied titles on Indians. Most have been about
their decimation by the Europeans - I'm more interested in stuff about
their social lives - work, kinship, property, etc. Any ideas?
Doug
I've been reading up on European monetary union, which is just 10 months
away, and my impression is that no one is really prepared for just how big
a deal it could be. Am I wrong?
Doug
--
Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212
Richardson_D quoted:
Evidence is mounting that productivity growth is returning to the level
of the golden 1950s and 1960s.
Here are the numbers; I'll leave it to the readers to decide if Business
Week's assertions are true, or just part of the intoxicating afterglow of
checking your mutual
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
That's because you are in the US mostly reading US
media and lit. Everybody in Europe knows it is a big deal
and if you are there reading the local media at all for any
extended period of time it is very clear that it is a big
deal and that everybody knows it.
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
the Central European core
will lock in the euro and then, once the thing has greater credibility
further down the road and weathers whatever nastiness the Pacific meltdown
has in store for the world economy, the semi-peripheries will be slowly
locked into orbit around
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
Or you can teach 40 or so hip hop-chanting undergrads the latest in the
global cultural dialectic. They'll keep you honest, believe me; if you
start preaching theory at them, they go to sleep right in front of
you (hey, after 10,000 hours of TV, they're past masters of
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
In case you didn't know, privatizing money and
eliminating central banks is an old Austrian idea long
pushed by Hayek.
Yeah, and some Thatcherites were hot on the idea, I think. But they weren't
nutty enough to do it.
Doug
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
At 01:39 PM 4/3/98 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
homework and piecework strategies. As my pal Larry Summers put it, I don't
see exactly what the supposed revolution in production has actually
revolutionized.
How about the destruction of the household as the production
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
I have argued on this list in the past that we are in
the early stages of a long wave upturn and I think that the
boom in many stock markets reflects the building into
present values of the expected future rising dividends to
accrue from that long wave upswing
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
Now we have the US in a fairly serious boom going
faster over a longer period than any since before 1973.
Eh?
US BUSINESS CYCLES
average annualized
GDP growth rate
-
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
And is it not true that the growth rate was higher in
1996 than in 1995 and still higher in 1997, in short, it is
accelerating?
How short-termist. If you look at a chart of actual/trend GDP you'd see
that that acceleration has merely brought the actual back
michael wrote:
Pat Buchanan might not be a fascist, but I think that we have to give him
credit for fashioning the language of hate that has become the mainstay of
modern politics.
He deserves to share that credit with Kevin Phillips, who has become
something of a darling of the liberals these
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
The spending here does not include EITC, which
I took note of above. One can see from Nathan's
numbers that the better part of the public assistance
increase was due to the EITC and SSI, the latter
focused on the elderly and reflecting health care
cost pressures, to some
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
"I wouldn't be surprised if the 3/4 of the Dems
who voted against NAFTA were allowed to do
so only after it became clear that they had enough
votes to pass it; that's the way Congress works
sometimes."
Our reportorial zeal for facts seems to be on hold.
So do you know the
2700 Dow points ago, Alan Greenspan worried, cautiously of course, about
"irrational exuberance" in the stock market. 1000 points ago, he said that
12 to 18 months from now we may come to look with regret on securities
purchased today. Yet on April 1, the American Banker reported (as quoted in
MScoleman wrote:
Barkely, first a question of information -- how low is the unemployment rate
in Wisconsin?
3.1% in Feb. 20 states have U rates under 4%.
Doug
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
In other words,
really-existing politics, rather than what is
often observed in these precincts (PEN-L),
namely routine classification and
judgement on moral criteria abstracted from
politics.
This reminds me of a talk that Randall Dodd gave at URPE summer camp a few
years
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
On Fri, 10 Apr 1998, James Devine wrote:
Speaking of jargon, Dennis, what's a "punter"?
A Wall Street professional, a.k.a. stock broker (that restrained, sober
term for silicon highway robbery). Any etymological-minded political
economists out there know if this was
Mark Jones wrote:
Doug's question about what lies behind Chile's alleged 7% growth
rate implies a judgment that salmon fisheries and apple orchards
are intrinsically less worthwhile endeavours than say car assembly
or silicon chip plants. Perhaps we should question that, maybe by
discussing the
Louis Proyect wrote:
If we confine ourselves to choosing between Pinochet's Chile and the latest
permutation of that model, and the South Korean chaebols, we are selling
ourselves short.
Lou, that wasn't the point. The point was to refute Mark's rather odd
pastoral take on Chilean agri- and
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
If Japan really did
what Wall Street says, namely raised interest rates and cut domestic
spending, you'd see a global credit and GDP holocaust which would make
the breakup of the Soviet economy look like a success story.
No, Wall Street doesn't want that. Wall Street
Mark Jones wrote:
So, just as you find my cassandra-ism risible, I am mystified
at the self-deception you are stricken with. Actually, I
find you schizoid -- on one e-list you can be seen expressing deep fears
for the globally-warmed, asphalted-over future; on another you are praising
to the
e. ahmet tonak wrote:
I urgently need an update about the developments re. IMF Article VI change.
Thanks very much.
One of the best sources on the doings of the IMF is Marike Torfs of Friends
of the Earth in Washington; I don't know if she does email, but FOTE is at
202-783-7400. Also, the 50
Any nominees/volunteers to talk about the Australian wharfies' situation on
my radio show tomorrow, Thursday, 5 PM New York time?
Doug
--
Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217 USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax
email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
web
Louis Proyect wrote:
Doug's mail-list is tied to LBO and will try to involve his subscriber base.
I'll certainly try to recruit LBO subscribers, but the whole world is
welcome (with a few exceptions).
Doug
Nathan Newman wrote:
Marx did not like Bismarck but he supported centralization of the German
state,
since that was preferable to the competition of small little states. Just as
Marx could attack Bismarck's actions while supporting a more centralized
state,
it is perfectly consistent for left
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
So, what's your take on the House of Representatives
apparently not voting the "emergency" $18 million?
(Boddhi, you didn't call that one; the House Republicans
are NOT backing the IMF). Is this just grandstanding for
the yokels because the "crisis is over"
Today's TheStreet.com, the market webzine, has an article urging that the
Fed be privatized, and that private banks issue their own money! End the
government monopoly over what is just another commodity! Let's have
CitiMarks and JPMorgan dollars, and the rest. Most of the readers who've
posted
Louis Proyect wrote:
Interesting how
blue-collar OSU has more guts on this question than Columbia with all its
Marxish professors.
Of course, it may be just the accident of different individuals on the
line, but I wonder if there's also some difference between private and
public institutions on
Richardson_D wrote:
Average job tenure of American workers at medium and large companies has
reached 13.1 years, nearly a year longer than earlier in the decade,
according to a study by a management consulting firm. Examining the
employment records of 1.1 million workers at 59 companies, Watson
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
Max, for the ADA I'd spin it by saying that the IMF deliberately depresses
investment in countries desperately in need of higher levels of
investment.
In Asia, the only region of the "Third World" to show gains in income
relative to the First over the last several
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
You are putting an ideological overlay on this vote
which is probably not held by the ones voting. The
vote was one part political -- let's give Clinton
a win after kicking his ass on Fast Track -- and
one part a fear of disaster, since Rubin and Summers
give their end of
Max B. Sawicky wrote:
When we roll over, we roll over big time.
You have inspired me to present a resolution on the IMF
at the upcoming ADA convention.
Max, for the ADA I'd spin it by saying that the IMF deliberately depresses
investment in countries desperately in need of higher levels of
James Devine wrote:
I thought that the point of left politics in the 1990s was not to oppose
the old left vs. the new, etc., etc., but to try to seek a synthesis,
criticizing the lefts both old and new (ruthlessly, of course, to use
Marx's word), but while rejecting the "bad," also trying to
Mark Jones wrote:
Doug, tell me as a Marxist: is it better for the world if people pick
strawberries or make 4x4's?
I suppose having tried to impose a forced choice on you I deserve one in
turn. But like you I'm not going to play. So I'll say this: I hate 4x4s and
everything they come
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
Tom Schlesinger - who's putting Fed transcripts up on the Financial
Markets Center website
What's the URL on this? I spidered for this and came up empty.
It's not up yet; lots of text to input.
When I talked to Tom yesterday, he pointed out how boring most of the
Louis Proyect wrote:
Doug, it is a mistake to detach planning from the overall class structure
of a given society and try to make some kind of case for the merits of
socialism on that basis.
I know this; I've made this very point just about every time I've been in
this sort of exchange.
There
Thomas Kruse wrote:
I wasn't paying close enough attention to a thread a bit ago entitled, I
belive, "what went right". If memory serves, the discussion was in part on
the creation of new jobs in the US. Does anyone have handy some of the data
from that thread, in particular the rate at which
J Cullen wrote:
I know Doug Henwood reported in 1995 that the Social Security "collapse"
was based on low-balled projections of economic growth during the next 75
years -- an analysis that is still overlooked in nearly all reports on the
Social Security "crisis". My question
Nathan Newman wrote:
IMF funding is a real tactical division: I very much doubt labor allies in
South
Korea, for example, support cutting off IMF funding. They would like
support in
easing the terms of the IMF in exchange for funds, but merely shutting
down the
pipeline won't help workers
Nathan Newman wrote:
I am not talking about myself but the denunciations by Doug of the AFL-CIO and
other political leaders.
My god, don't they deserve it? Speaking of union outrages, have you seen
Bob Fitch's cover story in this week's Village Voice (available at
Nathan Newman wrote:
For the record, here is Gephardt's comments on his position from Inter Press
Service News Wire on Mar 5 1998:
"Gephardt was driven to support the IMF funding out of concern
for labor, because 'a country on the brink of economic ruin isn't
going to worry about enforcing its
Nathan Newman wrote:
No. Only one out of four Democrats in the House voted for NAFTA.
Still looking for that Dem job, Nathan?
If George Bush tried to get NAFTA through Congress, he probably would have
failed. It took a Dem president twisting arms and buying votes (and, by the
way, the lying
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 1998, Colin Danby wrote:
The other day Hashimoto asked how can Japan be in such bad
shape if it has so many foreign assets. Big deal. If
anything the extent of its foreign assets is an indication
of the lousy return on capital within Japan, for which
James Devine wrote:
I wouldn't call US consumers "bankrupt," but the lack of sufficient real
wage increases fits with what I said above. It's more accurate to say that
current US consumer debt/income ratios are hard to sustain.
Greenspan was asked about consumer debt loads when he addressed the
James Devine wrote:
So the term "globalization" obscures more than it reveals?
Yup.
The fact is that "globalization" is an abstraction. All abstractions
simplify -- i.e., distort, obscure -- reality. We hope that they also
reveal more than they obscure, which is why we insist on clear,
James Devine wrote:
Advertising and marketing are taking over the world. Pretty soon the April
Fool's story that (US) NPR had a couple of years ago will come true: in the
story, teenagers were having brandnames tattooed on their foreheads in
exchange for discounts on products. Saith one: "living
Thomas Kruse wrote:
What do you make of such arguments? The intention is clearly to challenge
analyses that suggest globalizaton is driven be the search for low wages.
I think it shows that the word "globalization" is so vague as to be
useless, even misleading. There are electronics workers in
DOUG ORR wrote:
Who said: "I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half."
Was it Henry Frick?
Doug
Mark Jones wrote:
No need to speculate, Bill, here are the facts (we were discussing
Dennis's views about the unimportance of the UK vis a vis Japan
and Germany).
I suspect a lot of those purchases attributed to the UK are for
international operations of all kinds of financial institutions
Mark Jones wrote:
I read Doug Henwood's book attentively. Yes, it
is a good book. But his view that Wall St was not a good custodian of US
national and industrial assets, cannot surely be our final judgment. Wall St
led and initiated a massive restructuring of US capitalism, hauling it round
The Yale Alumni Magazine reports that its radio station, WYBC, is going to
drop the hipster college radio format for "rhythmic contemporary hits."
Though student-run it is advertiser-sponsored. It also put in a bid on a
bankrupt New Haven AM station that offers "urban contemporary music and
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
Although Doug Henwood has said that
PPP overstates living standards in poor countries.
Probably not so.
I didn't say that. I said using PPP shrinks the apparent income gap between
rich and poor countries, which is of some ideological use to the capitalist
oinkers
Dennis R Redmond wrote:
My theory is, the bigger the speculative
bubble (and Dow 8700 at a time when every corporation on the block, from
Nike to Compaq, is reporting sluggish earnings and falling profit
margins, surely qualifies as the most stupendous mania since the South Sea
Bubble) the more
Jay Hecht wrote:
Zvi vs a FRB Economist, with Zvi claiming no U-Turn in poverty rates (based on
consumption, not income) and the Fed guy responding that while not as "bad" as
census is reporting, poverty has been trending upward (possibly).
Eh? Where'd this happen? Which Fed economist, where?
"A Microeconomic Analysis of Slavery in Comparison to Free
Labor Economies"
BY: HALUK I. ERGIN
Bilkent University
SERDAR SAYAN
Bilkent University
SSRN ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT DELIVERY:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=62685
Michael Perelman wrote:
Books cost virtually nothing to produce. We even send the publishers disks
that eliminate the cost of typesetting, yet prices skyrocket.
Publishing isn't a high-profit industry though, except maybe high-end
sci/tech and financial publishing. Trade publishers earn less
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
What is not clear to me in this thread is are we
looking for a 'leading indicator' of cyclical
fluctuations or of 'standard of living'. If it is
the former, then it seems to me unlikely that the
kind of social indicators (drug use, incarceration
rates, crime, child
Thomas Kruse wrote:
Agreed, totally, except insofar as they're a window on a very perverted
cultural context and political process. For exmple, an interesting Harper
Index kinda stat might be "number of times drug wars declared since the
Harrison Act of 1914"
It's all one drug war, it just
michael yates wrote:
Can anyone direct me to a surce for employment turnover rates?
One of the recent OECD Employment Outlooks did comparative data on the % of
the U getting a job, and the % of the E losing one.
Doug
I was just told by a U.S. government official that claims of a 50% decline
in Russian incomes during this decade are based on flawed stats, and that
few Russians would claim that they're worse off now than in 1990.
This strikes me as preposterous, but does anyone have some data to back up
my
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
One piece of evidence is that consumption stats on
such things as electricity have not fallen nearly as much
as official income stats. One point, a lot more of the
economy is now underground unreported income for a variety
of reasons. Things are a lot worse
Mark Jones wrote:
I presume the official concerned did not attempt to consult the 3 million men
aged between 23-45 who according to official Russians stats (cited on JRL)
died *in excess of * the demographic trendline since 1991. This calamity, the
worst ever in Russian peace time
In updating the stats for the paperback edition of Wall Street (forthcoming
in June, order multiple copies, now!), I discovered that British net
foreign assets declined from 5.8% of GDP in 1993 (down from 22% in 1985!)
to 0.8% in 1996, the most recent year the IMF has numbers for. The few
other
Mark Jones wrote:
The article also suggests that US professors who are heads of
departments earn at least $200,000. Can this be true?
A bit of an exaggeration. Stars in the humanities and social sciences can
earn in the $100,000-150,000 range, plus perks. The perks can probably push
the total
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I would like to get some feedback about the net impact of the Soviets on
World History.
Here are some variables that I would consider:
The threat of the Soviet Union caused the U.S. and other capitalist
countries to soften the harsh face of capitalism -- more
Jay Hecht wrote:
Once again, the "paper of record" comes not to praise (or bury) Doug, but to
note that his tome "Wall Street" a quote "left deconstruction of financial
markets" was #1 in sales at the "academic, Labyrinth Books." Of course, Doug
is good enuff for the style section, but, ahem,
Thanks to all those who've offered (and I hope will continue to offer)
suggestions on indicators. Yes by all means international indicators,
especially those that make the US look awful, of course.
Doug
Jay Hecht wrote:
From what I can
tell, prior to the last decade or so, there really hasn't been a left
consensus on inflation.
Is there now? I'm all against tight money, but I still think the
populist/liberal left is too sanguine about inflation. I think it often
represents a cheap substitute
Between Feb 97 and Feb 98, U.S. real hourly earnings for all private sector
workers were up 2.7%, led by 3.0% gain in services; manufacturing lagged at
up 1.6%. There's been a steady acceleration in real wage growth since it
turned up in mid-1995, with a spurt over the last year; just a year ago,
Louis Proyect wrote:
Related to this is the question of the number of people living in
apartments, those who are not homeless but who are miserably crowded. The
NY Times ran articles last year about the horrible problems facing Mexican
and other immigrants who are crammed 10 to a one-bedroom
Speaking of indicators, The Nation has asked me to put together a set of
economic/social indicators, to be published quarterly, that would be
revealing, interesting, and against the grain of conventional thinking.
Any suggestions?
Doug
I just heard a stock pundit in CNBC who was touting Pfizer, which has the
Street all, um, excited over its new impotence drug. "The stock just hit
90, and stocks that hit 90 almost always go to 100." See why these guys
make so much money?
Doug
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